Free VMware Offering Needs Boost

One of the strongest enabling elements of virtualization is that there are plenty of offerings in the free space. This frequently allows organizations to build their business case and get comfortable with virtualization technologies. Recently at TechMentor, one of my sessions focused on when the free offerings are not enough. This was targeted toward small organizations that are at the decision point of introducing revenue solutions. Somewhat surprising is that VMware's free offering in the Type 1 hypervisor space and accompanying management is comparatively dull. Since the unmanaged ESXi was introduced, the only new enhancement available to ESXi on version 4 is thin provisioning of the virtual hard disks.

Posted by Rick Vanover on 07/06/20099 comments

Thin Provisioning: Under Control

Last week, I was at TechMentor in Orlando and a very interesting point was brought up in the virtualization track. For thin provisioning, who do you want doing it? Should the storage system or the virtualization platform administer this disk-space-saving feature? The recommendation was to use the storage system to provide thin provisioning on the LUN if supported. As a fan of virtualization in general and with vSphere's thin provisioning of VMDK files being one of my most anticipated features, I stopped and thought a bit about this recommendation. Then this sounded familiar to discussions of having software RAID or hardware RAID: We clearly want hardware controllers administering RAID arrays.

Posted by Rick Vanover on 06/30/20093 comments

Storage Sizing with VMFS Volumes

For VMware VI3 and vSphere environments, there is no clear guidance on how storage should be sized. We do have one firm piece of information, and that is the configuration maximums document. For both platforms, the only firm guidance is virtually the same for VMFS-3 volumes, in that a single logical unit number (LUN) cannot exceed 2 TB. With extents, they can be spanned 32 times to 64 TB. This became relevant to me while reading a post by Duncan Epping at Yellow-Bricks.com. He's right -- it just depends.

Posted by Rick Vanover on 06/29/20094 comments

Type 1 and Type 2 Hypervisors Explained

In a recent discussion, the topic of Type 1 and Type 2 hypervisors came up. To some, this is an arbitrary distinction that doesn't matter much as there's already an inherent understanding of what the requirements are for a virtualization solution.

Simply put, the distinction between Type 1 and Type 2 has to do with whether an underlying operating system is present. Virtualization Review editor Keith Ward touched on part of this topic in a post about KVM virtualization in regards to Red Hat.

Posted by Rick Vanover on 06/24/20098 comments

Thin-Provisioned Disk Monitoring Critical with vSphere

One of the more highly anticipated features of vSphere is the ability to thin-provision VMs for their storage. I first made mention of this during the end of the private beta program, and expressed concern about the practice side of thin-provisioning. Basically, we can get in trouble with thin-provisioning storage, as so many factors are involved with the behavior on disk. Not to pick on Windows, but when a service pack or new version of Internet Explorer is installed to a VM the storage footprint can go up a good bit. Multiply that by hundreds of VMs, and the storage footprint can be significant.

Posted by Rick Vanover on 06/22/20094 comments

Up to 32 Virtual CPUs with VirtualBox 3

Earlier this month when I checked in with VirtualBox, I was intentionally priming for the upcoming version 3 release. Currently in beta, version 3 offers what I believe is the highest virtual CPU count for a VM at 32 symmetric multiprocessors (SMP) for mainstream hypervisors using common Intel and AMD processors.

Posted by Rick Vanover on 06/19/200913 comments

Up Close with Cisco UCS: Switches and Ports

This week, I had a chance to talk with Cisco about the new Unified Computing System (UCS) architecture. For me, this was an opportunity to get a deep dive into the architecture and understand what may not be obvious initially.

First of all, the UCS is most beneficial to the largest environments. There can be scenarios where mid-size environments make sense, but there are many factors. Generally speaking, the UCS framework makes financial sense in the 2-to 3-blade chassis range. This is based on port costs for the blade chassis of the competition plus actual switching and interface costs on the blades. This is where it gets interesting. The costs for traditional blades can get high for 10 GB Ethernet switches and Fibre Channel switches to accommodate the I/O for blade chassis. In the case of UCS, this I/O is consolidated to a component called the UCS 6100 Fabric Interconnect (you can see it here).

Posted by Rick Vanover on 06/17/20091 comments

vSphere Upgrade Pricing: Good and Bad

Last month when vSphere was released to general availability, we were collectively relieved that it was finally made available. What seemed like a very long launch going back to previews, announcements, beta programs and partner activity had finally come to fruition. Now that it is here, people like me are considering what are the next steps and how do we upgrade to vSphere.

Posted by Rick Vanover on 06/15/20093 comments

vStorage VMFS Locking, Blocking Details

In case you didn't notice, I am a big fan of VMware vStorage VMFS. I recently pointed out some notes about slight version differences with vSphere's incremental update to the clustered file system for VMs. VMFS has other features of interest to me, like the coordinator-less architecture for file locking and smart blocking.

Posted by Rick Vanover on 06/10/20097 comments

Checking In with VirtualBox: OVF

Although Oracle is heavily focused on the business side of the recently announced acquisition of Sun Microsystems, the VirtualBox platform continues to receive updates. There are a lot of questions as to what will happen after Sun's acquisition is complete, such as what will the virtualization strategy be? Or who will be the steward of Java? One thing is for sure: Until the business end of things is complete, we really don't know anything.

Posted by Rick Vanover on 06/08/20096 comments

Keeping Sales a Priority -- at The Expense of Free Tools

One of the best things about virtualization is that it lends itself to so many other great things, including partner products that supplement the larger landscape. Virtualization Review Editor Keith Ward hinted at this with a recent post. Today, Veeam Software has announced that the Veeam Backup product's offering to perform backups of the free edition of ESXi will be discontinued. The recommended path will be to use vSphere Essentials and enhanced Veeam offerings.

Posted by Rick Vanover on 06/03/20094 comments

Odd Processor Assignments

For most server consolidation implementations, running server operating systems with one or two virtual CPUs can address most situations. Rarely do I see a need for more processing power beyond two virtual CPUs, but there are always exceptions that can make an example.

With vSphere, we can now provision VMs with up to eight virtual CPUs. Further, we can introduce an odd number of processors available to the guest VM, as in Fig. 1, which shows a VM during the creation process and the option to assign three, five or seven processors.

Posted by Rick Vanover on 06/01/20092 comments