Dave Convery's Blog

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?

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Have you ever needed an easy to reference way to see what the
configuration maximums are for different versions of VMware ESX. I
know I seem to need this all the time. I find it a huge pain to keep
referring to each of the individual VMware documents to get the
answers. Sometimes I also want to see what the changes are between
versions and I can’t seem to memorize this information in my tiny
little brain. So I went ahead and created a “Configuration Maximums
Comparison Matrix” based on the VMware Configuration Maximums for each
version.

You’ll notice some settings don’t have values for each version.
This is because they were not published in the VMware documents. As I
go through some additional documents and extract these values I will
update the document to reflect. For no the document does include
everything from the VMware Configuration maximums published for each of
these Versions:

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There are many reasons to install VMware ESX in text mode. The main
reasons I use text mode are that it seems quicker for me and text mode
responds better when using remote console connections, such as iLo,
DRAC or console over IP. Previous versions of VMware used a text mode
that incorporated Anaconda and was very similar to the text mode for
RPM based Linux distributions. The new text mode in ESX 4 is VERY
rudimentary when compared to the earlier versions. Hoever, it performs
very well and is fairly straight forward to use.

The text mode installer uses simple lists of choices. Usually, 1 is
for continue or to answer yes. Some items will have more than one
choice. Here is a screenshot:

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So, I use NewsGator
to aggregate a BAZILLION feeds from several sources, blogs, like this
one, actual news feeds and a bunch of VMware feeds. The VMware feeds
are from the VI:OPS and VMTN
forums. The VMTN forums allow you to create a custom feed by selecting
the RSS link at the bottom right of each page or you can get a feed
from a specific section of the forum by clicking the link on the bottom
left of a list. On of the custom feed options is to get a feed of the
new KB articles.

VMware has released quite a lot of new KB articles surrounding vSphere. They just released nice best practice guidelines for installing or upgrading to ESX 4 and vCenter 4. They are short and to the point. There is also a nice article covering best practices for upgrading an ESX 3.x virtual machine to ESX 4.0. One thing I noticed, but never thought about is this : Read more…

Yes folks, it rears its ugly head again…Disk Alignment… If you have not read it yet, check out the whitepaper on disk alignment from VMware.

First, chethan from VMware posted a great thread on VMTN
about I/O performance in vSphere. The start of the thread talks about
I/O, then leads into anice discussion about block size. A couple of
weeks ago, Duncan Epping posted a very informative article about block sizes. It convinced me to use 8MB blocks in VMFS designs.

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