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Did you know that it is possible to run multiple ESX servers, a Virtual Center server, a NAS appliance all on a laptop? Even more cool is that VMotion will work to live migrate VMs between the two ESX servers, which by the way are running on a single laptop. It is important to note that none of this is supported, but it does give you a really cool ESX testing environment - on your laptop!

The complete details about how to get this installed and running were contributed to delltechcenter.com on a new wiki page - Virtual Infrastructure Test Environment. Jose Maria from Dell in Europe uses this configuration to show how VMware ESX Server and VirtualCenter work together. He gets lots of questions about how he did it so he put together this doc to explain. He's included lots of screen shots which makes it easy to follow.

The basic configuration that he uses is a Dell Latitude D630 with 4GB of RAM running VMware Workstation.

Todd

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The VMware VI Team Blog recently had an entry announcing that Storage VMotion is now supported with iSCSI. Although many of you may not have known, until this announcement Storage Vmotion was only supported with fibre channel storage. I did a video demo of Storage VMotion a few months ago when it came out. The funny story is that I actually had to redo the video after recording it the first time because initially I had used an the iSCSI based PowerVault MD3000i as the source. When I found out that iSCSI wasn't supported, I had to re-record it - no big deal - but it made me really appreciate this announcement of support. This really makes Storage VMotion much more compelling as you can use it to migrate your VMs between fibre and iSCSI without interruption.

Todd

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On the TechTuesday chat yesterday the topic was Selecting a Server for Virtualization, and we had an excellent discussion. One of the points that came up was the importance of understanding VMotion compatibility between different servers. On easy rule is that it is not possible to VMotion between AMD and Intel processors. As these are completely different processors in many respects it is easy to understand how it is not possible to move a running VM from one to the other with no downtime. The next aspect that VMotion will not work across different generations of processors. The difficulty here is that processor generations do not always line up with Dell server generations. So even if you have all Dell 9G servers, there are cases where VMotion will not work.

It really comes down to the instruction set that each processors is using. A running VM has identified the processor that it is running on and is expecting a certain instruction set to be available. If this were to suddenly change in the middle the OS would not be able to cope or adapt and would most likely crash. There has been some work done to improve the situation - but as of today it is still an issue.

The answer to this problem is the compatibility matrix that our virtualization engineering team has put together and updates as new servers are released. It is important to consider this matrix when selecting a server if VMotion is in use.

Todd

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The second post on the Microsoft Virtualzation Team Blog about Quick Migration and VMotion was added a few days ago. It is mostly a discussion about how VMware HA and Quick Migration both provide a failover solution for UNplanned downtime. I agree with Jeff that both do basically the same thing in the event of an unplanned server outage - the VM is moved to another server and restarted.

The difference that he doesn't talk about is that the rules of the failover are different because of the underlying filesystem that is used in each solution. Microsoft Hyper-V and Quick Migration are using the tried and true Microsoft failover-clustering, which uses an NTFS filesystem on the shared storage. As this is not a cluster file system, the shared storage is actually only visible to one of the servers at a time to prevent corruption. VMware ESX server and VMware HA are working with VMs that are on a VMFS file system which is cluster aware - meaning that multiple ESX servers are able to access the files (or VMs in other words) at the same time.

So following a failure of a Hyper-V server, all VMs on the same disk (or LUN) must be recovered on the same server because the LUN or disk can only be used by one server at a time. In the event of a failure of an ESX server, the VMs can be restarted on any ESX server that has access to the LUN. In order to achieve this flexibility with Hyper-V and Quick Migration it would be necessary to have each VM on it's own LUN. This isn't impossible, but could be more complex to setup and manage.

The end result would be same - the VMs would be restarted on another server. Some of the underlying details can make a difference with flexibility in where those VMs end up.

Todd

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