VM /ETC

Archive for the ‘vi3’ Category

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 »

Today marked the official release of the Hyper9 search based, agentless VMware admin tool. Regular readers will recall VM /ETC helped recruit beta testers for this product through multiple different sign up periods over the last 6 months. In fact, the Hyper9 team in Austin, TX has been busy with several press releases recently. I’ll sum them up with some quotes here in this post. Go to the Hyper9 | Company » News & Events web page to read all announcements in full. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in December Scott Herold posted on the VMGuru.com web site that free chapters from the popular book “VMware Infrastructure 3: Advanced Technical Design Guide” would be available for download every 2 weeks. Eventually the entire book would also be available as a down loadable .pdf. That’s great news, but as of this writing I could not find any of the chapters on the page of downloads available from the VMGuru.com site.

Scott, Mike, Ron, consider this post a reminder that it’s mid January now (I know you guys have nothing else going on ), and hopefully this gives you some added promotion and excitement about your book. I’m sure a lot of VMware Admins will want personal copies.

Read Scott’s original post  titled Free Chapters Available Starting in January.

“Ron, Mike, and I have decided that starting in 2009, we will be giving out 2 free chapters of the VMware Infrastructure 3: Advanced Technical Design Guide every 2 weeks.  I am still in the process of collecting the source DOC and PDF files from the Publisher, but as of right now we are anticipating the first two chapters to be availabe during the first week of January. “

There are 0 comments on Scott’s post so maybe he thinks no one was listening? Help me show him we are all waiting!

If you can’t wait for the downloads then Read the rest of this entry »

As of VirtualCenter 2.5 (VC) MSDE was replaced by SQL 2005 Express as the default installation database. This post explores the idea of running small and medium business (SMB) VMware virtual infrastructure (VI) environments with the free SQL 2005 Express version instead of  a fully licensed instance of SQL 2005/2000.

To start with VMware’s VI3.5 and VC2.5 Installation Guide states:

The Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express database package is installed and configured when you select Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express as your database during VirtualCenter installation or upgrade. This is shown in Installing VMware Infrastructure Management Software. No additional configuration is required.

If Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express is already installed, review the required database patches specified in Table 2-1. If you do not prepare your database correctly, the VirtualCenter installer might display error and warning messages.See www.microsoft.com/sql/editions/express/default.mspx.

Note: Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express is intended to be used for small deployments of up to 5 hosts and 50 virtual machines.

5 ESX hosts and 50 VMs is definitely enough support for most small business deployments. Frankly, with modern hardware pricing the 50 VM limit will be reached before ever deploying 5 ESX hosts. 16 guests on a host is a common scenario these days which, if you do the math, creates a 3 host ESX Cluster.

So why would a company that does not expect to grow it’s number of VMs beyond 50 not use SQL 2005 Express? Here’s the 2 best reasons I could think of, and then a counter argument for each. Read the rest of this entry »

free Veeam tool unwrapped

The VMware administrators holiday gift from Veeam has been revealed. As promised, I received an email this morning announcing that a new free version of Veeam Monitor 3.02 is available for download. A description of the tool can be found on the products web page:

“Veeam Monitor is an easy to deploy, framework-independent VMware monitoring solution that was created expressly to help you better manage the health and performance of your VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3) environment. Veeam Monitor provides support for troubleshooting and issue resolution, as well as trend reporting and capacity planning – equipping you to proactively manage ESX / ESXi infrastructure system health and performance today and over the long term.”

The product’s Release Notes reveal the limitations of the free version:

Veeam Monitor 3.0.2 features a new free functionality mode which is automatically enabled if you install the product without a license, or if your your license expires. Veeam Monitor Free Edition has the following limitations compared to the full version:

• Performance history lookup is limited to 24 hours
• Number of alarms is limited to ten
• Performance and trend reporting is disabled
• Alarm modeling is disabled
• Guest OS process management functionality is disabled.

Veeam Monitor requires a SQL 2005 database or installs SQL 2005 Express by default. It is my understanding Read the rest of this entry »

VMTN moderator and Roundtable podcast regular Jason Boche and virtualization bloggers Rick Schere and Scott Lowe are reporting that VMware will be changing the name of their flagship enterprise Virtual Infrastructure products from VI 3.5 to vSphere. Following mostly the same individuals’ tweets on Twitter I learned that the new name was decided via a vote by VMware employees. It’s unclear to me at this time when the name change will officially take place, but I imagine it will coincide with the availability of the next software release.

First some quotes from the other guys, and then my first impression.  Read the rest of this entry »

Everybody talks about running VMware ESX on VMware Workstation, but how come we don’t see more about running ESX on VMware Server 2.0? I’ve tried and been semi successful. This post is sort of a “how to” and kind of “need help” post about this topic.

First, Duncan Epping over at yellow-bricks.com made a quick post to remind himself of the configurations necessary to run ESX/ESXi 3.5 on VMware Workstation 6.5. There are numerous other posts about how to do this, but the post ESX in Workstation contains just the basic information to remember. If you’ve never done this before and you need pictures and a good explanation then I recommend the .pdf from Xtravirt.com titled VI 3.5 in a box.

Trying to take this a step further, I have moved the ESX 3.5 VMs I created on Workstation 6.5 to a VMware Server 2.0 running on a 64 bit Ubuntu 8.10 Desktop. I can start the ESX server VMs just fine, but unfortunately I can’t run the VMs (hosted on the ESX VMs). It’s still a convenient option for learning, testing and configuring the latest builds and features even without running VMs.

Using basically the same configuration settings I’ve also been able to install and run Citrix XenServer 5.0 and Microsoft Hyper-V on both VMware Workstation and VMware Server 2.0. Here is a screenshot of my VMware Server Summary tab. Click on it for a larger view. Read the rest of this entry »