VM /ETC

Archive for September, 2009

At the VMworld 2009 Vizioncore booth I discovered 3 new free tools from Vizioncore that all VI administrators, no matter which popular hypervisor platform you use, should know about. vConverter SC, vControl Multi-Hypervisor Management, and vOptimizer WasteFinder offer unique features that accomplish and automate common virtual environment administrative tasks. These products include tools for P2V and V2V migrations between multiple vendor platforms, a web based multi hypervisor management server, and virtual disk optimization through VMDK alignment and wasted storage scanning.

Vizioncore is banking on creating wider interest and adoption of its full product suite in the virtualization market, but for now administrators definitely come out the winners with these great tools at no cost. The free products mentioned in this post (as well as all of Vizioncore’s software) can be downloaded here.

I’ve summarized these utilities in the rest of this post. Read the rest of this entry »

During VMworld 2009 I talked to Trend Micro about their virtualization protection solutions. Some of which are based in part on VMware’s VMSafe APIs. Trend told me about their protection against virus and malware attacks, network intrusion, firewall integrity, and application threats in VMware virtual machines (VMs). After researching some more about what I heard in the Trend booth at the conference, I discovered Trend also offers a free product, VM Protection, for a maximum of 100 guests.

Antivirus and Malware

At the Trend Micro booth I was introduced to Core Protection for VMware Virtual Machines, and I learned that although virtual machines still require Trend Real Time Agents (RTA) installed in each VM, the protection workload is now isolated to a dedicated “scanning virtual machine”.

The virtualization RTA on each guest is a specialized version responsible only for scheduling and status monitoring, and is not the same agent installed if using Trend’s physical server protection. The volumes and files of each guest are actually scanned directly on the VMFS datastore by the scanning VM, and not performed by the RTA running on each virtual server.

The following diagram was copied from the Trend Core Protection data sheet and shows the logical design of the solution. Read the rest of this entry »

By now you’ve seen the pictures, video (VMworldTV), and posts about the hardware in the datacenters that hosted the VMworld 2009 Labs. You should already know about the staggering number of virtual machines ( > 37,000 ) running on the ESX 4 servers ( > 770 ). But enough about the hardware.

If you are like me you probably would have loved to get the opportunity to use the vSphere client to connect to a vCenter server managing that entire virtual infrastructure (VI). Although I did not get to do just that, I did get the opportunity to do the next best thing – talk to the manager of the team that does. My VMworld ended by talking to Randy Keener, Group Manager of VMware’s GETO team (Global Engineering Technical Operations). Keener explained to me some of the VMworld 2009 virtual infrastructure design details that VI administrators would be interested to know.

Nested ESX in the Lab Manager Cloud

What Keener revealed somewhat surprised me. Although vCenter 4 server was a piece of the design, the true magic that supported the self paced labs, instructor led labs, and the Solutions Exchange was (arguably) an example of a private cloud created by

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One of the Solutions Exchange theater presentations I sat through was at the PHD Technologies booth. I watched a presentation on their latest product release, esXpress 3.6. Backing up virtual machines (VMs) is a constant and important concern of virtualization administrators, and esXpress offers a unique, award winning alternative. Up to 16 simultaneous live backups or restores per ESX host is possible without impacting ESX Service Console resources and without configuration of additional VCB (VMware Consolidated Backup) infrastructure.

The secret to esXpress is the use of VBAs (Virtual Backup Appliances). A VBA is a prebuilt software solution running on it’s own Linux OS that runs as a VM along with the production VMs on each ESX 3.x /4.x host. There are no agents to install in the VMs being backed up, nor any dependency on APIs. A single Configuration Virtual Appliance must run somewhere in the environment to provide a esXpress management console that enforces global configuration settings across all the backup VBAs. A fourth VM appliance can also be added to the solution to serve as a deduplicated, backup destination target VM. Other possible backup destinations are SMB, SSH, FTP, and VMFS repositories.

Some other quick highlites of esXpress 3.6: Read the rest of this entry »

After talking with NetApp at their booth on the VMworld 2009 Solutions Exchange floor I came to the conclusion that the Rapid Cloning Utility (RCU) does way more for VDI implementations then the tool’s name implies. Available for free to customers that already own NetApp’s file and volume cloning  features, RCU can create automated and customized virtual desktops more quickly and with better storage efficiency while still integrating the administrative convenience and control available in vCenter and VMware View. RCU has been elevated in my mind as a “must use” tool for VDI implementation using NetApp storage.

I went to their booth with a purpose. It was obvious to me that RCU would automate the mass creation of virtual desktops by cloning a volume that contained a template desktop image. Although that’s a great time saver available when you deploy a solution based on NetApp storage,
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This VMworld 2009 session took place Thurs at 9:30 am in room 134

Points made by the presenter worth remembering.

• Physical failure is unavoidable, and an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure
• There is a 50% chance that pieces of an ESX Cluster will fail and take down critical services and servers.
• You’re not usually staring at a monitoring screen, and you want to be notified as the hardware degrades not afterwards.
• You want as much hardware info about a host, from multiple different vendor platforms, and on a single screen
• Physical failure is a fact of virtual life
• Be proactive about hardware failure and use DRS + hardware monitoring + Alarms

An interesting demo in this session showed the use of  the built in vCenter 4 host hardware temperature status alarm generating SNMP traps as well as automatically putting a host in maintenance mode so an administrator can investigate. This action instigated a VMotion evacuation of the VMs on the impacted host and effectively isolated the hardware issue in the environment with minimal or zero impact.

My key take away of this session is that numerous “out of the box” vCenter event based alarms can be leveraged during the warning phase of hardware failures. This includes alerts covering power, fans, cpus, memory, batteries, etc. The ESX host hardware monitoring feature is detected and available automtically in vSphere 4.

My notes: Read the rest of this entry »

I will still be uploading more photos over the next few days, but here is a slide show of some of my photos so far.

Enjoy!

I’ve also created a Tweetdeck after the page break that filters all of my Twitpics from the week.
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