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Virtualization Frontier : August 2008

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Hyper-V Theme Song

Posted by ToddMuirhead Aug 22, 2008

During our weekly tuesday chat, I told ye110wbeard that I would send him a TechCenter shirt if he created a theme song for Hyper-V. I felt secure that I would not have to actually payout. Unbelievably, he had a Hyper-V theme song and video and lyrics up by late Wednesday. I think the song is kinda catchy and the lyrics are pretty good. Check it out when you get a chance. And I am working on sending out not only a nice TechCenter shirt, but also a nice coffee mug tumbler thing as well because he went above the original challenge and added video!

Todd

0 Comments Permalink Tags: hyper-v, delltechcenter, mp3, song
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It was officially announced that VMware has joined Microsoft's Software Virtualization Validation Program - known as SVVP. This is big news because it means that VMware hypervisors can become a validated and supported platform for Microsoft applications, including my favorite Exchange. The catch currently seems to be in the details. VMware ESX has not yet been certified (MS KB article with supported 3rd party hypervisors), although VMware has joined the SVVP.

I think that Microsoft and VMware coming to agreement on a process that leads to better support is a big win for their customers (Many of which are Dell customers too). Although the certification tests have not yet been run with ESX, it is my humble opinion that it is just a matter of time until it is a validated and supported hypervisor through the SVVP. The other big benefit here is that I will be able to remove some of the footnotes from my Exchange on VMware whitepapers once this is all settled.

Additionally the Exchange team blog has an excellent post with a link to a doc with their recommendations for running Exchange on Hyper-V which should be of great assistance to customers looking to do such a solution.

Todd

0 Comments Permalink Tags: delltechcenter, esx, exchange, support, microsoft
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During last week's chat the we discussed ESXi licensing and features. In the features portion of the discussion flakrat asked if it was possible to setup two ESXi servers with shared storage to be able to do a manual fail-over of a VM between the two servers. I was able to create this setup and confirm that it works. Read on for details.

The setup that I used to test was two PowerEdge R805 servers with ESXi Update 2 refresh installed on the hard drive. This was the currently available "free" ESXi installable from VMware's web site. To install I used the Dell Remote Access Card (DRAC) virtual media capability to boot from the ESXi ISO I downloaded. I selected the local hard disk as the location to install and let it complete. Once installed, I used the ESXi configuration to set the password, IP, gateway, and hostname for each server. I then installed the Virtual Infrastructure client on a windows server and used that to manage each of the R805 servers individually.

For shared storage I used a PowerVault MD3000i iSCSI storage array. I enabled the iSCSI software initiator on each server and discovered the the MD3000i. On server A, I created a VMFS partition and created a new VM called VMTest1. I installed Windows Server 2008 64-bit Enterprise Edition. After install completed I shutdown the VM on server A. I then went to server B and rescanned the storage adapters. It found the new VMFS partition on the shared iSCSI LUN. I created a VM using the same settings as I had on Server A including the same virutal hard disk file. I then boot the VM successfully.

The most interesting part of this test was to verify that the cluster file system of VMFS was still working without Virtual Center in the picture. So with the VM still running on Server B, I tried to start it on Server A - and I got an error message that the file was in use by another server. This was great because it showed that it would not be possible to run the VM at the same time on both servers.

We will chat more about this on today's chat - ESX and ESXi.

Todd

0 Comments Permalink Tags: delltechcenter, failover, fail-over, esxi, esx3i, esx, vmware, md3000i, iscsi, r805, installable, free
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My plan for VMworld this year was to get to present another session on a cool topic like virtualizing Exchange, virtualizing SQL Server, or why ESXi is so cool. All three ideas were rejected each with a a separate rejection email (although it was very nicely worded). So I was resolved to just be an attendee this year, and probably spend some time helping out in the Dell booth on the expo floor. Then somebody mentioned doing twitter from VMworld - which fits perfectly with what we are doing here on delltechcenter.com. The details are still being worked out, but Scott and I will both be doing live twitter posts and blogs from the show. So watch this space and our twitter account for what is going on at VMworld 2008.

For the conference, I'm flying in on Monday and leaving Thursday night. I don't get back to Austin until pretty late, but otherwise I got some really nice flight times. I managed to get into the host hotel, the Venetian, so it should be easy to get to and from the conference everyday. I would like to meet any DellTechCenter members that will be at the show and maybe we could even plan to all meet somewhere. Any suggestions?

Todd

0 Comments Permalink Tags: vmworld, vmworld, 2008, twitter, delltechcenter, blog, blogs, esx
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The Day After with ESXi

Posted by ToddMuirhead Aug 14, 2008

We are having a chat this afternoon, at 3 pm central time, that is officially titled ESXi Features and Licensing. I think that I should have named it The Day After with ESXi because that more clearly gets to the questions that I people are having. Many have downloaded the newly free ESXi in the last month. Installation and creating an initial VM are usually the first steps that are taken. Then you go home, sleep on it, and start to really evaluate how to use ESXi the next day.

Initially a single server running ESXi maybe all that is needed. Questions about how it works and what it can do will need to be answered. This is the Features part of the chat today. Some will arrive at the conclusion that they may need some of the features that are included with VMware's Virtual Infrastructure which includes things like live migration, high availability, load balancing, and centralized management. There are actually lots of options in terms of licensing to upgrade the free ESXi into Virtual Infrastructure. This is the Licensing part of today's chat.

Todd

0 Comments Permalink Tags: delltechcenter, esxi, esx, license, licensing
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What To Do With Free ESXi

Posted by ToddMuirhead Aug 7, 2008


VMware announced a couple of weeks ago that ESXi was being made available as a free download. There was lots of talk and discussion about what this means. Detailed price analysis have been done. On twitter I have seen several posts where people were downloading, installing, or deploying ESXi. It's twitter so you don't get a lot of detail, but it does seem to indicate that people are doing something with it.

I just wonder exactly what to do with ESXi and does it really change things dramatically.

What you get with the free ESXi download - A high performance enterprise class hypervisor with a web based management tool to create, modify, monitor, and generally do cool stuff with all the VMs that are running on that server. This is a really good deal, especially considering the price.

For a single physical server or maybe a few servers, the free ESXi should be a really great solution.

What is not included is Virtual Center and all of the features of that are multi-server related. This means that there is no VMotion, no HA, no DRS, no multi-server management of any kind.

The great thing is that it is possible to buy the correct licenses (I'll let the license experts handle exactly what this means) and then be able to enable all of these great features with Virtual Center and ESXi. So you can use ESXi as a starting point and grow into a full blown enterprise virtualization solution - later. In many ways this seems to be the same exact thing that VMware did when they made GSX Server free and renamed it to VMware Server. They even renamed ESX 3.5i to be ESXi.

There are some things that I still wonder about. Is ESXi easy enough to use for those just getting started with virtualization? Will ESXi get more SMBs to try out VMware's virtualization?

Todd

2 Comments Permalink Tags: delltechcenter, esx, esxi, free
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Jose Maria, a Dell virtualization guru and member of delltechcenter, has his own virtualizaiton blog that he writes en espanol. Even after taking 2 years in high school and 2 more years in college I still need lots of hand waving and gesturing to get by when attempting to speak Spanish. Jose Maria is a native speaker who does very well with English as well, but has started his blog to reach the large audience of technical minded Spanish speakers. He has many excellent posts and updates it several times a week with entries that disucss the latest developments in the virtualization industry. This is a great opportunity for those of you that would prefer to get some technical content en espanol and for me to brush up on my Spanish.

I've put a link to his blog right on the delltechcenter home page, giving it some international feel.

Todd

0 Comments Permalink Tags: spanish, espanol, delltechcenter, vmware, virtualization

ToddMuirhead

 Member since: Feb 13, 2006

Some Stuff on Enterprise Virtualization from DellTechCenter

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