Weblog.BassQ.nl » ESX

vSphere 4.1 features list!

BassQ — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 09:35:03 +0000

Source; http://virtualization.info/en/news/2010/07/release-vmware-vsphere-4-1.html

As expected, VMware releases today a significant update for its vSphere virtual infrastructure.

vSphere 4.1 introduces an impressive number of new features that virtualization.info partially unveiled in May:

Scripted Install for ESXi. Scripted installation of ESXi to local and remote disks allows rapid deployment of ESXi to many machines. You can start the scripted installation with a CD-ROM drive or over the network by using PXE booting.
vSphere Client Removal from ESX/ESXi Builds. For ESX and ESXi, the vSphere Client is available for download from the VMware Web site. It is no longer packaged with builds of ESX and ESXi.
Boot from SAN. vSphere 4.1 enables ESXi boot from SAN (BFN). iSCSI, FCoE, and Fibre Channel boot are supported.

Hardware Acceleration with vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI). ESX can offload specific storage operations to compliant storage hardware. With storage hardware assistance, ESX performs these operations faster and consumes less CPU, memory, and storage fabric bandwidth.
Storage Performance Statistics. vSphere 4.1 offers enhanced visibility into storage throughput and latency of hosts and virtual machines, and aids in troubleshooting storage performance issues. NFS statistics are now available in vCenter Server performance charts, as well as esxtop. New VMDK and datastore statistics are included. All statistics are available through the vSphere SDK.
Storage I/O Control. This feature provides quality-of-service capabilities for storage I/O in the form of I/O shares and limits that are enforced across all virtual machines accessing a datastore, regardless of which host they are running on. Using Storage I/O Control, vSphere administrators can ensure that the most important virtual machines get adequate I/O resources even in times of congestion.
iSCSI Hardware Offloads. vSphere 4.1 enables 10Gb iSCSI hardware offloads (Broadcom 57711) and 1Gb iSCSI hardware offloads (Broadcom 5709).
Network I/O Control. Traffic-management controls allow flexible partitioning of physical NIC bandwidth between different traffic types, including virtual machine, vMotion, FT, and IP storage traffic (vNetwork Distributed Switch only).
IPv6 Enhancements. IPv6 in ESX supports Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) with manual keying.
Load-Based Teaming. vSphere 4.1 allows dynamic adjustment of the teaming algorithm so that the load is always balanced across a team of physical adapters on a vNetwork Distributed Switch.
E1000 vNIC Enhancements. E1000 vNIC supports jumbo frames in vSphere 4.1.
Windows Failover Clustering with VMware HA. Clustered Virtual Machines that utilize Windows Failover Clustering/Microsoft Cluster Service are now fully supported in conjunction with VMware HA.
VMware HA Scalability Improvements. VMware HA has the same limits for virtual machines per host, hosts per cluster, and virtual machines per cluster as vSphere.
VMware HA Healthcheck and Operational Status. The VMware HA dashboard in the vSphere Client provides a new detailed window called Cluster Operational Status. This window displays more information about the current VMware HA operational status, including the specific status and errors for each host in the VMware HA cluster.
VMware Fault Tolerance (FT) Enhancements. vSphere 4.1 introduces an FT-specific versioning-control mechanism that allows the Primary and Secondary VMs to run on FT-compatible hosts at different but compatible patch levels. vSphere 4.1 differentiates between events that are logged for a Primary VM and those that are logged for its Secondary VM, and reports why a host might not support FT. In addition, you can disable VMware HA when FT-enabled virtual machines are deployed in a cluster, allowing for cluster maintenance operations without turning off FT.
DRS Interoperability for VMware HA and Fault Tolerance (FT). FT-enabled virtual machines can take advantage of DRS functionality for load balancing and initial placement. In addition, VMware HA and DRS are tightly integrated, which allows VMware HA to restart virtual machines in more situations.
Enhanced Network Logging Performance. Fault Tolerance (FT) network logging performance allows improved throughput and reduced CPU usage. In addition, you can use vmxnet3 vNICs in FT-enabled virtual machines.
Concurrent VMware Data Recovery Sessions. vSphere 4.1 provides the ability to concurrently manage multiple VMware Data Recovery appliances.
vStorage APIs for Data Protection (VADP) Enhancements. VADP now offers VSS quiescing support for Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 servers. This enables application-consistent backup and restore operations for Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 applications.
vCLI Enhancements. vCLI adds options for SCSI, VAAI, network, and virtual machine control, including the ability to terminate an unresponsive virtual machine. In addition, vSphere 4.1 provides controls that allow you to log vCLI activity.
Lockdown Mode Enhancements. VMware ESXi 4.1 lockdown mode allows the administrator to tightly restrict access to the ESXi Direct Console User Interface (DCUI) and Tech Support Mode (TSM). When lockdown mode is enabled, DCUI access is restricted to the root user, while access to Tech Support Mode is completely disabled for all users. With lockdown mode enabled, access to the host for management or monitoring using CIM is possible only through vCenter Server. Direct access to the host using the vSphere Client is not permitted.
Access Virtual Machine Serial Ports Over the Network. You can redirect virtual machine serial ports over a standard network link in vSphere 4.1. This enables solutions such as third-party virtual serial port concentrators for virtual machine serial console management or monitoring.
vCenter Converter Hyper-V Import. vCenter Converter allows users to point to a Hyper-V machine. Converter displays the virtual machines running on the Hyper-V system, and users can select a powered-off virtual machine to import to a VMware destination.
Enhancements to Host Profiles. You can use Host Profiles to roll out administrator password changes in vSphere 4.1. Enhancements also include improved Cisco Nexus 1000V support and PCI device ordering configuration.
Unattended Authentication in vSphere Management Assistant (vMA). vMA 4.1 offers improved authentication capability, including integration with Active Directory and commands to configure the connection.
Updated Deployment Environment in vSphere Management Assistant (vMA). The updated deployment environment in vMA 4.1 is fully compatible with vMA 4.0. A significant change is the transition from RHEL to CentOS.
vCenter Orchestrator 64-bit Support. vCenter Orchestrator 4.1 provides a client and server for 64-bit installations, with an optional 32-bit client. The performance of the Orchestrator server on 64-bit installations is greatly enhanced, as compared to running the server on a 32-bit machine.
Improved Support for Handling Recalled Patches in vCenter Update Manager. Update Manager 4.1 immediately sends critical notifications about recalled ESX and related patches. In addition, Update Manager prevents you from installing a recalled patch that you might have already downloaded. This feature also helps you identify hosts where recalled patches might already be installed.
License Reporting Manager. The License Reporting Manager provides a centralized interface for all license keys for vSphere 4.1 products in a virtual IT infrastructure and their respective usage. You can view and generate reports on license keys and usage for different time periods with the License Reporting Manager. A historical record of the utilization per license key is maintained in the vCenter Server database.
Power Management Improvements. ESX 4.1 takes advantage of deep sleep states to further reduce power consumption during idle periods. The vSphere Client has a simple user interface that allows you to choose one of four host power management policies. In addition, you can view the history of host power consumption and power cap information on the vSphere Client Performance tab on newer platforms with integrated power meters.
Reduced Overhead Memory. vSphere 4.1 reduces the amount of overhead memory required, especially when running large virtual machines on systems with CPUs that provide hardware MMU support (AMD RVI or Intel EPT).
DRS Virtual Machine Host Affinity Rules. DRS provides the ability to set constraints that restrict placement of a virtual machine to a subset of hosts in a cluster. This feature is useful for enforcing host-based ISV licensing models, as well as keeping sets of virtual machines on different racks or blade systems for availability reasons.
Memory Compression. Compressed memory is a new level of the memory hierarchy, between RAM and disk. Slower than memory, but much faster than disk, compressed memory improves the performance of virtual machines when memory is under contention, because less virtual memory is swapped to disk.
vMotion Enhancements. In vSphere 4.1, vMotion enhancements significantly reduce the overall time for host evacuations, with support for more simultaneous virtual machine migrations and faster individual virtual machine migrations. The result is a performance improvement of up to 8x for an individual virtual machine migration, and support for four to eight simultaneous vMotion migrations per host, depending on the vMotion network adapter (1GbE or 10GbE respectively).
ESX/ESXi Active Directory Integration. Integration with Microsoft Active Directory allows seamless user authentication for ESX/ESXi. You can maintain users and groups in Active Directory for centralized user management and you can assign privileges to users or groups on ESX/ESXi hosts. In vSphere 4.1, integration with Active Directory allows you to roll out permission rules to hosts by using Host Profiles.
Configuring USB Device Passthrough from an ESX/ESXi Host to a Virtual Machine. You can configure a virtual machine to use USB devices that are connected to an ESX/ESXi host where the virtual machine is running. The connection is maintained even if you migrate the virtual machine using vMotion.
Improvements in Enhanced vMotion Compatibility. vSphere 4.1 includes an AMD Opteron Gen. 3 (no 3DNow!) EVC mode that prepares clusters for vMotion compatibility with future AMD processors. EVC also provides numerous usability improvements, including the display of EVC modes for virtual machines, more timely error detection, better error messages, and the reduced need to restart virtual machines.
vCenter Update Manager Support for Provisioning, Patching, and Upgrading EMC’s ESX PowerPath Module. vCenter Update Manager can provision, patch, and upgrade third-party modules that you can install on ESX, such as EMC’s PowerPath multipathing software. Using the capability of Update Manager to set policies using the Baseline construct and the comprehensive Compliance Dashboard, you can simplify provisioning, patching, and upgrade of the PowerPath module at scale.
User-configurable Number of Virtual CPUs per Virtual Socket. You can configure virtual machines to have multiple virtual CPUs reside in a single virtual socket, with each virtual CPU appearing to the guest operating system as a single core. Previously, virtual machines were restricted to having only one virtual CPU per virtual socket.
Expanded List of Supported Processors. The list of supported processors has been expanded for ESX 4.1. Among the supported processors is the Intel Xeon 7500 Series processor, code-named Nehalem-EX (up to 8 sockets).

More than that, with vSphere 4.1 VMware is enriching its offering for the SMB market, adding VMotion to the Essential Plus license:

Microsoft’s Hyper-V R2 vs. VMware’s vSphere: A feature comparison

BassQ — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 13:07:24 +0000

VMware and Microsoft are ramping up their virtualization games with relatively new releases. Scott Lowe compares and contrasts some of the major features in vSphere and Hyper-V R2.

Source: http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/datacenter/?p=1820

Microsoft was late to the virtualization game, but the company has made gains against its primary competitor in the virtualization marketplace, VMware. In recent months, both companies released major updates to their respective hypervisors: Microsoft’s Hyper-V R2 and VMware’s vSphere. In this look at the hypervisor products from both companies, I’ll compare and contrast some of the products’ more common features and capabilities. I do not, however, make recommendations about which product might be right for your organization.

Table A compares items in four editions of vSphere and three available editions of Hyper-V R2. Below the table, I explain each of the comparison items. (Product note: With the release of vSphere, VMware has released an Enterprise Plus edition of its hypervisor product. Enterprise Plus provides an expanded set of capabilities that were not present in older product versions. Customers have to upgrade from Enterprise to Enterprise Plus in order to obtain these capabilities.)

Table A

Max host processors. Indicates the number of physical host processors that can be recognized by the system. Bear in mind that the Windows columns are Windows limits and not necessarily Hyper-V limits.

Max cores/processor. How many processor cores per physical processor are recognized?

Max virtual SMP. In an individual virtual machine, this indicates the maximum number of supported virtual processors. Note: This is a maximum value; not every guest operating system can support the maximum number of virtual processors.

Max host RAM (GB). The maximum amount of RAM recognized by the hypervisor.

Max RAM/vm. The maximum amount of RAM that can be allocated to an individual virtual machine.

Failover nodes. The maximum number of physical hosts that can be clustered together. N/A indicates that failover clustering is not supported for that particular hypervisor edition.

Memory overcommit. Does the hypervisor support memory overcommit? Memory overcommitment is a technique available in vSphere that allows administrators to allocate more RAM to virtual machines than is physically available in the host. There are numerous pro and con articles about this topic, but it’s clear that having the ability to allocate more resources than are physically available increases overall virtual machine density. The decision to use memory overcommit in a production environment is up to each organization. That said, in my opinion, when used in the right circumstances, I can see great benefit in this feature.

Transparent page sharing. Transparent page sharing is one method by which memory overcommitment is achieved. With this technique, common code shared between virtual machines is, itself, virtualized. Let’s say that you have 100 virtual machines running Windows XP for VDI. Using transparent page sharing, RAM isn’t necessarily a major limiting factor when it comes to desktop density on the server. VMware has an excellent example of this technique in action.

Live Migration/VMotion. The ability for the hypervisor to migrate virtual machines between host servers without significant downtime. This is considered one of the most significant availability benefits provided by virtualization solutions.

Simultaneous Live Migration. Can the product utilize its Live Migration capabilities to move multiple virtual machines simultaneously between nodes?

Live guests per host. The number of virtual machines that can be powered on for a maxed-out host. In the real world, I’d be extraordinarily surprised to see anyone getting close to these limits. Virtualization is a great way to lower costs, but there are limits.

Live guests/HA cluster node. If you’re running your hypervisor in a cluster, this is the maximum number of virtual machines that can be active on any single host in the cluster. For vSphere with update 1, if you have eight or fewer cluster hosts, you can run up to 160 VMs per host. With nine or more cluster hosts, that number drops to 40.

Distributed Resource Scheduler. DRS is a technology that enables the migration of virtual machines between hosts based on business rules. This can be a boon for organizations with strict SLAs.

Snapshots per VM. The maximum number of snapshots that can be taken of an individual virtual machine. A snapshot is a point-in-time image of a virtual machine that can be used as part of a backup and recovery mechanism. I find snapshots incredibly useful, particularly on the workstation side of the equation, where a lot of “playing” takes place.

Thin Provisioning. One decision that has to be made early on in the life of any server (virtual or physical) is how much storage to allocate to the system. Too much storage and you waste valuable disk space — too little storage and services crash. In order to maintain reliable services, most IT shops overprovision storage to make sure that it doesn’t run out; but that conservatism adds up over time. Imagine if you have 100 VMs all with 4 or 5 GB of “wiggle room” going unused. With thin provisioning, you can have the best of both worlds. You can provision enough disk space to meet your comfort level, but under the hood, the hypervisor won’t allocate it all. As space begins to run low, the hypervisor will make more space available up to the maximum volume size. Although thin provisioning shouldn’t be used for massive workloads, it can be a huge boon to organizations that want conservatism without breaking the bank.

Storage Live Migration. This feature enables the live migration of a virtual machine’s disk files between storage arrays and adds an additional level of availability potential to a virtual environment.

Distributed Switch. VMware and Microsoft have virtual switches in their products, but only VMware has taken it one step further with the introduction of vSphere Enterprise Plus’ Distributed Switch. According to VMware, “Distributed Switch maintains network runtime state for VMs as they move across multiple hosts, enabling inline monitoring and centralized firewall services. It provides a framework for monitoring and maintaining the security of virtual machines as they move from physical server to physical server and enables the use of third party virtual switches such as the Cisco Nexus 1000V to extend familiar physical network features and controls to virtual networks.” In short, this new capability increases VMware’s availability and security capabilities.

Direct I/O. The ability for a virtual machine to bypass the hypervisor layer and directly access a physical I/O hardware device. There is limited support for this capability in vSphere; the product supports direct I/O operations to a few storage and networking controllers. Called VMDirectPath I/O, this feature can improve overall performance since it eliminates the “virtualization penalty” that can take place when hardware access is run through the hypervisor. There are some major disadvantages to VMDirectPath; for example, VMotion can’t work anymore because of the hardware need. (Note: This feature is different than direct access to disks, which Hyper-V does support.)

Max. partition size (TB). What is the largest partition supported by the hypervisor? Although VHD-based volumes, such as those used by Hyper-V R2, can be up to 2 TB in size, read this blog by Brian Henderson for insight into maximum Windows partition sizes, particularly if you bypass the VHD option altogether and use disks directly.

Application firewall (vShield). According to VMware “VMware vShield Zones enables you to monitor, log and block inter-VM traffic within an ESX host or between hosts in a cluster, without having to divert traffic externally through static physical chokepoints. You can bridge, firewall, or isolate virtual machine between multiple zones defined by your logical organizational and trust boundaries. Both allowed and blocked activities are logged and can be graphed or analyzed to a fine-grained level.” In other words, you don’t need to run traffic through external switches and routers to protect applications from one another.

Virtual instance rights. This is a Microsoft-only right that can seriously lower the overall cost of running Hyper-V R2 in a Windows-only environment. If you use the Data Center edition of Windows, you can run as many Windows Server-based virtual machines as you like without incurring additional sever licensing costs.

Hypervisor licensing. The method by which the product is licensed. Either per host or per processor.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 RTM!

BassQ — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 19:44:33 +0000

Zane Adam: System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 has RTM’d and GA via volume licensing is set for October 1. This is great news for all and I’d like to especially thank our VMM 2008 R2 Development, Product Management, and Test teams. Lots of hard work fueled by their passion in virtualization and management has resulted in a very good software release.

A 180-day evaluation version is now available, too, on the Microsoft Download site. You can access it here.

Please experience for yourself what the 10,000+ people who have previously downloaded our ‘Release Candidate’ plus organizations such as Continental Airlines, Lionbridge Technologies, and Indiana University have seen with VMM 2008 R2!

I encourage everyone to explore the new System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 and its new features such as quick storage migration, live migration, and many others. We even offer support for vSphere 4.

To learn more on the new features and capabilities of VMM2008 R2, please try to attend our upcoming TechNet session ‘Technical Overview of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2’. Presented by our Technical Product Manager Kenon Owens, it will be chocked full of new and cool VMM 2008 R2 items. Go here to register for this Wednesday, September 09, 2009 (10:00 AM Pacific) event.

Source : http://techlog.org/archive/2009/08/24/system_center_virtual_machine_

Manage your VMware environment from your Iphone

BassQ — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 14:00:38 +0000

Want to manage your VMware virtual environment on the go? Now there’s an app for that! VManage is an application developed to allow the IT administrator to view critical environment data about their virtual infrastructure as well as perform fundamental tasks such as VMotion’ing from anywhere at any time. Viewing basic performance data (more advanced data to come) is as easy as selecting a Virtual Machine or Host and examining the details. Simply add a Virtual Center server address, credentials and a VPN if necessary and that’s it. So if you’re an IT administrator who doesn’t spend every waking moment in front of your PC, this is the tool for you.

Environment Configuration Note:
The Virtual Center server by default exposes port 443 for the web service. This port will need to be available to the iPhone/iPod Touch in order for the VManage application to be able to interact with it. This can be achieved via a VPN or exposing the port to the web.

Application Configuration Note:
The iPhone/iPod Touch settings application needs to be set as follows …

server: https:///sdk     **required**
domain: AD Domain Name    **optional**
username: AD User **required**
password: AD password    **required**

VMware vSphere

BassQ — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 17:43:18 +0000

There’s hardly any point in covering the announcements of today. There are so many people blogging right now that no one will have the chance to keep up with reading. That’s why I decided not to write or copy any of the announcements. Of course I just might give my thoughts on the webcast this evening but that’s probably it… Anyway, I divided it up in two major sections “News” and “Previews” and within these sections VMware and of course “Bloggers Community”. I will keep updating this post, make sure to visit it again.

News / Coverage

VMware

VMware.com (includes podcast) – vSphere Product page
VMware.com (press) – Press Kit
VMware.com (press) – VMware Enables Users to Easily Test-Drive Cloud Computing through the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace (VAM) and VMware vCloud Service Provider Free Trials
VMware.com (press) – VMware vSphere 4 Provides ‘Always On IT’ for SMB and Branch Office IT Environments With Low Cost, High Availability Solutions
VMware.com (press) – VMware Unveils the Industry’s First Operating System for Building the Internal Cloud—VMware vSphere 4
VMware.com (press) – VMware vSphere 4 Launch Supported by Broad Virtualization Ecosystem
VMware.com (press) – VMware vSphere 4 Sets New Records in Virtualization Performance
VMTN – Introducing VMware vSphere 4 – The Industry’s First Cloud Operating System
VMTN – VMware vSphere Resources And Webcasts Customers Should Know About!
VMTN Community – VMware vSphere Community is here – plus some rearrangement…
Vroom – Database sizing charts for vSphere 4.0
Networking – vSphere launches
VMware (pdf’s) – vSphere list of Key Features
VMware (pdf’s) – vStorage: What’s New Whitepaper
VMware (pdf’s) – vNetwork: What’s New Whitepaper
VMware (pdf’s) – vSphere Pricing, Packaging, and Licensing Whitepaper

Bloggers Community

itsjustanotherlayer.com – vSphere 4 – the next great thing
blog.VirtualTacIt.com – VMware vSphere: Not your average Cloud-OS… oh wait the only Cloud-OS
Blog.Fosketts.net – Storage changes in the VMware vSphere 4 family
VMETC.com – vSphere announced. Now what for VMware customers?
BriandMadden.com – VMware announces vSphere – the foundation for the next generation datacenter
vinternals.com – VMware Slaps Enterprise and Cisco In Face, Opens Doors For Competitors
technodrone.blogspot.com – vSphere 4, so what is new?
Dabcc.com – vSphere, initial comparison with Hyper-v and Xen
VMware-land.com – My growing collection of vSphere links
Virtualgeek.typepad.com – One man’s take on the vSphere launch
VMwareTips.com – VMware vSphere launch event, onsite coverage
Mikedipetrillo.com – VMware Launches vSphere
Ideationcloud.com – VMware unveils vSphere 4.0; calls it Cloud Operating System
sqlchicken.blogspot.com – VMware unveils new vSphere 4
virtualizationexchange.blogspot.com – Breaking news from VMware: vSphere 4 unveiled
Hypervizor.com – The ultimate vSphere4 learning path: Videos, Webcasts, Podcasts, Free online classes and much more
Latogalabs.com – VMware Announces vSphere 4 Cloud OS
ROIDude.typepad.com – VMware has its Head in the Clouds, but its Feet are Planted Firmly on the Ground
TheVirtualBlackhole.com – Partner Exchange and the vSphere Press Release
vmjunkie.wordpress.com – vSphere Launch
chucksblog.emc.com – The real impact of vSphere
chucksblog.emc.com – vSphere as an I/O engine
OzVMs.com – vSphere – Skillsets and VCP
OzVMs.com – Paul Maritz quotes from the vSphere launch
OzVMs.com – Efficiency, control and choice – vSphere launch review
VirtualLifestyle.nl – One big step for VMware, one giant leap for virtualization: VMware launches vSphere 4
NTPRO.nl – VMware vSphere(TM) 4 Sets New Records in Virtualization Performance
NTPRO.nl – VMware vSphere(TM) 4 Provides ‘Always On IT’ for SMB and Branch Office IT Environments With Low Cost, High Availability Solutions
NTPRO.nl – VMware Enables Users to Easily Test-Drive Cloud Computing Through the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace (VAM) and VMware vCloud(TM) Service Provider Free Trials
NTPRO.nl – VMware vSphereTM 4 Launch Supported by Broad Virtualization Ecosystem
NTPRO.nl – VMware Unveils the Industry’s First Operating System for Building the Internal Cloud–VMware vSphere(TM) 4
NTPRO.nl – VMware vSphere Podcasts
rtfm-ed.co.uk – vSphere4 Pricing – From the Press Release
rtfm-ed.co.uk – vSphere launch video
VMGuru.nl -VMware announces vSphere 4
MalaysiaVM.com – VMware vSphere 4
MalaysiaVM.com – 6 cores limitation per socket for vSphere Enterprise
Boche.net – vSphere licensing notables
virtualization-spotlight.com – VMware Unveils vSphere 4
kevinkomiegasstorageblog.blogspot.com – VMware vSphere of influence
Techtarget.com – A guide to VMware vSphere 4.0
blog.ScottLowe.org – Mastering VMware vSphere 4.0
VirtualizationReview.com – Breaking down vSphere pricing
Gabesvirtualworld.com – List of VMware FT compatible CPUs
thestoragearchitect.com – Enterprise computing – VMware announces vSphere 4.0
virtualisedreality.wordpress.com – vSphere launch

Previews

VMware

Bloggers Community

Boche.net – A random collection of what’s new vSphere eye candy
Virtualgeek.typepad.com – Incoming treat for EMC CLARiiON/Celerra+VMware Customers
Virtualgeek.typepad.com – A sneak peek at vSphere 4 I/O goodness (and world records)
Yellow-Bricks.com – Storage views, exploring the next version of ….
Yellow-Bricks.com – Alarm Actions, exploring the new version of ESX/vCenter
Yellow-Bricks.com – Storage VMotion, exploring the next version of ESX/vCenter
Yellow-Bricks.com – Resizing your VMFS the right way, exploring the next version of ESX/vCenter
Yellow-Bricks.com – Pluggable Storage Architecture, exploring the next version of ESX/vCenter
Yellow-Bricks.com – iSCSI multipathing with esxcli! Exploring the next version of ESX
Yellow-Bricks.com – esxcfg-scsidevs, Exploring the next version of ESX!
Yellow-Bricks.com – Disabling the VMFS-2 module! Exploring the next generation of ESX
Yellow-Bricks.com – VMFS recognized as a snapshot what to do? Exploring the next version of ESX…
NTPRO.nl – CPU compatibility with VMware Fault Tolerance
NTPRO.nl – Datastore Performance Charts
NTPRO.nl – Migration with Storage vMotion
NTPRO.nl – How to set up an email event trigger
NTPRO.nl – Using vNetwork Distributed Switches and dvPort Groups
NTPRO.nl – New Alarm Actions
NTPRO.nl – Acknowledge Triggered Alarms
NTPRO.nl – Managing VMware vApp
NTPRO.nl – Zoom In or Out of the Map View
NTPRO.nl – New alarm definitions in the next version
NTPRO.nl – Generate virtual machine desktop shortcut
NTPRO.nl – EMC Powerpath/VE for VMware vSphere
MalaysiaVM.com – Windows 7 on vSphere
MalaysiaVM.com – Virtual CPU Increase on Demand in vSphere
MalaysiaVM.com – ESX Host Profiles with vSphere
MalaysiaVM.com – Match RDM to Actual LUN on SAN Storage with vSphere
MalaysiaVM.com – Storage VMotion through GUI in vSphere
MalaysiaVM.com – Memory Hot Add for Virtual Machine
MalaysiaVM.com – Storage Management in VMware vSphere
Vinf.net – Remote in-place upgrade from ESX 3.5 to vSphere

How to convert VMWare image to Hyper-V images?

BassQ — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 18:58:45 +0000

Here’s a small how-to based on my experiences:

1) Uninstall VM tools from your VM

2) Shutdown the VM

If your VMs are based on SCSI drives (like mine were – because VMware recommends SCSI) and the operating systems are Windows XP, 2003 or earlier then you have to add the IDE driver to your VM before you shut it down in VMware.

Otherwise you will end up with a converted VM that starts up in Hyper-V with a blue screen of death (BSOD) and 0x0000007B – “Inaccessible Boot Device” error. This is due to the fact that your converted VM will have no Primary IDE Channel and Hyper-V will presume that your converted disk is IDE type and located on the Primary IDE Channel.

Doing a Windows Repair Install can fix the 0x7B Inaccessible Boot Device error – but it’s both time consuming and the result might not be good. (Believe me – I had to redo a migration of a SharePoint installation because a Windows Repair Install messed it up. Luckily I then came up with the solution described below instead).

Please note that adding a temporary IDE disk to your VM is not necessary with VMs running Windows Vista or Windows 2008 – they seem to detect the Primary IDE Channel during initial boot phase.

3) Add a new IDE disk drive to your VM: (any size will do)

Make sure that you select “Adapter: IDE 0 Device: 0” under “Virtual Device Node” while creating the new disk (otherwise you might end up with yet another SCSI disk)

4) Boot up your virtual machine with both drives connected and check that it detects your new IDE drive (along with a primary IDE channel and a disk device driver). You should be able to see the new drive as "not initialized" in Disk Management.

5) Power off your virtual machine and remove the newly created IDE disk from your VM (you can delete it from disk as well). Do not power on your VMware Machine again!

6) Now convert your VMDK file to VHD format using the newest Vmdk2Vhd utility (currently version 1.0.13) that can be downloaded from http://vmtoolkit.com.

7) You can now uninstall VMware Server and install Hyper-V + current Windows Updates on your host server

Create a new Virtual Machine in Hyper-V. Make sure you select “Use an existing virtual hard disk” and select the VHD file that you just created.

9) Power it on, Install “Integration Services” and reboot when prompted:

10) Assign the original IP address(es) to your new network card(s)

11) Check device manager

12) Do another reboot

13) Check that all your applications and services are running

14) Done!

Note: if you have Win2008 VM’s then it’s not necessary to add a temporary IDE disk during migration but you might want to copy the relevant KB949219 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/949219) update package to your VM before converting it. Otherwise it will start up with three warnings in the Device Manager for “Microsoft VMBus Video Device”, “Microsoft VMBus HID Miniport” and “Microsoft VMBus Network Adapter” – hence you will have no network access. I worked around it by “burning” the KB949219 updates to an ISO file using “ISO recorder“ (http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com) and mounting the ISO file to my VM.

Pushing the Limits of Windows: Paged and Nonpaged Pool

BassQ — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 18:01:44 +0000

In previous Pushing the Limits posts, I described the two most basic system resources, physical memory and virtual memory . This time I’m going to describe two fundamental kernel resources, paged pool and nonpaged pool, that are based on those, and that are directly responsible for many other system resource limits including the maximum number of processes, synchronization objects, and handles.

Paged and nonpaged pools serve as the memory resources that the operating system and device drivers use to store their data structures. The pool manager operates in kernel mode, using regions of the system’s virtual address space (described in the Pushing the Limits post on virtual memory) for the memory it sub-allocates. The kernel’s pool manager operates similarly to the C-runtime and Windows heap managers that execute within user-mode processes. Because the minimum virtual memory allocation size is a multiple of the system page size (4KB on x86 and x64), these subsidiary memory managers carve up larger allocations into smaller ones so that memory isn’t wasted.

For example, if an application wants a 512-byte buffer to store some data, a heap manager takes one of the regions it has allocated and notes that the first 512-bytes are in use, returning a pointer to that memory and putting the remaining memory on a list it uses to track free heap regions. The heap manager satisfies subsequent allocations using memory from the free region, which begins just past the 512-byte region that is allocated.

Nonpaged Pool

The kernel and device drivers use nonpaged pool to store data that might be accessed when the system can’t handle page faults. The kernel enters such a state when it executes interrupt service routines (ISRs) and deferred procedure calls (DPCs), which are functions related to hardware interrupts. Page faults are also illegal when the kernel or a device driver acquires a spin lock, which, because they are the only type of lock that can be used within ISRs and DPCs, must be used to protect data structures that are accessed from within ISRs or DPCs and either other ISRs or DPCs or code executing on kernel threads. Failure by a driver to honor these rules results in the most common crash code, IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL .

Nonpaged pool is therefore always kept present in physical memory and nonpaged pool virtual memory is assigned physical memory. Common system data structures stored in nonpaged pool include the kernel and objects that represent processes and threads, synchronization objects like mutexes, semaphores and events, references to files, which are represented as file objects, and I/O request packets (IRPs), which represent I/O operations.

Paged Pool

Paged pool, on the other hand, gets its name from the fact that Windows can write the data it stores to the paging file, allowing the physical memory it occupies to be repurposed. Just as for user-mode virtual memory, when a driver or the system references paged pool memory that’s in the paging file, an operation called a page fault occurs, and the memory manager reads the data back into physical memory. The largest consumer of paged pool, at least on Windows Vista and later, is typically the Registry, since references to registry keys and other registry data structures are stored in paged pool. The data structures that represent memory mapped files, called sections internally, are also stored in paged pool.

Device drivers use the ExAllocatePoolWithTag API to allocate nonpaged and paged pool, specifying the type of pool desired as one of the parameters. Another parameter is a 4-byte Tag , which drivers are supposed to use to uniquely identify the memory they allocate, and that can be a useful key for tracking down drivers that leak pool, as I’ll show later.

Viewing Paged and Nonpaged Pool Usage

There are three performance counters that indicate pool usage:

Pool nonpaged bytes
Pool paged bytes (virtual size of paged pool – some may be paged out)
Pool paged resident bytes (physical size of paged pool)

However, there are no performance counters for the maximum size of these pools. They can be viewed with the kernel debugger !vm command, but with Windows Vista and later to use the kernel debugger in local kernel debugging mode you must boot the system in debugging mode, which disables MPEG2 playback.

So instead, use Process Explorer to view both the currently allocated pool sizes, as well as the maximum. To see the maximum, you’ll need to configure Process Explorer to use symbol files for the operating system. First, install the latest Debugging Tools for Windows package. Then run process Explorer and open the Symbol Configuration dialog in the Options menu and point it at the dbghelp.dll in the Debugging Tools for Windows installation directory and set the symbol path to point at Microsoft’s symbol server:

After you’ve configured symbols, open the System Information dialog (click System Information in the View menu or press Ctrl+I) to see the pool information in the Kernel Memory section. Here’s what that looks like on a 2GB Windows XP system:

2GB 32-bit Windows XP

Nonpaged Pool Limits

As I mentioned in a previous post, on 32-bit Windows, the system address space is 2GB by default. That inherently caps the upper bound for nonpaged pool (or any type of system virtual memory) at 2GB, but it has to share that space with other types of resources such as the kernel itself, device drivers, system Page Table Entries (PTEs), and cached file views.

Prior to Vista, the memory manager on 32-bit Windows calculates how much address space to assign each type at boot time. Its formulas takes into account various factors, the main one being the amount of physical memory on the system. The amount it assigns to nonpaged pool starts at 128MB on a system with 512MB and goes up to 256MB for a system with a little over 1GB or more. On a system booted with the /3GB option, which expands the user-mode address space to 3GB at the expense of the kernel address space, the maximum nonpaged pool is 128MB. The Process Explorer screenshot shown earlier reports the 256MB maximum on a 2GB Windows XP system booted without the /3GB switch.

The memory manager in 32-bit Windows Vista and later, including Server 2008 and Windows 7 (there is no 32-bit version of Windows Server 2008 R2) doesn’t carve up the system address statically; instead, it dynamically assigns ranges to different types of memory according to changing demands. However, it still sets a maximum for nonpaged pool that’s based on the amount of physical memory, either slightly more than 75% of physical memory or 2GB, whichever is smaller. Here’s the maximum on a 2GB Windows Server 2008 system:

2GB 32-bit Windows Server 2008

64-bit Windows systems have a much larger address space, so the memory manager can carve it up statically without worrying that different types might not have enough space. 64-bit Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 set the maximum nonpaged pool to a little over 400K per MB of RAM or 128GB, whichever is smaller. Here’s a screenshot from a 2GB 64-bit Windows XP system:

2GB 64-bit Windows XP

64-bit Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 memory managers match their 32-bit counterparts (where applicable – as mentioned earlier, there is no 32-bit version of Windows Server 2008 R2) by setting the maximum to approximately 75% of RAM, but they cap the maximum at 128GB instead of 2GB. Here’s the screenshot from a 2GB 64-bit Windows Vista system, which has a nonpaged pool limit similar to that of the 32-bit Windows Server 2008 system shown earlier.

2GB 32-bit Windows Server 2008

Finally, here’s the limit on an 8GB 64-bit Windows 7 system:

8GB 64-bit Windows 7

Here’s a table summarizing the nonpaged pool limits across different version of Windows:

	32-bit	64-bit
XP, Server 2003	up to 1.2GB RAM: 32-256 MB > 1.2GB RAM: 256MB	min( ~400K/MB of RAM, 128GB)
Vista, Server 2008, Windows 7, Server 2008 R2	min( ~75% of RAM, 2GB)	min(~75% of RAM, 128GB)

Paged Pool Limits

The kernel and device drivers use paged pool to store any data structures that won’t ever be accessed from inside a DPC or ISR or when a spinlock is held. That’s because the contents of paged pool can either be present in physical memory or, if the memory manager’s working set algorithms decide to repurpose the physical memory, be sent to the paging file and demand-faulted back into physical memory when referenced again. Paged pool limits are therefore primarily dictated by the amount of system address space the memory manager assigns to paged pool, as well as the system commit limit.

On 32-bit Windows XP, the limit is calculated based on how much address space is assigned other resources, most notably system PTEs, with an upper limit of 491MB. The 2GB Windows XP System shown earlier has a limit of 360MB, for example:

2GB 32-bit Windows XP

32-bit Windows Server 2003 reserves more space for paged pool, so its upper limit is 650MB.

Since 32-bit Windows Vista and later have dynamic kernel address space, they simply set the limit to 2GB. Paged pool will therefore run out either when the system address space is full or the system commit limit is reached.

64-bit Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 set their maximums to four times the nonpaged pool limit or 128GB, whichever is smaller. Here again is the screenshot from the 64-bit Windows XP system, which shows that the paged pool limit is exactly four times that of nonpaged pool:

2GB 64-bit Windows XP

Finally, 64-bit versions of Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 simply set the maximum to 128GB, allowing paged pool’s limit to track the system commit limit. Here’s the screenshot of the 64-bit Windows 7 system again:

8GB 64-bit Windows 7

Here’s a summary of paged pool limits across operating systems:

	32-bit	64-bit
XP, Server 2003	XP: up to 491MB Server 2003: up to 650MB	min( 4 * nonpaged pool limit, 128GB)
Vista, Server 2008, Windows 7, Server 2008 R2	min( system commit limit, 2GB)	min( system commit limit, 128GB)

Testing Pool Limits

Because the kernel pools are used by almost every kernel operation, exhausting them can lead to unpredictable results. If you want to witness first hand how a system behaves when pool runs low, use the Notmyfault tool. It has options that cause it to leak either nonpaged or paged pool in the increment that you specify. You can change the leak size while it’s leaking if you want to change the rate of the leak and Notmyfault frees all the leaked memory when you exit it:

Don’t run this on a system unless you’re prepared for possible data loss, as applications and I/O operations will start failing when pool runs out. You might even get a blue screen if the driver doesn’t handle the out-of-memory condition correctly (which is considered a bug in the driver). The Windows Hardware Quality Laboratory (WHQL) stresses drivers using the Driver Verifier, a tool built into Windows, to make sure that they can tolerate out-of-pool conditions without crashing, but you might have third-party drivers that haven’t gone through such testing or that have bugs that weren’t caught during WHQL testing.

I ran Notmyfault on a variety of test systems in virtual machines to see how they behaved and didn’t encounter any system crashes, but did see erratic behavior. After nonpaged pool ran out on a 64-bit Windows XP system, for example, trying to launch a command prompt resulted in this dialog:

On a 32-bit Windows Server 2008 system where I already had a command prompt running, even simple operations like changing the current directory and directory listings started to fail after nonpaged pool was exhausted:

On one test system, I eventually saw this error message indicating that data had potentially been lost. I hope you never see this dialog on a real system!

Running out of paged pool causes similar errors. Here’s the result of trying to launch Notepad from a command prompt on a 32-bit Windows XP system after paged pool had run out. Note how Windows failed to redraw the window’s title bar and the different errors encountered for each attempt:

And here’s the start menu’s Accessories folder failing to populate on a 64-bit Windows Server 2008 system that’s out of paged pool:

Here you can see the system commit level, also displayed on Process Explorer’s System Information dialog, quickly rise as Notmyfault leaks large chunks of paged pool and hits the 2GB maximum on a 2GB 32-bit Windows Server 2008 system:

The reason that Windows doesn’t simply crash when pool is exhausted, even though the system is unusable, is that pool exhaustion can be a temporary condition caused by an extreme workload peak, after which pool is freed and the system returns to normal operation. When a driver (or the kernel) leaks pool, however, the condition is permanent and identifying the cause of the leak becomes important. That’s where the pool tags described at the beginning of the post come into play.

Tracking Pool Leaks

When you suspect a pool leak and the system is still able to launch additional applications, Poolmon, a tool in the Windows Driver Kit , shows you the number of allocations and outstanding bytes of allocation by type of pool and the tag passed into calls of ExAllocatePoolWithTag. Various hotkeys cause Poolmon to sort by different columns; to find the leaking allocation type, use either ‘b’ to sort by bytes or ‘d’ to sort by the difference between the number of allocations and frees. Here’s Poolmon running on a system where Notmyfault has leaked 14 allocations of about 100MB each:

After identifying the guilty tag in the left column, in this case ‘Leak’, the next step is finding the driver that’s using it. Since the tags are stored in the driver image, you can do that by scanning driver images for the tag in question. The Strings utility from Sysinternals dumps printable strings in the files you specify (that are by default a minimum of three characters in length), and since most device driver images are in the %Systemroot%\System32\Drivers directory, you can open a command prompt, change to that directory and execute “strings * | findstr ”. After you’ve found a match, you can dump the driver’s version information with the Sysinternals Sigcheck utility. Here’s what that process looks like when looking for the driver using “Leak”:

If a system has crashed and you suspect that it’s due to pool exhaustion, load the crash dump file into the Windbg debugger, which is included in the Debugging Tools for Windows package, and use the !vm command to confirm it. Here’s the output of !vm on a system where Notmyfault has exhausted nonpaged pool:

Once you’ve confirmed a leak, use the !poolused command to get a view of pool usage by tag that’s similar to Poolmon’s. !poolused by default shows unsorted summary information, so specify 1 as the the option to sort by paged pool usage and 2 to sort by nonpaged pool usage:

Use Strings on the system where the dump came from to search for the driver using the tag that you find causing the problem.

So far in this blog series I’ve covered the most fundamental limits in Windows, including physical memory, virtual memory, paged and nonpaged pool. Next time I’ll talk about the limits for the number of processes and threads that Windows supports, which are limits that derive from these.

Enable ssh on ESXi 3.5

BassQ — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 11:30:21 +0000

First ESXi shell access;

How to get shell access to your VMWare ESXi server?
By default the VMWare ESXi server don’t offer shell access (through the menu).
But by doing the following, you will be able to access the shell (although its limited):

1. Hook up a screen and a keyboard to the VMWae ESXi server.
2. Press “Alt+F1″
3. Write “unsupported” and press Enter (if you screw up, and think you’ve typed something wrong,
you can use Ctrl+U to clear the input field).
4. Enter the root password, an voila, shell access.

Then enable ssh on ESXi 3.5

By default, ssh access is disabled on VMware ESXi 3.5, so how do i enable ssh on VMware ESXi 3.5?

1. Type “vi /etc/inetd.conf” and press “enter”.

2. Locate the line that starts with “#ssh stream tcp nowait root /sbin/dropbearmulti…….”

3. Move the marker over the “#” and press “x”.

4. Press “Escape” and write “:wq”, then press “enter”.

5. Type “/sbin/services.sh restart” and press “Enter”. Note: If you are running ESXi 3.5 Update 2, the services.sh no longer restarts the inetd process. You will have to manually kill the inetd process, in order to restart it and enable ssh access without a reboot. Type “ps | grep inetd” and press “enter”. You will then see something similiar to “1289 1289 busybox inetd”. Then write “kill -HUP 1289″, and remember to write the number “ps | grep inetd” returns to you!

Best practices for deploying Citrix on vmware ESX

BassQ — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 11:27:22 +0000

First and foremost: this tuning list is my own experience and the experience of several users on the VMware forum . Your mileage may vary.

The goods:

Virtual Infrastructure 3
Windows 2003 Std (or Enterprise) Edition R2 (x86, not x64)
Citrix Presentation Server 4.0 (yes, I know, the old one )

The tips:

First this: it all depends on the applications used! Context switches is the key here…
Use Windows 2003 , not Windows 2000
Don’t P2V your servers, but use clean templates
Make sure the correct HAL (single or multi) is installed in the virtual machine. Otherwise, your vCPU will spike.
Always assign 1vCPU . If necessary, add a 2^nd vCPU. Do not use 4 vCPUs!
Use 2 GB to start. Scale up to +-4 GB of vRAM if necessary
Use 1 .vmdk for your system partition (C:\ or other remapped drive letter) and 1 separate .vmdk for your program files.
Put the page file on the 2^nd .vmdk
Important: disconnect any .iso file in your virtual CD-Rom
Use roaming profiles and cleanup your profiles at logoff
Disable sound for your published apps
Install the UPH service (download it here )
User sessions: for me, 30 users on a VM is the sweet spot. Do not expect to get as many users on it as on a physical box!
Scale out, not up. A major advantage of VM is to clone/NewSID/sysprep existing servers and put them into your existing Citrix farm. Just stop & disable your IMA service , clean up your RMLocalDB (if you use enterprise) and NewSid the thing. Refer to this support article for more info.
Use dual core or quad core systems. This because ESX will have more CPU to schedule its vCPUs on.
Don’t ever use a 2 vCPU Citrix virtual machine in a 2 pCPU physical machine!
Do not install the memory ballooning driver while installing the VMware Tools
Do not use a complete installation Vmware tools : there is an issue with roaming profiles and the shared folders component. See my previous article for more info.
Disable COM ports, hyperthreading, visual effects & use speedscreen technology where possible.
Use snapshots when installing applications or patching your servers (yes! With VMware you can do this!). In case of disaster, you can still revert to the original working server without using backups. Make sure all snapshots are removed ASAP when finished!
Always check that there are no snapshot leftovers (f.e. the infamous _VCB-BACKUP_ when using VCB)
Don’t forget you can use DRS rules to run your citrix servers on separate physical hosts.
Check out this vmworld 2006 presentation
And last but not least: do not forget to read ESX’s (excellent) performance tuning white paper .

Source: http://virtrix.blogspot.com/2007/03/vmware-best-practices-for-deploying.html

VMware: Hyper-V on Server Core vs ESXi

BassQ — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 07:46:37 +0000

Video 1 : http://www.vmware.com/technology/whyvmware/resources/esxi-hyper-v-installation.html

This first video shows every step required to install Hyper-V and ESXi on a fresh machine. We kept count of the elapsed time, reboots, mouse clicks and keystrokes each product needed and it clearly shows the huge advantage the truly thin and OS-free ESXi architecture has in installation speed and simplicity. ESXi goes from bare-metal to fully installed in one-third the time, half the mouse clicks, hundreds fewer keystrokes and just one reboot vs. seven compared to Hyper-V. The simplicity of the ESXi wizard-driven installation is striking compared to the arduous process needed to first get the Server Core OS installed and then configure Hyper-V in a command line environment.

Video 2 : http://www.vmware.com/technology/whyvmware/resources/hyper-v-side-by-side-esxi.html

Our second video starts where the first left off and takes Hyper-V and ESXi through the steps needed to configure two iSCSI datastores for VM use. iSCSI setup is a standard task for any virtualization user that wants to take advantage of shared storage for VM migration and high availability. ESXi’s Windows-based Virtual Infrastructure client makes the iSCSI setup quick and easy. For Hyper-V, the "Windows you know" is nowhere to be seen. Instead, working with Server Core requires you to key in a long sequence of obscure commands to configure iSCSI initiators and targets, partitions and file systems. We generously showed the Hyper-V setup executed with no delays, although it took us hours of digging through Microsoft documents and knowledgebase articles to find the right commands to use when configuring iSCSI in Server Core.

Source: http://blogs.vmware.com/virtualreality/2008/09/esxi-vs-hyper-v.html

VMware accidentally timebombs ESX, causing worldwide mayhem

BassQ — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 12:44:11 +0000

In an act of “endeavoring to deliver a release with support [that] customers deem important ” VMware accidentally left a licensing timebomb enabled in the build that it shipped to customers about three weeks ago. The timebomb causes all installed licenses for ESX to be regarded as invalid on August 12, 2008. This in turn causes virtual machines to not be allowed to start from a powerdown or suspended state or allow virtual machines to be VMotioned to another ESX host .

~~VMware provides one way to prevent encountering the problem and one temporary workaround until they can provide a patch:~~ VMware has released express patches to remedy the problem.

Full repeat of VMware’s latest e-mail advisory:

Dear VMware Customers,

We have released the express patches for the product expiration issue. Please go to http://www.vmware.com/go/esxexpresspatches for download and KB articles. Since our last customer email we have completed our verification tests that the express patches we’ve released are fully compatible with the VMware Update Manager. Please see the KB articles for deployment information regarding Update Manager.

The KB articles are kept up-to-date. Please refer to the KB articles for information and updates.

In our last update, we referred to an initiative by our support and engineering teams to find an option to apply the patch without the necessity of entering maintenance mode and VMotion of VM’s to other servers, or VM power-off and re-power-on. Our earlier tests have not found a consistently successful way to address this. We continue to investigate this possibility, as we know that it would reduce the maintenance burden on our customers who may not have a patched server available for VMotion.

We are on target to release updated versions of the ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 2 patch at 6 PM PST today. This is for customers who have not already upgraded to the previously released version of ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 2

Thank you,

The VMware ESX Product Team

Problem:

An issue has been discovered by many VMware customers and partners with ESX Update 2 (build number 103909) and ESXi 3.5 Update 2 (build number 103908) where Virtual Machines fail to power on or VMotion successfully. This problem began to occur on August 12, 2008 for customers that had upgraded to ESX 3.5 Update 2. The problem is caused by a build timeout that was mistakenly left enabled for the release build.

The following message is displayed in the vmware.log file for the virtual machine:

This product has expired. Be sure that your host machine’s date and time are set correctly.
There is a more recent version available at the VMware web site: http://www.vmware.com/info?id=4 .
————–
Module License Power on failed.

Affected Products:

- VMware ESX 3.5 Update 2 & ESXi 3.5 Update 2. Thank you, The VMware ESX Product Team

- The problem will be seen if ESX350-200806201-UG is applied to a system.

- No other VMware products are affected.

Resolution:

VMware Engineering has produced express patches for impacted customers to resolve the issue

Source: http://www.buit.org/

Monitoring VMWare ESX using OpsMgr

BassQ — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 19:21:18 +0000

Monitoring VMWare ESX with SCOM isn’t a hard thing, however getting correct and relivent information in a clean and easy way can be. This guide I have compiled with VMWare should provide the mechanics of setting up monitoring between VMWare ESX and SCOM.

– UPDATE : If you have trouble with the link its due my limit being reached. I will add a secondary site ASAP. Wasn’t prepared for the responce –
Download Here:
Mirror 1
Mirror 2

Options for adding more detials to SNMP Alerts

As many of you who use SNMP may be finding that all the Alerts come in with the IP Address. In a large environment this can be an issue and as this is the mechanism in which they are added to the SCOM Database there is no way around this directly. However…

You have 2 options to make this a little easier.

1st you can enter the DeviceName in the Alert Description:

$Target/Property[Type=”MicrosoftSystemCenterNetworkDeviceLibrary6050000!Microsoft.SystemCenter.NetworkDevice”]/Name$

2nd you can use the custom fields if you have the option. Alert Generated Rule will allow for Custom Field editing.

Again add: $Target/Property[Type=”MicrosoftSystemCenterNetworkDeviceLibrary6050000!Microsoft.SystemCenter.NetworkDevice”]/Name$ to the particular Custom Field.

Of course this is provided you have setup the SNMP setting on the device with the correct name you refer to that device.

This is what you will see in your Alerts: (I have blanked out the detail due to confidentiality)

Alert View:

Alert Description:

Custom Field:

Hope this makes your life a little easier

VMWare Links !

BassQ — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 12:41:20 +0000

Backups:
Virtual Machine Backup Guide – http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_301_201_vm_backup.pdf
Consolidated Backup in Vmware Infrastructure 3 – http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_consolidated_backup.pdf
Vmware Consolidated Backup Best Practices, Tips and Tricks – http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/bct4540.pdf
Backup and Recovery of Virtual Servers – http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/mdc9870.pdf
Hot Backups and Restores – http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/tac9816.pdf
Non-disruptive Backups of Vmware Environments Using Veritas Netbackup – http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/tac9912.pdf
Perl Backup Script for Vmware ESX 2.x – vmbk.pl ( free ) – http://www.vmts.net/vmbk.htm
Perl Backup Script for Vmware ESX 3.x – vmbk.pl ( free ) – http://www.vmts.net/vmbk3.htm
Backup scripts – http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/?p=23+and+http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/?p=156
Shell script – http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=475244
Perl script – http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=70253&start=0&tstart=0
Oracle backups – http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=76746&messageID=601703#601703
Vmware Consolidated Backup Technology: Today and Future – http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/bct4539.pdf
Implementing VMware VCB – http://www.vmware-tsx.com/download.php?asset_id=19
Virtual Infrastructure Scripted Backup Utility (VISBU) – http://www.xtravirt.com/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=75&func=fileinfo&id=7

Blogs:
The Console (Vmware management) – http://blogs.vmware.com/console/
VMTN (Technical Community) – http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/
Vroom! (Performance team) – http://blogs.vmware.com/performance/
Virtually There (Steve Herrod) – http://blogs.vmware.com/sherrod/
Run-virtual (Richard Garsthagen) – http://www.run-virtual.com/
Blog.scottlowe.org (Scott Lowe) – http://blog.scottlowe.org/category/virtualization/
Infoworld Virtualization Report (David Marshall) – http://weblog.infoworld.com/virtualization/
VMwarewolf (Richard Blythe) – http://www.vmwarewolf.com/

Books/Documentation/Learning Resources:
RapidApp’s Quick Start guide to ESX 3.0 – http://www.lulu.com/content/712361
VMware ESX Server 2.5 Advanced Technical Guide – http://rapidapp.com/publications/VMware%20ESX%20Server%20Book.pdf
Vmware VI3 documentation – http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/vi_pubs.html
Vmware TSX 2007 presentations – http://www.vmware-tsx.com/index.php?page_id=10
Vmworld 2006 presentations – http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/vmworld/
VCP Study Online Quiz – http://vcpquiz.awardspace.com/
VCP Quiz – http://www.vmuser.com/joomla/index.php?option=com_joomlaquiz&Itemid=7
Rob Scmidt’s VMware VCP Study Questions – http://www.petri.co.il/forums/showthread.php?t=15947

Citrix:
Optimizing Citrix Presentation Server on Vmware ESX Server – http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/med0115.pdf
Citrix and Vmware – http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/tac9728.pdf
Best practices for deploying Citrix on ESX – http://virtrix.blogspot.com/2007/03/vmware-best-practices-for-deploying.html
Improving Scalability for Citrix Presentation Server – http://www.vmware.com/pdf/esx_citrix_scalability.pdf
To virtualize or not Citrix and Terminal Server – http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=671864
Citrix and VMware: Oil and Water? – http://redmondmag.com/features/article.asp?EditorialsID=718

Cloning:
Newsid – http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/Security/NewSid.mspx
Sysprep – http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/deploy/duplication.mspx
Sysprep – http://www.vernalex.com/guides/sysprep/
Clone VM script for ESX – http://www.pgregg.com/projects/vmclone/

Clustering:
Setup for Microsoft Cluster Service – http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_vm_and_mscs.pdf
Guide to creating a vmotion-able Microsoft cluster with VI3 – http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=625404
MSCS Limitations – http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=83511&tstart=0

CPU:
ESX Server 2 Best Practices Using Vmware Virtual SMP – http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsmp_best_practices.pdf
ESX Server 3 Ready Time Observations – http://www.vmware.com/pdf/esx3_ready_time.pdf
A Performance Comparison of Hypervisors – http://www.vmware.com/pdf/hypervisor_performance.pdf
ESX Server CPU Scheduling – http://www.vmware-tsx.com/download.php?asset_id=39
To vSMP or not to vSMP – http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=298150
Evaluation of ESX Server under CPU Intensive Workloads – http://www.windley.com/docs/2006/OIT%20Report%20Sept06.pdf
AMD vs. Intel for VMware – http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=27838&start=0&tstart=0
AMD & Intel Servers Compete for Ultimate Virtuality – http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/12/29/amd_and_intel_servers_compete_for_ultimate_virtuality/
What to choose, Intel or AMD? – http://blog.baeke.info/blog/_archives/2006/9/18/2338562.html
Dell Intel vs. AMD – http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=522714

Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity:
Vmware users explore disaster recover options – http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid94_gci1253386,00.html
Vmware ESX Server and Storage Architecture Best Practices for Performance, Backup, and Disaster Recovery – http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/adc9591.pdf
Using Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning to Drive Virtualization in the Production Data Center – http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/adc9732.pdf
An Aggressive Approach Using P2V to Address Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning – http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/adc9938.pdf
How Management Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Virtualization: A Brush with Disaster Leads to a Virtualization-Based Disaster Recovery Plan at the Las Vegas Valley Water District – http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/bct0046.pdf
Leveraging VMware ESX Server in Disaster Recovery Solutions – http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/bct5070.pdf
Implementing Effective Backup Strategies For Disaster Recovery – http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/bct9502.pdf
VMware Infrastructure 3 Capabilities for Improving Disaster Recovery – http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/bct9552.pdf
Using Virtual Infrastructure as a High Availability Platform for Physical Production Servers – http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/bct9560.pdf
RepliStor: Disaster Recovery and Data Migration Solution for VMware Environments – http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/bct9636.pdf
VMware ESX Server as a Foundation for High Availability and Disaster Recovery for the Microsoft Server Platform – http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/bct0107.pdf
Migrating Server Operations from Remote Sites to the Data Center for Disaster Recovery and Protection – http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/bct0893.pdf
Innovative Approaches for High Availability and Disaster Recovery in Your VMware Infrastructure Environment – http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/bct9708.pdf
Vmware Consolidated Backup for Disaster Recovery – http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/labs2006/vmworld.06.lab01-VCB-PRESENTATION.pdf
HA/DR of Physical and Virtual Environments Using VMware ESX Server and Double-Take for Virtual Systems – http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/bct9468.pdf
Platespin P2V DR – http://www.platespin.com/p2vdr/
Double-Take for virtual systems – http://www.doubletake.com/products/virtual-systems/default.aspx
Double-Take Replication in the VMware Environment – http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vmware_doubletake.pdf
Replistor – http://software.emc.com/products/software_az/replistor.htm
ESX 3 Disaster Recovery site options – http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=473674
Disaster Recovery Plans – http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=517701
Disaster recovery site VM Startup – http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=514046
Disaster Recovery for Vms – http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=502276

Domain Controllers/Active Directory:
Virutalization of Active Directory – http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=352424
Considerations when hosting Active Directory domain controller in virtual hosting environments – http://support.microsoft.com/kb/888794
Virtualizing a Windows Active Directory Domain Infrastructure – http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/tac9710.pdf
How to detect and recover from a USN rollback in Windows 2003 Server: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/885875/
How to detect and recover from a USN rollback in Windows 2000 Server: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/875495/
P2Ving Domain Controllers – http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=390630
Virtualize Domain Controllers or not? – http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=81928&messageID=630985#630985

Exchange:
Deploying Microsoft Exchange in VMware Infrastructure – http://www.vmware.com/pdf/exchange_best_practices.pdf

Licensing:
Vmware licensing page – http://www.vmware.com/download/licensing.html
Server-based License File Checker – http://www.vmware.com/checklicense/
Pricing, Packaging & Licensing Overview – http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi_pricing.pdf
Install License File – http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=76518
Guest Licensing – http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=81345&messageID=627156#627156
Microsoft Virtual Machine Technology FAQ – http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/highlights/virtualization/faq.mspx
Windows Server Virtualization Calculator – http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/howtobuy/licensing/calculator.mspx
Licensing Microsoft Server Products with Virtual Machine Technologies – http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/8/9/68964284-864d-4a6d-aed9-f2c1f8f23e14/virtualization_whitepaper.doc
Microsoft Server Version Feature Comparison – http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsserver/evaluate/features/compare.mspx
ESX single-CPU multi-core licensing – http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=648327
Splitting 2 processor license between 2 single CPU servers – http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=87871&messageID=669665#669665

Linux:
Getting a DHCP Address in a Red Hat Linux Virtual Machine – http://kb.vmware.com/kb/977
Windows to Linux roadmap – http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-roadmap.html
Windows to Linux roadmap post on Vmtn – http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=77279
Install Vmware Tools in a Linux VM under ESX Server 3.x – http://kb.vmware.com/kb/5242329
From DOS/Windows to Linux HowTo – http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/DOS-Win-to-Linux-HOWTO.html
Universal Command Guide for Operating Systems – http://www.allcommands.com/
Linux knowledge required? – http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=625255 and http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=628551

Performance:
VMware ESX Server guest performance tips Pt .1 – http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid94_gci1231666,00.html
VMware ESX Server guest performance tips Pt. 2 – http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid94_gci1231917,00.html
VMware ESX Server guest performance tips Pt. 3 – http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid94_gci1235138,00.html
Top 12 ways to Improve Guest Server Performance under VMware ESX Server – http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/mdc9700.pdf
Tuning Windows Server 2003 – http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpapers/pdfs/redp3943.pdf
Performance Tuning Guidelines for Windows Server 2003 – http://download.microsoft.com/download/2/8/0/2800a518-7ac6-4aac-bd85-74d2c52e1ec6/tuning.doc
Linux Performance and Tuning Guidelines – http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpieces/pdfs/redp4285.pdf
Performance Tuning for VI3 – http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/tac9872.pdf
Performance Troubleshooting – http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/labs2006/vmworld.06.lab04-PERFORMANCE-MANUAL.pdf
Performance Tuning Best Practices for ESX Server 3 – http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi_performance_tuning.pdf
ESX Server 3.0 Tips and Tricks – http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/tac9567.pdf
Performance Monitoring and Capacity Planning – http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/adc0199.pdf
A Performance Comparison of Hypervisors – http://www.vmware.com/pdf/hypervisor_performance.pdf
Using esxtop to troubleshoot performance problems – http://www.vmware.com/pdf/esx2_using_esxtop.pdf
ESX Workload Analysis: Lessons Learned – http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/adc9398.pdf
ESX Server 2 Architecture and Performance Implications – http://www.vmware.com/pdf/esx2_performance_implications.pdf
ESX Server 2 Performance and Resource Management for CPU-Intesive Workloads – http://www.vmware.com/pdf/ESX2_CPU_Performance.pdf
ESX Server 2 Performance Tips and Tricks – http://www.vmware.com/pdf/esx_performance_tips_tricks.pdf
ESX Server 2 Storage Subsystem Performance in ESX Server: Buslogic vs. LSI Logic – http://www.vmware.com/pdf/ESX2_Storage_Performance.pdf

RTFM Guides:
Upgrade Guide to ESX 3 and VirtualCenter 2 – http://www.rtfm-ed.eu/docs/vmwdocs/esx3.x-vc2-upgradeguide.pdf
Guide to ESX 3 Service Console – http://www.rtfm-ed.eu/docs/vmwdocs/esx3.x-vc2.x-serviceconsole-guide.pdf
Guide to ESX 2.x Administration I – http://www.rtfm-ed.eu/docs/vmwdocs/admin-01-esx2.x.pdf
Guide to ESX 2.x Administration II – http://www.rtfm-ed.eu/docs/vmwdocs/admin-02-esx2.x.pdf
Beyond the Manual – VMware ESX 2.x – http://www.rtfm-ed.eu/docs/vmwdocs/esx2.x-beyondthemanual.pdf
ESX 2.x Service Console Quick Command-Line Guide – http://www.rtfm-ed.eu/docs/vmwdocs/esx2.x-serviceconsolecommands.pdf
Guide to vCenter 1.x Administration – http://www.rtfm-ed.eu/docs/vmwdocs/admin-vcenter1.2.pdf

Scripting:
Simplifying Administration with Scripting APIs – http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/labs2006/vmworld.06.lab12-Scripting.VI3-MANUAL.pdf

Service Console:
Common Linux commands on the service console – http://www.vmts.net/article/linuxcommand.htm
Command Line Interface Tips and Tricks for Vmware ESX Server 2 and 3 – http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/tac9685.pdf
Third-Party Software in the Service Console – http://www.vmware.com/pdf/esx_3p_scvcons.pdf
Locking server console – http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=383046
Send mail from Service Console – http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=575650
Working with the new ESX 3 Service Console – http://www.vmware-tsx.com/download.php?asset_id=22
Accessing VMware ESX Server 3 securely using SSH and SUDO – http://www.xtravirt.com/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=75&func=fileinfo&id=10
B2V Guide to VMware ESX Server3 – http://www.b2v.co.uk/b2vguide2vmware3.htm

ESX 3.5 & VC 2.5 Released, whats new?

BassQ — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 09:47:15 +0000

At the VMUG event I learned about a few new features that are available in ESX 3.5 & VC 2.5. Jeremy van Doorn told us about:

Distributed Power Management (Still experimental)
NPIV support (connect a HBA to a VM instead of an ESX host)
VMware update manager (formerly Shavlik)
Storage VMotion (VMotion the storage of a VM to a different location, only through command line)
Paravirtualization possible on a per VM basis
More RAM for a VM, up to 64GB and more RAM for the host, max 128GB
SATA drives support (not known which drives are supported)
Hardware page tabels for even less overhead when virtualizing memory
32 nodes instead of 16 in a DRS / HA cluster
Up to 10 isolation addresses in HA
A VM can now have a local swap file
Cisco Discovery Protocol
Wake On LAN for your nics
And a very important VCB feature: restore files on VM

Apart from these items, I discovered some more nice little improvements in the interface. So the next post will be only screenshots and short comments on each new feature or button I discovered

Just some screenshots and comments about new ESX 3.5 & VC 2.5 features.

Logon with the VI Client

Starting the VI Client, I noticed a little change in the text and when you logon using the hostname instead of the FQDN, you’ll receive a certificate warning box

Getting Started Wizard

Next thing you’ll immediately notice is the “Getting Started Wizard”. On quite a number of levels, you can find these wizards like Hosts & Clusters view, Datacenter, Host, VM, Resource Pools and Clusters. The wizard helps you with the most common task to get you familiar with VC 2.5 as soon as possible. Did you notice the “Close tab” in the upper right corner? The wizards can be disabled for the advanced users.

Plugins

In the menu-bar I noticed a plugins option. Clicking it and installing the”VMware Update Manager Extension” and “VMware Converter Enterprise”, gave me two new options in the top bar. The “Consolidate” button and the “Update Manager” button. I’ll explore boh buttons later on.

Hosts & Clusters

To wade through all the options I started at the “Hosts & Clusters” level and the DataCenter level (alsmost identical). The datacenter tab didn’t bring anything new and the virtual machines tab looks the same as in VC2.0. I did notice I can now also view the column DNS Name, not sure if this was in VC2.0 already. On the hosts tab and the task & events tab, I couldn’t find any new info or columns. Except for quite a number of warning messages that my storage for VMware Update Manager is low. It is pointing to c:\documents and Settings\….. have to get an extra disk for this . It a shame that you can’t select the warning or error message in the “Event details” screen. Would be much easier for copying and pasting when looking for support. The alarms tab, permissions tab and maps tab look like there hasn’t changed anything. But the “Update Manager” tab is completely new. On a seperate page I’ll write more about the update manager.

Hosts level

At the hosts level, there is ofcourse the “Getting Started” tab again and at the “Summary Tab” there now is an option to make an Annotation. I often use them for my VMs, but not yet for the hosts. We’ll see

The “Resource Allocation” tab showed different values then the one I was used to see. When looking at the cpu reseravtions and shares, I noticed that each VM (all single cpu) still had the value “Normal Shares” but the “Shares Value” now was set to 4000. I edited the cpu resources for a VM and noticed that the values related to the settings Low, Normal, High had changed. They now are: low = 2000, normal = 4000, high = 8000 shares. They doubled each value. Well no big deal I guess, because its all relative When using esxtop at the cos, I noticed that there was a change in how the shares are displayed. In ESX 3.0.2 one could see the number of shares in the “ASHRS” column like 1000, 2000, 2217, etc. But now in ESX 3.5 it shows only a value of -3 in my case. See the screenshots below:

For the memory resources there is a change as well. Low memory shares is a value of 327680, normal is 655360 and high is 1 million shares.

Performance graphs

It is now easier to switch from cpu to memory or other standard graphs. In the upper right corner, there is a little pulldown menu for easy switching. It also includes a new graph “Management Agent” which shows the memory usage of the service console. Another new option is “System” which shows quite a number of cpu and memory countes for the host.

I discovered it gets even better. You can save your own views and have them listed in the dropdown menu !!! For example, for the realtime network counters, I would like to add “Network Packets Transmitted” and “Network Packets Received” and view this on a regular basis. You can now save your view by pressing “Save chart settings” and the name of this chart setting will be available in your dropdown list.

Configuration tab

First thing to notice are the extra options “Time configuration” and “Virtual Machine Swapfile location”. When selecting a ESX 3.0.2 host, the “Virtual Machine Swapfile location” option is not displayed, but the “Time configuration” option is. Its just limited in options now.

In the hardware settings for processors, memory and storage I can’t spot any differences with previous versions. In the networking properties there is a little extra balloon showing behind each nic. If you click it, it displays the Cisco Discovery Protocol settings. I haven’t used CDP before so I google a little on it and found this link with some explanation about it: http://www.javvin.com/protocolCDP.html

I browsed through all the other network options, creating vSwitches adding nics etc, but can’t find any news there. I was just wondering, when creating a new vSwitch, is the option “Promiscuous Mode” always set to “Reject” ? Not sure if the default changed here.

Storage adapters

Couldn’t find any new options in here, but I was very pleased to find that my SATA controller showed ass Storage device I have an ASUS P2M5-SAS mainbord which I choose because of the LSI Logic Controller that emulates SCSI for the SAS controller. Now I probably can connect my disks directly to it. Small problem with the LSI controller is that you have to create an array (raid1 or 5) to present the disks to ESX. My guess is that I don’t need to do this anymore with the SATA disks.

Network adapater

A new column here: “Wake on LAN supported”. This feature is needed for Distributed Power Management. DRS is now able to powerdown a host when it doesn’t have a workload, should the host be needed again, then a Wake On LAN signal is needed to power it on again. Jeremy van Doorn (VMware) explained that this feature still experimental because integration with monitoring tools isn’t finished yet. Should DRS decide that an ESX host can be powered down, a lot of alarms will be triggered on severall external tools because they don’t understand why the host went down. Another thing I thought of myself, the HP DL 585 server I’m working with at my customers site, don’t power down. If I enter a “shutdown -h now”, ESX goes down, but finaly holds with the message “You can power down your system now” (or similar ). My guess is that WOL won’t be able to power on the server when its in this state.

I was pleased to find that suddenly my Intel NIC showed in the Network adapters list. This nic wasn’t supported or found when ESX 3.0.2 was running on it. I also noticed a change in vSwitches. I used to have a vswitch vsw-vm01 to which vmnic0 and vmnic1 were assigned. Now it only has vmnic0 assigned. The intel nic that was left in the system and is recognized now, became vmnic2 and my other nic which used to be vmnic1, has now become vmnic3. So be sure to backup your nic config / vSwitch config before upgrading. Although I guess only few people have non-working nics in their system before upgrading

Licensed Features

At a first glance, nothing new here. But when selecting the license source, there is a different window for selecting the license source. There are 4 options now.

“Use evaluation mode”. This provides unlimited host services during the evaluation period. It may not be selected once the evaluation has expired.
“Use serial number”. License host edition and add-ons using a serial number.
“Use License Server”. Acquire licenses for host edition and add-ons on demand from the following server. VirtualCenter may change this server while this host is under management.
“Use Host License file”. License host edition and add-ons using a file installed on the host.

Time Settings

This option makes it much easier to configure NTP. When you click properties, you first have a window in which you can set the date and time manually, next you can enable or disable the NTP client. Through the “Options” button you can configure the general settings and NTP settings. The general settings let you set the startup behavior of the NTP daemon. You can also start, stop and restart the NTP daemon at this point. The NTP settings let you define the NTP servers you wish to use. Nice feature is that enabling or disabling the NTP client, also updates your security profile and opens or closes the NTP client port (123). Hmmm, this would be nice with iSCSI. I’ve seen a number of failed iSCSI installations because the admin forgot to open iSCSI port on the firewall.

DNS and Routing

No changes here I guess.

Virtual Machine Startup / Shutdown

Again no changes.

Virtual Machine Swapfile location

This is a completely new feature. You can choose if your VM stores its swapfile with the VMX file or on a different datastore. This datastore can also be a local VMFS datastore !!! I remember that when running a Microsoft Cluster within ESX, there is the requirement that the boot-drive of your Windows guest, has to be on local storage. Someone explained me this is because sometimes there might be just too much delay if the guest wants to write to swapfile which might trigger the cluster to failover. I asked Jeremy van Doorn if I would now be able to put the cluster VM on SAN and VMotion it, but he thinks this is not the case yet. Unfortunately

Security Profile

No changes here

System Resource Allocation

Looks like no changes to me

Advanced Settings

I did notice some changes here, but I can’t find all of them. For sure I know that LVM has much less options to configure. There are some new sections called VMKernel and Config section. I’m not sure if options have just moved arround, seemed a bit much to search for now

That’s all for the “Configuration tab” of a host through VC2.5.

Virtual Machines

On the summay tab, I see two small GUI changes. First is that now the DNS name of a VM is mentioned, second it shows a “Memory Overhead” value. Not sure how this value is determined and what it would tell me On the performance tab, I see the same changes as on the upper levels. Although the set of settings you can define yourself, is a new set. So you can have different sets at different levels. On the other tabs there are no new things to be found, so lets edit the VM settings

Virtual Machine Settings: Hardware tab

First thing to notice is the max ammount of RAM I can give to the VM. We can now go to 64Gb RAM assigned to a single VM… that’s realy nice Doubt if I’ll ever need it. There is also a change in the recommended values. There are now 4 values suggested by VC, see the screenshot below.

On the network properites, I see a new box to change the MAC Address for a VM. You can choose Automatic or Manual and when selecting Manual, you can change the MAC Address. Very nice, no more editting the VMX.

In the virtual disk properties, you can resize your VMDK ! That’s realy nice. You can only increase the size, not shrink it.

Virtual Machine settings: Options tab

On this tab I immediately noticed quite a number of extra options. Lets have a look. On the “VMware Tools” item, I see an extra section “advanced”. Here you can check to “Check and upgrade Tools before each power on” and “Synchronize guest time with host”. Next there is a new section called “Power Management”. Here you define how the VM should respond when the guest OS is placed on standby. You can choose to suspend the VM or Put the OS in standby mode and leave the VM powered On. Plus you can define which nic should listen for Wake On LAN signals.

Advanced section

In the advanced section of the options tab, we see a number of unchanged options. One of them is the general section, which only has a different view under the “Configuration Parameters” button. The CPUID section hasn’t changed.

A new option is the “boot” option. Two settings can be made here, first is the Power-On boot delay. Here you can enter the number of miliseconds the boot is delayed after a VM is powered on or reset. Default value is 0 ms. Next option is “Force BIOS Setup”. This is a nice feature. Ever had to reset a VM multiple times because you were too slow pressing ESC or F12 to get into the BIOS? That’s history now, just enable “The next time the VM boots, force entry into the BIOS setup screen”. Now it will go into the BIOS without keypress

Paravirtualization

YES !!! WOW !!! We can now use the Paravirtualization technique if needed for a VM. Mostly Linux systems with kernel 2.6.21 and up, will be able to benefit from this. As the tab explains:

VMI is a paravirtualization standard supported by some guest operating systems. Guests that recognize VMI will gain significantly improved performance with VMI support. Guest operating systems which do not use VMI will gain no performance benefit from this support.

Fibre Channel NPIV

As the tab says: Virtual Machines running on hosts with Fibre Channel hardware that supports NPIV can be assigned virtual WWNs for advanced features.

Virtualized MMU

For cpu’s that support virtualizing the MMU, you can set if the VM will be using the automatic settings from the ESX host, force the use of this feature or forbid the use of this feature. I’m surprised that this MMU feature can be changed on a VM basis, very nice.

Tip: If you want to learn more about MMU and Paravirtualization, read this pdf:

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/VMware_paravirtualization.pdf

SwapFileLocation

The last option is the SwapFileLocation of the VM. Here you have three options:

default, use the host settings
always store with the VM
Store in the host’s swapfile datastore

The first two options are self explaining I think, the third one is a bit strange I think. The explanation in the text is: “If a swapfile datastore is specified for the host, use that datastore. Otherwise store the swapfile with the VM.”. Wouldn’t this be the same as “default”. Because setting a swapfile datastore at host level, will also enable it. If there is no datastore, then the VM can’t store the swapfile in a different location.

Today it became official, the release of ESX 3.5 & VC 2.5 & Converter 4.0.

When looking at the UN-official release of last friday, it seems that only the ESX buildnumber has changed.

ESX Server Version 3.5 | 12/10/2007 | Build 64607
VirtualCenter Version 2.5 | 12/10/2007 | Build 64201

Homepage at: http://www.vmware.com/products/vi/

Download at: http://www.vmware.com/download/vi/

Release notes at: http://www.vmware.com/support/vi3/doc/vi3_esx35_vc25_rel_notes.html

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VMware “announce” the new Vi3 features

BassQ — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 22:29:11 +0000

Main thing to say that is this is a just an announcement. There’s nothing new dowload and install yet. In fact some of these products (as far as I am aware yet) aren’t even on a private beta yet, never mind a public beta. Some of this was announced at VMworld in th keynotes. I’ll focus on what’s new:

128GB of RAM for ESX 3.5
64GB of RAM for Virtual Machines
Suport for Transparent Paravirtualization support for paravirtualizated enabled Linux 2.6.21 kernels
Support for MMU – Memory Management Unit – support for memory page tables handled by the new CPUs
Support for NPIV – N-Port ID Virtualization – presenting a WWN to a VM
Support for TCP Segment Offload and jumbo frames
Suport for local SATA Drives
Support for 10GigE
Storage VMotion – Moving VMs files around whilst the VM is running
Protect against operating system failures with virtual machine failure monitoring (experimental) in VMware HA. (Continuious HA???)
One-step restore of VMs using VMware Convertor/VirtualCenter
Distributed Power Management (Power down ESX hosts when you don’t need them – scarey or what!)
VMware Update Manager – “Windows Update” for ESX Hosts & the Vi Client and integrated with DRS
Consolidation Management – Mini-Capcity Planner and VMware Convertor integrated with VirtualCenter
Site Recovery Manager
ESX3i

Links:

Offical Press Release:

http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/esx_35.html
http://www.vmware.com/products/vi/features.html
http://www.vmware.com/products/vi/whatsnew.html