VM /ETC Go Green with Virtualization. Go UGLY Green with vmetc.com.

There is no official announcement from VMware yet, but according to various sources from the virtualization community new VMware CEO Paul Maritz announced during the July 22 Q2 Earnings Call ESX3i will be available for free as early as July 28, 2008 (next week). Although predicted to potentially be released as a free hypervisor, ESX3i, now named ESXi, has been available from VMware since September 2007 for $495. A cheaper option for purchasing ESXi as of today is available by ordering select new server hardware models to ship with the hypervisor embedded. However, offering the bare metal ESXi for free in the future to VMware customers will certainly increase the number of installations in data centers of both small and medium businesses and enterprise organizations world wide.

In my opinion, this is a timely and needed move to counter Microsoft’s Hyper-V release and marketing hype touting Hyper-V as free add-on to Windows Server 2008.

According to virtualization.info’s article, VMware will not restrict any

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In my post 730 Days Later - Replace The VirtualCenter Default SSL Certificate I pointed out the SSL certificate installed by VirtualCenter expires after 2 years. I did not document how to replace the default cert, but instead I linked to VMware’s guide for readers to explore. Thank goodness Leo Raikhman has picked up where I left off on his Leo’s Ramblings Blog! Leo has created 2 great “how to” posts for replacing certificates using OpenSSL that are much easier to follow then VMware’s guide.

In the post VirtualCenter CA Configuration Leo covers replacing the default certificate with a stand alone OpenSSL version that expires after 10 years. However, in his post More nonsense with VirtualCenter certificates - part 2 he provides instructions for using a domain enforced Windows Certificate Authority.

Read Leo’s posts in their entirety at the links above, but I am copying his instructions here for my personal knowledgebase. As a matter of fact, I recommend adding Leo’s RSS feed to your reader and bookmarking his site. He has been consistently creating posts relevant and helpful for virtual administrators.

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Citrix has announced this week the projected September 2008 preview release of the Project Kensho tools to create virtualized application appliances in the Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF). The official Citrix news release, Citrix Unveils Project Kensho for Hypervisor-Independent App Workloads, states the following:

“Citrix Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq:CTXS), the global leader in application delivery infrastructure, today announced “Project Kensho,” which will deliver Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) tools that, for the first time, allow independent software vendors (ISVs) and enterprise IT managers to easily create hypervisor-independent, portable enterprise application workloads. These tools will allow application workloads to be imported and run across Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and VMware ESX virtual environments.”

In the future Citrix will deliver OVF tools for the first time?

VMware’s OVF Tool already exists today and can be used on VMs created with Workstation, Player, and Fusion. VMs on ESX can also be exported to OVF via the VI Client version 2.5. Here’s some more information from the VMware OVF Tool technical note published in December 2007:

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I already commented about Rick Vanover’s series of articles on Sun’s xVM VirtualBox, but I decided to make a more detailed how to tutorial on using the headless RDP features. This tutorial explains a step by step process for remotely creating virtual machine hardware, installing the VM operating system, and managing the VM using the VBoxHeadless console command. This post uses the steps from the VirtualBox User Manual found in Section 7.4 titled Remote Virtual Machines (VRDP support)

The following information is copied from the User Manual and provides a good general overview of the goal of this tutorial:

“VirtualBox therefore comes with yet another front-end that produces no visible out-put on the host at all, but instead only delivers VRDP data. With VirtualBox 1.6, this “headless server” is now aptly called VBoxHeadless. (In previous versions, it was called VBoxVRDP. For the sake of backwards compatibility, the VirtualBox installation still installs an executable with that name as well.)

To start a virtual machine with VBoxHeadless, you have two options:

• You can use VBoxManage startvm -type vrdp. The extra -type option causes the VirtualBox core to use VBoxHeadless as the front-end to the internal virtualization engine.

• The recommended way, however, is to use VBoxHeadless directly, as follows:

VBoxHeadless -startvm

This is the recommended way, because when starting the headless interface through VBoxManage, you will not be able to view or log messages that VBoxHeadless may have output on the console. Especially in case of startup errors, such output might be desirable for problem diagnosis.”

Although using the VboxHeadless command is simple, it is a series of console commands. This can be considered inconvenient to many administrators that are used to the point and click functionality of VMware’s products. In my opinion, it would nice to see VirtualBox release a web gui or a toolkit of scripts that can automate these commands. The VirtualBox user community has published some scripts for basic headless VM administration, but I could not find any scripts that actually create new VMs.

Read on for the tutorial.

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So, I spent most of my day today preparing for a VMware Capacity Planner Virtualization Assessment that I will be starting next week. In typical fashion, the client had many questions and concerns about preparing for the installation of the data collector in their environment. To answer those questions I assembled a very informative and lengthy list of common questions and answers from the official VMware FAQs and I am posting the results of that effort here at VM /ETC.

The FAQs I used to create this post seem to be only available to VAC partners who’s accredited VCPs have completed the necessary Capacity Planner services training. Upon completing the training a VCP is assigned a log in to the VMware Data Warehouse Portal where Capacity Planner data collector’s uploads are processed into consolidation scenarios. Here, from this portal, is where these FAQ documents can be downloaded. I happen to be an accredited VCP, so I have access to the FAQs. All of the FAQs clearly state they are customer documents so I am now providing this information here. I’m not sure why these documents aren’t publicly available because I am sure they would help generate more interest in Virtualization Assessment service projects.

The remainder of this post combines VMware’s information from 3 different documents - the Capacity Planner Technical, Security, and Sales FAQs. The individual documents are provided on the VM /ETC Files page and are linked at the bottom of this post. I have trimmed down or omitted most of the FAQs in this post (and it’s still a lot of info to read), but check out the full .pdfs for more details and other FAQs I left out.

I recommend you at least skim through some of these very popular Q & A’s:

• How is Capacity Planner sold?
• Why should we add Capacity Planner when we already have so many other tools installed?
• What ports need to be open?
• What operating systems does it discover?
• What impact does collection have on my network?
• What impact does collection have on my servers?
• How are the utilization figures determined?
• What are the security features within the software?

Go get a fresh cup of coffee or your favorite beverage and then enjoy!

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It’s good to see more and more of the various Linux distributions prepackage enhancements that benefit the operating system when running in virtual machines. This also makes life a whole lot easier for the administrator configuring the virtualized OS. Building VMs is already fast in comparison to physical servers, but having to take the time to modify config files to get a usable screen resolution can get on your nerves real quick! Anyone who has ever built a Linux VM over the past several years has most likely experienced Xorg (screen resolution) problems and knows what I am talking about.

Today, thanks to VMware making a large part of the Linux version of the VMware Tools open source, the latest distribution of Ubuntu (8.04 or Hardy Heron) includes the xserver-xorg-video-vmware package in it’s core installation. Hopefully the other popular distributions are doing the same. Frankly, I haven’t had the chance to explore CentOS, Fedora or Red Hat, but recent announcements seem to indicate that the same virtulized enhancements are taking place for those distros too.

So, what this means is that you

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In a shocking move today, VMware announced the replacement of CEO and co-founder Diane Greene with Paul Maritz. Maritz, formerly with Microsoft where he was responsible for the development and marketing of successful products such as Windows 95 and Windows NT until he retired in 2000, was also named to the VMware Board of Directors. Most recently, Maritz’s startup Pi Corporation was aquired by EMC in February 2008. Maritz joined EMC’s executive management team as President and General Manager of the Cloud Infrastructure Services Division at the time of the acquisition and has been in that role until now.

Here are some quotes from a few of  the many reports and posts published today that summarize both positive and negative reactions to this news.

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The title of this post is part of a quote from David Davis’ SearchCIO article titled COMPARISON: Microsoft vs. VMware. David’s article was published back on June 4, and it’s been sitting in my drafts “screaming at me” to comment on here at VM /ETC. Now, with Hyper-V having been released and Microsoft’s marketing machine starting to cloud virtualization reality, I point my readers to David’s arguments as examples of sane and logical analysis of the two products. Here’s the entire quote my title is taken from in the context it was written:

“VMware is obviously the most experienced company when it comes to delivering a virtualisation product. The company has 10 years of virtualisation experience and a huge customer base, including 100% of the Fortune 500 companies and 92% of the Fortune 1000, totaling over 100,000 customers worldwide. VMware also holds 11 virtualisation patents, and in 2007 their revenue hit the $US1.33 billion mark.

This is in comparison to Microsoft which has a new virtualisation product, little enterprise virtualisation experience, and, to date, no Fortune 500 customers who have adopted their enterprise virtualisation product in a production environment. Ask yourself, which of these companies sounds more qualified to deliver your enterprise virtualisation solution?”

David’s article goes on to make excellent comparison points about

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Lately, I have had several clients and peers ask me how to get disk usage and performance statistics from their current virtual infrastructure of ESX hosts and virtual machines . Some needed data for planning and sizing a new SAN, while others needed statistics for upgrading, adding more disks, or for optimizing multi path and VMFS performance. In one case the customer was trouble shooting poor VM performance issues. Regardless of the objectives there are some built in tools in both VirtualCenter and ESX server that can get this information for you. This post explains 2 native methods:

• Using the VI Cleint to access the Performance data in VirtualCenter
• Using esxtop from the ESX Service Console

I have included plenty of screenshots. As always, click on them for larger views. The rest of this post is in an outline format, but should be easy enough to follow.

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Based on best practices, this post is a “formula” for planning and sizing SAN storage for maximum VMFS performance. This is intended to be for all protocols where VMFS volumes are utilized ( FC, iSCSI ) and conservative enough to allow general sizing estimates while ensuring high performance of the running VMs.

WARNING: The storage design resulting from following these recommendations will not be the most cost effective solution. As storage performance generally requires the most spindles (disks) possible and this formula requires as many dedicated LUNs as possible, the cost for storage will be maximized. More often than not, compromises between performance and cost have to be reached that keep the design within the expected budget.

This post is split into 2 sections. The first section lists the VMFS Maximum Performance Rules while the second section uses a 25 server example to walk through the design rules.

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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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One of the most popular topics of discussion in the virtualization community has always been about installing ESX on a whitebox server. Two of the most popular posts on VM /ETC have been ESX home lab hardware shopping list and Cheap ESX solutions for testing which are both about finding and using hardware not on the VMware HCL that can run ESX. Now, with VMware announcing new relationships with ASUS, Gigabyte, Tyan, Inventec, and Supermicro, ESX 3.5 and ESXi will be certified, supported, and even ship embedded on more server platforms than ever before.

VMware provides a timeframe of availability in the official announcement linked above:

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