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Love veeam

microkid — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 19:51:01 GMT

Yesterday I installed Veeam Monitor 4.0 Free. Wow, this is a nice tool! For small ESXi environments like mine it provides at least 24 hour reporting. I can see huge advantages for large ESX environments.

Portas necessárias para o VMware Converter

aandriolli — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 23:39:13 GMT

Hoje cruzei com um artigo no Knowledge Base da VMware que sei que pode ser útil pra muita gente. Ao menos já me perguntaram várias vezes. Que portas preciso abrir no meu firewall para fazer um P2V usando o VMware Converter?

Required VMware vCenter Converter ports

VMware Developer Center - Welcomes Orchestrator API Developers

heyitspablo — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:38:40 GMT

Folks,

We just created an Orchestrator API community and welcome all VMware vCenter Orchestrator API developers to participate and help us build a robust community. Please join us, participate and share.

http://communities.vmware.com/community/developer/orchestrator

Regards,

Pablo

VMware Developer Day - Registration is open !

heyitspablo — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:21:06 GMT

Folks,

Just wanted to let everyone know registration is open for VMworld Developer Day. We will be publishing Session and Demo details in a few days. Note event is open to all, and even better you get a FREE vSphere Standard License as part of the package of goodies.. more details to come.

VMware Developer Day:
http://communities.vmware.com/community/developer/techexchange

Registration Info:
http://communities.vmware.com/community/developer/techexchange/register

Regards,
Pablo

PS. As a random side note in case you plan to see the sites in SF before the event The King Tut exhibit is open and worth the effort to see.

How a high performance SVA transforms vSphere

StorMagic — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:16:43 GMT

As organizations make the transition to vSphere, it is important to consider the vStorage component. Storage is a critical element of your vSphere platform and enables you to perform many of the server virtualization features that VMware has to offer. Unfortunately, organizations have been denied of these benefits as the required storage component can be budget restraining. Storage Virtual Appliances (SVAs) have taken center stage to counter this problem. SVAs take the internal disk drives of your vSphere server and give you the required shared storage you need for advanced server virtualization.

StorMagic's SvSAN is a high performance Storage Virtual Appliance that allows VMware users to break new ground. With close to 2000 downloads since February 24^th ^2009, the SvSAN is fast becoming the most trusted leader for SVA technology. And why not? Few SVAs give you the high availability, performance, vCenter integration, and RAID management at a price point that is literally a third of most conventional storage appliances. In fact, the SvSAN can give you a Virtual SAN, High Availability, integration with vCenter, and an advanced Support frame for under $2000.

Attend this no-cost limited space event and find out what even has VMware talking about SVAs in their vSphere framework.

Avoid the complexity and cost of an external SAN while benefiting from VMotion and DRS
Enjoy higher performance levels than conventional SVAs
Implement highly available datastores a fraction of the traditional cost
Fully utilize the resources of your vSphere server (i.e. internal or attached disk drives) for shared storage
Maintain constant connection to virtual machines & datastores in the event of a server or storage failure
ESXi support
Perform updates and maintenance to vSphere servers without application downtime
Increase the capacity of your virtual environment without spending additional capital
Visit Case Studies at StorMagic.com to learn how organizations like yours leveraged SvSAN and changed their VMware environments forever...

Register here now!

Setting up a Splunk Server to Monitor a VMware Environment

dconvery — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 00:26:15 GMT

In a previous article, I compared syslog servers and decided to use Splunk.
Splunk is easy to set up as a generic Syslog server, but it can be a
pain in the ass getting the winders machines to send to it. There is a
home brewed java based app on the Splunk repository of user submitted
solutions, but I have heard complaints about its stability and decided
that I was going to set out to find a different way to do it.

Announcing the VMware Coffee Talk Live Webinars - First Wed. of the Month 9:00 am - 10:00 am PST

heyitspablo — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:41:29 GMT

Welcome to our VMware Coffee Talk Live Webinars. The goal of our webinars is to communicate latest information about our SDKs and Toolkits to our developers and scripters integrating and automating with the vSphere platform. Our meetings will be held the first Wednesday of the month from 9:00 am – 10:00 am PST. We will also be recording these sessions for folks that cannot attend. Visit our calendar on vmwareapis@gmail.com for latest sessions and be sure to invite a friend.

About our live webinars We will be using Web Ex for our events this means that some of the folks out there might need to download the Web Ex client. Our recorded sessions and pdfs will be posted here as well. These webinars are a great opportunity for you to meet our Product Management and Engineering teams and ask your questions. Looking forward to hearing from you.

Topic	Day	Registration Information	Presentation, WebinarLinks
What is new with vSphere Web Services SDK Deep Dive with Balaji Parimi\ Part 1	Wed May 6th, 2009	Completed	vSphereSDK_NewFeatures-5-6-09.pdf Webinar recording Link\
What is new with vSphere Web Services SDK Best Practices with Balaji Parimi\ Part 2	Friday May 8th, 2009	Completed	vSphereSDK_BestPractices.pdf Webinar recording Link\
PowerCLI - What is new in PowerCLI by Carter Shanklin	Wed June 3rd, 2009	Completed	PDF, Slides, Sample Code Link\ Webinar recording link\
Special Event - VMware Studio 2.0 - Matthew Ford\	Wed June 24th, 2009	Completed	Studio-CoffeeTalk-final.pdf Webinar recording link\
VMware Virtual Disk Development Kit - VDDK 1.1 - Sudarsan Piduri\	Wed July 1st, 2009	Completed	vddk-coffee-talk.pdf Webinar recording\
To be announced	Wed August 5th, 2009

How-To: Disable Debug Mode in Workstation 7.0 Beta

dconvery — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:36:08 GMT

OK… I know the wonks at VMware will frown upon this one, but someone
posted a similar hack for WS 6.5 beta, so here it is for WS 7.0 beta. I
finally got around to installing the beta code this morning and
immediately saw a performance issue. VMware Workstation Beta runs in
debug mode by default. It can seriously slow down your VMs. If you are
playing with vSphere and ESX/ESXi 4.0 inside a VM, it is horribly slow
once you get to the VM inside of the VM. This is actually part of the
testing VMware would like you to perform while using the beta.

For Linux, you will find the files in /usr/lib/vmware/bin. For Winders, they are probably somewhere in %PROGRAMS%. I usually stick to Linux for my host.

New Networking Features in vSphere

XtravirtPortal — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 13:34:32 GMT

Title: New Networking Features in vSphere
Author(s): Xtravirt (Peter Grant)
Target Audience: Technical - Intermediate
Current Revision: 1.0 July 2009
First Published: 1 July 2009
Products: VMware ESX 4.0, vSphere
UID: XD10019

Overview:

This Xtravirt white paper gives an overview of the new networking features included in vSphere. In addition to the new VMware distributed virtual switch, it will discuss the third party Cisco Nexus 1000V virtual switch. This document assumes some existing knowledge of virtual networking within a VMware environment.

Key Concepts:

* Summary of new networking features in vSphere and ESX 4.0
* Distributed Virtual Switch
* Cisco Nexus 1000V

Download the full article/whitepaper here: http://xtravirt.com/xd10019

1 vs 2 controllers, continued

microkid — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 12:21:14 GMT

Well, connecting all HD's to one controller was in fact slower than having 2 controllers. It's approx 10% slower.
So I reverted back to 2 controllers:
ICH10 SATA 320GB, VM's
Dell Perc 5/i RAID-5, 2TB, data

Performance Enhancements in vSphere 4.0

hgaidhani — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 05:41:30 GMT

Now that vSphere 4.0 is generally available, I have been getting several questions everyday about the performance enhancements in vSphere 4.0. So here's a list that tries to compile all VMware vSphere performance resources. Hopefully I have captured all that's available as of today - there's more work in progress and I will post an update at a later date to reflect the new additions.

First, I recommend starting with the whitepaper that I co-authored: What’s New in VMware vSphere™ 4: Performance Enhancements.
You can also listen to the webcast I did on this topic here.

Next you can delve into specific areas of your interest either by reading detailed performance white papers or blog posts at the VROOM! blog.

Here's list of what's available today:

Performance White Papers

VROOM! Blog Posts

If you do not have the patience to go through the detailed white papers, you can catch quick summary of the results for all the above performance white papers on the VROOM! blog as well.

Storage VMotion and independent disks

Chuck8773 — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 21:11:48 GMT

I have been impressed with many features of ESX4 and was again today. We currently, in ESX 3.5 U4, have VM's connect to their iSCSI volume with a software iSCSI initiator within the VM for performance reasons. This way we can give the VM multiple NICs in the SAN network and have it use multiple Gbps links to the volume. When using a VMDK on an iSCSI volume, we are llimited to a single Gbps link. That extra Gbps link or two really makes a difference.

With ESX4 supporting MPIO, we can now justify removing the iSCSI software from the VM and move all the data to a VMDK with a performance improvement, as the host has more connections to the SAN than the VM did.

Problem: In our current environment, when we snapshot the VM, system state is all that is snapped. Reverting only affects the system. If we move to VMDKs, now the snapshot affects data as well. This would be bad to roll back to a snapshot for an Exchange server.

Solution: Put the data VMDK into persistent mode so snapshots do not affect it. Great!

Another problem: Independent disks cannot be migrated with the VM online as snapshots cannot be taken.

Today I tested this on ESX4. It works. I have a VM with two disks, one is independent. Storage vmotion moved both disks.

Again, very impressed.

Charles Killmer

Dear VMware: Pick a Common (SUPPORTED) Virtual Appliance OS…Please….

dconvery — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 15:24:19 GMT

One of my pet peeves is that each virtual appliance coming out of
VMware is that each different virtual appliance released by them is
based on a different OS. Some of these do not even have documented
methods for updating the OS. We all know that no matter what OS is
running on a system, there will be updates for stability and security.
Almost every time I begin an engagement with a customer and it involves
using a virtual appliance, their security wonks get all pissy with me
and I need to show that I have the latest security patches installed
before I even connect the appliance to their network.

This all started with the HealthCheck Appliance, which is a tool
available to partners. Its running Ubuntu 7.10 Server JEOS. Great! It
is an unsupported, deprecated OS. If you know anything about Ubuntu,
you know that the “Long Term Support” (LTS) versions are released every
other year. So, the latest LTS version is 8.04 and the previous is
6.06. No big deal, right?

Read more…
[
|http://www.dailyhypervisor.com/#|Click me to see the sites.]

Core i7 VM Server is rolling along

parkinglot7 — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 13:34:23 GMT

Since my initial setup with Server 2, I haven't rebooted the Host machine since about June 9th. The Core i7 seems to be humming right along. Ubuntu 9.04 Server 64 - no issues there either.

The GRUB loader that was installed with 9.04 detected the pre-installed Windows Vista, and asked if I wanted to be able to load it. So now if I want, I can load Vista if I ever need. Though as I pointed out, I've never rebooted. I haven't seen any need to boot into Vista yet.

3 GB Ethernet ports point to different networks on LAN for different purposes.

I'm a voip guy, so I'm using this gear to setup a Cisco UCM 7.0 / Unity Conn. 7.0 / AsteriskNow Server.

I'm going to start a mediaWiki on this thing soon too, to capture all my discoveries and acquired knowledge. Before I forget them and become dumb again.

As for the consoling to my machines, I do have to RDP to my XP Pro running on VMWare fusion on my Mac, because the Cntrl + Alt does not work properly when directly using the VMWare fusion console. The system shifts the input context from my XPonFusion out to my Mac instead of from the Server 2 Console window to XPonFusion. How annoying!

I'm using a ZT Systems hardware from Costco. Cheapest fully built i7 machine. I know, I could build my own for cheaper, but I decided long ago, I'm not going to be Tech Support for my self. Anyway they have a 90-day warranty on the whole system. If I don't like it, or it does not work, I take it back to the local store for full refund. Oh, and they dropped the price another $100 this week.

I added 2-320 SATA drives so my guest OSes with more intensive read/write activities can be separated from each other.

Performance do SQL Server no vSphere 4

aandriolli — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 12:57:16 GMT

Um estudo detalhado sobre a performance do SQL Server em máquinas virtuais VMware, usando o ESX 4:

http://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2009/06/sql-sever-performance-on-vsphere.html

Acaba de sair do forno.

Este artigo é mais um do time de performance da VMware, que costuma publicar estudos como esse em seu blog chamado VROOM.

Guia para quem quer configurar redes no ESX via linha de comando

aandriolli — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 12:53:18 GMT

Se você prefere configurar suas redes, switches virtuais e portgroups pela linha de comando, então essa é pra você:

http://blog.scottlowe.org/2009/06/23/new-user-networking-config-guide/

Catálogo de sessões do VMworld 2009 já está disponível

aandriolli — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 12:50:22 GMT

Se você está planejando ir ao VMworld 2009, já pode começar a escolher as sessões de que pretende participar no catálogo de sessões:

https://vmworld2009.wingateweb.com/scheduler/catalog/catalog.jsp

São apresentações, labs, demos, enfim, um mundo. Vá escolhendo, porque em breve você poderá registrar (também pelo site) suas escolhas e montar sua agenda do VMworld. Algumas sessões costumam ser bastante concorridas, por isso não deixe pra última hora.

Convert a physical machine to a virtual machine using VMware Converter

quintes — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 06:11:28 GMT

Repost from my blog: http://quintesvanaswegen.com/2009/06/29/convert-a-physical-machine-to-a-virtual-machine-using-vmware-converter/

Introductions

that1guynick — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 03:49:11 GMT

In 1999, a friend of mine approached me asking me if I wanted to help him run some cables in an office building for $10/hr. I said sure. Being a techy-guy, I started asking questions about what cables were what, where they plugged in, and why they plugged in there...

It was all downhill from there.

Less than 2 years later, I was an MCSE-2000. For the past 10 years, I've worked in various systems administration positions, primarily focusing on Active Directory & Exchange domains. We did lots of Exchange migrations and AD 2000-to-2003 migrations earlier in the decade, because well, that's what admins did in those days.

But it wasn't until my current employer and I embraced the idea of virtualization that I truly came into my own. I finally found something I wanted to "specialize" in.

Since then, everything we have done has always had the "should we virtualize it?" tagline added to it, and more recently, it has been, "is there any reason why we can't virtualize it?"

My virtual career path started with ESX 3.0, and NetApp shared storage. Most of what I discuss here will be our trials and tribulations with migrating a company in the Healthcare sector (non-hospital) to the virtual world of consolidating servers and storage.

I welcome the feedback and any questions anyone and everyone might have, and hope that this not only serves as a track in my progress, but as a way for me to help fellow admins with situations I may have already encountered.

Nick Howell
Datacenter Engineer

Problems with hyper-v (Part 2)

jayctd — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 21:27:32 GMT

This one I want to discuss management

First of all microsoft
states that best practices is to deploy hyper-v on server-core. As
someone with a long history of someone with CLI experience the idea of
managing a windows server, specially your single point of failure with
microsofts badly implemented CLI interface makes me cringe.

In
test lab we already ran across one situation which having a
comprehensive interface would have saved a lot of work. In the lab we
deployed a stand alone server-core test platform, and some virtuals ...
we then decided to build out a domain and join it to the domain. The
problem being after that we did not have WMI rights to remotly open the
server manager remotly , and to join it to the SCVMM instance we needed
to update hyper-v to the RC. But the virtuals we deployed earlier
started before the main OS instance and we could not update hyper-v
with virtuals running.

We got the problem resolved (removing and
re-adding it to the domain after deleting the computer profile)
resolved but simply being able to stop virtuals from the CLI would have
saved a lot of troubleshooting

SCVMM VS VM

My second qualm is SCVMM which seems very 1st release, problems with naming between the two and how it behaves are common.

SCVMM
also falls short in controlls in a HA mode, which is controlled through
microsoft clustering not within SCVMM moving virtuals, controlling
them, all of which is done outside the SCVMM the tool just does not
have the power, controlls or reliability

We found ourselfs going
back to VM at times as well to just perform simple actions like
controlling the virtual networks. Some of this may be overcome with
familiarity with the tool but a lot of it just feels more disjointed.

Monitoring

Hyper-v,
from a built in standpoint hyper-v has almost NO advanced monitoring
capability. Tracking either virtual or host performance is an almost
imposible task. Scaling out to the cluster level and tracking
performance is almost impossible

They promice this ability but
they achive it through Pro-tips which is only avalaible deploying SC
Opps manager which a very large and complicated and expensive product.
I am a fan of opps man but deploying such a huge product for what
SHOULD be integrated into SCVMM seems silly to me, not to mention
requiring a lot of work to get out of the box

I will discuss some of the other shortcomings later

The problems with Hyper-V and HA in an ISCSI environment

jayctd — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 21:27:02 GMT

Hyper-v and High availability in an ISCSI environment
I am writing
this after doing a fairly extensive multi month test lab / first gen
deployment of hyper-v and wanted to talk about some of the specific
shortcomings of hyper-v in a high availability configuration. While
there are many many other shortcomings of this version 1 software I
wanted to address them separately as to not get overwhelmed by the topic.

This is based off the release code not the beta and not off of RC2

How it does it

For
those of you not familiar hyper-v deployed as a roll on top of server
2008 integrates and uses Microsoft clustering to provide high
availability and failover capacity.
To the local operating system
the drive that the virtual hard disk resides on is shared among the
cluster nodes, it is active on one and passive on all other nodes (even
if they have other shared drives) they also use a “quorum” drive (the
name has changed with 2008 clustering but the effect is the same) that
shares a hive to control cluster resources.
In the case of a failure
or initiating of a transfer the active drive becomes passive on the
original host and it transfers over to the target machine

The problem

The problem is that that Microsoft’s NTFS file system does not handle multiple server access to the same volume.
What
this means is that when you want to “move” a virtual between two hosts
you have to fail the ENTIRE volume that the virtual hard disk and
configuration files reside on over to the new host AT THE SAME TIME.
The
only practical way in this sort of setup if you want to have a fraction
of the functionality available to vmware is to setup each virtual on
its own separate volume.
Personally this is ridiculous and
unfeasible solution to the shortcomings of NTFS. It also causes
problems with many of the large players in ISCSI SANS, for example our
equallogic arrays currently (in version 4.05 of their firmware) only
allow a max of 512 simultaneous ISCSI connections to a pool, assuming
that we could today convert all of our 200 ESX virtuals over to hyper-v
on the same host density we would be talking roughly 4800 ISCSI
connections with MPIO! Or 9.4 times the maximum we can have in a pool
(even if we broke our arrays into separate pools we will still be at 3
times the maximum possible)

Conclusion

While
too many hyper-v is very attractive due from a cost perspective
(especially if using SPLA) this combined with many other flaws in the
product put it years behind ESX from a feature/performance/reliability
and manageability standpoint … hopefully I will touch on some of the
other issues a bit later

Equallogic CLI commands (Bash)

jayctd — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 21:23:48 GMT

As it is notoriously hard to find a command line reference I figure I
would post some out here, i would note that these should not be done
unless authorized by your vendor you have a good chance to shoot
yourself in the foot with these.

That being said here are some of them

*
All the below commands are taken from after you successfully login to
the array with your account via SSH or telnet (SSH prefered)
BASH shell

su exec /bin/bash

This one brings you into their bash shell with most of the advanced commands

*all the following commands are taken from the point that you are logged into the bash shell from this point forward

db task

This shows the table with queued tasks

db -remove task

This clears the table with the queued tasks

db plan

This shows the plan table

db -remove plan

This clears the table with the queued tasks

db command

This shows the table with queued user tasks

db -remove plan

This clears the plan table

pm mononce

This shows the current page movement, all page balancing including array extraction and volume moves (key command to know)

pm balanceconfig off

This
disables page balancing (volumes and arrays can still be moved just not
page balancing), be carefull with this one as you can get slices
stranded on more then 3 arrays and it can cause performance issues as
it has to track across multiuple arrays

pm balanceconfig perf

This turns page balancing back on

pm member

This shows member status (including group lead)

ps aux

This shows processor/memory statistics for processes

eqlinit stop MgmtExec

Stops
the MgmtExec service (this is ok to do for SHORT periods of time
mgmtexec along with many other tasks handles iscsi logins so it is very
very bad if you leave it disabled and volumes log out and try to log
back in)

eqlinit start MgmtExec

Starts the mgmtexec service

In
a future post I will add volume commands these are the troubleshooting
commands that can give you some insight into what the arrays are doing

Ubuntu Sources List auto-pgp key updates from Launchpad

ecrossley — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 17:25:41 GMT

While working with Ubuntu 9.04 i've found that it's quite a pain to update your software sources listing with new software sources that you trust. this is because each trusted software source from Launchpad has a PGP security key that needs to be imported so that you can validate that you are pulling source code from the website.

I've found a nifty script that was written by someone on the internet and a few instructions which allow for easier management of this process. Essentially, you add a software source to your software sources list via System - Administrations - Software Sources - (enter root password) - Third party software tab. Once you enter in the software source, the script and associated updates will automagically collect the proper PGP keys necessary to allow you access into the repositories on launchpad, when you run apt-get update.

Enjoy!

PS - I didn't write the script, nor the code inside of the readme but I have validated that it works with no security risk. The text of the readme is my own.

Readme contents:

How to automatically add new PPA repo security keys when doing a normal apt-get update:

1. Save the script which adds the keys for all your PPA repos from this email.

2. Extract and put it in /usr/local/bin

3. Chmod the script to 775. Do this by changing to /usr/local/bin and then typing chmod 775 launchpad-update into the terminal.

4. Create a new file, "etc/apt/apt.conf.d/05ppa" (file 05ppa which should be located in etc/apt/apt.conf.d) and put this in it:

APT::Update::Pre-Invoke { "if ~~-x /usr/local/bin/launchpad-update~~ ; then /usr/local/bin/launchpad-update; fi"; };

5. That's it. This will execute the script in local/bin and automatically import any security keys from the PGP keyserver to support repositories that you have added to your 9.04 system. Its an easy way to work through the adding a repository in system sources thing.

Ubuntu and VMWare Workstation Networking

ecrossley — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 17:15:59 GMT

I'm running Ubuntu 64 bit on my T-61 laptop as the host OS (so that I could actually use the full 4GB of ram issued to me when I received my laptop). I run workstation 6.5 and host all of my VM's I use to accomplish my job functions. One of the initial challenges that I ran into while running Workstation on Ubuntu started when I was creating a laptop lab to host ESX 3.5 and ESXi servers inside Workstation on my laptop. During boot time, ESX and ESXi attempt to put your network connections into promiscuous mode, which under Ubuntu isn't possible without the proper read / write permissions on the /dev/vmnet* items.

As such, I created a simple script that, once included in /etc/init.d will allow this action to occur during system startup. I'm attaching both the simple script and the instructions on how to execute and add this component to your startup sequence for Ubuntu. I've also attached a tar.gz file which includes both the script and the instructions.

Enjoy.

Read me file information:

How to set VMnets at startup:

1) Extract the vmnetset.tar.gz file to your desktop or any other location.

2) Copy the vmnetset.sh script to your /etc/init.d directory by executing the following:
a) cp /directory/where/the/script/is/vmnetset.sh /etc/init.d/

3) Execute the following commands to set the script to boot and to assign the proper symlinks for bootup
a) sudo update-rc.d vmnetset.sh defaults
b) sudo chmod +x vmnetset.sh

4) Once completed, reboot system and validate your network settings by:
a) open a terminal window and type ls -l /dev |grep vmnet

If all vmnet settings are set rw, you are good to go!

To remove the script from startup: sudo update-rc.d -f vmnetset.sh remove

2 controllers vs 1 controller

microkid — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 11:14:31 GMT

My whitebox has an onboard ICH10 controller and an additional Dell Perc 5/i controller. The stup is as follows:
ICH10: single 320GB disk for all VM's
Perc : 3 x 1TB in RAID-5 for my data

As the perc has an own cpu and 256MB cache, I thought it would be wise to move the 320GB disk to the perc controller. So said, so done. But after doing some testing (moving and copying files) it became clear the new setup was in fact slower. So having more than 1 controller seems to be faster.
I will revert to the original setup soon and test again.

Catbird V-Security: V-Agent Installation Guide

XtravirtPortal — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 11:13:50 GMT

Title: Catbird V-Security: V-Agent Installation Guide
Author(s): Xtravirt (Paul Buckle)
Target Audience: Technical - Novice
First Published: 29 June 2009
Products: Catbird V-Security

The wide-ranging benefits of virtualization are hard to ignore, but as enterprises develop their confidence in the technology and extend its deployment to mission
critical functions, focus needs to be drawn to one of its shortcomings. While traditional processes and methodologies typically work equally as well in a virtual environment, there is an exception when it comes to IT security.

This white paper provides information on the following key features:

The security risks in a virtual environment
The use of Catbird V-Security to address those risks
Installation of the V-Agent component of Catbird V-Security

Get the full free article/paper here: http://xtravirt.com/node/195

TAM Weekly Newsletter (Edition 1.20) 29 June 2009

nisserow — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 08:37:53 GMT

Hi everyone here is this weeks newsletter. Please note that there will be no newsletter next week as I will be on leave. I have also attached information on the upcoming VMware Virtualization Seminar Series 2009 in APAC.

Kind Regards

Neil Isserow | VCP | Technical Account Manager - Queensland |
VMware Australia

How to download YouTube videos (FLV)?

desertfish — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 03:43:19 GMT

Leawo YouTube Download is a free YouTube video Downloader, which can be used to download YouTube videos, Flash videos from YouTube and other video sharing sites. Leawo YouTube Download is very easy to use. With it,you could open video sharing sites to download videos with mouse-click. And the YouTube videos also can be downloaded off by dragging the thumbnails of videos into it.

Here, below is a tutorial which will show you how to download YouTube videos quickly with Leawo YouTube Download.

Step1: Open Leawo YouTube Download and input YouTube URL into it.

Step 2: Click the video you want to download for playing, and then click the “Download” button on the pop-up window to start downloading.

Step 3: The status of downloading can be checked on the following interface.

Step 4: If want to view the downloaded YouTube videos, you could double click the downloaded video on the following interface and play it with a
built-in flash video player which has full-screen capability.

Join the VMware Studio 2.0 Beta Program

Badsah — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 02:26:06 GMT

We are pleased to announce that the beta version of VMware Studio 2.0 has been released and is available for download. We look forward to receiving your feedback - issues, feature requests, suggestions for improvement - through the Discussions forum in the VMware Studio 2.0 Beta Program Community.

If you already have a Store account on VMware.com, register for the beta directly.
If you do not have a Store account, please create an account AND join the beta.

The VMware Team

See my blog

Defitek — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 01:20:03 GMT

Please go to http://www.defitek.com/blog

VCP

kmonser — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 15:16:20 GMT

kmonser is now a VCP.

VMworld 2009

aandriolli — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 14:42:30 GMT

Já tá chegando a hora do VMworld 2009 - o maior evento de virtualização no mundo:

Este ano vai ser em San Francisco, no mesmo lugar onde a Apple fez o lançamento do iPhone. É neste evento que a VMware anuncia as novidades e novas funções. Há muitas seções bastante técnicas. Você também pode se inscrever nos laboratórios e experimentar os produtos com experts te guiando.

O site é o http://www.vmworld2009.com

Virtualizando Domain Controllers com VMware

aandriolli — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 14:35:31 GMT

Já virtualizou seus controladores de domínio Windows? Tá pensando em virtualizar?

Esta é a melhor referência que conheço no assunto. É um artigo no Knowledge Base da VMware:

Virtualizing existing domain controllers

Clusters Microsoft Windows em VMware vSphere 4.0

aandriolli — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 14:31:16 GMT

Já saiu o guia atualizado para montagem de clusters MSCS em VMware no ESX 4/vCenter 4:

Setup for Failover Clustering and Microsoft Cluster Service

My view on the new TrendMicro Smart Scan Server Virtual Appliance

larstr — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 14:24:29 GMT

During the past year we've seen more and more of the old established software vendors starting to support VMware. Either by allowing their software to run on VMware or by offering solutions directly as virtual appliances.

I recently attended a presentation by Trend Micro where they told us that they were now offering a virtual OfficeScan appliance for VMware environments and that you would by using this appliance would get very good performance. Much better than you would if you ran it physically on a traditional windows server.

I think it's amazing that such products are finally targetting virtual environments. It's something I've been waiting for for many years, and now finally, things are happening!

Today I installed this appliance to see what it's good for. It's shipped as an iso file and installation is very quick. I think the initial install took about 10 minutes if not less.

When you look a bit under the hood of this VM you can tell it's a modified 64 bit RHEL 5.2 VM. Trend Micro is apparently also catching on to the cloud terminology:

bash-3.2# cat /etc/redhat-release
Cloud Scan Service release 3 (Final)

RHEL is a great OS and it is the base for many vendors (including the VMware Service Console). One should however be aware that RHEL does not support VMI (paravirt_ops) because it's using a too old kernel (and they haven't backported this functionality like SUSE did).

VMware has an old Best Practices document that recommends that a virtual appliance is shipped with easy configuration through graphical or web interfaces. This appliance is following these steps with a graphical installer and a web interface that is available after installation is done. The best practices also states:

"It is also important that your virtual appliance includes VMware Tools. VMware Tools provides optimized drivers for VMware virtual hardware and management tools that can monitor and manage the virtual appliance with VMware VirtualCenter."

VMware Tools was not installed in this VM per default, but as it was based on RHEL 5.2 it should be fairly easy to install.

I did however need to change a few things to get it to mount the cdrom:
1. I added the following line to /etc/fstab

/dev/hda /media/cdrom udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0

2. I created the directory /media/cdrom

Now I could (After having chosen Install VMware Tools from the menu) mount the virtual cdrom containing the tools with the command mount /dev/cdrom

Installing VMware Tools was now a breeze. I accepted all defaults and they installed successfully.

One other thing I found was that this VM wasn't following VMware's best practices on Timekeeping. VMware's kb article recommend you to add the parameters notsc divider=10

By adding those parameters to the boot image line in /boot/grub/menu.lst it will not only give you better timekeeping, but it will also give you better performance.

By doing these very few and easy steps I suddenly have a VM that is much better performing than it was out of the box. I hope also the software vendors will realize this soon so also the average admin can get optimal performance without having to read this blog posting first.

Lars

Bienvenidos

Aelis — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:47:31 GMT

Bienvenidos al blog de Virtualizacion de Aelis por Pablo Cruces.

DELL lanza nuevos paquetes orientados a la virtualizacion

Aelis — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:46:52 GMT

Los nuevos paquetes orientados a la virtualización (in-a-box) de DELL se extienden a todos los tamaños de empresas: desde Enterprise a SMB.
Los productos para Enterprise incluyen tecnologías de Cisco, VMware y Novell en servidores Dell PowerEdge M-series blades y EqualLogic P6000 iSCSI storage.
Para SMBs, Dell ha desarrollado una configuración consistente en el PowerEdge R710 server, Dell PowerVault MD3000 y PowerVault DL 2000 storage arrays.
The PowerEdge R710 esta basado en el Intel Xeon, en formato 2U rack que incluye el software Dell Lifecycle Controller.
El PowerVault MD3000 es un storage modular que soporta hasta 4 PowerEdge servers y 45 discos; con una capacidad máxima de 45 TB (terabytes). Soporta discos SAS y SATA.

VMware integrara tecnologias de HP en sus productos

Aelis — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:46:22 GMT

VMware anuncia que ha firmado un acuerdo OEM para integrar HP Discovery & Dependency Mapping software en su producto WMware vCenter suite y continuaran trabajando conjuntamente para integrar nuevos sistemas de manejo de datacenters.
Del otro lado, HP ha integrado VMware ThinApp con su plataforma de manejo de politicas basadas en HP CLient Automation, lo que permitirá a las empresas estandarizar en un solo producto: publicación, despliegue, ejecución y reporte de aplicaciones virtualizadas a través de plantillas que simplificaran los requerimientos hardware y su mantenimiento.
Se confirma de este modo las alianzas entre compañías para ofertar soluciones completas y facilitar la integración de sistemas físicos y virtuales en los clientes finales.

HP acaba de lanzar dos equipos optimizados para procesos de virtualización en los que también se ha mejorado el apartado de gráficos.

Aelis — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:46:12 GMT

Los nuevos HP gt7725 Thin Client y HP Proliant xw2x220c Blade Workstation, capaces de ofrecer una mejor experiencia multimedia y de flexibilidad y rendimiento. Permiten a los clientes reducir de forma significativa los riesgos con respecto a la seguridad, además de los costes de manejo y soporte.

Hewlett-Packard ha actualizado su línea de ordenadores ligeros con nuevos equipos que favorecen la implantación del modelo de virtualización de escritorio.

Aelis — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:46:06 GMT

HP acaba de anunciar la disponibilidad de las nuevas propuestas dentro del segmento de Thin Client a través de 3 modelos renovados: gt7720 Performance Series, t5630w Flexible Series y t5730w Flexible Series.

La compañía ha buscado en su diseño y prestaciones la mejor combinación para satisfacer las necesidades de los clientes que tienen implantadas soluciones de virtualización o se encuentran en este proceso de actualización.

Próximo lanzamiento de Microsoft Security Essentials

Aelis — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:45:59 GMT

Microsoft anuncia oficialmente el nombre final del antivirus que pretenderá derrotar a Symantec o McAfee: Microsoft Security Essentials.
Sera gratuito para todos aquellos equipos con Microsoft original previa validación del mismo en la instalación.
Security Essentials ofrecerá protección contra spyware, rootkits, troyanos y virus y se cree que no ocupara muchos recursos de un PC una vez que este instalado. El antivirus estará a la venta a fines de este 2009 y se comercializara en versiones de 32 y 64 bits.

Microsoft prepara el lanzamiento de upgrades a Windows 7

Aelis — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:45:54 GMT

Microsoft a registrado recientemente el site: windows7upgradeoption.com desde el que poder actualizar a precios competitivos los SO de equipos comprados entre el 26 de junio hasta Enero de 2010 para equipos nuevos con Windows Vista Home Premium, Business o Ultimate.

Paralelamente ha confirmado que extenderá la fecha final para downgrades a XP desde Vista hasta Abril de 2011, curiosas decisión teniendo en cuenta las buenas expectativas que ha generado la primera beta de Windows 7.

HP maximiza el beneficio de la virtualizazion con New Mobile Thin Client.

Aelis — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:45:48 GMT

HP ha introducido en el mercado un nuevo catalogo de Desktops y Thin Clients pensados para maximixar el beneficion de la virtualizacion, mejorando la seguridad y reduciendo el cosunmo de recursos.
Los nuevos Desktops seran los primeros en cumplir con las especificaciones de la verison 5.0 de Energy Star. Modelos como HP t5145, HP t5540, HP t5545, HP t5630 and HP t5630w permitiran tambien elegir entre CE, Windows Embedded Standard y Linux.

Nueva release Oracle VM 2.1.5

Aelis — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:44:55 GMT

Oracle parace no estar interesada en clarificar que va a ocurrir con su hypervisor en el futuro tras la compra de Sun y de Virtual Iron
Esta actualizacion soluciona varios bugs y añade una nueva interface de linea de comandos (CLI) y un servidor para APIs (Web Services API) para el Oracle VM Manager.
Mas info en: http://www.oracle.com/

Nueva version VMware Fusion 2.0.5 para MAC

Aelis — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:44:39 GMT

La nueva version VMware Fusion 2.0.5 para MAC ya esta en el mercado. Se puede actualizar gratuitamente deade la version 1 y 2.
-Soporta MAC OS X con Intel Xeon 5500 y 3500 (basados en Nehalem micro-arquitectura)
-Soporte experimental para MAC OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard (solo 32bit)
-Soporta Ubuntu 9.04
-Reduce el consumo de CPU y resuelve mas de 80 bugs
Mas info: http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/

Nueva aplicacion Vmanage para iPhone

Aelis — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:44:04 GMT

La nueva aplicacion Vmanage para iPhone permite gestionar entornos virtuales de VMware desde el movil iPhone. Desarrollada para entornos criticos en los que manejar a distancia desde cualquier punto con cobertura movil tareas como Vmotion, examinar MV´s, configuracion de los entornos Virtual Center, etc. Permite incluso la conexion a traves de VPN o directamente a la IP del Virtual Center por el puerto 443.
Mas info en: http://www.ebapps.com/EB_Studios/VManage.html

Nueva herramienta gratuita para verificar configuracion de servidores ESX

Aelis — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:42:42 GMT

Nueva herramienta gratuita de Tripwire pra verficar la configuracion de los servidores ESX y de las maquinas virtuales.
Se trata de una version ligera de la inicial Tripwire Enterprise for VMware que permite analizar y revisar la configuracion de los ESX y sus mv´s identificando aquellas que no este de acorde con las recomendaciones de VMWare, dando incluso unas pequelas guias de como corregir o modificar las configuraciones.
La aplicacion puede ser descargada de http://www.tripwire.com/configcheck/

Tweaking vSphere Performance For High-Consolidation Workloads

drummonds — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:13:21 GMT

I was recently copied on an internal thread discussing a performance tweak for VMware vSphere. The thread discussed gains that can be derived from an adjustment to the CPU scheduler. In ESX 3.5, ESX's cell construct limited vCPU mobility between different sockets. ESX 4.0 has no such limitations and its aggressive migrations are non-optimal in some cases.

This thread details the application of this change in ESX 4 and provides some insight into its impact. This scheduler modification is going to be baked in to the first update to ESX 4.

On 4socket (or more) Dunnington (or any non-NUMA) platform, VMmark score can be further improved by enabling CoschedHandoffLLC: In console OS, it can be enabled via vsish (available from VMware*debug-tools*.rpm):

vsish -e set /config/Cpu/intOpts/CoschedHandoffLLC 1
I believe that config parameter is also tunable through VC or VI client. (haven't confirmed myself)

The degree of improvement depends on the configurations but in one case, the improvement was about 10 - 20%.

In default setting, VMmark may suffer many inter-package vcpu migrations which causes performance degradation. Setting CoschedHandoffLLC reduces the number of inter-package vcpu migrations and recovers performance loss.

The fix is disabled by default in ESX 4.0 GA but will be enabled by default in ESX 4.0 u1.

Try this out and let me know if you see a significant change on any of your workloads.

BC2704: Site Recovery Manager, a real user experience

Virtual_JTW — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 13:38:02 GMT

VMworld must be my destiny! Let me explain...

I've been to every VMworld since the first was held in 2004. I really thought this was the first year I was going to miss the conference. The odds just weren't in my favor: the economy busted right around last year's VMworld and since then my employer has entered Chapter 11 (but should come back out of it relatively quickly) and I can't afford to cover the costs myself. I tried to reassure myself by remembering the last conference held in San Francisco was my least favorite thus far (which didn't really work anyway).

Then in March, my local VMware Systems Engineer, Dave, asked if I wanted to present my Site Recovery Manager (SRM) experience at this year's conference. My first reaction was not only "no", but "hell no". After a little more thought, I quickly changed my mind. I think SRM is a great product that isn't getting the attention it deserves. I'm also proud of what our little team has accomplished here in such a short amount of time. And finally, I enjoy the occasional challenge and believe this helps one to keep growing professionally and keep life interesting.

In case you didn't know, VMware typically covers the cost of the conference for speakers. The only thing left was to convince management to cover the travel costs which was not easy given the current financial circumstances. But in the end I was given approval and just like that, I'm VMworld bound again this year!

If you're considering SRM or are just getting started, check out my session "BC2704: Site Recovery Manager, a real user experience". I promise it will be worth your time. I can talk about this stuff for hours and Dave and I will answer all of your questions - from technical SRM product to general disaster recovery and everything in-between.

Here's the abstract:

"Learn from a customer in the Midwest, all of their experiences implementing, testing and running Site Recovery Manager in a production environment. Hear their challenges and how their SRM implementation has worked for them. Find the facts you need to know to maximize the success of your disaster recovery solution with SRM."

See you there!

StylePix(Image Editor) Ver 1.0 has begun beta testing

kansapa — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 01:54:17 GMT

Now to introduce a program that is lightweight and versatile beyond, a graphic image editor.

Stylepix is Style + Pictures . This means your pictures with nice style. Stylepix will help you edit your pictures fast and easy way. You could easily resize, rotate or change file's type with Stylepix. Stylepix is lite. It consumes low memory and low cpu usage. So, The Stylepix will work in a virtual machine

Features

Convenient working environment
Variety selection tools
Features a variety of drawing
Review and convenient image viewing
Batch processing
Image transformation tools
Correction and enhancement tools
30 kinds of practical image filter
Multi-layer supports
Change desktop background

Screenshots

More Information

Publisher: Hornil
Product Information: http://hornil.com/en/products/stylepix/
Download: http://hornil.com/en/downloads/stylepix/

5 Sr. Wintel Engineers needed

KatherineLe — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 18:25:50 GMT

Hello All,

We’re looking for 5 Sr. Wintel Engineers to help assist with a 600+ servers migration across datacenters.

These engineers will perform migration implementation, and HW/OS troubleshooting.

Duration : 4-6 months, possible extension

Preferred locations:

· 1st choice Atlanta, GA;

· 2nd choice Mason, OH;

· other locations OK, require ~50% travel for months June, July, mostly remote afterward. United States applicants only, please.

Required:

5+ Years experience in Windows server administration and support

Windows Server 2000 to 2008.

Excellent troubleshooting skills

Experience with Blade, rack mounted, tower servers

Server and Application Migration Experience using VMware Converter, Acronis, Ghost, or “Imaging Tool”

VMware ESX 3.x
Scripting
SQL
IIS
MCSE
VCP

Please send all resumes and inquiries to:
Katherine Le
KatherineLe118@yahoo.com

PHD Virtual Releases New Freeware Solution: Patch Downloader v6.0

VMSpotlight — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 14:38:44 GMT

http://phdvirtual.com/

PHD Virtual Technologies, provider of the pioneering esXpress data protection and recovery solution for virtual machines, today announced availability of Patch Downloader version 6.0, a new freeware solution to simplify patch downloading for various VMware ESX versions.

Patch Downloader version 6.0 is the fifth free virtualization utility to be offered by PHD Virtual as part of its longstanding commitment to the virtualization community.

Patch Downloader v6.0 eases the pain of downloading patches for various ESX versions from the VMware support site by automating the process for users that cannot use the VMware Update Manager. Now, rather than downloading each patch manually through a Java Download manager, VMware administrators can simply select the version of ESX from the Patch downloader drop down menu, and select the file repository (including folder, drive map, SMB share, etc.) to download the patches to. The new freeware solution will list all of the available patches and information about the patches including severity of the problem it corrects, what the impact on VM/Host uptime is, and a description of the problem fixed. Downloads of selected patches are performed with a simple click making it easy to keep the ESX patch repository up to date.

Read the full post here: PHD Virtual Releases New Freeware Solution: Patch Downloader v6.0

Add user on ESX 3.5

cfo — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 12:24:41 GMT

Login to service console
Type "useradd sshuser" (or whatever username you want to use) to add the user
Type "passwd sshuser" to set the password for this user
Type "usermod -g root sshuser" to add the user to the root group
Type "usermod -u 0 sshuser" to change the UID of the user to zero to match root

"Cannot access remote host"- When try to download and install plug-ins out side the place where Virtula Center is installed.

Chaitra — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 04:31:05 GMT

I encoutered a issue where we were unable to download and install the VMware converter and VMware Update Manager. (Vsphere)

It errored out time and again. We tried the KB: kb.vmware.com/kb/1005996 and kb.vmware.com/kb/1004887

The issue still persisted.

1. The local machine had Anti-virus installed in it.

2. Both the plug-in were installed using the IP address.

Solution:

1. Tried to reinstall the plug-in using the FQDN(which is recomended)

2. Whenever a Firewall is involved please add all the ports used by VC and the plugins manually

This resolved the issue and the port are mentioned when we install the plugin.

Quick Resources

pic — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 22:14:10 GMT

One of the first places I typically go when I start learning something new is to start with official documentation:

VMware ESX 4.0 and VMware vCenter Server 4.0
VMware ESXi 4.0 Installable and VMware vCenter Server 4.0
VMware ESXi 4.0 Embedded and VMware vCenter Server 4.0

An interesting, though typically unguided, way to keep on top of what's current is the VMTN Blog:
VMTN Blog

Liftoff

pic — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 21:11:37 GMT

Hey all,
I'm attempting to gain some blogging experience and I've decided to start with the release of our new vSphere products.

I have been teaching ESX server and Virtual Center since 2003 and I'm hoping to share some perspectives using the resources I have available to me as a VMware employee.

So, my first goal is to train myself to become a regular blog poster. This liftoff announcement just serves as an introduction to what I'm hoping to blog about.

I've taught the What's New class 12 times as of today and will begin ICM beginning July 7.

This blog will have a distinctly educational/training perspective and I'm not quite sure how this is going to look yet, so be patient as I learn.

I'll be putting some real content up very shortly.

vPic

Nuevo bundle Veeam Essentials para VMware vSphere Essentials

Aelis — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 19:48:34 GMT

Veeam Essentials es un un nuevo paquete de productos orientados a empresas tipo SMB (pequeñas y medianas) que ya posean en produccion o tengan intencion de adquirir VMware Essentials o Essentials Plus; lo que situia a esta compañia como lider en productos de backup y monitorizacion para entornos VMware.
Este bundle incluye: Veeam Backup & Replication; Veeam Reporte Enterprise y Veeam Monitor con soporte 8x5 y hasta 6 sockets.

Windows 7 y Windows Server 2008 R2 disponibles en Octubre de 2009

Aelis — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 19:47:45 GMT

Microsoft ha anunciado que Windows 7 y Windows Server 2008 R2 disponibles el 22 de Octubre de 2009. Tambien se lanzara una opcion de actualizacion para aquellos pc basados en Widnows Vista con el fin de facilitar la distribucion a los partners

Oracle suspende el desarollo de productos Virtual Iron en favor de Oracle VM

Aelis — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 19:46:10 GMT

Oracle suspende el desarollo de productos Virtual Iron en favor de Oracle VM

Oracle adquirio hace semanas la empresa Virtual Iron con el fin de mejorar su plataforma de virtualizacion optimizada para su propia bbdd.
Recientemente a comunicado que abandona el desarrollo de productos Virtual Iron-ware como tales para pasar a integrar su tecnologia en la plataforma Oracle VM, aunque aun no ha desvelado en que forma se fusionaran ambos productos ni en que fechas estaran disponibles en el mercado.

VMware prevé la virtualización de móviles para 2010

Aelis — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 19:42:06 GMT

VMware anuncia que su plataforma permitirá a las empresas virtualizar los smartphones y dispositivos móviles en el próximo año.
Stephen Harrod, responsable de tecnologías de VMware, apoya la idea de que los móviles son ya tan importantes como los propios pc´s o portátiles y que muchas veces desempeñan funciones similares. También confirma que este proyecto esta en sus primeras fases y que la idea es crear la "VMware Mobile Virtualization Plataform" para que los usuarios puedan mover sus móviles entre diferentes terminales físicos de telefonía.

Roy Mikes announces esXpress comparison document

VMSpotlight — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 13:17:29 GMT

This weekend virtualization blogger Roy Mikes (of http://Mikes.eu)
was one of the first people online to release a product comparison
document comparing PHD Virtual’s groundbreaking backup solution esXpress 3.5 to other solutions, including Visioncore’s vRanger, Veeam Backup & Replication 3.1, and VMware vDR 1.0.

Roy can also be found on Twitter here: http://twitter.com/teovmy

You can also read the article here: http://virtualization-spotlight.com/roy-mikes-announces-esxpress-comparison-document/

Tap into vSphere PVSCSI Performance with Separate VM Boot and Data Drives

anujmodi1 — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 12:20:44 GMT

One of the most interesting new vSphere storage features in my opinion is the new virtual
disk paravirtualized SCSI (PVSCSI) controller. It has been reported *that improved I/O with as much as 18%
reduction in ESX 4 host CPU usage can be achieved by switching to
PVSCSI*. The benefits of PVSCSI performance are twofold:

Reduced data center power and cooling costs to when you consider the impact
of tens of hosts not having to work as hard
A potential higher VM to host consolidation ratio when more CPU cycles are
available

For reference, EMC virtualization guru Chad Sakac provided a post that
explains the PVSCSI performance benefits:

http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2009/05/update-on-the-io-vsphere-performance-test.html

However, *to take advantage of PVSCSI a VM virtual disk configuration
might need to change. Because VMware does not support PVSCSI on the operating
system boot partition, VMs will need to be configured with separate virtual
disks(.vmdk) for the boot drive and the data drive(s)*. Note that all
the posts and articles referenced mention that PVSCSI works on a .vmdk
containing the boot partition. It’s just that VMware officially does not support
it.

So, *the challenge for using PVSCSI then is to migrate services and
applications that exist on VMs that contain both the boot partition and the data
on a single .vmdk*. Although separate boot and data partitions are the
defacto standard for physical servers, the convenience of VMs has lead to a single .vmdk configuration in a lot of IT shops.

Incentive to use PVSCSI therefore actually overlaps with a shift in VM
deployment strategy and ultimately supports and provides performance reasons to
adopt smaller, dedicated .vmdks for boot partitions. This multi .vmdk design
change also has other benefits including optimization of deduplication and DR
site replication technologies.

Here are some quick thoughts on deploying and migrating VMs to a multiple
.vmdk configuration.

Build a golden image VM template with multiple .vmdks, or change future VM
deployment policy to include adding new .vmdks for installing applications and
storing data.
For VMs that already have separate partitions on a single .vmdk use VMware
Converter or another tool to V2V to a new VM with separate .vmdks for each
partition.
When possible, make sure P2V migrations of physical servers result in a
separate .vmdk for each partition
Unfortunately, building new VMs and reinstalling the applications may be the
only choice for existing implementations combined on a single partition .vmdk

Once the .vmdk configuration is ready, *PVSCSI can be enabled
following the processes explained in these posts*:

Adding the PVSCSI adapter
in vSphere –
- http://blog.petecheslock.com/2009/06/03/how-to-add-vmware-paravirtual-scsi-pvscsi-adapters/
For Windows
VMs –
- http://blog.scottlowe.org/2009/06/01/vsphere-virtual-machine-upgrade-process/
For Linux
VMs –
- http://vmadmin.nt.com.au/?p=36
- http://vmadmin.nt.com.au/?p=28

The final question may be “is it worth the effort to migrate to a PVSCSI supporting
configuration for all VMs”? The performance, consolidation, and cost savings
factors would lead most virtual administrators to answer “yes”, but ultimately
the decision will most likely be made on a VM by VM basis. There are some other
factors to consider as well. For example, vSphere Fault Tolerance cannot be
enabled on a VM using PVSCSI.

VMware’s PDF on the new vSphere storage features can be found at http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/VMW_09Q1_WP_vSphereStorage_P10_R1.pdf.

- Hello World -

maiself — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 02:20:54 GMT

Welcome to my vmware blog. Starting this blog as i am using vmware.

Plug-in EVA for VMware

anujmodi1 — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 17:53:35 GMT

Plug-in EVA for VMware

Dowload the plugin

http://www.k-ante.com/page_interne.php?lang=UK&ID=plug_in_vmware

The
astounding success of applications virtualization on the VMware ESX
Server platform has changed the character of IT infrastructures
worldwide. Organizations today are continuing to deploy virtual
machines (VMs) at a record pace. If the advantages of server
virtualization are undisputable there is, however an area that often
requires a particular attention as the environment scales: Storage
management.

The EVA
plug-in for Virtual Infrastructure Client provides administrators a
tool to facilitate the discovery and identification of HP EVA storage
arrays connected to VMware ESX servers.

Administrators
can have a global view across all storage layers (SAN array, VMware ESX
server and Virtual Machines) to keep everything within a single pane of
glass through the VI client interface. As a result, ESX storage
management becomes easier and faster with a lower risk of configuration
mistake.

The
EVA plug-in for VI Client is supported with VMware Virtual
Infrastructure 3. (Update 2, Update 3, and Update 4 releases of VMware
VI Client 2.5, VMware vCenter Server 2.5, VMware ESX 3.5, and VMware
ESXi 3.5). To manage the EVA, the plug-in requires HP EVA Command View
version 7 or above.

Demo: Cisco Nexus 1000V in depth overview

anujmodi1 — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 17:46:14 GMT

Now that Nexus 1000V, the first virtual switch for VMware vSphere is out for
sale ([and
we know everything about it|http://www.virtualization.info/techtalk/2009/02/cisco-on-nexus-1000v-features.html|http://www.virtualization.info/techtalk/2009/02/cisco-on-nexus-1000v-features.html]), Cisco is free to publish detailed demos of the
product in action.

The company just uploaded two new HD videos on Facebook that cover how
vEthernet interfaces relate to VMware vNICs, what are port-profiles, how to
create them with a SSH console and how to apply them with the vSphere client,
how to monitor the network statistics of a virtual machine despite its migration
from a host to another with vMotion.

Both are worth a check:

RVTools

anujmodi1 — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 17:44:24 GMT

RVTools

RVTools is a small .NET 2.0 application which uses the VI SDK to display
information about your virtual machines. Interacting with VirtualCenter 2.x or
ESX 3.x RVTools is able to list information about cpu, memory, disks, nics,
cd-rom, floppy drives, snapshots, VMware tools, ESX hosts, datastores and health
checks. With RVTools you can disconnect the cd-rom or floppy drives from the
virtual machines and RVTools is able to list the current version of the VMware
Tools installed inside each virtual machine. and update them to the latest
version.

http://www.robware.net/

TAM Weekly Newsletter (Edition 1.19) 22 June 2009 - VCP, VCDX, vSphere Jumpstart

nisserow — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 07:37:12 GMT

Hi everyone, please see the attached zip file for this weeks newsletter
as well as information on the VCP and VCDX certifications and the
vSphere Jumpstart.

Kind Regards

Neil Isserow | VCP | Technical Account Manager - Queensland | VMware Australia

ESXi 4.0 performance difference between upgrade from 3.5 U4 and fresh install

microkid — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 05:53:29 GMT

I have a whitebox ESXi server. It was running ESXi 3.5 U4 fine for some months and two weeks ago I decided to upgrade it to 4.0. I used the vSphere update tool to upgrade the machine online. All went well and it was migrated to 4.0 in half an hour or so. All VM's also worked. But, after some days, I had the feeling something was wrong. The new version didn't seem as fast and responsive and smooth as 3.5. Sometimes it would take tens of seconds for the console of a VM to appear. VM's would take longer to start than usual. All was was working, no problem with that, but it just didn't feel good.

Last weekend, I created a bootable USB stick with ESXi 4.0 on it (extracted the dd file from the ISO and restored it on the USB stick). Then I inserted the USB stick in my server and booted. ESXi started from USB now and came up nicely without problems. I connected my datastores and imported the VM's so I could run them. There is quite a difference: the system is much more responsive now and VM's start a lot easier. When I click a VM console, it instantaneously appears. VM's start very fast now, W2K8 starts in 10 seconds or so.

The upgrade tool is supposed to upgrade 3.5 to 4.0. It did just that, but it seems there is a difference between an upgaded ESXi host and a fresh installed ESXi host. Maybe this is a upgrade bug to de discovered, or my system has some very special problems. Don't know, but I'm a very happy ESX'er now

Its official - VMware Developer Day @ VMworld 2009 SF CA - event dedicated to software developers

heyitspablo — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 01:52:55 GMT

Folks,

Please save the date for VMware's first Developer Day @ VMworld 2009 - Monday August 31, 2009 in San Francisco CA.

We will be publishing session and registration information in a couple of weeks, but can provide some general information.

o 1 Day event dedicated for software developers building solutions for the VMware platform

o TAP membership is not required, or purchase of full VMworld Conference Pass

o There will be a Tech Exchange - TAP Track for Product Roadmaps (NDA - TAP membership required to attend)

o Sessions will range from vSphere SDKs to vCloud APIs - please stay tuned for session updates

o We will have plenty of demos and opportunity to meet with our R&D teams

Wanted to thank the community for your support and please keep the feedback coming. If you have ideas on what you would like to see please let us know and look forward to meeting the community members.

Nice picture below of the California Academy of Sciences - great destination for anyone that has not visited. They also have a great restaurant and Bar. My house is the little one under the television tower on the hillside - (which might explain my sense of humor and hair loss

The importance of a strong community

larstr — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 23:37:15 GMT

In 1996 I attended some basic training and did my first firewall installation. During the following year I did a few more and every time I had a question I called other people in my company or the distributor. In 1998 I discovered that this product had a mailing list. I joined it and it opened a new world for me regarding known problems and solutions. There were a few very knowledgeable people on the list who seemed to know most of the common questions. These users where consultants or end users of the product who out of their own curiosity by the product learned the ins and outs of the product, offering free support for other peer users. There were also members of the list working for the vendor itself, but they would normally post from their personal accounts. Sometimes we would however see official postings or responses from the vendor.

After joining this mailing list and being there for a while I understood the product much better and the quality of my work also became much better. I could also more easily discuss different questions with my customers as the questions they had was often related to something I had discussed before on the list.

This was my first involvement in a mailing list, but I had used news groups (nntp) for years, and before that I had used similar discussion groups on different BBS networks (over modem/pots). Even though comp.sys.firewalls was nice, it’s user mass wasn’t product specific enough to give you the “little extra” of info that the vendors mailing list provided.

Having a mailing list where anyone can post their questions is something I regard as a very good thing, but it has a few limitations:

Threads are not implemented equally across all email clients
Searchability – Searching emails will return single postings, not the full thread
History – Hard to refer to a previous thread with a link
Formatting – Each email program will display emails differently so text only is often the only common denominator
No user profiles or stats per user
Spam
RSS feed?

I was introduced to VMware ESX Server 1.5 in 2002, but the project that I was part of waited for version 2.0 that was shipped in September 2003 before it was implemented. Installation was done by the HW vendor and I was thrilled by this new technology. First of all, the Console OS was based on RedHat 7.2 which was something I knew from before. Secondly, there were active news groups for this product that were fairly active. I think I posted my first posting on the VMware news groups in mid-September 2003.

A bit later, VMware announced on the news groups that they had started a web based forum. At first I didn’t really see the point why they had done that since the news groups were working so perfectly. I thought it was something that would just go away so I refused to try it. Why use a web browser when you could use your favorite news reader (tin)? A web based forum was likely to be much slower and you couldn’t use your own preferences of threading/searching etc that you were used to in your news reader.

News is quite similar to mailing lists and has the same limitations except that threads are working well across different clients.

After a few months I noticed that the traffic on the news groups was decreasing. In March 2004 I decided to check out what the entire buzz was about so I created a bogus account. I didn’t think I would log in to this system twice so why bother using real info? After seeing the quality of the content of these forums I logged out and created a real account that I could use in the future. I didn’t give up on the news groups right away, but I was more and more often using the web forums after that. Why? First of all, there were a few VMware employees on the forum that would have answers to questions nobody else could know. Things that wasn’t documented. Things that would require digging in the source to figure out. Documentation back then wasn’t nearly as good as today and a knowledgebase didn’t exist. Having access to discuss topics directly with those who can figure out such things, just make you want to hang around more to find out what else you have missed lately. It turned out to be highly addictive. And quite a few got addicted.

Another thing that didn’t hurt the forum activity was the “Forum rewards-program”. They announced that points were now to be awarded by the question posters and that VMware would send gifts to those who got enough points based on that. VMware also sponsored a trip+hotel+access to VMworld 2005 for the top 5 forum users where they would be a panel for an “Ask the community experts”-session. Having good products is one thing, but when you add things like this you risk that people start loving the whole concept. It attracted many smart users who in turn helped keep the quality of the forums at a very high level. When people start loving a company’s concepts they will help the company build a good reputation. We have during the past couple of years seen the blogosphere around VMware grow quite substantially and it wouldn’t do that if people didn’t feel good about VMware and the products. A large part of the bloggers has also a background as active users on the VMware community forums.

If I’m questioned about products/technology I don’t know well I usually check if the product has an active community. If it does, it’s often an indication that the products are good or that the products have great potential. You will also be able to get non-marketing answers to questions about the product line even if you’re not an existing customer. An active community does certainly not replace an official support line, but it can offload it quite a bit for the commonly known issues. An official support line is still needed for resolving the more serious issues.

A community is also normally something that potential customers can join and not only existing customers/partners. I’m still amazed that not all vendors understand the value of such a community and also charge their users extra for being able to join or post to such a community. By limiting their forums like that they are probably loosing potential customers and potential active users. If their product is interesting enough it can attract technical people who are willing to spend their free time on their forums. This is a win-win situation for all parts. Potential customers and existing customers are being helped with their basic questions on the forums and the official support center can concentrate about the more serious issues. Users and consultants are getting to know the most common challenges that people are having and special solutions to things in a way that is often more trustworthy than a marketing brochure.

A while ago I was introduced to a product that looked very interesting. It had a very nice design, some smart solutions and they could refer to a handful of major customers. Googling the product did however not give too many results and a user community didn’t exist. I evaluated the product and had a quite close contact with the distributor during this process. If the vendor had community forums I suspect I may have gotten answers to some of my questions quicker and saved myself some time during my testing.

While this product wasn’t bad, I still prefer using a competing product even though it’s a more expensive one. Not because the competing product is so much better for the end user, but because it has good community forums, a larger user base, and less complex installation procedures.

Personally I find the VMware forums an excellent resource, but I’m still waiting for the next version of the forums to be released as the current version is too slow for my patience and the rich text editor is useless. The current version was introduced in late September 2007 and had major problems shortly after being put into production. The stability problems were resolved, but the performance and formatting issues still isn’t perfect. As I’m not currently as active on the forums as I once was, I’m now blogging using the same system, just to be reminded of how bad or good the situation is. I could have used Wordpress or another known working blog platform, but then I wouldn’t get reminded of the status of the VMware forums.

There are still lots of activity on the VMware community forums, so it seems all are not as impatient or formatting oriented as me. I have tried joining back at some occasions, but found myself switching to another tab while waiting for a response from the community. Having the forums available is still something I value highly even if I’m not active there on a daily basis.

By subscribing to RSS feeds on Planet v12n (“planet virtualization”) I’ve been able to get a great deal of info without using the forums. The weekly VMTN Roundtable podcast on Talkshoe is also good. It also has chat during the show so it’s much more valuable in a live session than a recording.

There is also an irc channel on freenode, #VMware that I’ve been part of for a few years now and that’s also a place where it’s possible to discuss VMware related topics with other peer users.

In addition to these arenas I’m now also following the progress in the virtualization field via Twitter. It’s amazing how Twitter has attracted the right users who will point you to blog posts and good community postings on a regular basis while there’s also some direct discussion going on right there.

To sum things up, the bottom line is: VMware have some very good products that people like. VMware have supported their users by giving them an arena to discuss their product and share their experiences in an unmoderated fashion. This has lead to users spending a lot of their spare time writing about the products on both the community forums and in other arenas. The users now know more about the products than they would by only reading the documentation. This means that the users are now better at what they do, certified or not certified. Several books have been written by community members. The importance of such a community can never be underrated.

Using custom performance charts in virtualcenter

bjornb — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 10:13:06 GMT

As every esx engineer knowns its important to pay close attention to the core four components in a Vmware Infrastructure 3. For the most important counters see table below,referring to online documentation on performance monitoring and analysis for more information on these counters and how to interpret them.

Subsystem	Esxtop Counter	VirtualCenter Counter
CPU	%RDY &USED	Ready Usage
Memory	%ACTV SWW/s SWR/s	Active Swapin Swapout
Storage	ACTV DAVG/cmd KAVG/cmd	Commands deviceWriteLatency and deviceReadLatency kernelWriteLatency and kernelReadLatency
Network	MbRX/s MbTX/s	packetsRx packetsTx

Table 1 core fore counters

How to Interpret the disk counters

The following is NOT A GOLDEN RULE, but in general terms (own experience and from several vmware support cases)

In my esx career network is never beeing the problem.

Cpu and memory on a physical esx host can be "easily" monitored and can be "easily" interpret to be a bottleneck.

Because the virtual machines run on a san/nas, its important to monitor the disk counters to see if there is a bottleneck.

Below the values of the disk counters and what is good and what is really bad.

Disk counter	Very good	Busy	Really bad
Davg/cmd	100-	200+/300+	800+
Kavg/cmd	It doesn't change much. Normal values are 0.0X

esxtop

The drawback of esxtop is that its only realtime and that you cannot look back in time and that it is per esx server. So I thought that it would be very nice to use virtualcenter for the monitoring of these counters so you can look back in time and can monitor all the esx servers through a central management console.

virtualcenter

I found out that this is possible to monitor specific counters with virtualcenter but that this has also some drawbacks.

You have to change virtualcenter server setting which will let the vc database grow (depending on your environment)
you have to make custom_charts in the vi client per esx server because the default charts do not monitor the most important counters
it looks like the custom_charts are getting saved on the local vi_client or user profile (I did not found out where or how)

although that there are drawbacks, you have to set this up once, below the steps how.

how to setup the performance charts

STEP1 first of all you have to change the virtualcenter management server configuration and change the statistics level of each statistics interval otherwise you can only monitor your custom_chars real time, and that's not what you want .

In the vi client go to administration-"virtualcenter management server configuration"-statistics

default is statistics level 1, change it to 3 or 4 !!!! BE AWARE that changing these values on a large esx environment can have a big impact on the virtualcenter performance and the virtualcenter database. !!!!

STEP2 Making the custom charts in virtual center

click on a esx host go to performance tab and click change chart options

click on one of the core four components you want to make a custom chart of , change the metrics to the right metrics as mentioned in table1 and click save changes and give the custom chart a name

As you can see below you now have custom charts, which you can use to look back in time. As mentioned the big drawback is that you have to do this for every esx host and saved somehow on the client were the vi client is installed

twitter: www.twitter.com/bjornbats

http://www.bjornbats.nl/?p=459#more-459

Using Perfmon For Accurate, ESX Performance Counters

drummonds — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 04:58:53 GMT

My colleague in product management, Praveen Kannan, has been working to extend Perfmon to show some ESX performance counters. This capability is automatically installed with VMware Tools on vSphere 4. But Praveen and I have made a stand-alone version available to those of you that are still on VI3. Download it here to give it a try.

To install, place the file in an appropriately-named directory on any Windows VM on VI3. Double-click the executable, which will self-extract the files into the same directory. Run "install.bat" and you're done.

Once you bring up Perfmon you'll see two new performance objects on your computer: "VM Memory" and "VM Processor". These objects contain counters exposed by ESX that accurately reflect the VM's memory and CPU usage. Here's Perfmon on my test VM after I've installed the tool.

This makes collection of host stats a breeze. Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) programs can now easily get access to reliable host statistics. And anyone with access to Perfmon can get see their VM's resource usage. Unlike guest-based statistics, the host-statistics shown through these counters accurately reflect resource usage in the presence of virtualization overheads and time slicing of VMs.

Disclaimer:

This is a pre-release "sneak peak" version. Eventually this tool will be available for download on vmware.com and supported by VMware. But today there is no support for this tool and you're using it "as-is". Use at your own risk and do not contact VMware support for help with this release.

That's VMware's official position on this tool. But feel free to comment here with any ideas about this great new feature.

VMware vSphere & VI 3.x Management Survey - Cool prizes 1- VMworld Pass, 1- iPod 8 GB Touch

heyitspablo — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:15:19 GMT

Folks,

We have put together a survey to help us understand what your needs are from a vSphere Management perspective. The survey is targeted at folks that manage and write management applications for vSphere, VI 3.x environments.

Please take our survey - click here

The goal of this survey is to better understand which applications (commercial or in-house developed) you use or develop to manage the VMware vSphere Platform. We need your feedback as it will help us understand which 3rd party vendors or tools VMware needs to focus on.

This survey should take approximately 22 minutes to complete.

We will be awarding great prizes to lucky winners.

Grand Prize - 1 Full Conference Pass to VMworld San Francisco 2009
First Prize is - 1 iPod Touch 8GB

Winners will be chosen in a random drawing

Please review the contest rules, terms, and conditions below.

Contest Information and Rules

o Survey Starts: June 17, 2009 11:59 PM PST
o Closes: Monday August 3rd, 2009 10:00 PM CST
o Winners will be announced on the Developer Center Blog: Friday August 7th 2009
o VMware employees are excluded from entering
o One entry per person
o Raffle participants must fully complete survey
o Winners will be chosen at random by VMware
o You must provide a valid corporate email address - no personal email addresses please
o This contest is for VMware customers, there is no purchase necessary to participate
o Terms and Conditions

VMware Server 2 behind proxy or firewall - tunnelling ports 443 and 902

goseifer — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 16:23:59 GMT

We are running several test environments by means of VMware Server 2 on a root server located outside our company's premises. We have to pass through firewalls and proxies for accessing it. Assuming that some of you also want to use VMware virtual machines behind firewalls and proxies, here is a description of how we finally got access working properly:

For VI Web Access and VMware Remote Console, traffic over ports 443 and 902 must pass through all firewalls and proxies so that https and authentication can work. Otherwise you need to tunnel these two ports through ssl:

Install cygwin with ssh and connect-proxy.
These are contained in the cygwin packages "openssh" and "connect-proxy" of the category "Net".
Open a cygwin shell and set up the tunnel with the following command:
# ssh -f -N -C -L 443:localhost:443 -L 902:localhost:902 \
> -o ProxyCommand="/usr/bin/connect-proxy -H <ProxyIP>:<ProxyPort> %h %p" \
> <User>@<VMwareHostIP>
Enter the password for which you should be prompted then.
Launch a browser and access https://localhost.

That's it! You should be redirected to the login screen of VI Web Access. Subsequently the VMware Remote Console should connect and operate as expected. (NOTE: With only port 443 being open through firewalls and proxies you will be able to properly access VMware Infrastructure Web Access but then you will get stuck when launching VMware Remote Console.)

Good Luck!

Error opening the remote virtual machine <IP>:443\32: No response was received from the host.

goseifer — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 16:20:54 GMT

When opening the VMware Remote Console from the browser by clicking anywhere in the Console tab / window an error message may pop up reading:

VMware Remote Console
Error opening the remote virtual machine <IP>:443\32:
No response was received from the host.

This behaviour happens when only traffic over port 443 (https) can pass through firewalls and proxies but port 902 (authentication) cannot. You can work-around this problem by tunnelling ports 443 and 902 through ssl. See VMware Server 2 behind proxy or firewall for a description how to do this.

Riding the virtualization wave

larstr — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 23:29:36 GMT

Virtualization is a hot topic and has been that for a while now. While there is only really one big player in this field there are many smaller ones that are making their living out of complementary products. We also see virtualization as a field that is still growing. Only a small percentage of the existing servers in the world run virtualized. Only a tiny fragment of a percentage of the desktops is virtualized. Forecasts by IDC (and others) have predicted that virtualization is Soon™ coming to a system near you.

I’m sure vendors in many fields have noticed this trend and want to join in on the ride. The easiest solution would be to adapt an existing software solution into the virtualization field without too much rewriting, while writing software from the scratch requires more effort (and money).

I’m sure our good friends at CheckPoint had similar thoughts last year before they launched a “Virtual Edition” ( VE ) of their most known firewalling suites (UTM VE, Power VE & UTM Power VE). CheckPoint have provided a virtual appliance for years that has been available through the VMware Virtual Appliance marketplace, but it hasn’t been supported for production usage.

I have used their old appliance myself and it has worked fine for for testing out different firewalling concepts. CheckPoint is providing their own linux distro called SecurePlatform (SPLAT) which is based on RHEL (similar to the Service Console), but modified to be a firewall distro and comes with a custom shell (cpshell). It also ships with a custom built kernel. This kernel has until recently been a 2.4-kernel by default. R70 (shipped in march 2009) is the first version to have a 2.6-kernel by default. The old 2.4-kernel was a bit special since they have backported many newer drivers into it. The firewall also consist of kernel modules so you can’t use whatever kernel you want.

When this new “Virtual Edition” product line was shipped it was advertised as a product that could protect your virtual machines. It was licensed per ESX host and did not support VMotion. It came in two editions: One for up to 5 virtual machines and one unlimited version. This license is per VMware ESX host (yes, I’ve said that already). When this product was shipped it had broad media coverage and many websites/news sites noted that CheckPoint was now shipping products for VMware.

Who run 5 VMs or less on an ESX server? Who with such a smallish system would need an enterprise firewalling suite to protect the VMs? If you have a larger environment you can buy an unlimited edition, but as VMotion is not supported it would be useless too. In ESX 3.x you can have a maximum of 4 virtual nics (10 in v4), so if you want to protect each of your VMs with a separate set of rules you can’t put too many VMs on the system if the VMs are to be completely separated (also from each other). That still doesn’t justify that CheckPoint is trying to charge $7500 for the cheapest 5 VM edition (UTM) and $15000 for the unlimited edition. Per ESX host. Yes, to protect your VMs with a VE they will charge you a lot more than they would charge if you were installing their software on a physical box. An unlimited UTM license has a list price of $13000. And that price is independent on your number of ESX hosts.

So what is special about VE? Nothing. Well, it comes as an ovf file instead of an iso file so you don’t have to do the initial 7 minutes of an install wizard getting the disk partitioned+formatted and files being thrown over from the iso. Other than that, VE is a standard SPLAT (R65) install. Not even VMware Tools is installed, so networking performance is only as good as the emulated vlance (pcnet32) nic (that also puts extra cpu load on the system when in use). Guess they couldn’t get vmxnet working since VE is using a 2.4 kernel and vmxnet on 2.4 hasn’t been supported after ESX3 was released. I’m really sorry CheckPoint, but this is not good enough. The Virtual Edition concept really doesn’t have any benefits compared to the traditional editions. It costs a lot more, doesn’t have optimal performance and requires you to stop using VMotion(!). Can’t think of a single case where that would be a useful solution. Running a virtualized firewall is however something that in the future will be as normal as it is for many today to run a virtual server. The networking layer is already on it’s way into the virtualized datacenter now with Cisco as the first vendor with a native ESX switch. Cisco currently has no plans to port their ASA firewalling software over to a virtualized platform (ref VMTN roundtable a few weeks ago). Hope to see firewall vendors jumping onto the bandwagon in a more serious manner soon too. Who wants to ride the virtualization wave?

VMware & the World on the Internet: VMware can save your marriage...

Badsah — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 21:36:13 GMT

{youtube}http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3r4UcBmtR1M{youtube}

(courtesy of "vmwarerocks")

What's your opinion on Storage Virtual Appliances? - Tell us and win!

StorMagic — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 20:55:46 GMT

A few days ago, an article talking about how Storage Virtual Appliances had taken center stage was posted at http://www.vmworld.com/thread/2893.

There is clearly a lot going on in the server virtualization market these days with HP recently announcing their new virtualization bundles that incorporate a Storage Virtual Appliance from LeftHand (acquired by HP). At VMWorld last fall, VMware started to promote the concept of Storage Virtual Appliances and presentations on vSphere 4.0 include Storage Virtual Appliances as an area of interest for VMware.

So what are your views? Take a few minutes and fill out this short survey to give us a better understanding of what is going on in the market around SVAs. For your generous time, we will qualify you to win a copy of "The Green and Virtual Data Center" by leading technology analyst Greg Schultz, who was named an Eco-Tech Warrior by the Minneapolis St. Paul Business Journal.

Visit http://freeonlinesurveys.com/rendersurvey.asp?sid=n4v5svdhm4gy6q0610013 to take the survey now! It's quick and easy..

Storage Protocol Differences and FCoE Diagrams

dconvery — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 19:14:49 GMT

Just thought I would share these diagrams that I used in a recent training session. I used them to explain the differences in the storage protocols that may be used for a vStorage Cloud and how FCoE works.

vcbMC-1.0.7 Lite version

athlon_crazy — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 09:43:14 GMT

Okay dude, for those who already familiar with vcbMC-1.0.6 beta, here another new release (vcbMC-1.0.7-Lite) from me. Frankly, I lost my vcbMC-1.0.6 Beta source code and I need to start everything from the scratch for vcbMC Lite. Perhaps vSphere didn’t need VCB anymore, but I believe most of you out there still relying on vcb to backup your virtual machines. BTW, this tool only do manual backup for your ESX 3.5 virtual machines. It’s really easy to use though no manual, but you can always press “help” button for guidence.

Tool : vcbMC-1.0.7 Lite
Description : vcb GUI for ESX virtual machine manual backup operation
Tested : Win2k3 32 Bit / WinXP (old .ocx MSCOMCTL.OCX may need to be replaced during installation)
Download : here

p/s: Still working on another version which can do schedule backup job like vcbMC-1.0.6

Xtravirt Review esXpress 3.5

VMSpotlight — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 09:11:00 GMT

Last Tuesday virtualization knowledge buffs Xtravirt published their review of esXpress 3.5!

The review was written by technical author Peter Grant and is suitable for people at the level of “Technical – Novice”.

The main sections in the review include:

Introduction
Background
Features and Capabilities
Gotchas / Troubleshooting
Licensing
Summary
Useful References

You can view the review here: http://xtravirt.com/node/182

http://xtravirt.com/node/182

Neil's Weekly Newsletter (Edition 1.18) 15 June 2009 - VCP4, Storage, vSphere and more

nisserow — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 05:28:57 GMT

Hi everyone, well another week has gone by extremely fast. I was booked onto vSphere Install, manage and Configure training last week but unfortunately only managed to be there for one day. From my single day and reviews from my peers however this course appears to be extremely well received so those of you looking at getting into vSphere I suggest you start with this course. The newsletter format is still evolving, hopefully we are getting it right. For those of you that are VCP’s or keen to become VCP’s check out this weeks newsletter for how to become a VCP 4. This exam will be available soon so I will be putting a focus on learning materials for this as they become available.

Have a great week.

Kind Regards

Neil Isserow | VCP | Technical Account Manager - Queensland |
VMware Australia

Cloud Networking - We are not in Kansas anymore !

KrishnaSankar — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 19:48:19 GMT

A funny thing happened on our way from virtualization to the cloud world ! The domain of cloud application developers and network started to converge. Converge might not be the right word – because network builders continue to build robust networks and that has not been antiquated; application developers will continue to develop interesting applications. But what has happened is a common layer and a convergence of interests between cloud application builders and network builders is happening.

Few points to note:

I said and meant Cloud Application Builders – I do believe that there are many roles in the application domain and the role of an Application Builder is slightly different from Application Developer . I think I need a blog dedicate to this, for now the difference is in the focus – Cloud Application Builders will focus more on the infrastructure of applications – including scalability, availability, …
Also, cloud application builders literally have to worry about the essential cloud monikers (see my blog http://doubleclix.wordpress.com/2009/04/13/six-essential-traits-of-a-cloud-infrastructure-or-how-to-define-a-cloud-without-defining-it/
And Cloud Application Builders worry about the application archetypes and the optimum infrastructure for them
Going back, Cloud Networking is not just about speeds and feeds. It is also about overlays, isolation and abstract policy based provisioning in addition to traditional basic routing and switching.
In short the new network landscape of building networks for clouds has an application component
This is very evident in vSphere 4.0 – the virtual switch like the Nexus 1K as well as concepts like VNLink, VNTag, and distributed virtual switch.+
And add to the mix the interfacing with the traditional network layer and the devices thereof from access to distribution to the core …

In short, this blog is about digging deeper into the vNetwork feature set covering security, availability and most importantly scalability. The discussions will be in the context of popular cloud infrastructure patterns for various cloud application archetypes. A morphing of Cloud Application Builders and Cloud Network Builders

Cheers & I welcome your comments, insights and queries ...

Just finished the Installing and Configuring ESX 3.5 course...

JezzaV — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 23:51:49 GMT

I plan to use this as a fairly private blog on my experiences setting up my first Virtual Enterprise.....

Scheduled Maintenance, June 12 6pm - midnight Pacific

RDellimmagine — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 18:54:53 GMT

VMware will be performing a system upgrade to several VMware Web applications on June 12 – 13, 2009. Maintenance will begin on Friday, June 12th at 6 P.M. PDT. All maintenance will be completed by Saturday, June 13th at 12 A.M. PDT.

While this upgrade is in progress, you will be unable to:

- Log in to VMware Communities (if you are already logged in, all services will be available)
- Access or manage your VMware account
- Submit support requests online
- Download, purchase or register VMware products
- Manage VMware product licenses

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Storage Virtual Appliances take center stage!

StorMagic — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 18:28:18 GMT

There is a lot going on in the server virtualization market these days. HP announced the new virtualization bundles that incorporate a Storage Virtual Appliance from LeftHand (acquired by HP). At VMWorld last fall, VMware started to promote the concept of Storage Virtual Appliances and presentations on vSphere 4.0 include Storage Virtual Appliances as an area of interest for VMware.

Why is there so much noise about it?

First of all, you need shared storage in order to take full advantage of the enhanced features of VMware. VMotion isn't compelling if you're able to move the application, but the datastore becomes unavailable. HP has already demonstrated that by incorporating a Storage Virtual Appliance they can offer bundles at prices that are attractive for SMB and branch office customers while providing access to VMotion and DRS at the same time.

Why is this important?

SMB customers and branch offices have had to go without the high availability and ease of management features they get with VMotion and DRS, because of the cost of the external shared storage. With a Storage Virtual Appliance, the cost of the shared storage is a fraction of the cost of a traditional SAN or NAS.

What's still missing?

It's still too complicated. Most of the virtual appliances have tried addressed the issue of leveraging the server's resources, but haven't addressed the complexity issue. Many are using them as a means to either demonstrate core functionality or to move customers into an external SAN.

Our suggested solution

With a free download of the StorMagic SvSAN software, users can leverage up to 2 Terabytes of internal disk storage and begin sharing datastores right away. To expand beyond 2 Terabytes, it's a simple license key to grow their environment to unlimited capacity. If high availability is important, users can activate it with a license key as well.

With SvSAN, by integrating all of the management functionality (SAN, datastores and RAID) into VMware vCenter and providing automation of routine tasks, administrators can manage everything from vCenter, saving time and simplifying management. Automated datastore provisioning and intuitive management functions also minimize the time required to manage the shared storage.

Do you have to sacrifice performance for lower cost?

StorMagic customer surveys showed that the primary factor affecting storage performance is the underlying performance of the disks under random I/O loads. The Storage Virtual Appliance and other software components can easily keep up with the demands, and would deliver similar performance to external storage arrays with a similar number of disks.

vSphere4 Licensing Tiers but Who's crying?

thehyperadvisor — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 14:49:50 GMT

vSphere4 has a few tiers for licensing features but do the tiers make you cry? VMware vSphere4 has some really good additions to the product like Distributed Switch, Host Profiles, and Thin Provisioning. I am not totally heart broken over the different pricing options for vSphere4 but I do not completely agree with how the features are laid out in each tier. View Full Blog.

sanMelody works great in my tests

HughBorg707 — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 19:32:39 GMT

In my lab setting I've been using sanMelody for creating an iSCSI SAN target.

My main goal was to get comfortable with the higher end features of ESX like VMotion, but some of the other iSCSI software either didn't seem to support (Or I couldn't figure out how to configure it) multiple ESX servers accessing the same datastore.

I was able to do that and more with sanMelody.

Still in test mode but if anyone else is looking for a similar solution, check it out.

Vídeos com demos de novas funções do vSphere4

aandriolli — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 16:41:19 GMT

Se eu perguntasse aos meus clientes o que eles queriam, teriam dito um "um cavalo mais rápido".

Henry Ford

A frase do inventor da linha de montagem moderna é perfeitamente válida aqui. Porque a VMware acrescentou várias funções novas ao vSphere 4?

Você já viu o tal novo Fault Tolerance funcionando? Não entendeu o que é um Distributed Virtual Switch? Tá curioso pra saber se Host Profiles te ajudam ou não com o teu dia a dia administrando um ambiente VMware? Nada como ver funcionando pra entender do que se trata.

Talvez estes demos em vídeo lhe ajudem:

Host Profiles e vCenter em Linked Mode
Host Profiles permitem que você marque um host como modelo de configuração, que pode ser aplicada automaticamente a outros hosts (ou seja: esforço de configuração zero nos seus servidores ESX).

Linked Mode é um modo de operação do vCenter 4 (não disponível para vCenter 2.5) que permite que um único VI Client gerencie diversos vCenters, que agora são capazes de estabeler um link entre eles.

Distributed Virtual Switch
Também chamados "carinhosamente" de DVS, Distributed Virtual Switches foram criados para simplificar a administração de redes virtuais. Cada host ESX tem ao menos um virtual switch - o ponto de conexão entre redes virtuais e o reais. Em ambientes de produção, muitas vezes cada host ESX tem que lidar com diversas redes: produção, dados, backup, gerenciamento, e por aí vai. Administrar consistência através de vários virtual switches e portgroups através de vários hosts ESX é uma tarefa simplificada em muito pelo DVS. O DVS é um switch virtual que alcança o data center inteiro. Com ele, você pode criar um único switch virtual distribuído, e assinalar as placas de rede físicas de seus hosts diretamente ao DVS. Ao mesmo tempo, você pode continuar usando switches virtuais como sempre fez - eles convivem pacificamente.

Fault Tolerance
O Fault Tolerance serve para proteger VMs que precisam de alta disponibilidade. Pense nele como um "VMotion contínuo": tudo o que acontece na primeira VM, é copiado automaticamente para uma segunda VM em stand-by, preparada para assumir caso a primeira VM falhe, sem perder transações. Inicialmente limitado a VMs com uma vCPU.

VI3.5 to vSphere 4 Differences Chart

matsrob — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 12:06:09 GMT

Found this nice chart on http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/virtualization-pro/

Virtual Machine	VI 3.5	vSphere 4
Number of virtual CPUs per virtual machine	4	8
RAM per virtual machine	64 GB	255 GB
NICs per VM	4	10
Concurrent remote console sessions	10	40
ESX host	VI 3.5	vSphere 4
Hosts per storage volume	32	64
Fibre Channel paths to LUN	32	16
NFS Datastores	32	64
Hardware iSCSI initiators per host	2	4
Virtual CPUs per host	192	512
Virtual Machines per host	170	320
Logical processors per host	32	64
RAM per host	256 GB	1 TB
Standard vSwitches per host	127	248
Virtual NICs per standard vSwitch	1,016	4,088
Resource pools per host	512	4,096
Children per resource pool	256	1,024
Resource pools per cluster	128	512

Resource Management in a VM (Or Fysical)

matsrob — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 10:59:51 GMT

found a "Application" that seem nice ! It can resouce shedule processes in a windows environment!

http://www.smartpeak.com/content/solutions/workload_management_for_virtual_infrastructure.asp

Good Morning to ALL..!!!!!!!!!!

GoVirtual — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 06:02:26 GMT

This is my first technical blog.

New ESX4 and ESXi4 videos

thehyperadvisor — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 02:41:13 GMT

I have put together two new videos showing the install of Vmware ESX4 and ESXi4. There is also some basic information about the esx4 and esxi4 products. Hope you find them useful. View Videos at thehyperadvisor.com

My Hyper-V Video

drummonds — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 20:47:09 GMT

There's been no shortage of comments on the Hyper-V video I posted. I made a comment on this action in a VMTN blog entry. Read up and comment here or there.

Scott

VI3 coursework

awliste — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 20:11:31 GMT

Started this in the VI3 implementation and configuration course.

Vmware doubt

Abhare — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 13:14:58 GMT

Hi When i tried taking mock test i could not answere below question.

Can someone explain and give the answer.

You need to implement licenses within your ESX 3.x server and VirtualCenter 2.x virtual infrastructure that will allow: 1. the creation of new virtual machines 2. the ability to reboot the ESX server during hardware upgrades 3. power on a virtual machine (VM) 4. support for remote ESX Servers that may experience periods of license server unavailability in excess of 20 days 5. support of VMware HA and VMotion for all VMs Which solution meets these requirements?

Answer Options:

Use only host-based license files and do not install VirtualCenter Server.

Create a license server on the VirtualCenter Server; download and install the license file; register each ESX Server with the license server.

Create a license server on the VirtualCenter Server; download and install the license file; register the ESX Server with license server; install a host-based license on the remote ESX servers; do not register the remote ESX Servers with VirtualCenter Server.

Create a license server on the VirtualCenter Server; download and install the license file; register the ESX Server with license server; install a host-based license on the remote ESX servers; modify the confiuration of the remote ESX Servers to use a host-based license file.

Where did the vSphere SNMP MIB Modules go ?

heyitspablo — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 00:27:07 GMT

Folks,

Just wanted everyone to know we have put the VMware vSphere SNMP MIB Modules
in the vSphere Web Services SDK, CIM Community. The MIB modules are for use with ESX/ESXi and vCenter. These MIB modules support all ESX, ESXi and vCenter product releases through version 4.0.

CPUs ou Cores?

aandriolli — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 23:49:39 GMT

Se ainda não viu, dê uma olhada neste artigo no Yellow Bricks,o excelente blog do Duncan Epping, que eu copio aqui.

Você pode decidir como a sua VM enxerga suas vCPUs: como CPUs ou cores. O default é que sua VM veja vCPUs single-core. Se você criar uma VM com 2 processadores, o sistema operacional dentro da VM (guest OS) os reconhecerá como 2 processadores com um único core cada. Mas você pode definir quantos cores há em cada processador:

Power off the VM

Right click on the VM and select “Edit Settings…”
Select the “Options” tab
Click on “General” (in the “Advanced” options section)
Click “Configuration Parameters…” (in the pane on the right)
Click “Add Row”
Enter “cpuid.coresPerSocket” in the “Name” column
Enter a value (try 2, 4, or in the “Value” column
Click “OK”
Power on the VM

Fazendo isso, sua VM pode enxergar 2 CPUs dual-core ou 1 CPU quad-core, por exemplo. Isto pode lhe trazer uma flexibilidade útil, ou até vantagens com relação ao licenciamento de algumas aplicações.

Starting Out with i7

parkinglot7 — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 16:28:43 GMT

Starting out with a new Core i7 machine. MSI 58 Pro MB; 6 GBs DDR3s; 1 TB HD.

Installed Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Server in what I like to call Slim mode. Minimal install. There actually is an option under F4, when the CD boots to the install window. Expert Mode; (even though I'm not an expert by any stretch)

Anyway, loaded VMware Server 2.0.1 build 156745 last night.

Made a novice mistake. Forgot to use binary mode when I ftp'ed the images to the newly built server. This causes the TAR not to work properly.

VI Console seems to work on IE, but very quirky on Firefox (v3.0.10). Could not get login field on FF; and the error console always some jslib error or something. (Not a web guy)

I finally got it to work by adding the site to the "Allowed Site - Add-on Installation"

Then I found out that FF on Mac OS X cannot install the plug in for the Console. Wonder if that will be supported. I know more and more users switching to Mac environment. (I'm a 4-month old Mac user myself: MBP, 2.53Ghz, 4GB)

Maybe RDP to a Windows XP VM just to console to my other VMs. Hmmm. More to come.

Add aditional Video Modes

matsrob — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 12:54:16 GMT

Overview

To add additional video resolutions, several changes must be made to the virtual machine. Not all changes are required for all products and guests. The changes required are indicated by this article.

Add additional video memory to the virtual machine, if required, to support the higher resolutions.
Edit the virtual machine to expose a larger virtual monitor.
Adjust the virtual machine drivers to add the new resolutions, if required.
Set the resolution in the virtual machine to use the new resolutions.

Adjust the virtual machine's video memory and virtual monitor size

Power off the virtual machine.
Open the .VMX file in a text editor.
Calculate the amount of video memory required to support the highest desired resolution. Multiply the width by height of the largest resolution desired, then multiply the result by 4. If the result exceeds 16777216 or 4194304 for ESX Server, the video memory must be increased. Add or update the following line to the .VMX file and append the resulting value of the calculation: \\\\ svga.vramSize = \\\\ For example, to add the resolution 2560 x 2048 to a Workstation virtual machine. Multiply 2560 * 2048 * 4 = 20971520. This is the amount of memory in bytes required for the resolution. The result, 20971520 bytes, exceeds the default of 16777216 bytes, therefore you must add the following line to increase the video memory available: \\\\ svga.vramSize = 20971520 \\\\*Note*: The value must be evenly divisible by 65536 when the guest is running Windows. For more information, see Certain graphical elements are not drawn in a virtual machine running Windows (1001558).
Add or update the maxWidth and maxHeight values to provide the desired resolution. This value is used to report the maximum size of the attached virtual monitor to the guest operating system. Values can not exceed the resolutions used to calculate the video memory size in step 3 or there is not enough video memory available to support the resolution. \\\\ svga.maxWidth = 2560
svga.maxHeight = 2048 \\\\*Note*: Certain resolutions are not supported by all guests. Virtual machines running Netware or FreeBSD guest operating systems may not support this resolution change. For more information, see Guest Crashes If Display Settings Specify Too Large a Size on Too Many Monitors (1000229).
Save the file and open the virtual machine.