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VMware’s Performance Team posted an amazing article this week on the VROOM! blog. 16,000 Exchange Mailboxes, 1 Server not only offers insights on how to configure Exchange 2007 VMs to support large numbers of mailboxes, but it shows that ESX 3.5 and ESX 3i allow applications to utilize hardware resources that exceed the vendor’s recommended maximums in a physical deployment. Although this test was able to squeeze the Exchange 2007 implementation on a single ESX host without degrading the user experience, the technical details of how it was done provides administrators a blueprint to spread the Exchange VMs across multiple ESX hosts and fully leverage ESX Enterprise features.

“We did this test because we have felt for a while that advances in processor and server technology were about to leave another widely-used and important application unable to fully utilize the hardware that vendors were offering. Microsoft has guidelines on what environment works well with Exchange, and a system with more than eight CPUs and/or 32GB of RAM is beyond the recommended maximums.

Hardware vendors are now offering commodity servers with 16 cores Read the rest of this entry »

IBM is running a VMware ESX evaluation promotion through December 31, 2008. Details about the promotion can be found at IBM System x and BladeCenter with VMware.

From the IBM site:

For a limited time, you can try VMware® Infrastructure 3 software when you purchase a VMware ServerProven® System x server or BladeCenter chassis. The eligible products are shipped with a flyer that entitles you to register for a 90-day evaluation license for VMware Infrastructure 3. Once registered, you will receive an email with your VMware Infrastructure license activation code and easy instructions on how to get started.

The promotional 90 day evaluation is an extension to the normal 60 day evaluation offered from the VMware.com downloads site.

Although closely working with your favorite VMware partner can also get you extended evaluation periods for ESX anyways, this promotion is worth mentioning for companies that are considering implementing Blades in their data center. A Blade Center is an effective option for reducing your server sprawl without virtualization, and with the ability now to have up to 6 nics and 32 mb of ram in some blade servers makes implementing VI3 on blades a great decision.

As of Monday 12.31.07 Virtualization.info reports that the stand alone version of ESX 3i is now available for download.

Ten days after the much awaited launch of VI3.5 (aka ESX Server 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5), VMware is ready to release the special version of ESX Server called 3i.

ESX Server 3i completely drops the so called Console Operating System (COS), based on a customized Red Hat Enterprise Linux distro, and appears as a lightweight 32MB liveCD (no need for hard disk installation).

The new architecture is offered today as a parallel version, but VMware clarified in several occasions that this is the future of ESX Server.

The product was originally planned for OEM distribution only, pre-installed inside Solid State Drives (SSD) by Dell, IBM, HP and others popular vendors, but VMware is now offering it as stand-alone download.

Unfortunately the only two servers which are supported in this first release (build 67921) are Dell 2950 and HP DL380 G5 (experimental support).

The amount of features included in stand-alone ESX Server 3i is limited (just the vSMP and the VMFS support, you’ll need VirtualCenter bundles to get more) but the starting price is very interesting: $459 (without support). Any VirtualCenter 2.5 is able to support and manage it.

Download it here.

I followed the link for download and discovered it is a >200 mb .iso file?! I’m not sure why at this point but will follow up later with what’s on this CD.

Packages including server hardware, Virtual Iron 4.0 and implementation services are now being offered from IBM and HP. Virtual Iron has also signed a reseller agreement with Dell. The combination of these new partnerships is positioning the VMware alternative as a highly visible choice for SMBs looking to migrate to a virtual datacenter.

An article from SearchServerVirtualization.com, Virtual Iron, IBM, HP package virtualization on blades for SMBs, reports on Virtual Iron’s new SMB strategy: Read the rest of this entry »

Normally you must enable hyper threading in your server’s BIOS before ESX will report it as enabled on the Configuration tab in the Processors section.

For some reason IBM’s HS21 blade with Intel 5160 Xeon processors incorrectly reports hyper-threading by ESX as supported but not enabled. I thought I was losing it when I could not find where to enable hyper-threading in the blade’s BIOS. Turns out the only Intel processor that uses hyper-threading is the Pentium 4 workstation processor.

In fact, the entire family of Intel 5100 server processors do not have hyper-threading. For that matter, Intel does not make a server processor with hyper-threading.

Intel server and workstation processors

VMware Communities: IBM HS21 Blade Servers …

My customer had a couple of ESX hosts. Both ESX hosts had access to (4) 250 GB VMFS LUNs on fiber attached IBM storage. After upgrading their SAN controller in order to allow them to have the more storage partitions for booting several blades from SAN, the LUNs were no longer available to the ESX hosts. The LUN IDs were changed when the storage controller was upgraded and ESX began complaining that the LUNs were snapshot volumes.

The resolution was simple enough and is documented in VMware’s KB article titled “VMFS Volume Can Be Erroneously Recognized as a Snapshot“:

To resolve issues with invisible LUNs on certain arrays:

1. In the VI Client, select the host in the inventory panel.

2. Click the Configuration tab and click Advanced Settings.

3. Select LVM in the left panel and set LVM.DisallowSnapshotLUN to 0 in the right panel.
   Warning: When LVM.DisallowSnapshotLUN is set to 0, no snapshot LUNs should be presented to the ESX Server host. Otherwise, data corruption may result. For details, see “State 3 – EnableResignature=no, DisallowSnapshotLUN=no” on page 110 of the SAN Configuration Guide at www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_esx_san_cfg.pdf.

4. Rescan all VMFS volumes.

After the rescan, all VMFS volumes are available.

The issue resurfaced in slightly different form when I added 3 new ESX hosts to the environment. The existing 4 VMFS LUNs never appeared as available storage to the new hosts even though the zoning was correct. Rescanning from the storage adapters did not help. When I went to manually add the storage I could see the LUNs but I was warned:

The current disk layout will be destroyed. All file systems and data will be destroyed permanently.

That was enough to make me stop and research again. It turns out that the LUNs were appearing to the new hosts as snapshot volumes as well, so I had to make the same LVM.DisallowSnapshotLUN change as above.

If you actually do use snapshot LUNs then there is another fix to this issue detailed in VMware’s KB article titled “Resignaturing VMFS3 Volumes That Are Not Snapshots“.

Are you using IBM System X servers to run ESX? Are you planning on expanding your current VI with new IBM X series servers? Not sure which blades are compatible? Use this guide to make sure you do not create a vmotion boundary!

Although this is an IBM publication it does cover general processor compatibility. There are 3 tables. Table A is for IBM server compatibilties, Table B (incorrectly labeled as the first Table C) is for all Pentium processor compatibilities, and Table C is for all AMD processor compatibilities.

VMware VMotion Compatibility Guide for IBM System X and BladeCenter Servers