Archive for the ‘Virtualization’ Category

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Windows Azure under the hood

October 30, 2008

 

There is a an excellent video interview with Manuvir Das from the Azure team on the MSDN Channel 9 site here.

 )The interview is quite long, but I’ve tried to summarise it for infrastructure people/architects like me as follows;

Azure is an overall “OS” for the cloud, akin to VMWare and their VDC initiative but with a much richer re-usable services and applications framework layer.

In terms of describing the overall architecture diagram (below), Azure is sort of the”kernel for the cloud”, “Xbox for the cloud?” buy it in increments and (ab)use it - don’t worry about building the individual infrastructure components - you get all the tools in the box and the underlying infrastructure is abstracted so you don’t have to worry about it.

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The services layer Microsoft provide on top of Azure are as follows

Live Services Mesh (high level user/data sync - will run as app on Azure, doing some now) will be migrated to run on Azure over time

.net services (Zurich) high level services to enable rich scenarios like authentication, Federation, liveID, OpenID, Active Directory Federation Services etc.

SQL  - premium Database services in the cloud offering data warehousing, and I would assume massive scalability options - but I’m not sure how this would be implemented.

Sharepoint/Dynamics I understand are coming soon but would offer the same sort of functionality in the cloud.

It’s based around modified Windows with Dave Cutler’s involvement (no specifics offered yet) virtualized server instances are the base building blocks with an allocated and guaranteed amount of resource - 1×1.9GHz CPU, 2gb ram, 160gb disk) which is dedicated to your machine and not contended, which would mean MS are doing no over-subscription under the hood? that seems unlikely, and maybe wasteful to me; DRS anyone?

Dell have provided the underlying physical hardware hosted in Microsoft’s data centres with a customised server model, as noted here - and you can see a video tour inside one of the hosting data centres here from BBC news

There is an overall Fabric Controller which is essentially a resource manager, it continually monitors hosts, VMs, storage via agents and deploys/allocates/moves .net code packages around hosts.

to deploy your service to the Azure cloud;

You build your application as a code package (.net, others coming later)

You build a service model, this describes the number, type of hosts, dependencies etc.

The Azure storage layer a distributed, flat table-based storage system with a a distributed lock manager and keeps 3 copies of data for availability - it’s not SQL based (interesting) uses a REST API and is more akin to a file system so sounds like it’s been written from the ground up.

Interestingly it seems that the storage layer is deployed as a service on Azure itself and is controlled by the fabric manager, parts of the current live mesh services are using it now in production.

Interestingly Manuvir describes your service as containing routers, load balancers as well as traditional services so it sounds like they may have either built a complex provisioning framework for physical devices, or have implemented virtualized versions of such devices (Cisco Nexus type devices implemented as VM’s maybe?)

Azure can maintain staging and production platforms within the cloud, you can swap between production/stage etc. with an API command that re-points DNS.

There is a concept of an upgrade domain; where VMs are taken out of service for updates/deployments etc. - your service description I assume describes what are key dependencies and it works out the least-impact sequence?

No automatic paralellism, you can’t just issue a job and have it execute in a distributed fashion using all the Azure resources without being designed/built as such, which I think Amazon offer (but I may be wrong, as that does sound like something v.complicated to do)

Azure strategy for scale out is the traditional MS one, make the most use of individual resource allocation for your VMs (see above), scale out multiple independent instances with a shared nothing architecture

Azure is a programmable API, it’s not an end-user product, it’s a platform for developers to build services on.

There is no absolute requirement for asp.net will provide PHP/RoR/Python facilities over time and .net and visual studio integration out of the box - but can use other developer tools too.

A “Developer fabric” is available - it can run on a desktop, it mocks up the whole Azure platform on your desktop and behaves the same way so developers can understand how it works and debug applications on their desktops before pushing out to the cloud - this is an important shiny for Microsoft, as it’s a simple and quick way to get developers hands-on with understanding how to use Azure.

The cool part is that you can export your service model and code packages directly to Azure from your developer tool, akin to a compile and public option for the cloud. it’s part of SDK which can be downloaded here.

You can debug service copies locally using the SDK and developer fabric, no debugging in the cloud {yet} but provides an API to get logs and are working on an end-end transaction tracing API

Microsoft have made references to making Azure on-premise as well as in Microsoft’s own data centres in the same way that VMWare have with the VDC-OS stuff… but I would think that’s going to need some more details on what the Azure OS is to understand how that would be feasible.

As I concluded in an earlier blog post here, Microsoft could be poised to clean up here if they execute quickly and well - they have the most comprehensive offering for the corporate space due to having a very rich applications/services layer that is directly aligned to the desktop & application technology choices of the bigger customers (.net), they just need to solve the trust in the cloud issue first; and the on-premise piece of the puzzle is key to this… Maybe a server version of Windows 7 or MiniWin or Singularity is the enabler for this?

Posted in Azure, Cloud Computing, Microsoft, Microsoft Online Services, Virtualization | 1 Comment »

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Cloud Wars: VMWare vs Microsoft vs Google vs Amazon Clouds

October 1, 2008

 

A short time ago in a data centre, far far away…..

All the big players are setting out their cloud pitches, Microsoft are set to make some big announcements at their Professional Developer Conference at the end of October and VMWare made their VDC-OS announcements at VMWorld a couple of weeks ago, Google have had their App Engine in beta for a while and Amazon AWS is pretty well established.

With this post I hope to give a quick overview of each, I’ll freely admit I’m more knowledgeable on the VMWare/Microsoft offerings… and I stand to be corrected on any assumptions I’ve made on Google/AWS based on my web reading.

So, What’s the difference between them…?

VMWare vCloud - infrastructure led play

VMWare come from the infrastructure space, to-date they have dominated the x86 virtualization market, they have some key strategic partnerships with storage and network vendors to deliver integrated solutions.

The VMWare VDC-OS pitch is about providing a flexible underlying architecture through servers, network and storage virtualisation. why? because making everything ‘virtual’ makes for quick reconfiguration - reallocating resource from one service to another is a configuration/allocation change rather than requiring an engineer visit (see my other post on this for more info)

because VMWare’s pitch is infrastructure led it has a significant practical advantage in that it’s essentially technology agnostic (as long as it’s x86 based) you, or a service provider have the ability to build and maintain an automated birth–>death bare ‘virtual metal’ provisioning and lifecycle system for application servers/services as there is no longer a tight dependency for everything on physical hardware, cabling etc

There is no one size fits all product in this space so a bespoke solution based around a standard framework tool like Tivoli, SMS, etc. is typically required depending on organisational/service requirements.

No re-development is necessarily required to move your applications into a vCloud (hosted or internal) you just move your VMWare virtual machines to a different underlying VDC-OS infrastructure, or you use P2V, X2V tools like Platespin to migrate to a VDC-OS infrastructure.

In terms of limitations - apps can’t necessarily scale horizontally (yet) as they are constrained by their traditional server based roots. The ability to add a 2nd node doesn’t necessarily make your app scale - there are all kinds of issues around state, concurrency etc. that the application framework needs to manage.

VMWare are building frameworks to build scale-out provisioning tools - but this would only work for certain types of applications and is currently reactive unless you build some intelligence into the provisioning system.

Scott Lowe has a good round-up of VDC-OS information here & VMWare’s official page is online here

Google AppEngine- pure app framework play

An application framework for you to develop your apps within - it provides a vastly parallel application and storage framework - excellent for developing large applications (i.e Google’s bread & butter)

Disadvantage is it’s a complete redevelopment of you applications into Google compatible code, services & frameworks. You are tied into Google services - you can’t (as I understand it) take your developed applications elsewhere without significant re-development/porting.

The Google AppEngine blog is here

Microsoft Cloud Services Hosted Application stack & Infrastructure play

An interesting offering, they will technically have the ability to host .net applications from a shared hosting service, as well as integrating future versions of their traditional and well established office/productivity applications into their cloud platform; almost offering the subscription based/Software+Services model they’ve been mooting for a long time.

Given Microsoft’s market current dominance, they are very well positioned to make this successful as large shops will be able to modify existing internal .net services and applications to leverage portions of their cloud offering.

With the future developments of Hyper-V Microsoft will be well positioned to offer an infrastructure driven equivalent of VMWare’s VDC-OS proposition to service and support migration from existing dedicated Windows and Linux servers to an internal or externally hosted cloud type platform.

David Chou at Microsoft has a good post on Microsoft and clouds here

Amazon Web Services - established app framework with canned virtualization

the AWS platform provides a range of the same sort of functionality as Google AppEngine with SimpleDB,  SQS and S3 but with the recently announced ability to run Windows within their EC2 cloud makes for an interesting offering with the existing ability to pick & choose from Linux based virtual machine instances.

I believe EC2 makes heavy use of Xen under the hood; which I assume is how they are going to be delivering the Windows based services, EC2 also allows you to choose from a number of standard Linux virtual machine offerings (Amazon Machine Image, AMI).

This is an interesting offering, allowing you to develop your applications into their framework and possibly port or build your Linux/Windows application services into their managed EC2 service.

Same caveat applies though, your apps and virtual machines could be tied to the AWS framework - so you loose your portability without significant re-engineering. on the flip-side they do seem to have the best defined commercial and support models and have been well established for a while with the S3 service.

Amazon’s AWS blog is available here

Conclusion

Microsoft & VMWare are best positioned to pick up businesses from the corporate’s who will likely have a large existing investment in code and infrastructure but are looking to take advantage of reduced cost and complexity by hosting portions of their app/infrastructure with a service-provider.

Microsoft & VMWare offerings easily lend themselves to this internal/external cloud architecture as you can build your own internal cloud using their off-the-shelf technology, something that isn’t possible with AWS or Google. This is likely to be the preferred model for most large businesses who need to retain ownership of data and certain systems for legal/compliance reasons.

leveraging virtualization and commercial X2V or X2X conversion tools will make transition between internal and external clouds simple and quick - which gives organisations a lot of flexibility to operate their systems in the most cost/load-effective manner as well as retain detailed control of the application/server infrastructure but freed up from the day-day hardware/capacity management roles.

AWS/Google are ideal for Web 2.0 ,start-ups and the SME sector where there is typically no existing or large code-base investment that would need to be leveraged. For a greenfield implementation these services offer low start-up cost and simple development tools to build applications that would be complicated & expensive to build if you had to worry about and develop supporting infrastructure without significant up-front capital backing.

AWS/Google are also great for people wanting to build applications that need to scale to lots of users, but without a deep understanding of the required underlying infrastructure, whilst this is appealing to corporate’s  I think the cost of porting and data ownership/risk issues will be a blocker for a significant amount of time.

Google Apps are a good entry point for the SME/start-up sector and startups, and could well draw people into building AppEngine services as the business grows in size and complexity, so we may see a drift towards this over time. Microsoft have a competing model and could leverage their established brand to win over customers if they can make the entry point free/cheap and cross-platform compatible, lots of those SME/start-ups are using Mac’s or Netbooks for example.

Posted in Amazon, Cloud Computing, EC2, Fluid datacentre, Hosted Sharepoint, Microsoft, Microsoft Online Services, Service Provider, VMWare, Virtualization, Windows, google, google apps, vCloud | No Comments »

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Free EMC Celerra for your Home/Lab

July 9, 2008

 

Virtualgeek has an interesting post here about a freely downloadable VM version of their Celerra product, including an HA version. This is an excellent idea for testing and lab setups, and a powerful tool in your VM Lab arsenal alongside other offerings like Xtravirt Virtual SAN and OpenFiler.

I’ve been saying for a while that companies that make embedded h/w devices and appliances should try to offer versions of the software running their devices as VM’s so people can get them into lab/test environments quickly, most tech folk would rather download and play with something now, rather than have to book and take delivery of an eval with sales drones (apologies to any readers who work in sales) and pre-sales professional services, evaluation criteria etc. if your product is good it’s going to get recommended, no smoke and mirrors required.

As such VM appliances are an excellent pre-sales/eval tool, rather than stopping people buying products. Heck, they could even licence the VM versions directly for production use (as Zeus do with their ZXTM products); this is a very flexible approach and something that is important if you get into clouds as an internal or external service provider - the more you standardise on commodity hardware with a clever software layer the more you can recycle, reuse and redeploy without being tied into specific vendor hardware etc.

Most “appliances” in-use today are actually low-end PC motherboards with some clever software in a sealed box - for example I really like the Juniper SA range of SSL VPN appliances, I recently helped out with a problem on one which was caused by a failed HDD - if  you hook up the console interface its a commodity PC motherboard in a sealed case running a proprietary secure OS - as it’s all intel based, no reason it couldn’t also run as a VM (SLL accelerator h/w can be turned off in the software so there can’t be any hard dependency on any SSL accelerator cards inside the sealed box) - adopting VM’s for these appliances provides the same (maybe even better) level of standard {virtual} hardware that appliance vendors need to make their devices reliable/serviceable.

Another example, the firmware that is embedded in the HP Virtual Connect modules I wrote about a while back runs under VMWare Workstation, HP have an internal use version for engineers to do some development and testing against, sadly they won’t redistribute it as far as I am aware.

Posted in Appliances, EMC, SAN, VMWare, Virtualization, Work, iSCSI, useful | 3 Comments »

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Virtualization - the key to delivering "cloud based architecture" NOW.

June 23, 2008

 

There is a lot of talk about delivering cloud or elastic computing platforms, a lot of CxO’s are taking this all in and nodding enthusiastically, they can see the benefits.. so make it happen!….yesterday.

Moving your services to the cloud, isn’t always about giving your apps and data to Google, Amazon or Microsoft.

You can build your own cloud, and be choosy about what you give to others. building your own cloud makes a lot of sense, it’s not always cheap but its the kind of thing you can scale up (or down..) with a bit of up-front investment, in this article I’ll look at some of the practical; and more infrastructure focused ways in which you can do so.

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Your “cloud platform” is essentially an internal shared services system where you can actually and practically implement a “platform” team that operates and capacity plans for the cloud platform; they manage it’s availability and maintenance day-day and expansion/contraction.

You then have a number of “service/application” teams that subscribe to services provided by your cloud platform team… they are essentially developers/support teams that manage individual applications or services (for example payroll or SAP, web sites etc.), business units and stakeholders etc.

Using the technology we discuss here you can delegate control to them over most aspects of the service they maintian - full access to app servers etc. and an interface (human or automated) to raise issues with the platform team or log change requests.

I’ve seen many attempts to implement this in the physical/old world and it just ends in tears as it builds a high level of expectation that the server/infrastructure team must be able to respond very quickly to the end-”customer” the customer/supplier relationship is very different… regardless of what OLA/SLA you put in place.

However the reality of traditional infrastructure is that the platform team can’t usually react as quick as the service/application teams need/want/expect because they need to have an engineer on-site, wait for an order and a delivery, a network provisioning order etc. etc (although banks do seems to have this down quite well, it’s still a delay.. and time is money, etc.)

Virtualization and some of the technology we discuss here enable the platform team to keep one step ahead of the service/application teams by allowing them to do proper capacity planning and maintain a pragmatic headroom of capacity and make their lives easier by consolidating the physical estate they manage. This extra headroom capacity can be quickly back-filled when it’s taken up by adopting a modular hardware architecture to keep ahead of the next requirement.

Traditional infrastructure = OS/App Installations

  • 1 server per ‘workload’
  • Silo’d servers for support
  • Individually underused on average = overall wastage
  • No easy way to move workload about
  • Change = slow, person in DC, unplug, uninstall, move reinstall etc.
  • HP/Dell/Sun Rack Mount Servers
  • Cat 6 Cables, Racks and structured cabling

The ideal is to have an OS/app stack that can have workloads moved from host A to host B; this is a nice idea but there are a whole heap of dependencies with the typlical applications of today (IIS/apache + scripts, RoR, SQL DB, custom .net applications). Most big/important line of business apps are monolithic and today make this hard. Ever tried to move a SQL installation from OLD-SERVER-A to SHINY-NEW-SERVER-B? exactly. *NIX better at this, but not that much better.. downtime required or complicated fail over.

This can all be done today, virtualization is the key to doing it - makes it easy to move a workload from a to b we don’t care about the OS/hardware integration - we standardise/abstract/virtualize it and that allows us to quickly move it - it’s just a file and a bunch of configuration information in a text file… no obscure array controller firmware to extract data from or outdated NIC/video drivers to worry about.

Combine this with server (blade) hardware, modern VLAN/L3 switches with trunked connections, and virtualised firewalls then you have a very compelling solution that is not only quick to change, but makes more efficient use of the hardware you’ve purchased… so each KW/hr you consume brings more return, not less as you expand.

Now, move this forward and change the hardware for something much more commodity/standardised

Requirement: Fast, Scalable shared storage, filexible allocation of disk space and ability to de-duplicate data, reduce overhead etc, thin provisioning.

Solution: SAN Storage, EMC Clariion, HP-EVA, Sun StorageTek, iSCSI for lower requirements, or storage over single Ethernet fabric - NetApp/Equalogic

Requirement: Requirement Common chassis and server modules for quick, easy rip and replace and efficient power/cooling.

Solution: HP/Sun/Dell Blades

Requirement: quick change of network configurations, cross connects, increase & decrease bandwidth

Solution: Cisco switching, trunked interconnects, 10Gb/bonded 1GbE, VLAN isolation, quick change enabled as beyond initial installation there are fewer requirements to send an engineer to plug something in or move it, Checkpoint VSX firewalls to allow delegated firewall configurations or to allow multiple autonomous business units (or customers) to operate from a shared, high bandwidth platform.

Requirement: Ability to load balance and consolidate individual server workloads

Solution: VMWare Infrastructure 3 + management toolset (SCOM, Virtual Centre, Custom you-specific integrations using API/SDK etc.)

Requirement: Delegated control of systems to allow autonomy to teams, but within a controlled/auditable framework

Solution: Normal OS/app security delegation, Active Directory, NIS etc. Virtual Center, Checkpoint VSX, custom change request workflow and automation systems which are plugged into platform API/SDK’s etc.

the following diagram is my reference architecture for how I see these cloud platforms hanging together

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As ever more services move into the “cloud” or the “mesh” then integrating them becomes simpler, you have less of a focus on the platform that runs it - and just build what you need to operate your business etc.

In future maybe you’ll be able to use the public cloud services like Amazon AWS to integrate with your own internal cloud, allowing you to retain the important internal company data but take advantage of external, utility computing as required, on demand etc.

I don’t think we’ll ever get to.. (or want) to be 100% in a public cloud, but this private/internal cloud allows an organisation to retain it’s own internal agility and data ownership.

I hope this post has demonstrated that whilst, architecturally “cloud” computing sounds a bit out-there, you can practically implement it now by adopting this approach for the underlying infrastructure for your current application landscape.

Posted in Cisco, Datacentre, Fluid datacentre, GigE, Grid, HP Blade, Microsoft Online Services, SAN, VMWare, Virtual Fabric, Virtual Grid, Virtualization, Windows, Work, blade, datacenter in a box, google, google apps, iSCSI | 6 Comments »

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VMWare/Cisco Switching Integration

June 21, 2008

 

As noted here there is a doc that has been jointly produced between VMWare and Cisco which has all the details required for integrating VI virtual switches with physical switching.

Especially handy if you need to work with networking teams to make sure things are configured correctly to allow failover properly between redundant switches/fabrics etc. - it’s not as simple as it looks, and people often forget the switch-side configurations that are required.

Doc available here (c.3Mb PDF)

Posted in Cisco, ESX, ESX 3.5, ESX 3i, GigE, Virtual Machine Networking, Virtual Switches, Virtualization, Work | No Comments »

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LiveBlogging from TechEd

June 12, 2008

 

Scott has an excellent series of articles that he’s relaying from sessions at Microsoft TechEd US..

looks good for Hyper V and SCVMM content..

http://blog.scottlowe.org/

Posted in Hyper V, Tech-Ed, Virtualization | No Comments »

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Slow vMotion..

June 2, 2008

 

Note to remember, don’t forget to check the duplex settings on NICs handling your vMotion traffic.

My updated clustered ESX test lab is progressing (more posts on that in the next week or so)… and I’m kind of limited in that I only have an old 24-port 100Mb Cisco hub for the networking at the moment.

vMotion warns about the switch speed as a possible issue.

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I had my Service Console/ vMotion NICit forced to 100/full and when I 1st tried it vMotion took 2hrs to get to 10%, I changed it to auto-negotiate whilst the task was running and it completed without breaking the vMotion task ain a couple of seconds, dropped only 1 ping to the VM I moved.

Cool, it’s not production or doing a lot of workload but useful to know despite the warning it will work even if you’ve only got an old hub for your networking, and worth remembering that Duplex mis-matches can literally add hours and days onto network transfers.

Posted in Cheap ESX PC, ESX, ESX 3.5, Run ESX on a cheap Desktop PC, VMWare, VMotion, Virtual Center 2.5, Virtual Switches, Virtualization, Xtravirt, iSCSI | No Comments »

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Free SAN for your Home/Work ESX Lab

May 25, 2008

 

VM/Etc have posted an excellent article about a free iSCSI SAN VM appliance that you can download from Xtravirt

it uses replication between 2 ESX hosts to allow you to configure DRS/HA etc.

Excellent, I’m going to procure another cheap ESX host in the next couple of weeks so will post back on my experiences with setting this up, my previous plan meant I’d have to get a 3rd box to run an iSCSI server like OpenFiler to enable this functionality, but I really like this approach.

Sidenote  - Xtravirt also have some other useful downloads like Viso templates and an ESX deployment appliance available here

Posted in SAN, VMWare, VMotion, Virtual Grid, Virtualization, Work, Xtravirt, iSCSI | No Comments »

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A Closer look at Green IT and Microsoft’s new Container Data Centre in Chicago

May 24, 2008

 

Link here - good visualisation about 10mins in of how their new Chicago data centre is laid out internally.

With virtualisation breaking the traditional hardware/OS ties; this is becoming an increasingly appealing way of managing commodity compute grid resources for large organisations. Mike makes some good points about the de-comissioning of servers on a large scale where you are adding 10’s of thousands on a regular basis - you need to take them out at some point too, and that’s time consuming. at this scale of operation It’s more efficient to make the the container and/or datacentre the field replaceable unit (as I discussed a while back) in this scenario.

Also interesting point that water consumption may be the next environmental touch paper for legislation and disclosure for IT shops.

Posted in Datacentre, Disaster Recovery, Fluid datacentre, Geeky, Grid, Virtual Disaster Recovery, Virtual Fabric, Virtual Grid, Virtualization, datacenter in a box, follow the comms, follow the power | No Comments »

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Running ESX 3.5 and 3i Under VMWare Workstation 6.5 Beta Build 91182

May 18, 2008

 

Following on from my earlier post I upgraded my installation to the new build of 6.5. it un-installed the old build and re-installed the latest without a problem, took about 30mins and required a reboot of the host OS.

All my previously suspended XP/2003 VM’s resumed ok without a restart but needed an upgrade to the VMTools which did require a restart of the guest OS - all completed with no problems.

Now, onto installing ESX….

I used the settings from Eric’s post here to edit my .vmx file

ethernet0.virtualDev = “e1000″

monitor.virtual_exec = “hardware”
monitor_control.restrict_backdoor = “true”

Note - you need to select an x64 Linux version from the VM type drop down, if you have to go back and change it via the GUI after you’ve edited the .vmx file it overwrites the Ethernet card “e1000″ setting to “vlance” so you need to edit again otherwise the ESX installer won’t find a compatible NIC and won’t install.

it was initially very slow to boot; 5mins on my dual core laptop with only one error - which was expected..

imageimage

To improve the performance I changed my installation to run the non-debug version of the Workstation binaries (rename the vmware-vmx.exe to vmware-vmx-debug.exe)

note: this isn’t recommended unless you know what you are doing, VMWare will rely on the output from the debug version of the code if you need to report any issues)

It also seems to work for the installable version of ESX 3i… (although I’ve not quite figured out the point of that version yet :)).

image

Install prompt

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it did fail with an error the 1st time round..

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this was because I had specified an IDE disk as per the ESX instructions, I changed it to a SCSI one and it worked ok.

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Finished..

imageimage 

The ESX 3i install has a footprint of about 200Mb on disk, and ESX 3.5 uses 1.5Gb.

I’m going to keep the 3.5 install on my laptop and will try to use linked clones to maintain a couple of different versions/configs to save disk space.. I’m sure I could knock up a quick script to change the hostname/IP of each clone - if I do I’ll post it here.

Why would you want to do this? well because you can, of course :) and its handy for testing patch updates and scripts for ESX management etc.

I will  also try to get a ESX DRS cluster running under workstation with a couple of ESX hosts and shared storage over iSCSI using something like OpenFiler as shown here. won’t exactly be production performance, but useful for testing and demo’ing.

Posted in Beta, ESX, ESX 3.5, ESX 3i, ESX under VMWare Workstation, Geeky, Performance, VMWare, VMWare Workstation 6.5, VMotion, Virtualization, Windows, Work | 14 Comments »

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New VMWare Workstation 6.5 Build(s) and ability to run ESX 3.5

May 18, 2008

 

As a result of this post from Eric Sloof I note there is a new build of Workstation 6.5 available; I hadn’t noticed this as I haven’t had much time to follow the forums and my beta/RC (as used in this post and installed here is build 84113) hasn’t notified me there is a new release as all the previous 4.x/5.x beta’s have.

Oddly I checked this morning before I saw Eric’s post and it reported no new builds available - assume this is because its still a beta programme.

Anyway - if you downloaded the previous build before 14th May then go to this page and you can update your registration for the new build (below).

image

I’ll be trying this out in the coming week and hopefully will be able to get ESX running on my laptop under VMWare Workstation (very handy mobile demo platform).

Posted in Beta, Unity, VMWare, VMWare Workstation 6.5, Virtualization, Windows, Work | No Comments »

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Deleting a Virtual Machine from Virtual Center and Disk

May 14, 2008

 

If you deploy your VM’s from a master image using Virtual Center’s Deploy from template functionality (below).

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When you try and delete a virtual machine you’ve created from disk

image 

You get the following prompt

Are you sure you want to delete this VM and it’s associated base disk?

Please note if other VMs are sharing this base disk, they will no longer have access to this disk.

image

This does not refer to the master VM image you deployed from; in other words if you delete the VM it does not break all other VMs deployed from the initial template.

One other point to note, when you perform “Deploy virtual machine from template” operation, the target field (below) is actually the name of the base image you are cloning, rather than the name of the eventual VM you are creating from it - odd, but that’s how it is (below)

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Posted in ESX, VMWare, Virtual Center 2.5, Virtualization, Work, useful | No Comments »

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Solid Sate SAN, Storage vMotion and VMWare - HSM for your VMs

May 13, 2008

 

You’ve been able to buy solid state SAN technology like the Tera-RAMSAN from TMS which gives you up to 1Tb of storage, presented over 4Gb/s fibre channel or Infiniband @10Gb/s… with the cost of flash storage dropping its going to soon fall in to the realms of affordability (from memory a year ago 1Tb SSD SAN was about £250k, so would assume that’s maybe £150k now - would be happy to see current pricing if anyone has it though).

If you were able to combine this with a set of ESX hosts dual-connected to the RAMSAN and traditional equipment (like an HP EVA or EMC Clariion) over a FC or iSCSI fabric then you could possibly leverage the new Storage vMotion features that are included in ESX 3.5 to achieve a 2nd level of performance and load levelling for a VM farm.

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It’s pretty common knowledge that you can use vMotion and the DRS features to effectively load level or average VM CPU and memory load across a number of VMWare nodes within a cluster.

Using the infrastructure discussed above could add a second tier of load balancing without downtime to a DRS cluster. If a VM needs more disk throughput or is suffering from latency then you could move them to/from the more expensive solid-state storage tiers to FC-SCSI or even FATA disks, this ensures you are making the best use of fast, expensive storage vs. cheap, slow commodity storage.

Even if Virtual Center doesn’t have a native API for exposing this type of functionality or criteria for the DRS configuration you could leverage the plug-in or scripting architecture to use a manager of managers (or here) to map this across an enterprise and across multiple hypervisors (Sun, Xen, Hyper V)

I also see EMC integrating flash storage into the array itself, would be even better if you could transparently migrate LUNS to/from different arrays and disk storage without having to touch ESX at all.

Note: This is just a theory I’ve not actually tried this - but am hoping to get some eval kit and do a proof on concept…

Posted in ESX, Grid Storage, Hyper V, Infiniband, SSD SAN, Solid State, VMWare, VMotion, Virtual Center 2.5, Virtual Fabric, Virtual Grid, Virtualization, Work | No Comments »

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Misc bits of Useful, Recent VMWare News

May 12, 2008

 

I’ve been really busy the last couple of weeks and I’ve had to trim down my incoming RSS feeds, as there was too much noise and I was missing important things like the following;

  • Scott Lowe’s summary of sessions from VMWare’s partner Exchange, some useful information on Site Recovery Manger
  • The new VMWare Certified Design Expert (VCDX) certification - next step up from VCP, will have to have a look into it now I’ve finally managed to re-schedule my cancelled QA course - official VM announcement here.
  • Official Microsoft Clustering Support with ESX 3.5 Update 1 here
  • Some workarounds for deploying Windows Server 2008 with virtual center here - would have been nice if support was in an official update from VMWare soon; it’s not like it’s been beta’ing for a while is it (errr!)

Posted in Blogging, ESX, QA-IQ, Training, VMWare, Virtual Center 2.5, Virtualization, Windows, Windows 2008, Work | No Comments »

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Lifecycle Manager, Site Recovery Manager and Stage Manager Released

May 12, 2008

 

Linkage here.

VMWare are shaping up to have a really good set of management tools - lab and site recovery manager are of particular interest to me for several projects I’m working on.

Posted in ESX, VMWare, Virtual Center 2.5, Virtual Disaster Recovery, Virtualization, Work, useful | No Comments »

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VMWare Server Performance - A Practical Example

April 19, 2008

 

The following screen dump is from an HP DL380G5 server that runs all the core infrastructure under VMWare Server (the free one) for a friend’s company which I admin sometimes.

It is housed in some co-lo space and runs the average range of Windows servers used by a small but global business, Exchange SQL, Windows 2003 Terminal Services.

As a result of some planned (but not very well communicated!) power maintenance the whole building lost power earlier today, when it was restored I grabbed the following screenshot as the 15 or so Virtual Machines automatically booted.

interesting to note that all the VM’s had been configured to auto-start with the guest OS, meaning there wasn’t any manual intervention required, even though it was a totally dirty shutdown for both the host and guest OS’es (No UPS, as the building and suite is supposed to have redundant power feeds to each rack - in this instance the planned maintenance was on the building wiring so required taking down all power feeds for a 5 yearly inspection..)

There are no startup delay settings  in the free version of VMWare Server so they all start at the same time, interesting to note the following points..

The blue line that makes a rapid drop is the pages/second counter, and the 2nd big drop (green) is the disk queue length. the hilighted (white) line is the overall %CPU time, note the sample frequency was 15 seconds on this perfmon.

image 

After it had settled down, I took the following screenshot, it hardly breaks a sweat during its working day. there are usually 10-15 concurrent users on this system from around the world (access provisioned via an SSL VPN device) and a pretty heavily used Exchange mail system.

image

The box is an HP DL380 G5 with 2 x quad core CPUs (8 cores in total) and 16Gb of RAM, it has 8 x 146Gb 15k HDDs in a single RAID 5 set + hot-spare, it was purchased in early 2007 and cost c.£8,000 (UK Prices)

It runs Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition x64 edition with VMWare Server 1.0.2 (yes, its an old build.. but if it ain’t broke..) and they have purchased multiple w2k3 ent-edition licences to take advantage of the virtualisation use-rights to cover the installed virtual OS’es.

It’s been in-place for a year and hardly ever has to be touched, its rock-solidly available and the company have noticed several marked improvements since they P2V’d their old servers onto this platform, as follows;

  • No hardware failures - moving from lots of low-end servers (Dell) and desktops to a single box (10:1 consolidation)
  • The DL380 has good redundancy built in, but it’s also backed up with a h/w maintenence contract, and they also have a spare cold-standby server to resume service from backups if data is lost.
  • Less noise, the old servers were dotted around their old offices in corners, racks etc - this is the main thing they liked!
  • Simple access anywhere - using a Juniper SA2000 SSL VPN,  its easy to get secure access from anywhere
  • Less reliance on physical offices and cheap DSL-grade data communications, now the servers are hosted on the end of a reliable, data centre class network link with an SLA to back it up. if an individual office looses its ADSL connection, no real issue - people pick up their laptop(s) and work from home/starbucks etc.
  • Good comms are cheaper in data centres than in your branch offices (usually)

Hopefully this goes to show the free version of VMWare’s server products can work almost as well if budget is a big concern, ESX would definitely give some better features and make backup easier, they are considering upgrading and combining with something like Veeam Backup to handle failover/backup.

Posted in Cheap ESX PC, Datacentre, ESX, Exchange, HP, Microsoft, Networking, P2V, Performance, Performance Stats, Reference, Terminal Services, VMWare, Virtualization, Windows, Work | 4 Comments »

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How to Convert Virtual Center from Evaluation to Licensed Version

April 10, 2008

or “How to convert virtual centre from evaluation to licenced version”… for us Brits… the “American English” is to help the international Googlers :)

I can’t believe I missed this, on a couple of platforms I’ve built I’ve had to start with an eval licence and then move to a proper licence but could never find how to change virtual center from eval to licenced mode.

ESX itself was fine you can do that via the VC GUI (below)

image

But despite a lot of googling I could never find out how to set Virtual Centre itself to use a licence server - so I ended up reinstalling/repairing and then selecting the option to use a licence server, my bad - it’s actually in the VI client GUI d’oh as Homer would say!

for my own reference, and for anyone else who has missed and is searching for how to convert Virtual Center from evaluation to licensed..

image

and then configure the setting here to point it at a proper licence server to enable full VC.

image

D’oh!!!

Posted in VMWare, Virtual Center 2.5, Virtualization, Work, licencing | 2 Comments »

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VMWare Workstation 6.5 Beta Open Now

April 2, 2008

 

As of 1st April (not an April fools joke!) you can register for, and download the VM Worksation 6.5 beta programme here..

Main new features are;

  • Use Unity to integrate your guest apps with your host
  • More Powerful VM Record and Replay
  • Support for Smart Cards & Smart Card Readers
  • Enhanced ACE Authoring
  • Link State Propagation Networking
  • Improved 3D graphics Support

I’m most looking forward to being able to use Unity… very cool, have used it on the Mac with Fusion and Parallels equivalent, maybe now I will be able to run 2 instances of full-fat Outlook 2007 side by side, plugged into different Exchange mailboxes and orgs (maybe a bit overkill - but I have my reasons!)

Posted in Beta, Outlook, Unity, VMWare, VMWare Workstation 6.5, Virtualization, Windows, Work | No Comments »

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How to Monitor VMWare ESX Servers from Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 (SCOM)

March 26, 2008

 

Jonathan has a really good post and link to a .PDF file here he’s done some great work to pull together a document on how to monitor your ESX hosts from SCOM.

Thanks Jonathan - will definitely be looking at this in more detail in the next couple of weeks!

Posted in SCOM, VMWare, Virtualization, Windows, Work, useful | 1 Comment »

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Useful Document for getting your Network Teams up to Speed with VMWare and it’s Virtual Networking

March 18, 2008

 

Doc from Cisco Here.

Posted in Cisco, VLAN Tagging, VMWare, Virtual Switches, Virtualization | No Comments »

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