Next week is the big event. VMworld will return once again to San Francisco and connect the entire virtualization community together. This will be my third trip to VMworld, and I'm quite excited. While I am saving my snarky post about the five things I dislike most about VMworld for later this week, here are five things that I like best about VMworld:
- Community. I don't exactly know why or how, but virtualization "just gets" the whole technology community thing. Virtualization is unique among the greater IT landscape in that we have a passionate blog network, podcasts, events such as VMworld, colorful Twitter personalities and a common desire to tie all of these social media strategies together. Having these entities manifest themselves at a big event, such as VMworld, is a real treat.
- Partners. VMworld does a good job of effectively bringing every partner into one room in the Solutions Exchange pavilion. This is a good way to get a feel for what's out there when the Internet isn't enough.
- Sessions. Most sessions are presented by leaders in their field, and I've enjoyed almost every one I've ever attended. Here's a little secret on the sessions: VMware is very stringent on the quality assurance aspect of the presentation format. Sure, there is a what you can and cannot say aspect to it, but also a very professional and effective communication strategy.
- Variety. As I have stated before, and anyone whom has attended will say, VMware is not like a training class for a specific product. There is no "deliverable" that you walk away with, but what you do experience is a sampling of every aspect of your infrastructure (beyond virtualization). This can come in the form of conversations with people in similar situations. Everyone walks away with something positive from VMworld.
- Fun. VMworld has fun as part of the agenda. This can be the VMworld party, which will have INXS performing this year, vendor parties or even exhibit floor swag. I'm not one to take much notice of swag, but every year someone will provide some form of promotional material that is pretty cool. I've amassed a boomerang, ocarina, water bottles, T-shirt apparel for any occasion and an endless score of USB flash drives.
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Posted by Rick Vanover on 08/24/20103 comments
I believe virtualization rolls in circles of sorts. When we got started with virtualization we were focused on squeezing in enough memory to consolidate the workloads we wanted, new processors that came out with more cores with a better architecture caused us to architect around them and then we zeroed in on storage.
With storage, we definitely need to be aware of IOPs and datastore latency. But, how much? You can turn to tools to identify problems with latency, such as VKernel's free StorageVIEW. But where do you really look for the latency? Do you look at the storage controller (if it provides this information), do you look at the hypervisor with a tool like StorageVIEW, or do you look in the operating system or application to get this data? With each method, your mileage may vary, so you may want to be able to get them from each measure -- your results surely won't be exactly the same all of the time.
IOPs are something that can give administrators headaches. Basically, a drive is capable of an IOP rate that is pooled together for all of the hard drives in a pool, whatever the technology may be. So, if you have 12 drives spinning capable of 150 IOPs, you can extend 12X150 IOPs up to 1800 IOPs for that collection of disk resources. Very many other factors are involved, and I recommend reading this post by Scott Drummonds on how IOPs impact virtualized workloads, as well as other material on the Pivot Point blog.
For the day-to-day administrator concerned with monitoring the run mode of a virtualized infrastructure, do you look at this all day long? I'll admit that I jump into the datastore latency tools when there is a problem and my biggest issue is that application owners can't give me information about the IOPs of their applications. Getting information about read and write behavior also is a challenge.
How frequently do you monitor these two measures and how do you do it? Share your comments here.
Posted by Rick Vanover on 08/19/20104 comments
For virtualization administrators, there are a lot of free things out there today. But how much you can do with all of this free stuff becomes harder to see. Citrix takes a different approach, however. I have long thought that the Citrix virtualization offering for virtualizing server infrastructures with XenServer has been the best free offering among free ones from Microsoft, VMware and Citrix. I'll go out on a limb and say XenServer is easier to set up than Hyper-V; you can flame me later on that.
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Posted by Rick Vanover on 08/17/20101 comments
The old saying that history repeats itself does indeed manifest itself in the IT realm. Recently, I read Brandon Riley's
Virtual Insanity post
where he asks: Is VMware the Novell of Virtualization?
Virtual Insanity is a blog I read frequently. Regular contributors include a number of VMware and EMC employees. Now that the transparency topic is out of the way, let's talk about the whole idea that VMware is acting like Novell years ago when NetWare was pitted against Windows NT. A consultant working with me back in the mid 1990s when I was mulling going to Windows NT for file servers asked me, "Why would you replace your file server with an inferior product?"
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Posted by Rick Vanover on 08/11/201014 comments
One of the most definining community aspects of virtualization is manifested annually at VMworld. This year in San Francisco, I am particularly intrigued about what is coming. Partly because I am still somewhat surprised and perplexed that vSphere 4.1 was released somewhat close to the upcoming VMworld conferences.
I am perplexed because VMware has historically strived to have the conferences center around a major announcement. Since vSphere 4.1 was recently released, the major announcements will presumably be about "something else." The enticement is definitely enhanced with social media sites such as Twitter. VMware CTO Steve Herrod recently tweeted, "Most announcements I will have ever done in keynote!" Coming into this conference, I don't have any direct information about what the announcements may be, which piques my curiosity.
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Posted by Rick Vanover on 08/10/20100 comments
One of the aspects of vSphere from the recent 4.1 release is the introduction of
per-VM pricing
for advanced features. My initial reaction is negative to this, as I'd like my VM deployments to be elastic, to expand and contract features without cost increases. With my grumblings, I decided it was important to chew on the details of per-VM pricing for vSphere.
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Posted by Rick Vanover on 08/05/20103 comments
One of the most contentious issues that can come up in virtualization circles is the debate on whether to use blades or chassis servers for virtualization hosts. The use of blades did come up in a recent
Virtumania podcast
discussion. While I've worked with blades over the years, most of my virtualization practice has been with rack-mount chassis servers.
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Posted by Rick Vanover on 08/03/20103 comments
Regardless of where we sit on the VMware/Citrix/Microsoft virtualization debate, there is one indisputable fact: Microsoft has the largest partner ecosystem. It's size will give the company a certain amount of market share once virtualization solutions start to emerge. In
episode 13
of the Virtumania podcast, Gartner research director
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Posted by Rick Vanover on 07/29/20101 comments
A lot of chatter on vSphere 4.1 is flying through the blogosphere, and rightfully so. Aside from running lots of features into the enterprise-class virtualization suite, a number of requirement changes are being rolled in as well.
When VMware released vSphere, we saw for the first time that ESX and ESXi had hard requirements for x64 processors. It was really to be expected, as enterprise virtualization would not be well served on equipment that cannot support x64 at this time. I encourage each administrator to read through the vSphere Compatibility Matrix (PDF here) as well as the Hardware Compatibility Guide.
One observation is that many of the infrastructure components are being updated, rather significantly, when going from vSphere 4.0 to 4.1. Here is a list of some of the requirements that may catch administrators off guard:
- vCenter Server must be installed on an x64 system. This means that the days of Windows Server 2003 (x86 installs) as a vCenter Server are over. The best bet, of course, is to install it on Windows Server 2008 R2, which is only one available on x64 installations.
- There are a number of database engine landmines to navigate. For example, in the compatibility matrix SQL Server 2005 for the vCenter Server Update Manager database can run on SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition with SP2, but cannot run on SQL 2005 SE 64-bit with SP2. It's an example of where an infrastructure administrator trying to get ahead of the curve implementing a database server or cluster may be stuck. The vCenter Server database works on both of those SQL Server 2005 platforms, however.
- Windows 2000 cannot run the vSphere Client. This isn't so much of a stopping point but somewhat expected, as the platform has now fallen off of Microsoft extended support.
While I don't think x86 is entirely dead, it is falling quickly from the infrastructure footprint in terms of servers. While ISV support of x64 server applications is an entirely different, emotionally charged discussion, the end of the line will likely come when x86 clients fall off the roadmap. VMware is nudging us along swiftly, and rightfully so at this point in technology. Like many administrators, this may be the release where the process is more of a new install instead of an over-top upgrade.
How do the vSphere 4.1 requirements impact your infrastructure configuration? Share your comments here.
Posted by Rick Vanover on 07/27/20108 comments
One of the most lauded features of vSphere 4.1 is the built-in Active Directory authentication engine for ESXi hosts. It's very easy to configure, and it works for both free ESXi installations as well as hosts managed by vCenter. The Active Directory-integrated security is configured in the Authentication Services section of each host (see Fig. 1).
As easy as it is to configure, I recommend you read Maish's post on the Technodrone on how to do such.
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Posted by Rick Vanover on 07/22/20103 comments
As we review more details of VMware's vSphere 4.1 update; we find more nuggets that we can latch onto for which we can find use cases.
One feature that I am somewhat mixed on is the vStorage APIs for array integration (VAAI). I'm not discounting whether or not it is a good feature, but how much of the storage ecosystem will take advantage of this amazing feature. As of its release, only a handful of products support VAAI and they are from the usual suspects: NetApp, Hitachi Data Systems, EMC and 3Par. I hope that we see the larger storage ecosystem embrace VAAI support. While these are familiar players in enterprise storage, many VMware installations use other products that do not yet support VAAI.
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Posted by Rick Vanover on 07/20/20104 comments
Virtualization Review
Editor Bruce Hoard points out in
this post
that VMware has trimmed costs on some of vSphere 4.1 suite’s offerings. It helps SMBs and is a huge step in the right direction.
I want to focus specifically on the Essentials Plus Kit offering of vSphere, which has the following features:
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Posted by Rick Vanover on 07/15/20102 comments