VM /ETC

Archive for November, 2009

On the TechRepublic Servers and Storage Blog, Scott Lowe (not this Scott Lowe) posted his objective feature comparison table of VMware vSphere and Hyper-V on Server 2008 R2. Two things from Lowe’s Microsoft’s Hyper-V R2 vs. VMware’s vSphere: A feature comparison caught my eye and made it worth pointing out to VM /ETC readers:

1. Lowe currently runs ESX but, in his words: ” As Microsoft continues to improve Hyper-V R2, we will monitor its progress to determine if and when it might be able to replace VMware.”
2. Lowe actually compares the latest editions of both vSphere and Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V

Read the entire post for Lowe’s explanation of each feature row, but I am posting a screen shot of his table here. Read the rest of this entry »

It has to be the most common question for those implementing a new virtual infrastructure (VI)  – “how do we back up our virtual machines?” There are certainly plenty of choices. A company could stay with the (most commonly found in physical environments) system of agent based tape backups, implement VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB), implement a third party disk to disk product, or rely on SAN array snapshots. Most likely they will end up with a hybrid solution involving many of these choices. There is not an easy and consistent answer. It’s a company by company decision.

Luckily several posts have recently been published on TechTarget.com sites SearchDataBackup and SearchVMware that tackle the topic of comparing the software based VMware VM  backup alternatives and offer a lot of information for those evaluating the choices. I thought I would summarize these links since they have caught my attention over the last several weeks. Finally I link to a post about the unique advantages of SAN array backups for a hardware based backup comparison.

Readers should be aware that VMware’s Data Recovery (vDR) product has been updated since the posts linked in this summary were written. Although there are some new features introduced, the implementation requirements have not changed and therefore the content of these posts remain relevant.

Although I’ve covered what VI admins need to know about VCB in the past, I am not covering the product in this post. Check some of my other VCB posts for more information. Read the rest of this entry »

Here is my video of the GesaltIT Tech Field Day Party at The Computer History Museum in San Jose, CA. It’s not exactly high quality work, but provides some good images of the museum, the event and people, the presentation of the "thank you" gift to Stephen Foskett, and then Foskett’s appreciation speech for the event organizers and sponsors.

Sorry about the shaky video and frequent unfocused shots. I tried to edit out as much as possible without making the video hard to understand. Consider this my “Blair Rich” style of filming – except there are no “up my nostrils” angles. (if you saw the movie you’ll hopefully get that joke!)

GestaltIT Tech Field Day 1 Party from Rich Brambley on Vimeo.

I’ve also created a Vimeo album of all the Tech Field Day videos I could find. Check it out for several other of the attendees videos as well.

The video (in my video) on the screen was created by Marc Farley and Sunshine Mugrabi to set up our presentation of Foskett’s gift. Now, that’s a great video! I’ve embedded it here in this post, but it’s real home is on the StorageRap blog. Watch it too and see what everyone was laughing at!

As promised a few weeks ago, you can now download the latest version of VMware’s VDI solution, VMware View 4. The download can be found here, and the Release Notes explain What’s New and other helpful information about Getting Started. View 4 is available for trial with a 60 day license – plenty of time to work out the deployment and pilot a group of users. Be sure to upgrade to vSphere 4 Update 1 to take full advantage of View 4.

I thought I’d be a little different and offer a quick overview of View 4′s Features, the new PCoIP protocol, some key deployment requirements, and a high level architecture diagram for those about to implement. I’m pasting information found in the View Architecture Planning Guide and the View Administrator’s Guide, so get a copy of those documents to prepare as completely as possible. Check out all the available literature on the VMware View documentation page.

View 4 Features

It helps to stop and remember what VMware’s VDI can do for the enterprise and not just focus on what’s new from in the latest release. This is more sales than engineering, but the list summarizes the whole package of benefits and shows that the VDI solution covers a lot of desktop and user management concerns:
Read the rest of this entry »

Ocarina Networks presented to us during the Day 2 morning session of the GestaltIT Tech Field Day. Their presentation was a deep dive into storage compression and optimization. If you read my Ideas About Presenting To Engineers from earlier this week, then you’ll know what I mean when I say that Ocarina had “black magic” that wasn’t as interesting to me as how and where the solution was deployed in the data center. After all, Ocarina claims that they will optimize and compress data on any storage device. I wanted to know how they could integrate with existing, third party storage before I was ready to absorb how their compression and de-duplication was actually achieved.

I don’t want to mislead anyone – almost all of my fellow delegates where deeply impressed with the block by block algorithm lesson on Ocarina’s technology. The storage gurus where so into it I had to wait for the hands on labs to start before I could get my questions answered. In fact, I never did the labs because I spent the whole time at the white board understanding the deployment options.

My post is therefore about implementation options of an Ocarina solution. I’m using several quotes from posts by Carter George, co-founder of Ocarina Networks, taken from the Online Storage Optimization Blog to help me explain the deployment options. Then I’ll cover some ideas about how could Ocarina function in a virtual environment.

For those that want to know more about the deep dive on the Ocarina technology, follow the links at the end of this write up to my fellow attendee’s posts. Read the rest of this entry »

The VMGuy has the scoop on all the VMware releases tonight! VMware has also made available an updated version of the GUI based virtual machine (VM) backup and restore plugin for vCenter 4, VMware Data Recovery 1.1 (VDR). Download it here and check the check the Release Notes here.

VMware is saying VDR has improved performance and progress information during intgregity checks, enhanced CIFS support, and that the previous experimental support status for File Level Restores of Windows VMs has been elevated to full support.

Although I could find no mention of it on the VDR web page, the data sheet, or in the new Release Notes, VDR was originally targeted for virtual infrastructure that hosted up to 100 VMs. I’m not sure if this VMware support limitation is still in effect or not.

Still, combined with the already built in de-duplication of VDR VM backups, SMBs have a great VCB alternative that continues to improve.

It was speculated that it might not happen until next week (Monday 11/23), but VMware engineer Dave Lawrence’s post Release: ESX 4.0 Update 1 on his VMGuy Blog confirms that ESX 4.0 U1 is now available for download. The most notable changes in this update include full support for VMware View 4 (expected to be available for download on 11/23), full support for Windows 7 and 2008 R2 in both 32 bit and 64 bit flavors, and an update to the vSphere Client that fixes the problem when installing on Windows 7 desktops – eliminating the need for the workaround VI admins have had to configure until now.

Go here for the full Release Notes that explain other new changes such as enhanced MSCS support, enhanced paravirtualized SCSI support, improved Distributed Switch performance, increased vCPU core limits, Intel Xeon 3400 CPU support, and several resolved issues.

VMware has also released vCenter 4 U1 tonight with matching support for View 4 along with Windows 7 and 2008 R2. The Release Notes indicate a few other goodies can be found in the vCenter update:

• Pre-Upgrade Checker Tool — A standalone pre-upgrade checker tool is now available as part of the vCenter Server installation media that proactively checks ESX hosts for any potential issues that you might encounter while upgrading vCenter agents on these hosts as part of the vCenter Server upgrade process. You can run this tool independently prior to upgrading an existing vCenter Server instance. The tool can help identify any configuration, networking, disk space or other ESX host-related issues that could prevent ESX hosts from being managed by vCenter Server after a successful vCenter Server upgrade.
• HA Cluster Configuration Maximum — HA clusters can now support 160 virtual machines per host in HA Cluster of 8 hosts or less. The maximum number of virtual machines per host in cluster sizes of 9 hosts and above is still 40, allowing a maximum of 1280 Virtual Machines per HA cluster.