VMvisor

A lot of you have been very busy this week, patching ESX hosts(That would be you Jason ) and hopefully reading all the excellent articles being aggregated on Planet V12n…

• Duncan Epping – CPU/MEM Reservation Behavior
  The above paragraph is a bit misleading , as it seems to imply that a
  VM has to access its full reservation. What it should really say is
  “Memory which is protected by a reservation will not be reclaimed by
  ballooning or Host-level swapping�even if it becomes idle,” and
  “Physical machine memory will not be allocated to the VM until the VM
  accesses virtual RAM needing physical RAM backing.” Then that pRAM is
  protected by the reservation and won’t be reclaimed by ballooning or
  .vswp-file swapping. If there is any .vswp memory at all as no .vswp is
  created when the reservation is equal to the provisioned memory.
• Scott Lowe – PXE Booting VMware ESX 4.0
  Next, you’ll need the PXE boot files. Specifically, you’ll need the menu.c32 and pxelinux.0 files. These files are not on the DVD ISO image; you’ll have to download Syslinux from this web site. Once you download Syslinux, extract the files into a temporary directory. You’ll find menu.c32 in the com32/menu folder; you’ll find pxelinux.0 in the core folder. Copy both of these files, along with vmlinuz and initrd.img, into the root directory of the TFTP server. (If you don’t know the root directory of the TFTP server, double-check its configuration.)
• Stu Radnidge – Challenge Convention & Garbage In / Garbage Out & Engage Support Early & Engage Support Early
  The notion of GIGO is of course much older than I am, but it’s one of
  those concepts that is timeless. In relation to Cloud, it’s more
  pertinent than ever. The marketing hype would have you believe that
  Cloud is a panacea, and many people hawking their wares artfully dodge
  the subject of your existing tools and processes. But ignore these at
  your own peril. The COO of the company I work for has a great quote,
  which goes something like “God made the earth in 6 days, because he
  started with a clean slate.”. The same is true of internal Cloud (or
  whatever you want to call it – I’m going to call it that for the sake
  of convenience) – you could probably nail down the platform code and
  functionality that you want to launch with in a few weeks, but making
  the requisite changes to existing processes and integrating with
  existing tools in your environment is what will take the lion’s share
  of time to address.
• Luc Dekens – Counter the self-aware VUM
  Today there was quite a bit of activity on Twitter following Jason Boche’s blog post titled VMware Update Manager Becomes Self-Aware.
  The problem Jason discovered was that the VUM skipped the guests which are hosting the VUM server and the vCenter server. As a consequence you can not select a cluster, select “remediate” and go out for lunch anymore. The resolution was a rather cumbersome and error prone manual procedure.
  But of course PowerCLI can help the human vSphere administrator…
• Chris Wolf – RSA, Intel, and VMware Take a Big Step Forward in Cloud Security
  In the past, I have talked about this security dilemma in a couple of couple of key areas. First, we need a standardized set of cloud isolation levels. We also need standard metadata (either de facto or industry standard) so that third party audit tools can properly query an application’s relationship to cloud security policy in relation to virtual and physical controls that are in place. I covered those issues in more depth in the post “The Cloud Mystery Machine: Metadata Standards.” In addition, virtual resources need to be able to answer the question “Where are you?” That applies to both the runtime location and data location. It’s important to ensure that data privacy and governance concerns are met, and regulatory compliance issues such as data export restrictions are satisfied.

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Top 5 Planet V12n blog posts week 09

Recently John Arrasjid(@vcdx001), Steve Kaplan(@roidude) and I (@DuncanYB) released a book titled “Foundation for Cloud Computing with VMware vSphere 4″. The book as John Arrasjid described it “provides a starting point for
understanding the requirements to design and optimize a virtualized data
center that also serves as the foundation for efficient and safe cloud
computing.”

The book is published by USENIX/SAGE and it is the 21st book in the Short Topics series. SAGE is a Special Interest Group of the USENIX Association. Its goal is to serve the system administration community by organizing conferences and training to enhance the technical and managerial capabilities of members of the profession.

Twenty copies of the book have been given away via Twitter and Mark Vaughn was one of the lucky people who won a copy and published a review. Here's an outtake from Mark's review:

Review by Mark Vaughn
This is not a technical manual designed to walk you through a vSphere installation, this is the book that will explain why you need to develop a virtualization strategy and identify the key items that you will need to address in developing that strategy. This book is a must have reference source for people working with virtualization, whether you are deploying it, developing strategies around it, or simply looking for a better understanding of virtualization technologies and strategies.

This is the 21st book in the Short Topics series by USENIX, available on the SAGE website. In fact, I like this book so much that I will probably join SAGE to get access to more of the Short Topics series.

Original post:
Foundation for Cloud Computing with VMware vSphere 4

Creating a top 5 seems to be getting more difficult week after week. Not only does the quality of the blog articles increase, the amount of blogs listed on PlanetV12n and the amount of articles also increase steadily. I hope I can keep up with you guys, or I might just need to get a cute assistant to help me out with this…. Hmmm, that's actually not a bad idea. Anyway, here's the list!

• Eric Gray – Taking snapshots of VMware ESX 4 running in a VM
  Clearly, the capability introduced with VMware vSphere 4 that allows VMware ESX 4 to virtualize itself is a real crowd-pleaser.

  However, one limitation that some have discovered while using this lab-testing technique is the lack of ability to use snapshots with virtual ESX systems. In fact, after taking a snapshot of a virtual ESX VM, you will see the system boot into the recovery shell.

• Kenneth van Ditmarsch – Using LeftHand Snapshot techniques within a VMware Environment
  Well, currently no integration exists between the LeftHand Snapshot
  technique and vCenter. If the LeftHand Snapshot process is started, vCenter isn’t alerted to quiesce the VM’s and therefore the VM’s are able to continue processing while a LeftHand
  Snapshot is made, which leads to inconsistent VM states. Last year the LeftHand roadmap indicated that vCenter application integration would be available in the new SAN/iQ 8.5. SAN/iQ 8.5 is currently shipped with the HP/LeftHand P4000 G2 nodes and will be available�for download on 29th of March for existing P4000 user. For some reasons however vCenter application integration is shoved back to Q4 2010 or later.
• Steve Kaplan – The multi-hypervisor fallacy
  Implicit in multi-hypervisor advocacy is an undertone of virtualizing
  servers rather than the�data center. This myopic�perspective
  limits�both savings and synergies.�Cisco studies, for example, show a
  lack of vNetwork capability results in 30% fewer servers that can be
  virtualized along with 30% higher�administrative requirements. Network
  administrators have no way to monitor traffic over a vSwitch for
  compliance, auditing and troubleshooting purposes, and they cannot
  apply network and security policies that follow a VM as it
  live-migrates. Since only�vSphere enables vNetwork capabilities,
  multiple hypervisors�leave at least a portion of the data center
  running less efficiently and less secure.
• Steve Chambers – IT Departments and the Collapse of the Silos
  Today I had the opportunity to present at the National Computing Center Think Tank. The NCC have a fantastic remit to bring together practitioners from the private and public sector to explore the current realities. Add to this the vendor invitations where folks like me can share our observations with no axe to sell, and it makes for a really great discussion. Awesome stuff. Prior to this invitation I prepared two documents. First I wrote a blunt paper based on my observations and feedback via Twitter. Second I wrote a Prezi for that to share the findings in ten pieces.
• Craig Risinger – The Resource Pool Priority-Pie Paradox
  We run into this on a daily basis; Misunderstanding of the “shares”
  concept in combination with resource pools. To start with a bold
  statement: A few VMs in a Low-shares Resource Pool can outperform each
  of many VMs in a High-shares Resource Pool. How is this possible you
  might ask. Resources are divided at the Resource Pool level first. Each
  Resource Pool is like a pie whose size determines amount of resources
  usable (during contention). Then that pie is subdivided among the VMs
  in the pool. A Resource Pool applies to all its VMs collectively. Thus
  a smaller pie divided among fewer VMs can yield more resources per VM
  than a larger pie divided by even more VMs.

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Top 5 Planet V12n blog posts week 08

Let me start by congratulating two well known community members with achieving the VCDX certification. Congrats Jason Boche and Scott Lowe, well done. These two guys just received the news that they passed the final stage and I am already been preparing the upcoming VCDX Defense Panels in Munich. Upcoming week is an exciting one for me personally, shifting jobroles… As of Monday I will be a vCloud Architect for VMware Advanced Services. My focus, in terms of blogging, will remain the same but of course will include more cloud related topics. But enough introduction blabla, let's start digging into the top-5:

• Frank Denneman – Impact of host local VM swap on HA and DRS
  This rule also applies when migrating a VM configured with a host-local
  VM swap file as the swap file needs to be created on the local VMFS
  volume of the destination host. Besides creating a new swap file, the
  swapped out pages must be copied out to the destination host. It’s not
  uncommon that a VM has pages swapped out, even if there is not memory
  pressure at that moment. ESX does not proactively return swapped pages
  back into machine memory. Swapped pages always stays swapped, the VM
  needs to actively access the page in the swap file to be transferred
  back to machine memory but this only occurs if the ESX host is not
  under memory pressure (more than 6% free physical memory).
• Jason Boche – My VCDX Defense Experience
  During the days leading up to my defense, I felt very confident.� I had
  been studying my design and going over all the Enterprise Admin and
  Design exam study material on a daily basis.� I had been brushing up on
  white papers and blog articles for areas which I felt I was weak on or
  had forgotten details of.� I brought a 3 ring binder filled with about
  400 pages of documentation as well as every VI3 published .pdf�known to
  mankind on my thumb drive.� While I didn’t read all the .pdf files,
  they were with me if I needed them for reference.� As it turned out, a
  few of the documents I crammed on the night before my panel would play
  a nice role during part of my defense.
• Scott Sauer – Performance troubleshooting VMware vSphere CPU , Memory
  Watch pCPU0 on non ESXi hosts.� If pCPU0 is consistently saturated,
  this will negatively impact performance of the overall system.� If you
  are using third party agents, ensure they are functioning properly.� A
  couple of years ago we had issues with HP System Insight management
  agents (Pegasus process) which was creating a heavy load on our COS.�
  All of the virtual machines looked fine from a performance perspective,
  but once we dug a little bit deeper, we discovered this was our root
  cause.
• Gabrie van Zanten –
  Converting vscsiStats data into Excel charts
  Some time ago I wrote a posting on how to use vscsiStats to gather even more data from your VMs and their SCSI performance ( See: Using vscsiStats – the full how-to). Last week I received an e-mail from Paul Dunn who had written an Excel macro that can read the output from the vscsiStats exported csv file and convert it into Excel histograms.Using the macro is very straight forward. First you let vscsiStats run for a while and have it export the data to csv file. For example with the following command (Do pay attention to just one capital S in vscsiStats):
  /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vscsiStats -p all -w id -c > /root/vscsiStats-export.csv
• Simon Gallagher – The Computing Super-Powers are Aligning Their Stacks
  With HP’s recent acquisition on 3Com and their existing HP ProCurve
  range I would hazard a guess that they will stop selling Cisco blade
  switches in future – I also note from an email that all HP partners got
  this week that all Cisco manufactured blade switch components were
  facing supply issues, stoking the fires somewhat to resellers to push
  the HP product with some choice anti-Cisco FUD which I won’t repeat
  here.

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Top 5 Planet V12n blog posts week 07

Today VMware is proud to unveil the VMware Express during its inaugural stop at the 2010 VMware Partner Exchange in Las Vegas, NV.� This state of the art mobile datacenter, demo environment and briefing center has been built to bring VMware solutions directly to our customers across the USA and Canada during the 2010 Virtualization Tour. The VMware Express is sponsored by Cisco, EMC, Dell, MDS, NetApp, Xsigo, ChipPC, Amulet Hotkey and Teradici.

There are 5 demo stations covering both VMware desktop and server virtualization solutions. Customers will have the unique opportunity to get hands on and dig deep into solutions with VMware Experts. There are demos highlighting the following products and solutions:

VMware View

• Best User Experience – Highlighting the power of the PCoIP display protocol to deliver a rich user experience, perfectly adapted for the network connection and end-point device.

• Follow-Me Desktop – Enabling immediate access to desktops, applications and data while ensuring a consistent user experience across sessions and endpoint devices.

• Access Across Boundaries – Providing access to desktops, applications and data anytime, anywhere regardless of network availability.

• Windows 7 Migration – Reducing the costs and complexity associated with desktop and application migration.


VMware vSphere

• The industry’s most reliable platform for datacenter virtualization offering the highest levels of availability and responsiveness for all applications and services.� Optimize IT services and deliver the highest levels of application service agreements with the lowest total cost per application workload by decoupling your business-critical applications from the underlying hardware for unprecedented flexibility and reliability.

vCenter Server

• Learn about this scalable and extensible platform that forms the foundation for virtualization management with the family of vCenter products including CapacityIQ, AppSpeed, Chargeback and many more focused on providing advanced operational controls.

Customers will not only benefit from being able to see and interact with multiple VMware products in one place but can also take advantage of the conference room where they can have deep dive conversations with VMware solution experts. Leaving the VMware Express, visitors will have an improved understanding of the VMware Desktop partner eco-system, VMware solutions, and how they are positioned to address today’s technical and business requirements.

The VMware Express is letting us reach customers like never before and is ready to roll to industry and partner events as well as customer sites bringing VMware solutions directly to the customer.� Don’t miss your opportunity to catch the VMware Express on the 2010 Virtualization Tour as it crosses the U.S. and Canada coming to a location near you.� Learn more and keep up to date by going to http://www.vmware.com/tour

Read more from the original source:
Introducing the VMware Express: hands-on virtual desktops coming to your town