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Virtualization Frontier : September 2008

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The super virtualization engineering team here at Dell recently upgraded the Dell Virtualization Advisor Tool. This free on-line tool prompts you to answer about 10 questions and then gives a detailed sizing of servers and storage. Additionally it will list the available services that might be useful when implementing the proposed solution. The part that I really like is it is easy to go back and change your answers to some of the questions to see how that affects the proposed solution. For example you can change your preferred storage from fibre channel to iSCSI.

In addition to support for VMware based solutions, it will now also provide Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer based solutions as well. So for those that are interested in what is needed for a Hyper-V solution with high-availability and "quick-migration" the advisor can help. Additionally if you want to get the specifications for a Xen Server solution with live migration and backup and recovery capabilities - the advisor has a configuration recommendation.

The other new feature of the advisor tool is the ability to specify what workloads you will be running in the VMs which makes the sizing more accurate. You are able to specify the number of test and dev, file servers, web servers, domain controller, DNS servers, and other you will be running as VMs.

Take advantage of the free advice.

Todd

0 Comments Permalink Tags: delltechenter, dell, advisor, sizing, configuration, advice, esx, hyper-v, xen, storage, iscsi, fibre
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VMWorld 08 Was A Full Week

Posted by ToddMuirhead Sep 22, 2008

I was at VMWorld 2008 in Las Vegas all last week and it was the best conference I have ever attended. During the show Scott and I used the delltechcenter twitter account to interact with other twitter heads and provided some basic coverage for those not able to attend. We also have a virtual booth and blogs (here and here) on VMworld.com where some of the fun of the conference was captured. I also uploaded all of my pictures from the conference as well.

VMware's big announcement was really more of a vision for where their virtual infrastructure is going over the next few years. Initially there are some changes coming with Virtual Center and ESX that will allow for better management and interaction with 3rd party tools. There was much more talk of creating a platform with APIs and partners than in previous years. Client vitalization and VDI is now a much bigger area of focus based on the amount of time that it was discussed in the keynotes and the number of breakout sessions. Ultimately, VMware talked quite a bit about being able to use the "cloud" as part of future solutions.

Some things are still going on over on VMworld.com and I will be posting some things here and there. Some will only be in one place. Just trying to put the content where it belongs. Chime in with comments anytime.

Todd

0 Comments Permalink Tags: delltechcenter, vmworld, vcloud, pictures
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Microsoft announced yesterday that they are basically matching VMware's free ESXi download with a free slimmed down version of Hyper-V to also be a free download. Previously both companies had charged money for this virtualization software, but will now make them available for free. VMware announced on July 28th 2008 that ESXi would be available as a free download and Microsoft announced on September 8th 2008 that they would have a slimmed down version of Hyper-V available as a free download. The two products are not exactly the same - there are feature differences between the two but I think it is fair to say that they are comparable in most respects.

This is actually almost an exact replay of history from about two years ago.

On Februrary 6th, 2006 VMware announced that the product previously known as GSX server would now be called VMware Server and would be available as a free download. About two months later on April 3rd, 2006, Microsoft announced that Virtual Server 2005 was becoming a no-charge download. Again these products previously cost money and were not the exactly the same feature for feature, but they were comparable.

Have fun reading through the old press releases and comparing them to the recent ones from the last month.

Todd

0 Comments Permalink Tags: delltechcenter, esxi, hyper-v, gsx, free
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I just finished up testing for a new whitepaper on Hyper-V performance and one of the initial things I had to figure out was how to measure the CPU utilization on the server. What is known as the parent partition (the initial Windows Server 2008 that is installed on the server and then used to enable the Hyper-V role) does not include the CPU utilization for its VMs in the main Processor Utilization performance counter. This was surprising to me at first, but makes sense when you consider the architecture of Hyper-V. In this architecture, the VMs do not go through the parent partition to access the processors. (Although I/O does to use the device drivers of the parent partition.)

In order to solve this problem Microsoft has created some new performance counters that are specific to the Hyper-V Hypervisor. Early on in the betas for Hyper-V it wasn't clear what these counters did, as I blogged about back in January, but it is now much clearer with some guides from Microsoft.

In order to measure the total CPU utilization on a Windows Server 2008 system running VMs under Hyper-V use the Hyper-V Hypervisor Logical Processor % Total Run Time counter in Performance Monitor (more affectionately known as perfmon). If you just look at the % CPU Utilization or the performance tab of Task Manager you will only see the CPU utilization of the parent partition and not the VMs.

Todd

0 Comments Permalink Tags: delltechcenter, hyper-v, performance, perfmon, cpu, utilization
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Wow that was fast. It was only a couple of weeks ago that VMware joined the Microsoft Software Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP) and now ESX 3.5 Update 2 has been offically certified under that program. This means that now ESX and Hyper-V are supported virtualization platforms for running Microsoft applications. This removes a big issue that many customers had regarding support for Microsoft apps like Exchange, SQL Server, and SharePoint when running on VMware ESX. Check out the Microsoft Virtualization Team Blog and Scott Lowe's blog for some some additional details.

Todd

0 Comments Permalink Tags: esx, vmware, delltechcenter, svvp, certification, support, validation

ToddMuirhead

 Member since: Feb 13, 2006

Some Stuff on Enterprise Virtualization from DellTechCenter

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