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I have already posted about Sun xVM VirtualBox as a great open source alternative to VMware Workstation. ZDNet also wrote a comparison article of VirtualBox and and VMware Server that I reported on here at VM /ETC. I’ve been using VirtualBox as a free virtualization solution (replace VMware Server 1.5) on my notebook since Sun’s version 1.6 was released. So, when Rick Vanover began his series of posts on the SearchServerVirtualization Blog about VirtualBox I was more than interested. This post is a summary of (and links to) Rick’s posts with some of my personal experiences and opinions thrown in.

Networking Features

In my opinion, one of the biggest adjustments between VMware’s products and VirtualBox is having to

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Scott Lowe is live blogging from TechED 2008 in Orlando, FL this week, and his Tech-Ed 2008 Keynote Liveblog post from this morning’s opening Keynote reports on some interesting cross virtualization vendor management capability of Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). I’ve blogged previously about how I believe the future virtual data center will a combination of ESX, XenServer, and Hyper-V hosts, so the idea of a single managment server for all platforms is very exciting.

Read all of Scott’s post at the link above, but here’s a few quotes that give a good overview of how the demo worked:

“At this point, Rakesh Malhotra comes on the screen to show off using System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) to manage Hyper-V, Virtual Server, and VMware ESX. Rakesh launches the VI Client to show that there is a three-node ESX cluster. Flipping over to SCVMM, Rakesh showed that the same ESX cluster shows up side-by-side with a Hyper-V cluster.”

“In the next part of the demo, Rakesh uses SCVMM to perform a VMotion operation on the ESX cluster. Here, at least, Rakesh alludes to the fact that VMotion provides no downtime to the user, whereas Quick Migration does not. Bob chimes in to remind users that live migration will be added to a future version of Hyper-V.”

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Duncan over at yellow-bricks.com has posted a very helpful VMware HA troubleshooting tip. Changing the IP-address of an ESX host and HA deals with fixing HA issues that arise after changing the ip address of ESX hosts. In summary, Duncan was helping a colleague that was having trouble reconfiguring HA on an ESX cluster, and even though all the standard steps for resolving the issue were followed the HA feature could not be enabled on the cluster. Duncan was able to to identify that the issue was caused because a HA agent auto-generated file still contained the wrong ip address information. Specifically the /etc/FT_HOSTS file was the culprit.

Read the yellow-bricks.com post for the full details, but I am copying the t-shooting and resolution steps here for my future knowledge base.

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I wrote a post for the Virtualization Pro blog about my take on Microsoft’s ROI Calculator. I was inspired to check out the calculator by the VMware Virtual Reality post Microsoft’s Virtualization ROI/TCO Calculator: Our Take.

“…it wasn’t how Microsoft calculated the numbers that bothered me most. I struggled to understand why a TCO and ROI calculator included a competitive analysis. After all, VMware’s TCO calculator doesn’t compare the cost of competitor’s products. What does that have to do with return on investment? It just seems out of place to me. Furthermore, if you go back and review VMware’s points they are mostly about the competitive cost comparison, too. It’s easy to forget we are discussing a TCO / ROI calculator.”

Check out the whole post at Virtualization Competitive Analysis in the middle of an ROI Calculator? - Virtualization Pro: A SearchVMware.com blog.

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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:

• Steve Beaver - sbeaver
• Tom Howarth
• Alex Mittell - mittell
• Eric Siebert - esiebert7625
• Edward Haletky -Texiwill
• Dave Mishchenko

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.

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Jason Perlow of blogs.zdnet.com has written a great feature comparison post of the 2 best multi-platform, free virtualization products in my opinion - Sun xVM VirtualBox 1.6 and VMware Server 2.0 Beta 2.

Personally, I used to run VMware Server 1.x on my XP notebook until I was tempted to try VMware’s first beta of version 2.0. Although not an officially supported OS for any version of VMware Server, my use of Server on XP was for basic research and test purposes, and I chose the free version over VMware Workstation. Like most, after the switch to 2.0 beta 1 I experienced frustration with the web interface. Now, since I discovered Sun’s xVM VirtualBox 1.6 seamless feature and the ability to run virtual machines created in VMware’s .vmdk format, I have switched. I am extremely happy with VirtualBox, and I even consider it to be a closer open-source replacement for VMware Workstation with features that rival the still in beta version of Workstation 6.5. I also use VirtualBox 1.6 on both 64 bit and 32 bit Ubuntu at home.

Jason’s comparison focuses on using the products in a true virtualization host capacity, and he provides some interesting performance analysis.

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Carlo Costanzo over at ipmer.com has a great post about how to quickly and easily solve issues resulting from VM snapshots. As Carlo points out, too many administrators misunderstand the ESX snapshot to be a point in time backup and unfortunately do not realize it is instead a live and growing file. More often than not the snapshot is forgotten until the LUN is completely out of space at which time the VM is unstable. Trying to commit the snapshot becomes a time consuming burden.

The post 70GB Snapshot, YIKES! explains how Carlo used some “outside of the box” thinking to use VMware Converter to rescue VMs without going through the commit process. The idea is so simple it’s brilliant! Carlo writes:

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VM-Aware.com posted Amending ESX Time which is a great guide for setting the time on an ESX host when you can not automatically sync with a NTP server. The post explains how to use the standard Linux date command. Personally, I can never remember the parameter order when using date because it’s not the expected mm/dd/yy format. Finally, the guide shows how to use the hwclock command to make sure the ESX internal clock matches the newly adjusted OS time.

Follow the link above for the original post. I have slightly modified the command syntax in the following steps here based on my experience.

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VMware Certified Professionals command higher salaries, report shows is SearchServerVirtualization.com blog written by Joe Foran that explores the value of the VCP certification. Joe uses indeed.com to create a graph that compares the average annual salary of today’s popular technical certifications to demonstrate that, as Joe puts it, “the VCP is as hot as ever”. I figured if Joe can do it I can do it too, so I used indeed.com to recreate basically the same salary comparison table for this post.

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This weeks edition is centered on the topic of quick migration versus VMware HA and VMotion. We start with a post from the Windows Virtualization Team’s blog site and then explore some responses from a couple popular blogs in the virtualization community. Finally, if you have not seen Microsoft’s Quick Migration in action then check out the video at the end of this post. Links to the full posts are provided by clicking the section titles. Enjoy!

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Why is it that migrating to virtual infrastructure (VI) is most often considered to be the responsibility of the server administrators? Anyone who has already done it can tell you it involves much more than servers and hardware. Even for small companies, virtualizing servers potentially (and usually) involves networking, storage, security, and infrastructure services changes. In fact, it is often as involved and complex as moving your physical servers from one data center to another.

So why is there a perception that implementing VI is only a server team responsibility? Obviously, one reason is because on the surface it’s about installing and consolidating operating systems on server hardware. Another reason is because VMware, the source for all the interest in migrating to VI to date, has done such a great job marketing their products as just server installs.

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Did you know you can modify a VI client shortcut so you can enable single sign on to Virtual Center? This is an undocumented feature that many blogs reported on in March, but most credit vinternals.com and the post VirtualCenter 2.5 Passthrough Authentication as the first to report this option.

“At last! VMware have finally added passthrough auth support in VC 2.5, although it is currently classed as experimental. This is something I have been waiting / asking about for quite some time. And even better, it’s on by default! To use it, simply add -passthroughAuth -s vchostname to the end of the shortcut used to launch the VI 2.5 client.

By default it uses the Negotiate SSPI provider, however since they have fully implemented the interface you can change that behaviour to use Kerberos by adding the following within the <vpxd> node in the vpxd.cfg file on the VC server:

<sspiProtocol>Kerberos</sspiProtocol>”

The screenshot of the VI Client shortcut was found at Pass Through Authentication with the VMware VI Client by Diary of a Bad Golfer. Click on it for a larger image.

There is also a VMware Communities thread at How to enable passthrough authentication in VMware VirtualCenter 2.5

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