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Archive for the ‘esxi’ Category

Alex Barrett’s SearchServerVirtualization.com VMware clampdown on free ESXi may prompt defection to Hyper-V article presents VMware’s reasons for making a request to Veeam to stop supporting Veeam Backup with the free ESXi versions. Quoting the interview from Barrett’s story:

“We provide certain APIs [application programming interfaces] and methods particular to the virtualization environment,” said Patrick Lin, the vice president of product management for VMware’s server business unit. By offering access to the hypervisor via a preferred set of APIs, “our intent is to provide a level playing field in the basis of backup,” he said.

But Veeam did not use VMware-approved methods to develop its product, said Parag Patel, VMware’s vice president of alliances. “We’re not exactly sure what they did, but it didn’t seem sound,” Patel said. “For us it’s a question of what’s built and how it’s built. … To be perfectly honest, we didn’t want to be associated with it because it wasn’t satisfactory.”

Perhaps more to the point, Veeam Backup is inconsistent with VMware’s vision of free ESXi deployments. “It’s meant to be a starter … walk before you run,” Patel said. “It’s not supposed to be for complex software environments.” With free ESXi, “you shouldn’t need a whole lot of other tools to make it work.” If you do, you are free to upgrade.

On the other hand, Barrett’s interview also helps confirm the idea that VMware does not wish
Read the rest of this entry »

In the official press release today Veeam Software Offers New Essentials Bundle, Acceleration Kits for VMware vSphere 4 Veeam mentions a new policy removing support for the use of Veeam Backup with the free version of ESXi.

“At the same time, Veeam introduced a new policy with respect to support for the free edition of VMware ESXi. “As a longtime Premier Technology Alliance Partner and supporter of VMware’s product strategy, Veeam Software takes great pride in creating innovative software products that enhance the customer value of VMware ESX, ESXi, and ESXi Free,” said Ratmir Timashev, Veeam president and CEO. “One such example is support for the free edition of VMware ESXi in Veeam Backup and Replication.

“Recently, VMware requested that Veeam discontinue support for ESXi Free in Veeam Backup and Replication in order to comply with VMware’s updated licensing policy,” Timashev continued. “In light of VMware’s request, and our close technical partnership, Veeam Backup and Replication will no longer support ESXi Free. We will still continue to offer support for ESXi Free to existing Veeam customers who purchased Backup & Replication prior to version 3.1.””

Be sure to read those two paragraphs again.

Veeam, a company that seems to have found a successful niche marketing to SMBs and remote branch office VMware deployments, has been asked to remove support of the use of one it’s popular products with free ESXi. Possibly shedding some additional light on this mystery, the press announcement mentions respect for VMware’s product strategy and Veeam’s long time status as a technology partner. There is no mention of Veeam pulling free ESXi support of the popular FastSCP file management tool.

Without any inside information about the VMware ESXi roadmap and strategy, here is a quick review of ESXi’s public timeline: Read the rest of this entry »

“Should I use VMFS or RDMs (Raw Device Mappings) for my VMware ESX virtual machines (VMs)?” It’s a popular discussion not just for new virtual infrastructure (VI) planning but for existing environments as well. In my experience, Many VMware ESX virtual machines using RDMs were created because of a perceived boost in VM and application performance. Somehow, the wrong impression became widespread: the proprietary VMware VMFS file system created too much I/O overhead and slowed down the VM performance. Although the VMFS reputation has been publicly repaired again, there are still regular challenges explaining this virtual disk myth to VMware administrators.

There are definite pros and cons for using both VMFS and RDMs. This post suggests the 3 most common practical reasons (in my opinion) to use RDMs. That is, reasons that benefit VI administrators, leverage a VM’s native operating system,  or take advantage of technologies and process designed for physical environments. I also provide some links to a few other blogs that have recently explored the same RDM vs VMFS topic as supporting examples.

First, if proof is still needed that performance should not be a factor in the VMFS versus RDM decision, check out VMware’s own PDF titled Performance Characteristics of VMFS and RDM.

So what are some practical reason for using RDMs? Read the rest of this entry »

VMware’s release of ESXi Update 4 (U4) has apparently restricted Remote Command Line Interface (RCLI) administration of the free version of ESXi again. I followed a link in a tweet today from fellow vExpert William Lam which led me to a VMware Communities thread titled ESXi 3.5u4 is out, does the RCLI still have r/w access for the free version?. In this thread Dave Mishchenko reports:

“I tried vicfg-advcfg and vicfg-snmp and both failed to write ( Failed : fault.RestrictedVersion.summary). They worked fine to read configuration.”

Of course, the licensed version of ESXi U4 will allow remote read and write access.

Readers may recall that remote read and write access to free ESXi U3 via the RCLI was announced here on VM /ETC and then quickly reported as a mistake that VMware would “fix” in an upcoming version.

I find it hard to believe VMware will not allow remote configuration of it’s free version. Seems to me that free hypervisor alternatives from Microsoft and Citrix would warrant a competitive justification. Besides, vCenter offers the real, GUI based ease of administration. Why not allow command line read and write access to the free ESXi version?

William ends the thread with a thought worth considering:

“Too bad to hear, looks like if users are happy with their r/w access with the RCLI, they may not want to upgrade to U4 just yet.”

VMware has released Update 4 (U4) of ESX and ESXi. There are some new features available with these latest builds, so check out the Release Notes of each product (linked below).

Although there are a lot of new enhancements, probably the biggest surprise for me was the experimental support for PXE booting ESXi U4. PXE boot allows stateless servers without local hard drives. For a “how to” on PXE booting ESXi 3.5 U4 check out VMware KB Article 1008971

“The main benefit of PXE booting ESX Server 3i version 3.5 Update 4 is that it allows you to run the deployment on systems with no disk or other local persistent storage. Furthermore, PXE booting greatly simplifies both the booting and upgrading processes. Therefore, scaling to many machines is greatly facilitated. No manual installation steps are necessary when the system is fully-realized.”

This sounds like an obvious Cloud enabling technology to me!

In the past, Chris Wolf and Mike Dipetrillo both gave us glimpses of a PXE boot future for ESXi. As both bloggers have described, it appears VMware architect Lance Berc is the man to thank for this new feature. Check out their posts for more info on what is possible and how it is done.

Another major enhancement of Update 4 in my opinion is the expanded and improved Enhanced VMXnet virtual network driver. Improved network performance is now possible for the 32 bit versions of Windows Server 2003 as well as Windows XP. Update 4 appears to make my recent post on enabling the VMXnet driver obsolete!

I’ll highlight (using cut and pastes) what else caught my attention from the Release Notes of both ESX and ESXi in this rest of this post. Read the rest of this entry »

Part of the magic hosting multiple virtual machines (VMs) on VMware ESX server is accomplished by leaning on the host’s CPUs to simultaneously handle networking loads. The more network I/O generated the more the CPUs have to work. When this happens the performance of the ESX host and the VMs can suffer because the result is limited access to available physical processing. Some common network I/O examples are software iSCSI adapter or NFS access to data stores, live migration of VMs between ESX servers via VMotion, and even administrator access with the VI Client.

Fortunately, ESX/ESXi 3.5 TCP Segmentation Offload, or TSO, can remove some of the networking burden from the host’s CPUs and improve overall performance. When the ESX server’s physical NICs support it, enabling TSO is as simple as choosing the right virtual network adapter, the Enhanced VMxnet adapter, for the VM. Surprisingly, making the Enhanced VMxnet adapter available to the VM is not a straightforward process because the Enhanced VMxnet adapter might not be an option in the virtual NIC properties or the Add New Hardware wizard.

First, you may be wondering how TSO reduces CPU overhead. Read the rest of this entry »

Jason Boche’s post titled Idle Memory Tax is a great read if you are trying to understand ESX memory allocation between virtual machines (VMs). Specifically, the post does a great job explaining how it works when you over commit your physical host’s memory. In other words, the sum of all the RAM assigned to the VMs running on a host is greater than the actual physical RAM of the ESX server.

Here’s a quote from Jason that briefly explains part of the technology that makes over commit possible: the Idle Memory Tax (IMT).

“Quite simply it’s a mechanism to take idle/unused memory from guest VMs that are hogging it in order to give that memory to another VM where it’s more badly needed. Sort of like Robin Hood for VI. By default this is performed using VMware’s balloon driver which is the more optimal of the two available methods. Out of the box, the amount of idle memory that will be reclaimed is 75% as configured by Mem.IdleTax under advanced host configuration. The VMKernel polls for idle memory in guest VMs every 60 seconds.”

Read the entire post for much more technical details and examples.

I’ve blogged before about the symptoms when the IMT and the ESX balloon driver can no longer keep up and it’s time to add another ESX host and spread the VM load.

I believe that ESX 3.x changed the need to Read the rest of this entry »