VM /ETC

Archive for June, 2009

[updated 06.29.09] – The owner of the site has professionally responded in the commnents following this post. I appreciate the reply and this exercise has made me to decide to investigate providing multiple RSS feeds for VM /ETC.

To the owner(s) of networkvirtualization.com:

Change the current method of publishing protected vmetc.com content to a more acceptable style of blog aggregation, contact me to arrange a syndication agreement, or take down any and all of my content from your site.

Based on Scott Lowe’s post I Love Having My Content Stolen and the consistent reaction in both Scott’s post comments and on Twitter, I assume it’s in your best interest to do the same for all the other bloggers whose content you have used.

What is acceptable? Here are some examples.

Blog Aggregation

Take a look at Planet v12n or VirtualizationFeed.com. In summary, publish only a preview of the post, provide the proper attribution to the creator, and make sure the link is obvious and goes back to the original site and not the RSS feed. Both also maintain a blog roll of the aggregated sites.

Blog Syndication

Use Gestaltit.com for an example. As a syndicated author, I allow specific posts to be republished there via an arranged agreement. Each author’s personal blog is linked and each has their own individual Gestaltit.com RSS feed as well.

Quotes and References

Feel free quote or reference published content to make your own point. Be sure to make the quote/reference identifiable and give proper credit to the originator.

Let me clarify

I am flattered that you enjoy my content and I welcome the additional exposure. I get a great sense of satisfaction from the public use of vmetc.com. I’m not saying, nor does my Creative Commons license state, the vmetc.com RSS feed cannot be used. It is simply a matter of proper format and due recognition.

Even though my posts are available in full in my RSS feed, I suggest using a news reader such as Google Reader or social media such as Facebook and Friendfeed to access my content, as well as aggregating any other blogs, from the convenience of a web browser on any computer.

Edwin Yuen, Microsoft Virtualization Team Senior Technical Product Manager, has introduced Hyper-V’s latest feature closely emulating VMware’s virtual infrastructure enterprise product offerings. Quick Storage Migration (QSM) is being added to System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2. SCVMM 2008 R2 Release Canidate was recently released to the public. Hyper-V’s final release was integrated in Windows Server 2008 SP2.

Quoting Yuen’s post on the Microsoft Virtualization Team Blog titled System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 – Quick Storage Migration, here are some high level notes about QSM:

• QSM enables the migration of a VM not only between storage locations but also from one SAN to another
• QSM relies on Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS)
• QSM can move the virtual disks of a running virtual machine independent of storage protocols (iSCSI, FC) or storage type (local, DAS, SAN), with minimal downtime
• QSM will not be available on the free Hyper-V Server 2008 version and requires Microsoft’s Virtual Machine Manager (VMM)
• Quick Storage Migration is included with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 both in the Enterprise Edition and the Workgroup Edition
• A VM can remain running for the almost the entire duration of the transfer of its virtual disks from one storage location to another. The post estimates the VM downtime to be under 1 minute in most cases assuming W2K8 R2.
• The VM is put into save-state (Hyper-V snapshot) for a brief interval to migrate its memory state and associated differencing disks.

Yuen’s post provides a feature comparison table of QSM versus VMware’s Storage Vmotion. The following is a screen shot of the table. Read the rest of this entry »

PHD Virtual added their latest VMware utility to it’s ever growing list of free tools for virtualization administrators. Patch Downloader 6.0 is best described as a tool that will “ease the pain” for dowloading ESX 3.X patches in environments without vCenter Update Manager (VUM). Designed to filter the list of ESX patches available by selecting the desired version of ESX/ESXi, Patch Downloader enables the administrator to review individual patch classifications and instructions. Patches are then easily downloaded to a configured repository where they are ready to be manually transferred and applied to each ESX/ESXi host. I assume support for ESX 4 patches will be added soon.

The following image is a screen shot of Patch Downloader downloading ESX 3.5 patches.

Patch Downloader is the fifth free tool from PHD Technologies. The following excerpt is from an email I received and provides links and and a brief explanation of the other tools already available.
Read the rest of this entry »

I was notified by Nava Davuluri of VMware Product Marketing that a new VMTN community site and blog has been created for the purpose of centrally organizing freely available VMware product scripting and code samples. In Davuluri’s words:

“These sample codes are related to products such as the new vSphereCLI, vCLI, Perl toolkit, Java Webservices SDK, etc.

I’m trying to involve the entire developer community in using(sharing/contributing) this site more.“

On the VMware Code Central Blog he explains Code Central “is intended for VMware community developers and system administrators who use VMware infrastructure and would like to have IT control through automation.” Apparently, the Code Central Blog will update what’s new on the Code Central Community Page on a weekly basis.

After quickly checking the CodeCentral Community page one can see the potential for this to become a great site for VMware administrators and developers. For example, Davuluri already has featured links to the following, well known community contributions :

• lamw: Backing up VMs in ESX(i) 3.5 and 4.x in vSphere SDK for Perl
• lucd: Guest Provisioning System in vSphere PowerCLI
• alanrenouf: Report into MS Word in vSphere PowerCLI
• esloof: Dynamic Resource Pool Calculator in vSphere PowerCLI
• tzamora: VMware Infrastructure Power Documeter in vSphere PowerCLI
• stumpr: FindDatacenterByHostname in vSphere SDK for Perl

Update your bookmarks and RSS readers. I’m sure the Code Central Blog and VMTN Community will become a great resource.

One of the most interesting new vSphere storage features in my opinion is the new virtual disk paravirtualized SCSI (PVSCSI) controller. It has been reported that improved I/O with as much as 18% reduction in ESX 4 host CPU usage can be achieved by switching to PVSCSI. The benefits of PVSCSI performance are twofold:

• Reduced data center power and cooling costs to when you consider the impact of tens of hosts not having to work as hard
• A potential higher VM to host consolidation ratio when more CPU cycles are available

For reference, EMC virtualization guru Chad Sakac provided a post that explains the PVSCSI performance benefits:

http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2009/05/update-on-the-io-vsphere-performance-test.html

However, to take advantage of PVSCSI a VM virtual disk configuration might need to change. Because VMware does not support PVSCSI on the operating system boot partition, VMs will need to be configured with separate virtual disks(.vmdk) for the boot drive and the data drive(s). Note that all the posts and articles referenced mention that PVSCSI works on a .vmdk containing the boot partition. It’s just that VMware officially does not support it.

So, the challenge for using PVSCSI then is to migrate services and applications that exist on VMs that contain both the boot partition and the data on a single .vmdk. Although separate boot and data partitions are the defacto standard for physical servers, the convenience of VMs has lead to a single .vmdk configuration in a lot of IT shops.

Incentive to use PVSCSI therefore actually overlaps with a shift in VM deployment strategy and ultimately supports and provides performance reasons to adopt smaller, dedicated .vmdks for boot partitions. This multi .vmdk design change also has other benefits including optimization of deduplication and DR site replication technologies.

Here are some quick thoughts on deploying and migrating VMs to a multiple .vmdk configuration. Read the rest of this entry »

 In my opinion, there are only a handful of reasons not to implement vSphere 4 immediately and all of them are temporary, techincal limitations. My list of reasons:

• 64 bit hardware (or virtualization assist CPUs) requirement
• Already Implemented the following VMware products
  • vCenter Stage Manager
  • vCenter Lab Manager
  • vCenter Site Recovery Manager
  • vCenter Lifecycle Manager
  • VMware View (Manager and Composer)

These are temporary limitations because VMware has already announced compatibility for all of their solutions with vSphere will be available in the second half of 2009. Of course, buying 64 bit hardware with modern CPUs could make you wait a little longer depending on your ’09 budget.

VMware has a Software Compatibility Matrix that helps identify supported combinations of all their virtualization products. Here’s a screen shot. Read the rest of this entry »

The last part of Upgrading VMware VI 3.X to vSphere 4 involves upgrading the individual virtual machine (VM) VM tools and virtual hardware. Although guests can still run hosted on ESX 4 if the virtual hardware is not upgraded, there are some great features of Hardware version 7 (v7) that are worth the reboots required.

This post is a summary of my notes and various cut and pastes from several VMware vSphere presentations and documents. I’ve tried to organize them to where the content can be read in a logical flow. I’ve directly copied a lot of this information from the What’s New in vSphere 4.0 VMTN community document, so I’ll just recognize VMware as the provider of this information. Check out the whole document for features and maximums of vCenter and ESX 4 as well.

This VMware slide shows all the configuration maximums for vSphere 4 VMs using v7 hardware.
Read the rest of this entry »