VM /ETC

Archive for August, 2009

So, you think you are good at Twitter? You’ve figured out how to say everything you want in 140 characters? Then in the spirit of keeping “the cloud in your head” while at VMworld 2009 join me in The VMworld3Word Challenge.

That’s right, keep all your tweets during the VMworld Welcome Reception and the Monday Night Tweetup to just three words. Be sure to include the hashtag #vmworld3word at the end.

I’ve got another live Tweetgrid queued up after this post’s page break for all that are up to it.

Impossible you say?

No can do?

Not very fun?

Don’t be ridiculous!

Tag. You’re it!

Read the rest of this entry »

To entice SMB interest and acceleration in building cloud infrastructure, today VMware announced new offerings centered on the ESXi 4 hypervisor. In 2 separate press releases, VMware revealed that a new agreement was signed with Intel to effectively distribute ESXi to more SMB customers, and that these customers can now easily automate the installation and configuration of ESXi with VMware Go. This post summarizes the official announcements and then offers some opinion on other factors that continue to influence the ultimate adoption of ESXi.

VMware Signs Agreement with Intel to Expand Reach of VMware vSphere 4 to SMB Customers

“The Intel global reseller community of more than 50,000 Premier and Associate members will benefit from the new agreement by being able to resell the industry-leading virtualization platform to their SMB customers. The agreement supports Intel’s strategy to proliferate virtualization technology on the recently announced Intel Xeon Processor 5500 series into SMB markets and it provides resellers with low-cost high availability solutions, including the three new VMware vSphere 4 product editions for SMBs that enable Always On IT. The Intel ESAA program also provides resellers with pre-certified Intel server platforms for VMware vSphere 4 with the ability to have their products listed on the VMware Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) at no additional charge. This reduces deployment costs and speeds time to market for resellers to address new opportunities.”

VMware Introduces VMware Go—A New Service that Will Make Virtualization Even Easier for First Time Users

“VMware Go is a free web-based service that will enable SMB customers to fly through the ESXi setup process with just a few mouse clicks.  The award-winning VMware ESXi is the industry’s most widely deployed hypervisor, with hundreds of thousands of users worldwide.  VMware ESXi, also available for free, allows companies to reduce overhead and simplify business operations by running multiple operating systems and applications on a single server, spending less money on hardware, power and cooling, and server administration. VMware ESXi together with VMware Go is an on-ramp for companies new to virtualization, especially small businesses who may not think they have the time or budget to get started.

VMware Go was developed in partnership with Shavlik Technologies, a member of VMware’s Technology Alliance Partner Program. VMware Go will be made available as a beta offering on August 31, 2009 to customers who go to http://www.vmware.com/go/vmware-go-beta. VMware Go is expected to become generally available as a free service in 2010″

As first pointed out to me by Eric Sloof on the NTPRO.NL blog, the VMware Go Beta is available today at Read the rest of this entry »

Hello from the Thirsty Bear in San Francisco!

I am (will be) reporting on the goings on at the Sunday Night Warm Up Extravaganza via Twitter, and with some luck I’ll have enough phone battery to send regular updates and twitpics throughout the whole event.

Enjoy! The live Tweetgrid can be found after the page break.

updated 08.31.09 –

I filtered the Tweetgrid down to just rbrambley #xtrav tweets. (Hey, it’s my blog!) To see all tweets from last night go here (tweetgrid – last 100 tweets) or here (search.twitter.com).

Read the rest of this entry »

Since I am traveling to San Francisco, CA for VMworld today I thought I would dedicate a post and a Tweetgrid to the journey. In keeping with VMworld’s “Hello” theme I am aggregating tweets via the hashtag #hello.

Tweetgrid updates usually within 10 seconds. To join in the fun just add the hashtag to your tweet.

I’ll add more to this post as my travels allow, but for now enjoy the conversation!

updated 08.30.09 -

The flight went great and I am in San Francisco! I wish everyone traveling yesterday could have said the same.

I modified the Tweetgrid format show that it shows up only on the full post after the page break. Seems I could not figure out how to make multiple Tweetgrids with different keywords co-exist peacefully on the VM /ETC home page. Not as cool looking in my opinion, but just as effective.

Be sure to click through to see my twitter reports from yesterday. The picture of @jtroyer doing his best Vanna White modeling my UGH shirt and @jasonboche’s vCalendar is worth a look by itself!

Read the rest of this entry »

There have been a couple of bloggers this week that, while responding to Microsoft’s competitive analysis on Hyper-V versus ESX/ESXi footprints, have revealed some very interesting and helpful information about what exactly is contained in ESXi installations and on the bootable ESXi flash drive. For reference I’ll summarize a few posts and then link to a VM /ETC post from last year explaining why the ESXi .ISO is so large as well.

First, Nate from Techopsguys.com provides a realistic, and “colorful” at times view of the actual amount of space consumed by ESXi when you install it in Does size matter?. Read his post, but the condensed message and my interpretation of what Nate is saying is “VMware please stop telling people your ESXi hypervisor is so small when so much more space is required to install it.” 

“ESXi v3.5 was unable to boot directly from SAN so I can’t tell with the same level of accuracy how big it is, (”df” says about 200MB) but I can say that our ESXi v3.5 systems are installed on 1GB USB sticks, and the image I decompressed onto those USB sticks is 750MB(VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_4-153875.i386.dd), regardless, it’s FAR from 32MB or even 75MB, at best it’s 10x larger than what they claim.”

If VMware ESXi 4 is so small, why is it so big? is a post by Eric Gray that explains why the 32 mb ESXi 3 and the 60 mb ESXi 4 hypervisors on bootable flash drives require a 1 GB drive.

“Not only does a 1GB flash device contain the ESXi hypervisor, it also provides VMware Tools for various supported operating systems and a copy of the vSphere Client which administrators can download and install to their workstations.  These components are not executed by the hypervisor at all — they can be obtained through other means, but it is very convenient to have them right on the host.”

Gray’s post also provides GParted screen shots of showing the partition layout as well as an image of the directory listing of the tools, drivers, and vSphere Client.

ESXi is as small as VMware says it is… by Mike Laverick also similarly discusses the contents of ESXi flash drives. Laverick also points out that for roll back purposes, ESXi installations also maintain copies of the previous installed versions. When an upgrade goes wrong a local copy of the former working ESXi version can be quickly recovered to.

If your curious about VMware’s methodology for coming up with the hypervisor footprint calculations they base their claims on then check out the Virtual Reality Blog post Our position on hypervisor footprints, patching, vulnerabilities and whatever else Microsoft wants to throw into a blog post. Eric Horschman gives you the gorey details on ESXi disk partition sizes as well as direct replies to the several other topics Microsoft has competitive issues with.

“A df -h command will then show you that the total size of those compressed ESXi boot images in the directory corresponding to /bootbank is 59.3MB — somewhat less than the 70MB figure we’ve publicly stated.  The other partitions in the listing are either loaded only in memory (/), or they are excluded per the rules above.  Note that this is not just a stripped down ESXi installation, it is a fully capable ESXi host supporting all licensed vSphere features.”

Finally If ESXi is so small why is the download so big? is a post I wrote after talking to Amir Sharif, VMware Senior Product Manager about the reasons the ESXi .ISO download(s) are over 200 MB. Copying what I wrote in the original post:

Amir explained to me that the VMware ESXi downloads (both for installation media and patches) contain 4 major components.  These components and their approximate sizes are:

• VMware ESXi (32 MB)
• VMware VI Client (48 MB)
• VMware Tools (120 MB)
• Global and regional server vendor value-add customization bits (30 MB)

It’s important to note that there are several versions of the VMware Tools depending on the target OS, and there are two different bundle types for Linux OSes (.rpm and .tgz).  There are multiple versions of server vendor customization bits as well. Therefore, VMware’s completeness to include all of these items in a single download makes for a large .iso file. In case you noticed the math doesn’t match the current version’s download size, that is because the 4 component sizes are approximates and will change from version to version.

On the Virtual Geek Blog, Chad published some early photos of the server infrastructure in use for VMworld 2009.

VMworld – V-Max – powered up and ready to go!

Chad’s post title indicates the VMworld 2009 datacenters are using EMC’s Symmetrix V-Max for storage.

Some links for EMC V-Max
Symmetrix V-Max: A New Paradigm For Storage Virtualization?
Symmetrix V-Max: Storage Architecture Redefined
A great new VMware View/Cisco UCS/V-Max whitepaper
EMC V-Max: V stands for bigger – Storage Soup

On Run-Virtual.com, Richard provides some additional details about the VMworld servers:

At least 512 Cisco UCS blades at VMworld 2009!

“This year there will be 3 ‘datacenters’ at the event where VMware is placing all its kit to support all the hands-on labs, email stations, booths, etc. The biggest datacenter is showing 16 Racks with each 4 Cisco UCS blade chasis, with each 8 blades = 512 Blades! WOW!!”

Some links for Cisco UCS
Cisco UCS and Nexus 1000V design diagram with Palo adapter
More on Cisco UCS
What are the hardware components of UCS – Ciscowiki
The good and bad of Cisco’s UCS servers

Looks like the bottom of the main escalators at the Moscone Center will be a great spot to get warm if needed!