VM /ETC

Archive for the ‘services’ Category

As IT budgets decline, old servers called to virtualization duty is an article written by Alex Barrett and Colin Steele on SeachVirtualization.com. Other then asking some pretty good virtualization sources their opinions , I think the article does a great job explaining why the expense of buying modern hardware still makes sense even in today’s economy. Whether to buy new servers is a common decision being made today as more and more companies are conducting capacity planning studies for consolidation to virtual infrastructure analysis.

Read the entire article for several great points, but here is one quote as an example argument:

“The first thing to determine is whether installing virtualization on older hardware actually saves money. Today’s servers are equipped with quad- and six-core CPUs that can deliver much greater consolidation ratios that single- or dual-core models, he said. “VI3 [VMware Infrastructure 3] is licensed per socket, so you’re paying the same cost for older CPUs but you’re getting less bang for your buck.”

But if the budget for new hardware simply isn’t there, consider the age of a server and how much life it has left in it. When identifying a candidate for a virtualization host, identify a box that is three years or younger and has “had a relatively low runtime,” the systems administrator said.”

updated 03.13.08 – Unfortunately I declared victory too soon on this issue. I got a status update this week and the customer can deploy from template in some scenarios but is still getting the same error at times. The HP SIM agents are still turned off and have not been ruled out as part of the problem, but IBM has provided a recommended design and they have made the changes.

As Brian points out in his comment the customer has a multiple IBM SVC design in front of multiple storage devices.

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Last week I helped a customer resolve an issue where whenever they deployed a new VM from a template the job would fail with the error “Failed to deploy template: The virtual disk is either corrupted or not a supported format” We were troubleshooting numerous ESX servers and the problem was the same on all the hosts. The template was fine. We changed it back to a VM and turned it on without issue. The vmtools and virtual hardware were up to date.

Surprisingly the Virtual Center error message was not well indexed on Google. I was scratching my head until I stumbled across the VMware Communities thread Read the rest of this entry »

How do you design resource pools in an ESX Cluster? There are two strategies that are the most popular in my experience. The first strategy creates resource pools based on CPU and Memory shares for host resource conflict management, and the second strategy uses reservations and limits to guarantee physical resources and ensure VM containment. This post will use a 3 ESX host example to explain both strategies. Please feel free to comment on the pros and cons of each or why you think one is better than the other.

In the example scenario three ESX hosts each have 16 GB RAM and 2 dual core 3.0 Ghz CPUs. The three hosts will all be members of the same ESX cluster. Read the rest of this entry »

Aaron Delp’s BladeVault.info site reports about calculators from HP and IBM that can help you plan for power when considering physical server consolidation by implementing blades. IBM’s calculator is a downloadable .msi while HP’s is an online calculator. HP also offers a downloadable offline version which has limited functionality compared to the online tool. IBM’s calculator is not just limited to blades as it computes power figures for all x series servers.

Read the rest of this entry »

Australian VAC Partner Oriel has created a clever Virtualization Calculator that illustrates how virtualization is good for the planet. Based on the statistic that the average 2 cpu server produces 12.5 tons of CO2 per year, the calculator not only tells you how much money you can save in hardware and power but it also provides comparable environmental benefit examples such as planting trees, reduced car emmissions, and reduced cow emissions.

I entered 200 servers in the calculator and received the following results (click on the screen shot to see a larger image): Read the rest of this entry »

It’s great to see the recent positive changes to the VMware Partner program. As the competition enters the market, VMware realizes that who better to help continue growth and capture the untapped market share than the services organizations that are already implementing and supporting the VMware products in the field. In my experience, VMware has always “talked the talk” about enabling the partner channel, but not necessarily “walked the walk” when it came time to ensure margin and protecting the deal.

Internally, Partner Channel Managers have reduced their accounts and are focusing on building better relationships with a smaller group of partners. Externally VMware has announced some exciting new benefits for members of the Partner Program. VMware Unveils Major Program Enhancements for its Nearly 10,000 Virtualization Channel Partners was a news release last week from VMware that promises better profitability, training, marketing and support. From the release: Read the rest of this entry »

What is VMware’s Capacity Planner tool and how do you get a copy? It’s a common question. Bottom line is that Capacity Planner is not a tool that can be downloaded by a Systems Administrator, but it is a tool that VMware partners use to perform a Capacity Analysis for Virtualization services project.

To understand the Capacity Planner tool let’s first back up and understand the Capacity Analysis services project. When you start to consider how to migrate your data center to VI:

• You need to size server hardware which will become ESX hosts, and you need to know how many ESX hosts you’ll deploy.
• You’d like to explore different vendor hardware platform scenarios for your ESX hosts.
• You need to understand which of your physical servers will consolidate well and which ones are not good virtualization canidates.
• You’d like to figure out a good VM to Host consolidation ratio.
• You need to estimate your total disk storage for the VI solution.

Capacity Planner helps you Read the rest of this entry »