VM /ETC

Archive for March, 2009

A couple of weekends ago an email discussion started among the authors at GestaltIT.com about cloud computing. As I remember it (yes, I am too lazy to check for the actual first email) we started on Friday and replied back and forth until Sunday night. The results of those replies are slowly forming as posts about real world, enterprise infrastructure concerns and opinions about implementing and migrating to Infrastructure As A Service (Iaas). Governance And Peaks In The Cloud written by Joerg, Martin, and Stephen is the first post to be published from this dialogue.

“As large organizations begin to look towards cloud computing, many find themselves questioning the suitability of the infrastructure for their business needs. As consumer-focused services like Carbonite lose data and startup-focused systems like Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure suffer outages, the image of the cloud has darkened. How are providers protecting the data? What RTO and RPO is offered? Are these sufficient for the types of applications being considered for the cloud?”

Read the entire post, and check out GestaltIT for much more about Cloud Computing infrastructure – both in posts already published and in the posts yet to come!

VMware’s release of ESXi Update 4 (U4) has apparently restricted Remote Command Line Interface (RCLI) administration of the free version of ESXi again. I followed a link in a tweet today from fellow vExpert William Lam which led me to a VMware Communities thread titled ESXi 3.5u4 is out, does the RCLI still have r/w access for the free version?. In this thread Dave Mishchenko reports:

“I tried vicfg-advcfg and vicfg-snmp and both failed to write ( Failed : fault.RestrictedVersion.summary). They worked fine to read configuration.”

Of course, the licensed version of ESXi U4 will allow remote read and write access.

Readers may recall that remote read and write access to free ESXi U3 via the RCLI was announced here on VM /ETC and then quickly reported as a mistake that VMware would “fix” in an upcoming version.

I find it hard to believe VMware will not allow remote configuration of it’s free version. Seems to me that free hypervisor alternatives from Microsoft and Citrix would warrant a competitive justification. Besides, vCenter offers the real, GUI based ease of administration. Why not allow command line read and write access to the free ESXi version?

William ends the thread with a thought worth considering:

“Too bad to hear, looks like if users are happy with their r/w access with the RCLI, they may not want to upgrade to U4 just yet.”

VMware has released Update 4 (U4) of ESX and ESXi. There are some new features available with these latest builds, so check out the Release Notes of each product (linked below).

Although there are a lot of new enhancements, probably the biggest surprise for me was the experimental support for PXE booting ESXi U4. PXE boot allows stateless servers without local hard drives. For a “how to” on PXE booting ESXi 3.5 U4 check out VMware KB Article 1008971

“The main benefit of PXE booting ESX Server 3i version 3.5 Update 4 is that it allows you to run the deployment on systems with no disk or other local persistent storage. Furthermore, PXE booting greatly simplifies both the booting and upgrading processes. Therefore, scaling to many machines is greatly facilitated. No manual installation steps are necessary when the system is fully-realized.”

This sounds like an obvious Cloud enabling technology to me!

In the past, Chris Wolf and Mike Dipetrillo both gave us glimpses of a PXE boot future for ESXi. As both bloggers have described, it appears VMware architect Lance Berc is the man to thank for this new feature. Check out their posts for more info on what is possible and how it is done.

Another major enhancement of Update 4 in my opinion is the expanded and improved Enhanced VMXnet virtual network driver. Improved network performance is now possible for the 32 bit versions of Windows Server 2003 as well as Windows XP. Update 4 appears to make my recent post on enabling the VMXnet driver obsolete!

I’ll highlight (using cut and pastes) what else caught my attention from the Release Notes of both ESX and ESXi in this rest of this post. Read the rest of this entry »

Image via Wikipedia

With all the recent talk about the software from Rove and VMware that provides mobile device access to managing VMware Infrastructure, administrators now need to consider how they will actually connect mobile phones to vCenter and ESX hosts behind the firewall. Fortunately, a thread from the VMware vCenter Mobile Access Technology Preview Community sheds some insight on how VMware actually tested the vCenter Mobile Access virtual appliance (vCMA) with several different mobile devices.

From The official “how will I connect to this thing” thread: Read the rest of this entry »

So, who wants free VMware High Availability? That’s the title of a post created by Leo Raikhman on his Leo’s Ramblings blog. In this post, Leo has published the steps and scripting necessary to simulate VMware’s VI3 High Availability (HA) feature. Leo’s script works without VirtualCenter (VC), so VMware customer’s who have not implemented VC can manually create “HA -like” awareness between 2 ESX hosts. If one of the ESX servers goes offline then the virtual machines (VMs) are auto restarted on the other host. Of course, the VMs must be created on shared storage for this to work.

Before considering this script as a replacement understand the major differences between VirtualCenter HA and Leo’s HA:

• Leo’s script only works between 2 ESX hosts while VC HA can be configured with up to 32 ESX hosts as of VI 3.5 (actually using 32 host HA clusters is another topic, but it can be done)
• Leo’s script needs the ESX Service Console as written. It would need to be ported for the RCLI to work with ESXi. VC HA works with both ESX and ESXi
• VC provides a visual status for the health of your HA cluster via the VI Client
• VC HA provides HA fail over capacity for more than 1 ESX host at a time

I’ve held this post in my drafts because I wanted to try this configuration myself, but alas, I have never gotten around to it.  For those that can benefit from VC -less HA and give this script a test, let me (and Leo) know your results.

Leo’s post says: Read the rest of this entry »

VMware has announced a new online calculator that specifically compares the total cost of implementing VI 3.X and Microsoft Hyper-V. An online tool similar to Microsoft’s competitive calculator introduced last year, the VMware Virtualization Cost-Per-Application Calculator is designed to emphasize that the cost of implementing virtual infrastructure is more than the expense of licenses. In the past many have criticized the cost of VMware’s flagship suite of VI 3.X Enterprise products as too expensive, and with both Citrix and Microsoft now claiming to offer free hypervisors, VMware’s new calculator helps illustrate the message that VM density at equal performance matters to the cost analysis bottom line.

“Following the lead of analysts and customers, VMware has adopted “cost per application” as a more accurate metric to compare costs between virtualization solutions. Going beyond a simplistic license price comparison, evaluating cost per application takes into consideration the number of virtual machines that can be run on a single server, or the ”virtual machine density” enabled by a specific virtualization solution. The higher the virtual machine density enabled, the higher the server consolidation ratio. The higher the consolidation ratio, the more an organization can reduce its infrastructure costs (including costs for servers, networking. storage, power and datacenter space), and software costs, (including guest operating system and virtualization software licenses). Following this logic, the solution that can provide the higher consolidation of servers – without an impact to performance – also provides the most value to customers.”

I decided to test the calculator with a 50 VM / application example. Read the rest of this entry »

Through a new partnership with Tradepub.com, I am excited to announce free industry publication subscriptions are available for VM /ETC readers. I’ve added a “FREE Publications” navigation tab at the top of the site header for quick access. Clicking on this tab will start you with virtualization tagged content, but with over 900 different publications and documents to select from you are bound to find something relevant to your needs!