Blog Posts

The whitepaper that I finished recently was new for me on many levels. It was my first whitepaper here at VMware which meant that I learned the review and publishing process. ESX 4.0 was also still under development when I started, so I got to learn about how to get new builds and report bugs. Which was all pretty cool.

I also used a NetApp FAS6030 storage array for the testing. Prior to this work I didn't have much exposure to NetApp and I didn't know what to expect. There are a few things that I wanted to note here that were surprising to me in working with the NetApp array for the first time.

1. The snapshots work really well. I was impressed with how the aggregate level snaps worked and how well they performed.

2. NFS on the NetApp array is better than I expected. I didn't think that it would be as close as it ended up being to the FC results.

3. It is really easy to use NFS with ESX. I didn't realize how easy it use NFS as a data store for ESX until I had done the setup.

4. The NetApp people that I worked with were good and it has been cool to interact via twitterand blogs with them as well. OK - so this shouldn't be categorized as surprising.

These were just a few things that didn't really fit in the whitepaper and the type of general stuff I think makes for good blog posts (If you are into this kind of tech stuff).

Todd

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

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

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

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

Virtual Geek has a some great performance and power consumption numbers up on his blog for virtualizing Microsoft Sharepoint. I've gotten lots of questions over the past year or so about how SharePoint would perform in a VM and this is the best data that I have seen to answer those questions. He has info about how you can download the full report from EMC's Powerlink site, but the charts and info in his blog post seem to cover the main points. The amount of savings in terms of power are so big as to be unbelievable, but after looking at the details behind them it all seems to add up. An excellent read - I recommend that you check it out.

Todd

I ran across Scott Lowe's blog entry on Melio FS, Hyper-V, and VMware ESX earlier today. Scott talks about his discussion with Jeff Woolsey - Senior Program Manager for Virtualziation at Microsoft - while at Tech Ed. Specifically how Microsoft has allowed storage partners to create a cluster file system that can be used by Windows 2008 \ Hyper-V. Such a cluster file system could enable the VMFS type functionality of having multiple physical hosts access a shared disk at the same time. This would remove the requirement of one LUN for one VM when doing quick migration with Hyper-V. Specifically Sanbolics' Melio FS was identified as capable of doing this.

I think this is excellent news and means that Hyper-V customers will have a cluster file system option for their Hyper-V hosts. This can greatly simplify storage management when you have more than just a few VMs. On the downside is the additional cost of such a cluster file system. There is not pricing listed on the Sanbolic website, but the Network World article states that the price is $5000 per host. If the cost is anywhere near that, then the price of VMware's ESX doesn't seem that bad in comparison to Hyper-V - assuming that you need or want the cluster file system capability.

Todd

I didn't get a chance last week to draw attention to the nice video that Marc Farley put up on the InsideIT blog last week about our TechCenter web chats. Marc is a regular attendee of our weekly chat sessions and he is also the lead blogger on InsideIT. The video is cool, short, and just as relevant this week as last. This week's chat (Tues 3 PM CST) will be about when to select blades for your virtualization server platform.

Todd