Virtualization Roundtable Podcast from VMTN

Posted on May 24th, 2008 in SAN, appliance, blogs, feature comparison, vmware by Rich

John Troyer from VMTN has hosted the first podcast episode of VMware Communities Roundtable and has posted a summary of the call notes at VMware Communities Roundtable podcast #1 | VMTN Blog. I am honored to have one of my “things that make you go hmmmm” (on the Quick Migration vs VMotion discussion) posts listed as a reference for one of the topics of the episode.

John announces the new series and the objective of the Roundtable podcasts with the following summary:

“Each week, we’ll bring together experts and leaders from the VMware Communities and virtualization blogs to discuss the interesting topics in virtualization. Think of this as if it were a group meeting up at VMworld over a pint to chat about the latest news.”

The episode lasts somewhere between 50 minutes to an hour and is a recorded call between John and an attendee list consisting of some of the virtualization community’s top minds from all over the world. VMware Community profiles of the individuals contributing to episode 1 are:

Go to John’s VMTN post to listen or download the podcast, but the following is my quick summary and take-aways from the call.

Xtravirt XVS creates a FREE SAN out of local ESX VMFS

Posted on May 23rd, 2008 in appliance, esx3.5, iSCSI, storage, vi3 by Rich

XVS Reference Architecture from xtravirt.comMove over Lefthand Networks VSA, xtravirt.com has provided a free alternative for creating a virtual iSCSI SAN. Xtravirt Virtual SAN (XVS) is a virtual machine appliance that runs on two of your ESX hosts’ local VMFS datastores to create a single, synchronized iSCSI SAN. XVS allows the creation of ESX clusters for VI3 Enterprise features without purchasing a physical shared storage solution.

“The Xtravirt Virtual SAN (XVS) appliance for VMware ESX3 Server is a free solution to provide the benefits of shared VMFS storage without the cost of a SAN – this allows the utilisation of otherwise unused local storage in the ESX server to facilitate enterprise level features such as vMotion, DRS and HA normally only available through the use of a shared storage device. All volume data is synchronously replicated between hosts, providing full fail-over capability with data integrity in the event of host, disk or appliance failure.”

XVS is the perfectly priced storage solution for the home ESX test lab, small and mediium businesses, or the small remote branch office.

To download a copy of the virtual appliance and for more about XVS go to xtravirt.com.

updated 5.24.08

Currently XVS is only configurable as a single LUN across paired ESX hosts. A third ESX hosts can use the virtual ip address for it’s SAN, but the additional host(s) would not be using their local storage as part of the synchronized SAN. Future editions will hopefully expand the storage across more than 2 ESX hosts.

Virtual Security Solutions

Posted on May 7th, 2008 in appliance, security by Rich

When I first started VM /ETC by live blogging from VMworld 2007 last September, I posted a few entries about what I call “ton of bricks” moments. This happens to me usually when I am talking to vendors or other engineers about virtualization technologies, strategies or designs and I learn something new that is so simple but so important that it hits me like a ton of bricks. VMware’s Partner Exchange 2008 first such moment happened not because of a single conversation or breakout session, but because of a collective of virtual infrastructure security discussions.

Virtual Infrastructure presents some unique security challenges to administrators. Sure, virtual machines are networked servers just like physical servers and traditional security monitoring and intrusion detection products and processes can be deployed as usual. However, consolidation of servers has changed the attack surface from physical networking to virtualized networks contained within virtualization hosts. If a hacker were to compromise one of your VMs could your current security monitoring alert you of any suspicious activity? What if the activity never reached the core network switch or even the physical NICs of the host server, but instead was kept internal to the host by only attempting to compromise the VMs that shared the virtual switches? What if an intruder brought his own VM and started it up on one of your virtualization hosts, would you know it ever happened?

I have talked with several vendors this week that have solutions to provide visibility and monitoring of the internal virtual network activity and inter-VM communications. These solutions

Preventing ESX performance bottlenecks

Posted on March 6th, 2008 in appliance, blogs, capacity analysis, esx, vi3, vmetc.com by Rich

Alex Bakman from blog.vkernel.com has created an interesting post about the possible performance bottlenecks of an ESX host. Want awesome performance in VMWARE ESX? is a high level strategy for preventing slow performance. Alex says it best in the post:

“To achieve stellar VMware ESX performance you have to remove ALL bottlenecks in your environment. Remember your performance will only be as fast as the slowest “link” in your performance equation.”

The post goes on to list four best practice tips and gives some brief info about each performance factor. Summarizing the list, the four tips are:

Zenoss VMwareESX Zenpack

Posted on February 20th, 2008 in appliance, esx, linux by Rich

Popular open source enterprise monitoring application Zenoss has a package for monitoring VMware ESX servers. Although I have never used Zenoss personally, I have run across several customers over the years who do. Check out Zenoss.com for more info about the application and the Zenpack package for monitoring ESX hosts.

A preconfigured Zenoss installation is available to download as a virtual appliance from the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace.

Here’s some more info from the web site:

Build new VMs for VMware Player with EasyVMX

Posted on November 19th, 2007 in appliance, easyvmx, how to, player, vmware by Rich

So, you need to build a new VM. You don’t have a license for VMware Workstation? You don’t want to install VMware Server on your desktop? You realize the free VMware server is only supported on a few server operating systems, right? WinXP or Vista is not supported (you can make it work, but that’s another post for another time).

In my experience, the simplest solution has been to

Design a clustered VM application that can fully leverage VMotion, DRS, and HA?

Posted on October 9th, 2007 in SAN, appliance, cluster, datacore, esx, iSCSI, lefthand, mscs, openfiler, storage, treesum, vmware, vsa by Rich

This post is more of an idea then a report. If you’ve experimented with a design similar to my thoughts below please post a comment and let me know!

Have you tried to configure VMs in a MS cluster across separate ESX hosts? How about clustering a physical server with a VM? VMware’s guide can be found here. Referencing this guide I am specifically talking about “Clustering Virtual Machines Across Physical Hosts (Cluster Across Boxes)” and “Clustering Physical Machines and Virtual Machines (Standby Host)”.

Read the guide and you’ll find there are several prerequisites and restrictions. The most important ones being:

  • you must use RDMs in physical mode for shared storage
  • dedicate at least 2 physical nics to the VMs
  • you can not use multipathing software
  • you must use the LSILogic virtual SCSI adapter in your VMs
  • you can only use 32 bit VMs. You can not cluster with 64 bit VMs
  • iSCSI disks are not supported. NAS disks are not supported.
  • you can only use 2 node clustering
  • the boot disks for the VMs must be on local storage
  • clustered VMs can not participate in an ESX cluster and use VMotion, DRS and HA

So how do we design a clustered VM application that can fully leverage VMotion, DRS, and HA?

Thursday 9.13.07 Keynote - what I missed :(

Posted on September 15th, 2007 in appliance, availability, gen session, stor vmotion, vmware, vmworld by Rich

Unfortunately I slept late Thursday morning. Waking up at 7:30 am in Hayward, CA meant that there was no way short of a helicopter I was going to make it to San Francisco before 9. I’m pretty sure my company would not let me expense a helicopter so I decided to catch up on some email from the hotel until traffic burned off. I also had “Smash Head” from the party Weds night!

blog.scottlowe.org has some great notes on this session. Here’s my thoughts on what I missed.

Live VM backups from a VM - esXpress VBA

Posted on September 12th, 2007 in appliance, dr, esxpress, sol exchange, vmworld by Rich

You don’t have the budget for the required infrastructure of VCB backups? Try esXpress from PHD technologies. I mean literally, try their free 30 day, fully functioning, fully supported demo that can back up live VMs to a dedicated VMFS partition, an FTP server, or both! After the 30 days you can continue to perform daily full backups for FREE!

Once you install it on all your ESX hosts, you can configure the backups from a basic console GUI or integrated within the VI client connected to the VC2 server.

LeftHand Networks VSA

Posted on September 12th, 2007 in SAN, appliance, iSCSI, lefthand, sol exchange, vmworld, vsa by Rich

Virtual SAN Appliance for VMware ESX

I’ve been hearing about it all week. The President of my company sent me an email about this at the start of the conference. I finally got to talk to the LeftHand team at their booth today about their new virtual appliance - VSA.

You can download a trial version of VSA here.

Some notes about implementing VSA:

  1. you must reserve 1 GB ram for VSA on each ESX host
  2. you must reserve 2 GHz cpu for VSA on each ESX host
  3. you must create a dedicated Gigabit virtual switch for VSA on each ESX host

After you configure the VSA VMs on each of your local ESX VMFS they are clustered and data is “striped” between all hosts. Then if one host goes down the data is still available to the VMs as they are VMotion-ed or restarted via HA on the other hosts.

The VSA has native ability to do SAN based replication via the WAN.