Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between
My ramblings on the stuff that holds it all together
Category Archives: VMWare
VMworld Europe Day 1: Wrap-Up
Posted by on February 24, 2009
The first official day kicked off at VMworld, I covered the keynote this morning and have written up the more interesting sessions that I attended now that I have access to power again 🙂
Crowding isn’t as bad as I’d anticipated and getting about is pretty easy, the aircon could do with being a bit cooler as it got a bit sticky towards lunchtime. Queues to sessions are manageable and they have opened up bigger rooms & auditoriums than were used on Partner day. I was relieved to see that most of the queues you see are waiting for the session to open – I’ve not seen many people turned away from the sessions I attended.
I spent some time in some private meetings with Microsoft & VMware today around general virtualization things – reception drinks were popular in the solutions exchange and I think I eat way too much 🙂
The following are the more detailed posts I’ve done on sessions I attended;
Because I can’t possibly write everything up (well, it’s a decision between sleep and blogging…) here are some links to other bloggers with good content
vCenter Data Recovery http://www.virtuallifestyle.nl/2009/02/vmware-vcenter-data-recovery/
A view from afar http://rogerlunditblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/vmworld-europe-2009-tuesday-view-from.html
if you are at VMworld there are some interesting vendors in the solution exchange, I recommend you check out;
HP – Flex 10 blade interconnects on display
Novell/PlateSpin have a large stand covering their management & migration product suites
Zeus – software based traffic manager (more info here)
Veeam win the award for most lurid green (and sheer number of people on their stand 🙂
ioko – because I work for them and I’ve put a lot of effort into this whole vCloud thing 🙂
If you’re not here in Cannes I will endeavour to post up some of the interesting bits from my discussions with these vendors, maybe even a video 🙂
More tomorrow, must sleep.
DC14 – Overview of 2009 VMware Datacenter Products (VMworld Europe 2009)
Posted by on February 24, 2009
This session was discussing new features in vSphere, or is it VDC-OS, I’m a bit confused about that one – vSphere is the new name for “Virtual Infrastructure”? that would make sense for me.
As usual this session is prefixed with a slide that all material presented is not final, and is not a commitment – things may change etc. – at least VMware point this out for the less aware people who then come and complain when something has changed at GA 🙂 this is my take on what was said… don’t sue me either 🙂
vApp is an OVF based container format to describe a virtual machine (os+app+data = workload) and what resources it needs, what SLA needs to be met etc. I like this concept.
in later releases it will also include security requirements – they use the model that vApp is like a barcode that describes a workload, the back-end vCenter suite knows how to provision and manage services to meet the requirements expressed by the vApp (resource allocation, HA/FT usage, etc.) and does so when you import the vApp.
There was some coverage of VMware Fault Tolerance (FT) using the lockstep technology, this has been discussed at length by Scott here however if I understood correctly it was said that at launch there would be some limitations; its going to be limited to 1 vCPU until a latter update, or maybe they meant experimental support at GA, with full support at a later update (update 1 maybe?) perhaps someone else at the session can clarify, otherwise there will hopefully be more details in the day 2 keynote by Steven Herrod tomorrow.
There is likely to be c.10% performance impact for VMware FT hosts due to the lockstep overhead (this was from an answer to a delegate question, rather than in the slides).
Ability to scale-up virtual machines through hot add vRAM and vCPU as well as hot-extension of disks.
The vShphere architecture is split into several key components (named using the vPrefix that is everywhere now!:))
vCompute – scaling up the capabilities and scale of individual VMs to meet high-demand workloads.
VMDirectIO – allowing direct hardware access from within a VM; for example – a VM using a physical NIC to do TCP offload etc. – the VM has the vendor driver installed rather than VMXNET etc. to increase performance (looks to have DRS/vMotion implications)
Support for 8 way vSMP (and hot-add)
255Gb RAM for a VM
up to 40GB/s network speed within a VM.
vStorage – improved storage functionality
Thin-provisioning for pragmatic allocation of storage, can use storage vMotion to move data to larger LUNs if required without downtime – monitoring is key here – vCenter integration.
Online disk grow – increase disk size without downtime.
<2ms latency for disk I/O
API for snapshot access, enabling ISV solutions, custom bolt-ons
Storage Virtual Appliances – this is interesting to me, but no real details yet
vNetwork
Distributed Network vSwitch – some good info here – configure once, push config out to all hosts
3rd party software switches (Cisco 1000V)
vServices
vShield - which is a self-learning and configuring firewall service and firewall/trust zones to enforce security policies
vSafe – a framework for ISV’s to plug in functionality like VM deep-inspection, essentially doing brain-surgery on a running VM via an API.
Last point before I had to leave early for a vendor meeting was about Power – vSphere has support for power management technology like SpeedStep and core sleeping and DPM (Distributed Power Management) is moving from experimental to mainstream support. This is great as long as you make sure your data centre power feed can deal with surge capacity should you need to spin up extra hosts quickly; for example at a DR site when you invoke a recovery plan. This needs thought and sizing, rather than oversubscribing power because you think you can get away with it (or don’t realise DPM is sending your servers to sleep); otherwise you may be tripping some breakers and having to find the torches when you have to “burst”.
DC02 – Best Practices for Lab Manager (VMworld Europe 2009)
Posted by on February 24, 2009
This was an interesting session; I’ve played a bit with Lab Manager but definitely intend to invest more time in it this year, key things for me were;
There are approx 1000 deployments of Lab Manager at customers, a large percentage in Europe.
You need to bear in mind VMFS constraints on the number of allowed hosts when using DRS with Lab Manager, LM typically provisions and de-provisions lots of VMs so size hosts and clusters accordingly. Consider the storage bandwidth/disk groups etc. The self-service element could easily let this get out of control with over-zealous users, implement storage leases to avoid this (use it or loose it!)
Real-life Lab manager implementations have typically been for the following uses;
- Training – I hadn’t personally considered this use-case before but it’s popular
- Demo environments – McAfee using LM to run their online product demo environments, some custom code to expose the VM console outside of VI into a browser.
- Development – VMware make heavy use of Lab manager for their own dev environments, they have build end-end automation via the SOAP API to integrate with smoke test tools and commercial tools like Mercury etc. builds go through automated smoke tests with the whole environment being captured with the bug in-situ and notifications and links sent to the relevant teams for investigation – excellent stuff; would be good to see a more detailed case-study on how this has been built.
Multi-site Lab Manager implementations are tricky – and need manual template copies or localised installations of LM; may be addressed in future releases.
When backing up Lab Manager hosted VMs think about what you are backing up; guest-based backup tools (Symantec/NTBackup etc.) will expand out the data from each VM and will consume extra storage – Lab manager uses Linked-clones so the actual storage used on the VMFS is pretty efficient.
Ideally use SAN based snapshots on the whole VMFS (or disk tree), and not individual VMDK backups – no file/VM granularity but there is a good reason for this; because linked-clones are so inter-dependent you need to backup the whole chain together otherwise you risk consistency issues (maximum number of linked clones is 30)
VMware say there is no real performance penalty for using linked clones, SAN storage processors can cache the linked/differential parts of the VMDK files very efficiently (due to smaller size fitting in cache I guess?)
There is a tool called SSMove which can move virtual disk trees (linked-clone base disk + all children) between VMFS volumes – not Storage vMotion aware; needs downtime to that VM (and it’s children) to carry out.
There is a concept of organizations within Lab Manager which allows you to separate out access between multiple teams accessing the same Lab manager server and infrastructure.
Network Fencing is a useful feature in Lab Manager, it means you have multiple environments running with identical or conflicting IP address spaces; it automatically deploys a virtual appliance which functions as a NAT and router between the environments to keep traffic separate but allow end-user access by automatically NAT’ing inbound connections to the appropriate environment/container.
All in there are some good features being added into Lab Manager but it would be really good to see VMware working with PlateSpin to integrate the two products tighter, out of the box Lab Manager doesn’t have a facility to import physical machines via P2V – VMware are focused on end-end VM lifecycle solutions but PlateSpin could bring a lot to the table by keeping lab copies of physical servers refreshed; and conversely the ability to sync workload (OS/app/data) changes from development systems back out to physical machines (or other hypervisors – more on PlateSpin and it’s X2X facilities in a previous post here).
VMworld Partner Day wrap-up
Posted by on February 24, 2009
I take back what I said earlier about lack of technical track & content – whilst it wasn’t quite up to the list of previously announced sessions there was enough good stuff with information that is relevant to VMware partners with both a technical & competitive slant.
I still have my concerns that tomorrow is going to be rammed with the number of people expected, best get in early if you want a seat.
There was a fair bit of mud-slinging at Microsoft & Citrix from the ThinApp and View camp but I’ve seen similar from the other side so I think that’s just business as usual, whilst a nice thought – it would be better to have more of an independent view on the matter and I note Brian Madden has a session about VDI vs.TS and he’s always been pretty objective about that sort of thing – I’ve seen him at BriForum in the past.
Afternoon sessions were interesting, covering the upcoming AppSpeed product (‘#include <subject to change, your mileage may vary type disclaimers.h>), which is borne from the B-Hive acquisition last year – I’ve been looking forward to this as a result of early demo work I did on the B-Hive product, the upcoming vCenter integrated product is likley to support a good set of DB & Web applications as well as Exchange – I for one would like to add my vote for RDP/ICA coverage in future releases, VMware have noted this is in the pipeline for future releases, there will be a further beta programme later in the year and it looks very promising – almost a killer app for virtualization projects as far as I can tell (more information later in the week from the public sessions).
Microsoft were hosting some drinks this evening and had some interesting discussions with the AppV/HyperV guys, they have a stand in the solutions exchange and are worth checking out, IMHO if only for the AppV stuff, it’s an excellent product and IMHO better positioned for the enterprise environment and can service offline scenarios much better than VMware ThinApp (despite the mud-slinging that went on today)
I spent a bit of time preparing the ioko stand in the vCloud pavilion, I’ll be on the stand tomorrow during the lunch break and the evening session with TechHead. Confusingly, and some would say tactically we are both called Simon in real life but if it helps, I look like this. Don’t let that put you off – or the fact that there seems to be some concrete attached to my head in the photo ! :)).
We’ll be there with some other ioko colleagues for the welcome drinks, please feel free to come over and say hi, we have a presentation on the stand around our cloud reference architecture and customers. I would be happy to talk anyone through it and our practical experiences implementing this cloud thing (we were doing it long before it was called “cloud”).
The solutions exchange is huge.. far bigger than I had expected, drop by the Dell stand for the biggest flat-screen TV you have ever seen!
Hands-on labs are looking good – dual screen setups and thin-client devices.
Here are some pictures from the Solutions Exchange as it’s being setup
Right, early start tomorrow (or later today, it’s 1am local time)… more live posts from the keynote – here’s hoping for some major product announcements from VMware to counter the recent MS/Citrix ones.
VMworld Partner Day – Keynote
Posted by on February 23, 2009
So things have kicked off here in Cannes for VMware partners of which my employer is one, the first session is the keynote/general session – covering general product announcements, some sales woop-de-woop and details of upcoming partner programmes.
Despite the “current economic climate” (a phrase which has been used at least 100 times already today, and it’s only 11am) there VMware are still seeing a strong demand for product and services and the VMworld event itself, this isn’t surprising (to me anyway) as I’ve long seen VMware’s key message as “do more, with less” which is what you need if you are tightening the corporate belt.
There are 1500 partners here today for partner day and they are expecting 4,600 delegates for the full conference which starts tomorrow; it’s already pretty heaving on the 1st floor balcony and I think tomorrow might be pretty crammed – best try to get to sessions early.
I’m not sure what happened but when I signed up for partner day originally there was a full-on technical track for today, which was my main reason for attending – this seems to have vanished without a trace and the remaining sessions are a mix of sales/business/competitive and partner sessions with what look to be some high-level tech session later today – this is a bit disappointing and I’ve not seen anything in the run up to say this was going to be the case, ah well I’m sure there will be some useful information anyway.
There was some interesting positioning of virtualization which I’ve not seen spelled out before – positioning it as enabling the “software mainframe”, building a large, reliable compute resource but using industry standard building blocks, reducing proprietaryness (new word I have invented) like you have with traditional mainframes (ICL, IBM, etc.) through standardisation of constituent parts (no single vendor tie-in).
in the keynote Paul outlined VMware’s key initiatives going forward;
- VDC-OS – foundation for the cloud; internal now, enabling…
- vCloud –
- Service Provider targeted,
- build clouds using VDC-OS tech
- allows eventual federation
- reduce proprietaryness (choice)
- VMware Working with standards bodies
- Desktop as a service (DaaS) – programme started with VMware View and ThinApp products, 2009 full rollout of full suite
- People stay, devices come and go
- Current model is device centric, move to user-centric (provision users not PCs.
- Abstract the underlying plumbing through virtualization
- Currently centralised / server hosted only Thin-Client/VDI
- Mobile
- Client hypervisor – make seamless replication of environment delivery and data between server based and local and sync data back
- VMware view – DaaS thin & thick clients with central mgmt.
- take advantage of de-duplication
- currently PCoIP (PC over IP – remote desktop) – blade PCs etc
- Trickle data changes back to cloud (less device dependency)
- possibly enable BYOPC (buy your own PC from say PC world, you get the choice, IT provide a sandboxed environment for you to work in
- Isolation through virtualization from local OS
- VMware would like you to install Win7 to the cloud (easy upgrades, less hardware dependencies, upgrade of lot of distributed PC hardware = resource intensive
- users & IT are Slaves to pieces of hardware.
Interesting item – Terraditchi (spelling?) is a hardware device that does WAN acceleration for remote desktop sessions they are a VMware partner and are collaborating to move the implementation entirely into software –less proprietary/dedicated hardware.
Cloud is great but as I’ve talked about before its going to take time (or will never happen) for everyone moves everything to the cloud, there will always be a hybrid internal/external cloud VMware are floating the term "virtual private cloud" through vCloud to describe a federation & choice between internal & various service providers.
this allows this sort of move to be done in an evolutionary way, rather than revolutionary (i.e throw it what you have and rebuild) – virtualization can deliver benefit now (cost saving/consolidation/DR) and position you for a strategic move to the cloud in future through the federation/standardisation from vCloud/VDC-OS.
VMware also officially using/announcing the vSphere; light on details – hope there will be a big announcement tomorrow – but he did say shipping this year.
2 (high-level) product announcements today
vCenter server heartbeat SLA monitoring and HA combined (app awareness and response time and DRS/HA)
vShield zones (leveraging vSafe API to delivery security & compliance products).
VMware are making big moves into the desktop space with the View suite and there could be a good green story here, VMware’s statistics show 684M desktop PCs in the world now
By my very quick workings are @85w each = 58 billion watts )58Million KW of energy) if a thin client + share of a central VDI datacentre is 20w that’s a huge energy saving
With the introduction of the client-side hypervisor they mention they have the possibility to solve the problems of this scenario for offline/mobile use.
Lastly, VMware Partner University is announced, accessible via Partner central All VMware technical and sales training materials online. It has been Localised to several language and is Role based (sales/pre/post) and solution specific (VI/VDI/BC)
Using VMware vCenter Converter 4 to create a Virtual Center Template
Posted by on February 20, 2009
I have a set of standard template Virtual Machines under VMware Workstation 6.5 that I use to spin up VMs, Workstation doesn’t have a native template feature but I get a VM to a point where I’m happy with the build, VM tools installed, Windows updates done etc. and then I sysprep it and shut it down.
At this point I mark it read-only and when I want to create a new Windows virtual machine I just right-click it and create a linked-clone.
This is handy for me as each VM only consumes small amounts of space as they are all just differential snapshots.
however, if I want to change the base template (for example to update from SP1 to SP2) this does present an issue as it has lots of children which depend on it so I can’t change the parent VM, in this instance I create a full clone of the base VM and update it and create further linked clones from it (essentially creating a “fork”).
I also have an ESX server farm in my lab and I like to keep my standard images consistent between workstation and ESX/VC to to save me creating and patching multiple templates.
I recently created the following templates and wanted to get a consistent copy on both my lab ESX system and my laptop VM Workstation system, I noted VMware Convertor 4.0 had been released so thought it would be an ideal time to use it to get a fresh set of images with all the current Windows updates applied.
- Windows Server 2008 x64 as a virtual centre template on my ESX farm
- Windows Server 2003 Ent, x86, SP2 as a read-only VM on VMware Workstation 6.5.
1st task is to import the Windows Server 2003 image from Workstation to ESX/VC using VM Converter 4.0;
Note the source machine options.
VM Workstation VM Information
Select appropriate target – in this instance it was an ESX farm, controlled by Virtual Center so I chose VMware Infrastructure Virtual Machine and put the hostname and credentials for my Virtual Center host, you can of course go direct to each ESX host if you don’t have VC.
This is a new feature, you get shown all the VM’s and can choose the appropriate storage group to on each host because it queries VC
It checks it out against the host and VC 
Some better laid out options for the conversion (reminds me of the PlateSpin UI)
Options to change CPU count and SCSI controller
Options to customize service start-up options post-conversion, for example if you have an application that you don’t want to start-up until you’ve checked the target VM is ok (not applicable in this case as it’s a vanilla template, but handy to know).
These are the new sync options – and a warning that I don’t have sysprep pre-loaded in this VM – not required at this stage as the VM already has sysprep applied within (will change this once its on the target as i can apply a customization template)
Note – I chose to install VM tools, as the ESX version is likely to be different from my Workstation version that is included in the image.
Usual summary screen… much nicer UI than previous versions
Running the conversion process, this is over a GbE network connection.
Note new job copy option.. very handy in previous versions you had to do it from scratch each time.
All done in about 20mins, although it did sit at 95% 1 minute remaining for about 10mins 🙂
And it shows up in Virtual Center as a normal VM
Worth remembering to use the ‘notes’ field in both workstation and ESX, Converter brings them across so you’ll always know this VM’s history
Now, running under ESX
at 1st logon its detecting newly installed hardware drivers and running deploypkg.exe, which I assume converter injected to do post-conversion tasks
The auto-install of VMtools threw up some errors over unsigned drivers, so had to manually ok the dialog boxes and then it rebooted itself, wonder if I hadn’t logged on manually it may have done all this in the background automatically.
Once the VM was across I got a service failure on boot up, after I did some digging, it turns out it is something related to VMware tools the vmhgfs service failed to start due to the following error: Cannot create a file when that file already exists – I guess this is a left over from the Workstation version of VM Tools as a bit of digging revealed that this driver is related to host/guest shared networking which isn’t in ESX. – in this instance I removed the registry key relating to the driver and all was good (do this at your own risk!)
I also had a failed device in device manager, I right clicked on the VMware Replay Debugging Helper and chose uninstall and all was well, maybe I could have uninstalled/reinstalled VM Tools instead.
A reboot and all was running ok, I then shutdown the newly cleaned up VM and converted it to a Virtual Center template and was able to apply my normal customization templates (see this post for more info on that).
Next part of this article will be to convert the Windows 2008 x64 template I have in ESX into a VMware Workstation image and all my templates will be consistent.
Cannot Set Static IP in OpenFiler When Running as a VM
Posted by on February 4, 2009
As a result of a power outage last week my home lab needed a reboot as my 2 x ESX D530 boxes didn’t have auto-power on setting set in BIOS, so I dutifully braved the snow to get to the garage and power them on manually.
However nothing came back online.. ESX started but my VMs didn’t auto-restart as it couldn’t find them.
The run up to xmas was a busy month and I had vague recollections of being in the midst of using storage vMotion to move all my VMs away from local storage to an OpenFiler VM in preparation for some testing.
However, in my rush to get things working the OpenFiler box didn’t have a static IP address set and was using DHCP (see where this is going…?)
So my domain controller/DNS/DHCP and Virtual Centre server were stored on the OpenFiler VM which my ESX box was running and accessed over iSCSI. As such when ESX started it couldn’t locate the iSCSI volume hosting the VM and couldn’t start anything.
OpenFiler couldn’t start its web admin GUI if it couldn’t get an IP address, nor would it mount the shared volumes.
Once I’d figured out what was going on, it was simple enough to get things going again;
- Temporary DHCP scope on my router,
- IPCONFIG/ RENEW to get a temporary DHCP address on my laptop
- VI client directly to ESX box rather than VC and reboot the OpenFiler VM
- Web browser to OpenFiler appliance on temporary DHCP addresss
However at this point I would have expected to be able to set a static IP address and resolve the issue for the future, however I couldn’t see any NICs in the OpenFiler config screen (see screenshot below)
I thought this was a bit odd, and maybe I was looking in the wrong part of the UI, but sure enough it was the correct place.
I tried updating it to the most recent software releases via the handy system update feature, which completed ok (no reboot required – beat that Windows Storage Server! :)) but still no NICs showing up, even after a couple of reboots to be absolutely sure.
Then, I stumbled across this thread and it seems this may be a bug (tracker here) following Jason’s suggestion I used the nano text editor via the VI remote console to edit the /opt/openfiler/var/www/includes/network.inc file on the OpenFiler VM as follows;
Before:
After:
I then refreshed the system tab in my browser session and the NICs show up;
note as part of my initial troubleshooting I added a 2nd virtual NIC to the VM, but the principal should apply regardless.
And I can now set a static IP etc.
I had to reboot my ESX host to get all my VM’s back from being inaccessible, I’m sure there is a cleverer way to do that, but in my case I wanted to test that the start-up procedure worked as expected now that I’ve set a static IP and re-jigged the start-up sequence so that OpenFiler starts before any other VMs that are dependent on it for their storage.
Workload Portability: Ultimate Cloud Edition
Posted by on January 23, 2009
I like the PlateSpin range of products a lot, it really does let you take an OS instance + app stack (workload) and move it between different physical machines, hypervisors etc. in a low impact way – if you’ve not come across it before – read this post for more info I see this portability as one of the key infrastructure components if you are looking to build or manage your own internal cloud infrastructures.
This isn’t possible at present, but put your architect hat on and imagine if you could plug PlateSpin Migrate (previously known as PlateSpin PowerConvert) tool into Amazon’s EC2 cloud, or a VMWare vCloud based farm – then you could do whatever you like with your Windows and Linux servers.
By design AWS and vCloud are both supposed to be automatable with web services and APIs to control machine provisioning and control etc. EC2 seems to have all of this now (API docs and example) and vCloud is coming along. (more real details at VMworld I’m guessing).
Moving services between on and off-premise cloud infrastructures is a key concept of vCloud; but I’m guessing this will only be between vCloud based infrastructures, what if you wanted to take advantage of the capacity and scale/commodity pricing from big providers like EC2 (which is Xen based under the hood) to offload some of your internal services – to my mind, there are a couple of scenarios here that PlateSpin could fulfil;
- Disaster Recovery – using the cloud (EC2 or other) for DR capacity; pay per use – use PlateSpin Protect to sync your machine images off to Amazon S3 and have a “panic button” that converts the S3 hosted images to running AMI’s. Brent has a similar idea here around SQL, my proposition takes this to the next level and does it from the OS up; if you did have to move over to the EC2 hosted DR cloud, then you could use it to go back to physical hardware again once you’ve repaired/rebuild your internal infrastructure
- Data centre moves or serious maintenance – use a cloud like EC2 as “swing” capacity to run services whilst you pick up your DC hardware and move it somewhere else (rather than a kit refresh).
- Test & Development; the ability to sandbox new apps in EC2 could be attractive to some organisations where corporate policies hinder or prevent this type of innovation taking place in-house; What if you could do this externally then just bring the machine instances back in-house to put into internal production use (I’ve seen this happening at several customers) – of course IT security teams would probably not be to happy about it.
- Short-term Expansion Capacity; if you experience an occasional surge of demand or load for an internal service. For example; if you have an internal application that you know will get really hit for a promotion or project then you could clone instances of the relevant web/application servers off to EC2 and use some kind of very clever load balancing tech to selectively hand off load to EC2 hosted instances when internal servers start getting saturated – or vice-versa.
Maybe even if PlateSpin were to position their product as a web service itself with downloadable agents – a connector/conversion hub between clouds – now that’s an interesting proposition.
Hopefully this diagram explains some of this idea visually
Issues at present:
- PlateSpin doesn’t have an interface to EC2 (consider this my feature request :))
- There is no secure connectivity back to corp HQ – this is something that as far as I can see AWS has an issue with – out of the box there is no way to have say an IPSec VPN or dedicated private subnet managed and provided by EC2, complicated networking scenarios don’t seem to be possible – you could build your own using software based routers and firewalls on EC2 hosted server instances but this is host based – would be good if EC2 add this sort of service to the platform in future – that would definitely be a killer feature as far as I’m concerned – AWS team, consider this my feature request :))
- VM Persistence is something of an issue with EC2 and I don’t think the EC2 model currently deals with it; with EC2 you pay whilst an instance is running, if you terminate it; i.e switch it off, it’s gone – the data (and that includes OS/app configurations) that you build into the instance are lost. there is no way to archive/suspend/freeze an instance to S3 and “spin it up” as required – I’m guessing this would be feasible for Amazon to build into EC2/S3 – you pay per GB stored on S3 so there is a cost-model for it – again this would be a killer feature for me – there are ways obviously to make your instances “vanilla” and have them auto-install relevant code and data when they are created; examples here and here but that takes a lot of work and isn’t so simple for most corporate type apps.
- You can attach an EBS (Elastic Block Storage) volume to an instance, this is persisted (as long as you keep paying for it) and you can mount it to a single host as a block disk device – but the issue remains with the actual OS instance not being persisted. if its a Windows OS, this is a particular problem as the config is all held in the registry etc. which is part of the OS itself.
- This still doesn’t get you past the concerns/issues over data ownership and cloud security, there is no magic bullet in this respect, just risk management/mitigation.
Anyways. just an idea, feel free to comment and give me your feedback..
Problem Installing VMWare Workstation on Windows 7
Posted by on January 13, 2009
I have tried to install the most recent build of VMWare Workstation (6.5.1 build 126130) on my Windows 7 beta (build 7000) machine, and it fails with an error 1935 An Error occurred during the installation of assembly component {0BAE132A2- etc. etc. etc. HRESULT: 0x8007054F
Ah well, it’s still beta – guess there will be an updated build from VMWare at some point. This will prevent me from running Windows 7 on my main machine without some dual-booting 😦
Works perfectly the other way round (Windows 7 running as a VM under VM Workstation) so that will do for now.
And so begins 2009..
Posted by on January 5, 2009
Ok, well it was last week 🙂 apologies for the lack of postings in the last month which was due to a mix of well-earnt holiday and some very busy periods of work in the December run-down.
Anyways, I would like to wish all vinf.net readers a belated happy new year; I’ve been amazed at how much this blog has grown over the last year, since my last review its now topped 120k hits – and (un)interesting factoid; Thursdays are consistently the most busy day for traffic!
Rest assured I haven’t been idle in the month’s absence from blogging. I have a number of interesting posts in the pipeline, continuing my PlateSpin power convert series (with the new product names/line-up that was announced in the meantime!) and fleshing out my cloud reference architecture, VMWare vCloud, Amazon EC2 and some further work on cheap ESX PC solutions for home/labs.
In other news, VMWare have kindly offered* me a press pass to VMWorld Europe in Feb which I’m honoured to accept and will hopefully be following Scott’s example by blogging extensively before, during and after; although I’ll probably stick to a day by day summary like I did for TechEd last year and break out any specific areas of detailed interest into separate posts so that they get the attention and level of detail required.
I’ve also submitted for a number of presenter sessions so fingers crossed they’ll be accepted.
2009 looks to be a very interesting year for the virtualization industry with increased adoption and considering the current economic climate maybe the VI suite should be renamed the Credit Crunch Suite rather than vSphere as more and more companies consolidate and virtualize to save money 🙂
Cloud computing also looks to be big this year and I’m hoping to be very active in this area, building on the work I did last year taking a more practical/infrastructure position on adoption, hopefully I will have some exciting announcements on this front in the coming months.
*In terms of disclosure, VMWare have offered me a free conference ticket in exchange for my coverage – there is absolutely no stipulation on positive/biased content so I’ll be free as ever to give my opinion, my employer is likely to be covering my travel expenses for the event as I was going to be attending anyway.
Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between 