VM /ETC

John Troyer from VMTN has hosted the first podcast episode of VMware Communities Roundtable and has posted a summary of the call notes at VMware Communities Roundtable podcast #1 | VMTN Blog. I am honored to have one of my “things that make you go hmmmm” (on the Quick Migration vs VMotion discussion) posts listed as a reference for one of the topics of the episode.

John announces the new series and the objective of the Roundtable podcasts with the following summary:

“Each week, we’ll bring together experts and leaders from the VMware Communities and virtualization blogs to discuss the interesting topics in virtualization. Think of this as if it were a group meeting up at VMworld over a pint to chat about the latest news.”

The episode lasts somewhere between 50 minutes to an hour and is a recorded call between John and an attendee list consisting of some of the virtualization community’s top minds from all over the world. VMware Community profiles of the individuals contributing to episode 1 are:

• Steve Beaver – sbeaver
• Tom Howarth
• Alex Mittell – mittell
• Eric Siebert – esiebert7625
• Edward Haletky -Texiwill
• Dave Mishchenko

Go to John’s VMTN post to listen or download the podcast, but the following is my quick summary and take-aways from the call.

I just posted about this new free iSCSI SAN for the local VMFS storage. Alex and Tom discuss the product in greater detail and provide some road map for future versions and expanding the features.

ESX snapshots

A great exchange between all attendees about the lack of true understanding of what snapshots are, how they should be managed, and a few example scenarios where VI admins have made some terrible mistakes deleting snapshots.

Eric disagrees with the idea of using VMware Converter as an alternative to committing snapshots due to the overhead of creating an entire new VM and the increased likelihood of corruption due to the use of the network while using Converter. He suggests that using the vmkfstools utility from the console is the best option. I’ll have to research this some more and maybe create another post on this method.

On a related note, the concept of creating a snapshot and then using vmkfstools to copy the frozen vmdk as a method for cloning running VMs is brought up. Another simple but brilliant idea!

ESX VMs in the DMZ

The concept of hosting VMs in the DMZ is explored, and Edward explains how many security professionals are wrongly requiring that the separate ESX and SAN infrastructure be dedicated to the DMZ. The concept of an ESX host straddling the firewall is actually a misunderstanding by security and networking engineers. Edward dives deep into the increased potential for attacks and Service Console compromise by placing ESX hosts in the DMZ.

Virtualization features comparisons

Dave and the group discuss the various web links and posts that discuss emerging virtualization alternatives such as Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer, KVM, Parallels and the attempts to compare the products to VMware’s features and architecture. A point is made about the competition reducing comparisons down to feature checklists is not really talking “apples to apples”.

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