VM /ETC Go Green with Virtualization. Go UGLY Green with vmetc.com.

Yep. It’s a shameless plug for my company. Regardless, I thought it was worth letting everyone know about these promotions from Microsoft before the year ended. Go crazy and implement a new server infrastructure on VI3 with your favorite solutions provider.

The following is from an email I received. I also have created a Promos page with this info.

Have you recently purchased Microsoft Office, SQL or Windows Server? If so, keep reading as you may have some free services to claim.

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Packages including server hardware, Virtual Iron 4.0 and implementation services are now being offered from IBM and HP. Virtual Iron has also signed a reseller agreement with Dell. The combination of these new partnerships is positioning the VMware alternative as a highly visible choice for SMBs looking to migrate to a virtual datacenter.

An article from SearchServerVirtualization.com, Virtual Iron, IBM, HP package virtualization on blades for SMBs, reports on Virtual Iron’s new SMB strategy:

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Shortly after Oracle announced their new free Xen-based virtualization product VMware sent an email to all it’s partners addressing the confusion caused by Oracle’s claims. The following is a cut and paste from the email I received:

What Was Announced?

Oracle announced Oracle VM at their Oracle OpenWorld user conference. Oracle VM is a Xen hypervisor based on Oracle Enterprise Linux. Oracle also announced that the Oracle Database, Oracle Application Server middleware and selected applications would be certified when run in Oracle Enterprise Linux virtual machines on Oracle VM. Oracle claimed that Oracle VM is more efficient than other virtualization products. Oracle VM is free, but annual support costs are $499 for two-socket systems and $999 for unlimited sockets.

Oracle Press Release:

• “Oracle Unveils Oracle VM”

Press/Blog Coverage:

• “ Oracle Introduces Oracle VM As It Leaps Into Virtualization” - Information Week
• “Analysts call Oracle’s virtualization bluff” - ZDnet

VMware Summary Response:

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If you have the time you can migrate Windows physical servers to virtual machines (P2V) or virtual machines back to physical servers (V2P) with Windows Backup. Use VMware Converter or your P2V tool of choice for faster conversions. VMware Converter Starter Edition is free, but you can’t use ESX as a destination.

Here’s a high level walk through of how it’s done with Windows Backup:

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This YouTube video showing off VMware Player blew me away. The start of the video shows the EasyVMX.com web site, so I am assuming the author created the various VMs he is showcasing with EasyVMX.The video demonstrates using multiple sessions of the VM Player running Windows and Linux on the same desktop. The file drag and drop feature between host and guest VMs is also demonstrated nicely.

What really amazed me was that the author’s pc for this computer has the following hardware:

Intel C2D 4300@2700

2GB DDR2 667

Nvidia 7900GS

Here’s the link to the video and the discussion on YouTube.com
YouTube - VMware player 2.0 on Ubuntu 7.04

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So, you need to build a new VM. You don’t have a license for VMware Workstation? You don’t want to install VMware Server on your desktop? You realize the free VMware server is only supported on a few server operating systems, right? WinXP or Vista is not supported (you can make it work, but that’s another post for another time).

In my experience, the simplest solution has been to

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Stefanschuller.com has a great post on getting APC Powerchute to work correctly with ESX servers.

“APC has a guide on how to do this but it doesn’t totally cover the installation for VMware ESX 3.0.x. For example it forgets to tell you about the firewall in ESX 3 that blocks some ports that need to be open to make the Powerchute Network Shutdown agent communicate with your APC ups (with network management card option installed)”

Check out the detailed instructions at

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VMware VI3.5 is scheduled to be generally available by the end of 2007. Based on a public .pdf released by VMware, this post is my summary of the new features. I’m guessing this .pdf is really a .ppt presentation that VMware is delivering, but I have not attended this presentation myself.

The screen shot is from the document and shows the new features in the defined layers.

After some sales and marketing slides the document classifies the VI3 features today across 3 layers. These layers are then used to group the new features for the rest of the presentation.

The features are divided into 3 layers:

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It’s always an afterthought. The client bought VI3 Enterprise so they know they have VCB. Everybody is talking about live VM backups so what’s the big deal? Sounds like it’s simple to start backing up VMs and maybe even reducing the cost of your backup agent licensing, right? Well, if you haven’t planned for it, then not really.

It’s not that it’s difficult to install VCB. It’s understanding what is needed to use it. I’ve heard VMware themselves say it’s not the whole solution. It’s just a framework of scripts to help integrate the enterprise backup solution with the virtual environment. Here’s how VMware’s Virtual Machine Backup Guide puts it:

Consolidated Backup consists of a set of utilities and scripts that work in conjunction with a third party backup software. To ensure that Consolidated Backup works with specific backup software, either VMware or your backup software vendor provide integration modules containing any required pre backup and post backup scripts. The third party software, integration module, and Consolidated Backup run on the VCB proxy, a physical machine that has Microsoft Windows 2003 installed.

Here’s what you need to configure before you install VCB.

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I get asked this all the time. “How many NICs does ESX need? 2, 4, 6 or more?”

Well, it’s not really about how many NICs ESX needs. I’m not recommending it, but the fact of the matter is that VI3 really only needs 1 NIC per ESX host. It’s just smarter for a company to build some redundancy and load balancing into their VI design. So, let’s say then that ESX just needs 2 NICs minimum.

The real question is “How many NICs does your network infrastructure and VI performance require?” Do you have or will you have:

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I got an email today about a problem I had not seen in a while. This company was still using local storage only and has not migrated to shared storage. So, unfortunately they have not been able to leverage DRS yet!

Here’s a cut and paste from my customer’s original email.

The process vmmemctl went crazy today for 30 seconds or so and made the machine unusable; after that, kswapd went nuts for about 30 seconds. Then things were back to normal. What’s up with that stuff? It seems every VMware virtual machine we’ve seen these kinds of problems on. They’re pretty annoying on a development machine, and really problematic on a production machine.

Here’s my reply:

It’s been a while since I’ve seen that! This problem used to occur more often in ESX 2.X days before VI3 - before shared storage, vmotion, and DRS became the norm. Back then this always surfaced when an ESX host’s physical resources were over committed.

The reason is because your ESX servers guest VMs are battling over RAM, and how ESX manages that (without DRS in VI3 Enterprise) is to write out the RAM to a balloon driver on the VMFS LUN. Unfortunately that process zaps the VM(s) and spikes the ESX CPUs.

Here’s some quick links for more about this:

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/55488

http://communities.vmware.com/message/769479#769479

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_esx_resource_mgmt.pdf ( ! ! check out page 132 for vmmemctl info )

You can try to work around this by reserving RAM for each VM to 50% of the assigned VM memory. For example, if your VM has 1GB ram then create a memory reservation for at least 512 MB RAM. That was done by default back in ESX 2.X, but it is no longer done with VI3. This will quickly limit how many VMs you can host though! Maybe start with the VMs that seem to be affected the most? I would also look closely at all of your VMs and scale back virtual RAM where possible - do all of your VMs really need all the RAM they were created with?

Of course you can always add other ESX servers and spread the VMs out across more hosts. Finally, once you get to shared storage then DRS will auto manage contention for you by auto vmotion, but you will probably still need more ESX servers!

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Normally you must enable hyper threading in your server’s BIOS before ESX will report it as enabled on the Configuration tab in the Processors section.

For some reason IBM’s HS21 blade with Intel 5160 Xeon processors incorrectly reports hyper-threading by ESX as supported but not enabled. I thought I was losing it when I could not find where to enable hyper-threading in the blade’s BIOS. Turns out the only Intel processor that uses hyper-threading is the Pentium 4 workstation processor.

In fact, the entire family of Intel 5100 server processors do not have hyper-threading. For that matter, Intel does not make a server processor with hyper-threading.

Intel server and workstation processors

VMware Communities: IBM HS21 Blade Servers …

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