VMware Communities : Thread List - Strategy and Planning Archives

PowerChute Network Shutdown 2.2.1 on ESX 2.5.1

vvarnell — Wed, 28 Dec 2005 22:08:07 GMT

OK. I'm at my wits end. Two straight days of this and I'm burnt out.

I am attempting to get PCNS 2.2.1 on two ESX 2.5.1 servers connected to two parallel APC UPS's with management cards. Configuration on the Windows systems went just fine, so I know the overall configuration works.

I've looked through the forums and found every reference to powerchute I could but I'm just short enough on my linux skills that I'm hitting problems with simple things like: making tar files, setting file modes correctly, configuring java, etc. As a result, I'm mentally frazzled and no closer to a working solution. I've got the concepts and tools, just not the detailed know-how nor enough time to develop them.

So, here is my offer.

Anyone that can post a step-by-step procedure for getting PCNS from a RedHat 7.2 VM to work properly on an ESX 2.5.1 server will get the reward points.

I'm so worn on this problem that I'll even donate something like a Starbucks Card or some such thing to the first complete/correct solution.

Assistance vastly appreciated.

Switch for VMotion

jhevenerVAL — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 14:27:43 GMT

Are there any recommendations/guidelines for Gigabit Switches to use with VMotion?
Anyone ever use a Linksys SD2005 10/100/1000 Gigabit switch?

Does the VMotion switch/network need to be linked to the production/guest/host network(s)?

Capacity Planner ISSUE on Performance

aleph0 — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 13:45:44 GMT

Hi all,
I've got an error using Capacity Planner (latest version 2.1.5) on a lot of servers (WINDOWS SERVER 2003).

The Performance Monitor / Logging Service is in Manual startup, as on all the other machines on which I've no errors. I've tried to start the performance monitor services but it answer me with something like "... this services start if there is something to do....".

Inventory tasks works correctly on the same servers and so the authentication to the servers is correct!

The TCP ports are opened correctly (135-139, 445)

The errors is attached below (just for one of the servers 'cause only the server name change )

01/16/2007 15:39:44:0:3452: Performance.CollectSystemPerformance: [470-SERVER01] Perfmon returned - The specified object is not found on the system.(-1073738824) on every counter. This usually indicates that the remote system allows access, but not remote performance monitoring. Check firewall settings and remote services.

01/16/2007 15:39:44:1:3452: Performance.CollectSystemPerformance:[470-SERVER01] No valid counters found to collect on SERVER01. The last error received was -1073738824

01/16/2007 15:39:44:2:3596: Performance: SysPerfComplete for 470 with a status of -1073738824.

SAN Performance with extended LUN's

sandsturm — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 19:59:25 GMT

Hello

Knows anybody the "Best Practices" for SAN LUN Configuration. Is it better to make one 500GB LUN or to make 5 x 100GB and extend it in the esx server. Which example has the better performance? I heard, a SAN LUN is slower, as bigger it is. Can anybody tell me, what's the best choice?

Thanks for help
sandsturm

Is Dell trying to upsell me? Need some guidance for capacity planning.

TamBank — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 03:23:01 GMT

FYI, I'm new to virtualization...

I'm needing to build a server that will need to run our SPAM filter gateway, mass emailing system and an FTP server w/ light traffic (less than 300mb/week). The SPAM filter requires a 1ghz machine w/ 1gb ram. This would filter an Exchange system w/ ~90 users at a community bank. The mass email server and FTP server are currently running together on a P4 3.0 w/ 512mb ram. I'm all for future capacity planning, but they're is not much need to put more services on this "DMZ" type server. Dell thinks I need a Quad core 2.0 w/ 4gb ram which I feel is more than I'll ever need. Am I underestimating my needs? TIA

EqualLogic Vs EMC Clariion

femialpha — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 02:26:20 GMT

EMC has become very aggressive about capturing the SMB market especially with the release of the new CX3-10c. I haven't handled the CX line for a while now and would like some feedback from those who have had a chance to compare both products.

Which product would you recommend for a client that is starting from scratch for about 70 vm's.

Newbie question-VI3 Starter

rklemme14 — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 04:59:49 GMT

I am planning an implementation of four servers across two Dell PE 6950's. One server one will be VI3 with three vms, running on it will be SBS 2003, Blackberry Enterprise Server, and Terminal server for about 15 users.

Server 2 will be a traditional installation of SQL server that will run a large database that will get pounded.

My question is where do I install the tape drive? Will ESX allow me to share the SCSI host adapter to one of the VMs or will I have to install it on the standalone SQL server.

Thanks so much, I love this product and I can't wait to get formal training but until then I will ask the experts.

Robert

HP ProLiant BL685c or IBM LS41

porrasus1 — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 19:20:04 GMT

Hi:

Could someone here guide me to choose wich model refered in the subject is the best for installing 16 ESX 3.0.1, booting from SAN (Clarion cx3-40) ?

Thanks in advance

4 node Exchange cluster

tonypurewall — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 10:26:02 GMT

Hello

I have a physcial 4 node Exchange setup, I wish to create a disaster recovery site which will be implemented using VMware Infrastructure 3.

Is it possible to setup a 4 node Exchange cluster on a single piece of hardware or even across multiple boxes?

Regards

Tony

Starter to Standard??

AnthonyM — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 17:01:49 GMT

Hi All,

Simple question, I hope...Is there an upgrade option from VI3 starter to VI3 standard, or do I have to buy the Standard version as new?

I am trying to get prices for a second VI3 server, with standard, and to upgrade our current server, which is starter, with more RAM, and hence move to the Standard version.....

In the UK if that makes a difference (this will be on HP kit too if that makes a difference).

Regards

Anthony

Terminal Services as VM

multik — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 15:58:15 GMT

Hi guys,

I'd like to virtualize Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 Terminal Services server. For this purpose I have selected existing IBM x345 eSeries server (2x2.8GHz, 4GB RAM). I've installed VI3.0.1 and currently am running 2 VMs: 1 Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 Terminal Services server (allocated 1,5Gb RAM, 2vCPUs) and
2 Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 server running WSUS server, Computer Associates eTrust AntiVirus r8 and PestPatrol r8 servers and some smaller management applications that are not used too often (allocated 256MB RAM, 1 vCPU).

There will be >30 users connecting to Terminal Services on a daily basis to work with Microsoft Office 2007 (mainly Word-Excel-Outlook), Internet, Adobe Acrobat Reader. I'm using Computer Associates eTrust AntiVirus r8 and PestPatrol r8 as corporate antivirus and pest patrol applications. So far I've migrated only 4-5 users to new virtual Terminal server and already I see performance issues with printing (spoolsv.exe maxing out CPU), with opening files (doesn't matter if file is 32Kb or 15MB). All files are stored on another IBM x345. They will soon be moved to NetApp FAS250.

My questions are: is this physical machine powerful enough to handle all that load? Have I allocated enough resources for Terminal server VM? Could I get performance boost from moving files from server to SAN?

Any help is greatly appreciated. I'm kind of under pressure here, timewise

VC datcenter/clustering

seangar — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 18:29:18 GMT

I just set up a VC with 1 datacenter and a cluster in it. I have 2 ESX hosts in it. Also 1 Windows 2003 server with VC running the whole deal. All 3 physical boxes use/see a 60 GB NetApp LUN formatted as a VMFS vol.

1. Each ESX host has ~60 GB local, should I add this to the VMFS LUN/vol ?
If so will it be seen as 1 larger vol then and will VMotion, HA work on it properly ?
Or not use the local storage and hide it (how)?

2. With 1 VC and multiple host attached to a single LUN (VMFS vol) what are the options and how are others leveraging the product ?

TIA

VI3 Dashboard

buckethead — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 22:20:30 GMT

I have been tasked with coming up with a dashboard/ web report of our entire Virtual Infrastructure. Today that Infrastructure consists of VC 2, a couple of VI3 boxes and several ESX 2.5.2 boxes. I am not a scripting expert by any means.

So my question is how is everyone reporting on their environment. Is it all manual/ automated. Are you using scripts or a third party tool? We have looked at Charter and talked with Premitech, but haven't decided to go with either product.

The purpose of this dashboard would be to report on the # of datacenters, farms, hosts, virtual machines along with helping us to keep track of performance so that we can react to capacity and replenish as needed.

Some of the summary/ performance reports found in Virtual Center are useful, but I haven't yet found a way to automate those.

I am currently looking to see how I can script this, but wanted to get a better idea on how others are getting this done.

Windows on a Unix Host with a twist (netboot)

mspiegle — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 03:23:39 GMT

Hi all!
From all the research i've done, I have come to the conclusion that it is not possible to run windows in a netboot environment by itself (have a single windows image live on a machine, then use PXE boot to run multiple hosts off that 1 image).

Fortunately, Linux is very good at such things, so my plan was to have a netbooted linux cluster where the nodes run windows in a vmware session.

What's the advantage you ask? Well, with a central image, I can make an update to a single file and it should propagate out to all nodes. Also, I can run 2 logical windows guests on each physical machine and possibly enhance my hardware utilization.

So, what i'm currently trying to do is get Vmware to use an image as the virtual disk. I read some tutorials on using vmware with a windows partition (basically pointing vmware to load /dev/hda). What I tried to do was create a loopback filesystem as /dev/loop0 and run vmware with it, but vmware doesn't like it.

Can anyone shed some light on this? Vmware claims that it can't "read" the device, so i'm not completely sure where to go from here. Thanks in advance!

Performance battle \[RDM vs 1MB/2MB/4MB/8MB Block Sized VMFS]

davidbarclay — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 04:41:30 GMT

I used to think I knew why we would use each of these configurations/formats.

That was until I actually tested all the options. Details of these tests are here

Unless I need a 256GB+ VMDK, or need to use SAN based tools - why would I ever use anything other than VMFS with 1MB block size?

Am I missing something?

Dave

Message was edited by:
davidbarclay - fixed link

College project: Virtualization

MrScary — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 14:17:48 GMT

Hi all,

I am currently in my last year of college and doing my graduation paper on virtualisation in the datacenter. I have a target pool of 15 physical servers which I have been monitoring for about a month now, 3 samples a time and a 5 minuts interval. This leaves me with around 18000 samples for each counter I monitored, so I have data available.

Now I am wondering which counters I should take into consideration while investigating which machines can be virtualised and which not.
I was thinking at following counters:

CPU %usage (avg en peak)
CPU queue
MEM %usage (avg en peak)
MEM Page Faults
page file %
paging/sec
Disk I/O /sec (avg en peak)
Disk I/O Mb /s (avg en peak)
Disk Disk Read Queue Length
Disk Disk Write Queue Length
Disk Average Disk Sector Transfer Time
Net Mb/s (avg en peak)

(got em from different articles on the VM site)

Now when I see calculations, it seems they always calculate on the highest load possible. For example, if your CPU max load was 100% during some samples, you got to calculate this 100% into the hardware requirements of the new hardware (the formula was somewhere too -- found it)

((Processor Speed* # Processors)*utilization) = Processor Requirement
Host Processor Speed in Mhz/100)

Now, take this example: I got a domain controller, which peaked twice during these 18000 samples to 100 ... For the rest, he never got over 25%. Now if I would calculate the CPU requirement for this server to 100% instead of 25%, this would be totally off.

100%:Dual P4 with 2,8G CPUS: 2800x2x100 --> 5,6Ghz required on new machine
25%: Dual P4 with 2,8G CPUS: 2800x2x0,25 --> 1,4Ghz required on new machine

See the difference? And this goes up for almost all counters (Memory, disk, network)

any advice appreciated!

Should I use the max counters anyway, or could I use 95th or 97th percentile calculations (and discard the highest 5 or 3% of samples) ?

!Please understand I cannot use paying tools as it is a college project!

Message was edited by:
MrScary

Dmotion a vm with muliple vmdk files

epping — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 12:23:15 GMT

run into a bit of an issue.

want to do a dmotion, 2.5 to 3. the vm in question has two vmdk files stored on different LUNs i.e. an OS LUN and a Data LUN. When doing the Dmotion i dont seem to have the Advanced button on the Select Datastores i.e. i want the OS vmdk file to go to a new vmfs3 OS LUN and the Data VMDK file to go to the new Data VMFS LUN. I only get the option to select on LUN so it looks like both vmdk files can only be migrated to one LUN.

Is this correct??

i get the option of Advanced if a cold migration is selected.

this will course me a big problem

OK have done a search

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=495748&#495748

i just cant belive this is the case, it means Dmotion is completly unusable to me, a cold migration for all of my vms, this is a big big issue, VMware sort it out third party tools can do it and it cant be that hard to sort. There must be 100s of customers that seperate out their OS and Data on different LUNs....

Message was edited by:
epping

Environment Planning - am I on the right track?

GaryMartin7 — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 11:36:22 GMT

Hi,

I've had a quick look through previous posts about doing a VMware deployment, and thought I'd see if anyone could give me a little validation against my current plans.

We are looking at deploying a blade centre (HP C-Class) using 4 x BL685 blades. Each blade has 32GB RAM and 6 multifunction network cards (plus 2 more standard cards). We have a Netapp storage cluster with 2 shelves of FC disks.

Ok, the sticky part. We are planning to use ISCSI for our SAN and have dedicated ports on our Cisco 4000 series for the job (Gigabit ports). The physical network will go 2 x VMKernel (for VMotion etc), 2 x SAN and 2 x General LAN access per machine. Now, we need to tie up the security as servers will be added to DMZ networks using VLAN tagging. What is the general feeling about security with VMware when using tagging?

We will also need to have different VLANs for the SAN also because the systems are sharing ESX SAN and MS SAN physical network interfaces (using MS ISCSI initiator inside virtual hosts, which we need to complete some Netapp-based software backups). If I use the same SAN IP range universally then these machines can see each other on their SAN interfaces (virtual switches can't be configured with Access lists).

I will trunk ports to the Netapp and assign a network address for each SAN DMZ to the SAN interface on the Netapp. The Netapp does not act as a router and therefore should not allow traversal of other SANs from a host.

It's making my head hurt a little. Should it work the way I have it in my head?

Gary

Configuration Deployment Template

asiclari — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 06:13:39 GMT

Hi,
I am about to deploy ESX server 3.0.1 and going through the configuration phase. I need to document my process and all the configuration settings that I do, so in case of a disaster I can recall back to the documentation and reconfigure.

What I need is a template which I can work from to put all this information in, has anyone got a template to basically fill in the blanks or is there anywhere I can download one. Basically if I am not around someone can pick up this documentation and recreate the environment.

All you help is much appreciated.

Regards,
Tony

ESX Local Partition Layout

canadait — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 21:28:04 GMT

Hi,

I am just wondering what people think of this disk partion layout. (see image below)

I have two 73GB drives mirrored in a RAID 1 with hot spare. I am also going to be using VMWare HA and Dell Open Manage. All VMs will be stored on a SAN and ISOs on a NFS share. I used this thread as my basis.

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=73697

Add image to post?

canadait — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 20:42:50 GMT

Hi,

Can I add an image to a post on this forum? If so how?

The right SAN for a VW Infrastructure 3 solution?

Paal — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 14:56:12 GMT

We are in a process of choosing the right hardware for a new VW solution with two VW-servers, a SAN, VmWare Infrastructure 3 and Virtual Center.

So far we have reduced our choices to a few possibilities for the SAN:
- IBM DS3400 using SAS-disks
- Dell CX300 using FC-disks
- Dell CX3-10c using FC-disks

We will connect the SAN to our servers using FC2 or FC4.
My question is:
1. The Dell/CX alternative is more than twice the price of the IBM DS3400 box. Does anyone have any input on this? (performance, ease of use, use with VmWare)
2. Does VmWare support using direct connection between the disk-cabinet and two servers (DAS) or do we need a fiber switch (SAN)?

The price for the Xeon Intel Quad core server are not totally different between IBM and Dell.

New to ESX, some advice please

Alex8809 — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 17:06:18 GMT

We have been running GSX for a number of years and currently have 10 boxes, (Dell with Windows server, 2 X 3.xGhz Xeons 8GB Ram) these run 6 to 8 development VMs each.

We now have a requirement to host 22 new VM environments and they need realistic (or as near as possible) performance to the live sites. This means minimum 2GB RAM each and as much CPU as possible. They will not all be running concurrently however therefore I think ESX is the way to go using DRS and HA.

I have read the Infrastructure architecture overview pdfs but am still a little confused with how it should all fit together.

Under GSX I would buy 4 x Dell 2900 each with 10GB RAM and 2 x Dual Core 5150 2.66GHz and 6 x 140GB disks.

Under ESX would I still need roughly the same hardware maybe 2U rack mounts instead of towers plus a SAN or NAS?

Does each server run ESX and then install Virtual Center Management server on a separate box to control everything?

Would blades be a better option?

NFS on Windows

rrosenkoetter — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 19:56:46 GMT

I used the following help document to successfully set up NFS on Windows...

http://www.anbecom.com/wordpress/?p=129

Can anyone help me understand certain things about this process?

(1) What is the purpose of the mapping root to an administrator account? I had to copy over the passwd and group files to the windows server... does that mean that if I try to connect to this NFS share from a ESX server with a DIFFERENT root password, it will fail?

(2) Under the NFS Share permissions, the instructions say to set ALL MACHINES to Read/Write with Root access allowed... This seems insane to me from a security stand-point... Where can I learn how to lock this down?

Any help would be appreciated. I'm not a Linux or NFS expert. I can't believe all the work I'm doing to re-create functionality in VC2 that existed natively in VC1.

Backup VMs using suspend/snapshot?

mrbones — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 22:19:28 GMT

Hi,

I am trying to build a backup solution for my vi3 environment.

I am considering using suspend (which is a "cold" backup) - which means suspending all running machines, take a snapshot on the SAN device and then resume operations.

I was considering taking a snapshot of all VMs (using vmware's snapshot), then taking a snapshot using the SAN device.

1. Which of the methods is preferable?
2. I'd like to hear if anyone has had experience using one of these methods.
3. Does any of the methods ensure complete consistency (yes, even when running sql or exchange...)?

Thanks,
Shahar.

local VMFS Raid 1 or Raid 5

a-salt — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 07:12:42 GMT

Hi @all, i need a professsional information about local harddisk configurations. we will use vmware infrastructure 3 standard edition without a san. we will use local vmfs. what is better, a raid 1 mirroring with 2 harddisk or a raid 5 with more little harddisks
cu
arthur

Anyone Use Storageflex Storage?

doubleH — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 21:32:16 GMT

Specifically the 3945N? If so what are your experiences?

iSCSI storage experiences

jonhutchings — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 14:51:41 GMT

So we are looking to buy some lower price (compared with FC SAN) storage t oback end a budget ESX system. We already have an ESX VI with a Fibre channel san, however we are looking to put in place a budget solution for a different project.

I'd be interested in peoples experiences with iSCSI boxes in terms of IOPS, numbers of VMs running on the storage etc.

Thanks

Advice from those who've been there and done it?

fontyyy — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 23:37:26 GMT

Hi there,

I'm the network administrator at a mid sized further/higher education college in England, we've currently got around 50 servers of various ages, some doing very little (bought for projects that didn't need a new server or didn't really get off the ground for example) and in the odd case some very old ones doing far too much. We've a total of around 1.7tb of needed data (i.e. not just backup's of backup's because I'm paranoid) spread across the 6tb or so of total storage on those servers and a Dell AX100 DAS.

Now talk of fibre SAN's and pools of brand new quad core servers is all well and good (and I've got a $200,000 quote from Dell for just such a setup), but it's way out of our league, we're pushing our luck asking for an Equallogic PS300 (or similar if anyone has any ideas) and the VI licences to run across the 4 Dell twin Xeon 1850's I have freed up by shifting stuff around and using the free version of VMware, I have another free single processor 1850 to run the Virtual Centre one.

That'll do to get us started, the question is (see there is one), roughly how many servers (presuming a relativly understressed Dell 1750 with a gig of ram to be a typical server) am I likely to be able to get on this setup and how much RAM are they going to need?

My plan thus far is to get a SAN, get the VM setup running across the 5 servers mentioned, move the current file store from the DAS to the SAN, attach one of the two file share servers (a Dell 2850) to the SAN to do said sharing (maybe running Storage Server if we can get it).
Then move the old AX100 to somewhere else on campus (currently EVERYTHING is in one room!!!!) attached to probably the other file share server, get it running a iSCSI target and thus have something that vaguely resembes our critical data if a jet engine falls on the server room.

Thanks for any advice, I'm sure we can acually show a saving pretty much straight away by not replacing those servers that are nearing death and stopping buying new boxes for every single app that comes along but convicing the purse string holders that any software licence is worth around $10,000 is tough, it really is.

How to virtualize a physical machine with a FAX PCI Card ?

zemotard — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 07:44:22 GMT

Is it possible with esx 3 ?
Regards

How to calculate how many VMS a host can support?

zhangfred_vm — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 02:59:53 GMT

Hi Friends,

I am doing plan to create VMs on the Host.

Now I don't know how VMS should one ESX Server 3.01 Host will support. Is there a industry standard or a formula?

Creating SATA faq... Need your help.

dominic7 — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 22:12:02 GMT

Ok, I've seen enough posts on this forum about SATA that I've decided to come up with a small faq explaining which cards have been tested to work, pricing, availability and perhaps some benchmarks if I get some ($$$) help.

Here is what I have so far for cards that have been working or may work in ESX 2.5:

Confirmed Working:

Controller: LSILogic MegaRAID 150-4

Controller: LSILogic MegaRAID 150-6

Controller: Dell Cerc 1.5/6ch (Adaptec 2610SA)

Controller: Intel SRCS14L
Price: ~$300
/etc/vmware/vmware-devices.map:
device,0x8086,0x0600,scsi,RAID Controller,gdth.o
lspci:
RAID bus controller: Intel Corporation RAID Controller

Not Confirmed but suspected to work:

Controller: Adaptec 2410SA

Controller: HP P600

Confirmed *NOT* working:

Controller: Intel SRCS28X

If you have lspci/vmware-devices.map info for the last 3 boards I would appreciate it if you could post here or email me ( with the email address in my profile ). If there is enough interest or volunteers for the hardware I'd also like to get some benchmarks on the controllers. If there is a benchmark in particular that you want to see drop me a line.

If you have another board that is working, let me know. I've looked through quite a few posts and these were all that I could find.

Planning Best practice Documents for planning and deployment

zhangfred_vm — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 09:19:08 GMT

Hi Friends,

I am planning to do virtualization for about thirty machines? Firsly I want to do the plan.

When can I found the best practice documents for the planning and deployment?

Thanks

Exchange 150User on VI3 cluster.

rock0n — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 14:31:12 GMT

Exchange 150User on VI3 cluster with iSCSI / FC - SATA Storage

Is anybody running this in a productive environment.

Special thoughts going to the HA feature.

From my point of view, running database Application in a HA cluster could cause Database corruption.

University Presentation - Had a question regarding VMWare..

dhroovc — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 19:31:34 GMT

Hi Everyone,

I have a presentation on Virtualization Technologies this week. I want to know what technique does VMWare use?

OS Virtualization - which is each os talks to the processor independently

Hardware Virtualization - which is each the commands from the guest OS are translated into commands that the Host OS can understand, which then performs what is needed.

or complete Hardware Virtualization - Splitting processors using the new VT technology in AMD and Intel.

Thanks for your responses

Dhruv

Expanding servers virtualization

apoleia — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 09:54:39 GMT

Hello,

We're actually running a vmware server with 4 vms (WSUS, antivirus(EPO), LAMP, print server) for 200 people on a poweredge 1800 with 4 GB of RAM.

We would like to expand the virtualization to other servers (1 file server, 1 server for itinerant profiles, 1 local application server, 1 application server, 1 DHCP/scripts server). (win2003 servers)

First question: Should I go for esx ?

Second question: We only have a 20K $ budget ( 15000 Ã¢ÂÂ¬) and a spare poweredge 2850 server with 2 dual core xeon.
If my math are good for 3 dual core xeon (2 for the PE2850 and 1 for the PE1800), VI3 standard would cost me 3*the price of VI3 standard = 20k$. Which means I wouldn't be able to by a SAN.

I've been reading posts on this forum for a while but I'm still have no idea about what should I do ?

Any help would be really appreciated.

Thanks

Guest Disks: Growable vs Pre-allocated

JasonCzerak — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 16:28:50 GMT

I'm moving from Vmware Server to ESX servers with a SAN. Space shouldn't be a problem any more for me. But I'd like to be realistic here with space usage.

For example:

Win2K3 server with Corda PDF converter: This is a CPU and Memory intensive application and purpose. 15GIG grow able disk is what I selected for this server.

Linux with Oracle 10: I opted to create a 50gig disk pre-allocated.. Tho, once the OS is installed and Oracle installed and initial stuff done, Do we really have a speed advantage for pre-allocated disks if usage is relatively low? (This box is a development oracle server).

Another linux box with Apache. 5 developers use this box directly. The biggest disk intensive thing they do is run CVS commands. apache log files are grow able. All in all, once initially installed, do the same performance things apply? this is a 20 gig disk, preallocated.

I could save a lot of space, and A LOT of backup tape space if these were all grow able disks, but I certainly do not want performance to fall.

Naturally, watching disk space on the host/san is more of a requirement.

What is the general real world rule of thumb here?

best ESX 3.01 network layout

JasonNB — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 20:27:01 GMT

I have two ESX 3.01 servers. Both are Dell 1855 blades, and both currently connect to a FC SAN, sharing a single LUN. I need to add more storage and it will be in teh form of iSCSI. My question regards best layout given I only have two GB nic's to work with.

I have tested the following:
Single vswitch, both nics A and B active
Nic A is primary for the service console, Nic B is standby
Nic A is primary for my VM's, Nic B is Standby
Nic B is primary for the kernel/iSCSI service console, Nic a is standby
Nic B is primary for teh iSCSI, Nic A is standby

In testing, this seems to work very well, but should I have a separate vSwitch for each nic and work from that direction? If I understand correctly, this won't work since I have to have the failover iSCSI ncs in the same vSwitch? I plan on setting up some form of multipath as well since teh pNics are in different switches, and the iSCSI (on its on Vlan) has two controllers, so I can guard against switch failure as well.

I sthere a better way to get where I need to go?

Log in to Web Access on VMWARE ESX Server 3

Gooose — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 09:35:15 GMT

I have installed VMWare ESX Server 3 and appear to be having problems when using the "Log in to Web Access" option on the Service console.

I connect to the service console and click on "Log in to Web Acccess" on the WMware ESX Server 3 Welcome page, and the page just goes blank without a response...

Has anyone else experience this problems and be able to throw some light on how to resolve it. I have installed 4 ESX server which all appear to have the same problem.

I do not get this issue when using older versions of ESX. it just appears to be since I have started using Version 3.

Regards

questions for a modest beginning

tlyczko — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 18:49:01 GMT

I work for a non-profit agency, and we are looking to set up some new servers with VMware.

We are looking to virtualize some new ervers: Windows SharePoint Services Web Front End, SQL Server 2005, WSUS, and later hopefully fit in a few more servers as our needs grow.

I know that WSS or SQL may not be ideal VM candidates but I think we will be okay if we keep low the number of VMs on the host.

We are initially/tentatively thinking an HP DL 380 with two Xeons at 1.87 Ghz, 8 GB RAM, 3 100-GB SATA drives in RAID 5.

What advantages would we get with the Virtual SMP part of ESX Standard??

Should we get faster or different processors?? Would Opterons be a better choice??

We are initially looking to ESX Starter or Standard, but will use VMware Server if we get enough response that this would be better for us.

Is it an absolute necessity to have the VirtualCenter Server or are there other options for managing the servers??

What else should we consider toward deciding how to proceed??

How difficult is it to install VI3?? Should we have this done by a VMware consultant??

I know about the Vmware Server/Virtual Center bundle offer, this is also an option for us to consider.

Thank you, Tom

Guaranteed uptime 98%, 99%, 99.9% ???

Gabrie — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 13:29:51 GMT

Hi

How does one calculate the uptime for a VM? They want me to write down, how much uptime is to be expected from a VM, but I have no clue at how to calculate this number.

I guess it is kind of the same as for a physical machine, but even then I wouldn't know. How can I add 9-s to a configuration? What makes the difference between 99.9% and 99.99% ?

Gabrie

VMware Chargeback

NicusSM — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 22:44:25 GMT

Nicus Software's M-PWR product is used at several clients for VMware chargeback and reporting. Nicus is looking for a client site to assist us in enhancing our VMware support and setting future directions in this area. If you are interested in VMware chargeback, please contact us at nicus@nicus.com.

ANNOUNCEMENT: Draft VMcasting Specification Published (Input Requested)

enomaly — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 19:34:46 GMT

For anyone interested in virtual appliance deployments. We have just published a draft VMcasting specification and are actively seeking input and review at http://www.vmcasting.org

VMcasting Overview
VMcasting is an automatic virtual machine deployment specification based on RSS2.0 whereby virtual machine images (also known as virtual appliances) are transferred from a server to a client, securely delivering files containing a technical specification and virtual disk image. VMcasting together with virtual appliance formats eliminate the need to separately install, configure and manage interdependencies between virtualized operating systems and applications. Rather then updating single virtual machines, large groups of virtual machines can be delivered at once using a standard definition and process.

Regards

Reuven Cohen
Chief Technologist, Enomaly Inc.
http://www.enomaly.net

SQL 2005 SP2 supported - Well, maybe

Jim — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 15:32:15 GMT

New information released today, however I can't find the exact reference straight from MS.

Here's the best I've got.
http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2007/02/21/sql_server_virtualization/

Hope it helps someone.
Jim

System Resource Reservation

meistermn — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 23:38:51 GMT

If you look in VC in Configurtions tab, nunder software you will find
system resource allocation.
Does it make sense to change the MHZ and Memory settings?
I ask this because i have over 50 vm's on a hp 585 g2.
If i login at vm mouse is very slow. VMware tools are installed.
In the book esx technical advanced guide was told following

"In our ESX builds we often increase
the minimum CPU assigned to the service console to 25% on duals
and quads (default is 8%)"

Any hints

Meistermn

Is it the ultimate Network configuration for ESX

meistermn — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 00:07:35 GMT

Hi,
look at the following URL for VMware physical switch load balancing
http://virtrix.blogspot.com/

I read the whitepaper at
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/esx3_vlan_wp.pdf and the very helpful FAQ
and come to the conclusion that Vicent Vlieghe has done a very well summary
for load balancing, physical switch port configuration, vSwitch load balancing policy .

Anyone see it to be expanable:
1.) Configure physical Ports on pSwitch for SC for loadbalancing to nics and
vSwitch load balancing policy
2.) Set gigabit cards always to auto/auto
3.) Set 100 full duplex static , not auto

One of the most difficult (and almost undocument) features of ESX is to configure your switch for assisted load balancing for a VM Network vswitch with more then 1 pNICs. You should be aware of the fact that ESX supports 802.3ad Static only (EtherChannel).

In essence, you need 2 things:
1. A load balancing schema on your switch port group, based on the switch configuration. The trick here is to setup your vSwitch load balancing policy to be compatible.

src-mac, dst-mac, src-dst-mac = MAC hash
src-ip, dst-ip, src-dst-ip = IP hash
For Cisco catalyst switches, issue the show etherchannel load-balance command. This should result in something like src-dst-ip.

2. VLAN trunk port on your switch when using different VLANs (VST mode) for your Virtual Machines

To achive this, you need to configure your switch(example for a catalyst running on IOS creating an etherchannel for 3 pNICs):

----------------------------------------------------------
interface port-channel1
description VMware ESX - Trunk A
switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q
switchport trunk allowed vlan 100,200 (= VLANs to be assigned)
switchport mode trunk
switchport nonegotiate (=ESX does not support DTP (dynamic trunking protocol). So when you configure a trunk port, set it to nonegotiate)
spanning-tree portfast trunk
!
exit
!
interface GigabitEthernet1/1
description VMware ESX - Trunk A - NIC 0
switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q
switchport trunk allowed vlan 100,200 (= VLANs to be assigned)
switchport mode trunk
switchport nonegotiate (=ESX does not support DTP (dynamic trunking protocol). So when you configure a trunk port, set it to nonegotiate)
spanning-tree portfast trunk
channel-group 1 mode on
!
exit
!
interface GigabitEthernet1/2
description VMware ESX - Trunk A - NIC 1
switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q
switchport trunk allowed vlan 100,200 (= VLANs to be assigned)
switchport mode trunk
switchport nonegotiate (=ESX does not support DTP (dynamic trunking protocol). So when you configure a trunk port, set it to nonegotiate)
spanning-tree portfast trunk
channel-group 1 mode on
exit
!
interface GigabitEthernet1/3
description VMware ESX - Trunk A - NIC 2
switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q
switchport trunk allowed vlan 100,200 (= VLANs to be assigned)
switchport mode trunk
switchport nonegotiate (=ESX does not support DTP (dynamic trunking protocol). So when you configure a trunk port, set it to nonegotiate)
spanning-tree portfast trunk
channel-group 1 mode on

Can ESX Soft mirror vmfs storage ?

pipol73 — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 14:59:47 GMT

Hello,

I have 2 computer rooms, each hosting a SAN array.
When we build a HA cluster, we ask the OS to mirror the data on each array.
Do you know if it is possible to have ESX manage a mirror across 2 LUN (for the VMFS volumes) ?

Thanks for your help,

S.

vswp files issue

azerrad — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 12:18:48 GMT

hello ,
if i am using esx 3.0.1 with san datastore ,the size of the datastore is 300 GIGA in one lun. so:

1) can i use the all 300 giga datastore ? or should i need to reserver 15 % free for paging (vswp files) ? what are the vmware recomendation ?

2) i got the error message on one of my vm machines and i cannot power on this vm,at vmkernel log i see:
Feb 14 11:56:15 esx3 vmkernel: 1:20:28:24.831 cpu5:2473)WARNING: Swap: vm 2474: 1528: Failed to open swap file '/volumes/45926964-c95bf502-ebf4-00145e1c48f0/PSMGR1/PSMGR1-8d329f3c.vswp': Lock was not free
Feb 14 11:56:15 esx3 vmkernel: 1:20:28:24.831 cpu5:2473)WARNING: Swap: vm 2474: 2448: Failed to initialize swap file '/volumes/45926964-c95bf502-ebf4-00145e1c48f0/PSMGR1/PSMGR1-8d329f3c.vswp'
Feb 14 11:56:15 esx3 vmkernel: 1:20:28:24.831 cpu5:2473)WARNING: World: vm 2474: 702: init fn swap failed with: No swap file! "

what is the vswp file ? every vm has this vswp file ? how can i handle this?
respectfully,
avi

Where to buy ESX-Starter in Europe (at good price)

s.marks — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 18:34:43 GMT

The cheapest price I could find for ESX starter is at thenerds.com for 1300 $, unfortunately they only sell to customers in the usa.

Relating to http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vi3.html it is also overcharged (quote from website: VMware Infrastructure Starter list price is $1000 per two processors).

Does anybody know a good reseller which sells to europe customers at a good price (no support etc needed).

Thanks,
Mark

ESX replication to remote site over slow WAN

mrfun — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 18:07:25 GMT

Scenario

Live ESX server running 9 VMs on a single Dell 2950 no SANS. Largest VM is a SQL based box with 500gb of data in which 100+/- megs changes every day.

Possible DR site in data center 1000 miles away yet still inside the MPLS cloud - (3mbs). I would like to replicate the VMs from the LIVE site to the DR site in near real time over the wire. The DR site's VMs would not be running, only images of the LIVE VMs.

What would be the best approach to this scenario short of a SANS?

Is there a block level application that can keep the DR VM images up to date based on the changes in the LIVE VMs over a slow connection?

Thanks..

VI3 LUN Sizing Spreadsheet

jdixon — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 14:45:38 GMT

Hi Forum,

Has anyone come across a LUN sizing spreadsheet specifically written for sizing in a VI3 deployment? I have seen and used Ron Ogleby's version from ESX Advanced Technical Design Guide for some time, and it's great. However; lot's of things have changed under VI3 and it may no longer be appropriate to use it.

Hope someone can assist.

Jason

raid 6, raid 60/61

pauliew1978 — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 11:38:23 GMT

Hi there,

I am soon to be receiving my new disk array and was just wondering what the general consensus is on raid on sans for vmware? the disk array i am getting has 10x250gb drives and we will probably only need 500gb for the moment. The disk array has a raid 6 controller and Ideally I would like to use it. My thoughts are to set up either a very large raid 6 array which would give me 2tb of storage or to set up raid 6 on 5 disks and then mirror the raid 6 set to the other 5 disks. Alternatively I have read that I could setup raid 6 on 5 disks and then set up raid 0 (striping) but I am a little confused in terms of if I lose a disk in one of the raid 6 sets in this scenario? Would I lose the entire san or would I just lose one disk in that raid 6 subset and the raid 0 config would not fail?. What do you think is best? I don't know what the performance differences are on having either configuration but we are not going to have anything to intensive. The most data that would change is in the region of a few hundred megabytes a day (distributed throughout the day) if that!.

many athsnkf ro any help

Paul

How important are SAN-based snapshots?

eolson-uf — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 18:32:32 GMT

I confess to being a VMWare and SAN newbie. Am looking forward to being able to answer rather than only ask questions in the near future!

We're about to deploy VMWare at my College. After a couple months' work researching storage, talking with vendors and reading various posts on this list, I have come down to two fundamentally different solutions:

1. IBM DS4700 with about 14TB of usable disk (combination of FC and SATA) -- but no "extras" like SAN-based snapshots

2. EqualLogic or LeftHand SAN with about 5-6 TB of usable disk.

The total cost of the two alternatives is within $5K of each other, but as you can see there's a huge difference in storage. Also, I feel good about either solution providing the performance that I need for my workloads.

The question is this:

How important are SAN-based snapshots? I believe that ESX can do snapshots itself, so do I really need them at the SAN level? I could always buy it in the future for the DS4700, but that could change the cost picture quite a bit.

Thanks in advance for sharing your experiences!

Best,
Eric

NUMA vs. UMA ... has it been tested?

Justin King — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 20:58:10 GMT

I got the rss feed today about testing the Memory utilization of a NUMA enabled system (in this case an AMD running on an HP 585).

http://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2007/02/studying_numa_w.html

For those of you who want the cliff notes, it basically proved that ESX was fully NUMA aware and ran much more effiently when you didn't not try to "mask" the NUMA mappings so it could allocate CPU and memory cycles to minimize the HT link use between the various nodes of resources.

While this is interesting form the perspective of letting us know that a NUMA unit performs best when running as a NUMA unit and not interleaving and masking as a traditional UMA computer ... it doesn'treally say which model is preffered (even if I do have my hunches).

The best way to compare I would think is a current model Core2 Duo chip vs an Opteron chip ... but I can't find anything recent enough to make that comparison.

Has anyone found a link that tried to maek that comparion? Somehting that tried to leave the core/clock speeds the same but compare the north-bridge/UMA model that intel uses and compare it to AMD's HT/NUMA model? AKA two chips, both at 2.5ghz with 2 cores ... but one an AMD with NUMA enabled and one an Intel Core2 Duo.

Theory aside I'd be interested to see if NUMA provides any advantages or if it is a non-issue when it comes to practical application in a virtualization scenario.

Anyone have any links on the topic?

Message was edited by:
Justin King

Help with NFS for Templates

rrosenkoetter — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 20:42:24 GMT

Can anyone point me to an article or a web-page explaining how to set up NFS on a Windows Server (including permissions - that's where I'm stuck now), so that I can use a Windows file server as a central repository for my VM templates in Virtual Center 2.0. I've installed Windows Services for Unix, but I'm having problems configuring everything. Any general guides out there?

Here's a vote for putting the functionality that existed in Virtual Center 1.x (i.e. storing templates on the VC server) back into Virtual Center 2.1 Having a dedicated SAN LUN for templates is not cost-effective nor does it meet all needs... I have several dev/test VMware host servers using local disk only with no SAN connectivity.

I cannot believe how much time I've spent already trying to get back to where I was in Virtual Center 1.x

Thanks for any help in advance.

One ESX 3.0.1 host to two different MSA1000?

Svalovs kommun — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 07:22:42 GMT

One ESX 3.0.1 host with two HBA's connected to two different MSA1000's. Is this a supported and working setup? Can we expect problems?

Kind regards,
Rutger

upgrade path from 2.5.0 build-11548

hieppo — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 16:01:55 GMT

I know its time to upgrade its been running flawlessly.
I need to know the update path to get to at least 2.5.4 in preparation for DST.

I am not ready for 3 yet.
Can i run straight upgrade or do i have to stair step?

thanks

Migrating Linux 7.2 on a physical machine to a VM on a new box.

dvaldes — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 18:50:41 GMT

Can anyone please tell me if there is a way to migrate Linux 7.2 which currently resides on a physical box to a VM on a new box?
I would really like some documentation on planning this migration.
I understand that this may not be an easy task to accomplish, but I look forward to a good challenge. I do plan to document my every step and will make it available to everyone who uses this forum once I've completed my task.

VMs per host?

jpoling — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 16:59:31 GMT

Ok, this is a very, very subjective question, but I am curious. I have two IBM x460's (4 - Dual Core Xeons, 48 GB RAM). Today, one host is running 30 VMs and the other is running 15. We are in a mode right now where projects are stating that need VMs. I am also trying to drastically reduce the number of physical servers we use. For those who use x460's, how many virtual machines do you run on a single host at a given time?

Thanks,

Jeff

rdms luns, vmotion and failover

pauliew1978 — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 16:02:41 GMT

Hi there,

I was just wondering if anyone could answer a couple of questions as I am finding the esx manuals a little hard to understand in relation to the aforementioned. Basically, I am under the impression that in order to use vmotion you need to use raw device mapping files?. I will outline my configuration very quickly so you'll know where I am coming from.

2 esx host servers (with 4 vms)
2 disk arrays (each running sanmelody with the high availability option installed)

Due to the various "tiers" involved in my set up I am a little confused as to how one sets it all up (more in terms of the theory rather than step by step instructions). I want both esx servers to be able to see both storage arrays (obviously the idea is that both esx hosts will only be using the same disk array unless there is a failure when there path will change over to the backup array). Is this possible? (I am yet again assuming this is the way it works....). Are the rdms stored on separate physical disks on the storage array to where the vm files are actually stored? My aim is to set up 2 raid sets on each disk array. One for storing rdms(so they will be vmfs) and one for storing the virtual disk files (probably one large raid 6 set with the 4 vms disk files stored on them).

As You'll have guessed by now i am in a bit of a pickle!. Are there any recommended configs for this scenario? and has anyone out there set up esx for use with san melody? I have a lot of questions about sanmelody in terms of how to recover from a disk breaking in the raid set and how to synchronise replication again if it breaks etc. I know this is proably not for this forum and i will contact datacore. Just wondering if any nice person could spare me there thoughts and what to watch out for when creating an initial set up in thsi type of configuration

many thanks

Paul

Microsoft new Virual Server

Panzer — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 14:41:43 GMT

Does anyone have information about Microsofts upcoming product that is said to be a competitor to ESX?

Virtual applications with different proprietary hardware in a PC

imsys — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 22:06:35 GMT

Would it be possible to create isolated VM environments on a Windows server looking at different hardware cards installed in the PC? These cards work only with a specific version of the software. To test these different versions of the software on one box we would need to be able to point to one of these boards. Is it possible?

Which storage setup to use?

jgezels — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 20:21:09 GMT

Hi

I need some professional info here concerning the setup of the SAN storage we will use with ESX. For starters we use a NetApp with snapmirror which is cool when you want to 'restore' a previous vm BUT I was wondering, if you use only 1 lun for the vmfs it will mean that IF you restore a snapshot, you're restoring the complete vmfs? true?

So my question, is it wise to use one lun for the complete vmfs or do you use for, lets say, every drive of a VM a diffrent lun?

Can someone give me some direction in how to setup the storage?

Thnx

SC project plans

AndrewWin — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 21:47:40 GMT

Does anyone have a updated SC project plan for VI3. I made one for ESX 2.5x but havent had a chance to update it yet. I'll gladly trade with someone for a VI3 version.

New Equallogic Array

femialpha — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 19:16:52 GMT

Equallogic just announced their latest release using 300G 15K drives. Below is the link. The feedback on the vendor has been overwhelmingly good. Has anyone had any disappoints out there yet?

ESX 2.5.2 and DST

bauzo — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 15:25:45 GMT

We are currently running ESX 2.5.2 build-21059 and we do NOT intend to apply any patches to ESX servers which do not use a US Timezone.

The VMs get their time from an external ntp source (which will be patched) but also use vmware tools to sync up to the clock from the ESX host.

Will we have any problems when DST kicks in? In particular I am concerned about the possibility of a Guest OS setting the time to a US time, would that work? (Assume the Guest OS is patched for DST).

Thanks.

Disaster Recovery

mjcb — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 17:23:57 GMT

Hello,

We currently use VMWare in our Disaster recovery environment. Our current process is to copy ghost backups to our DR site then in case of a disaster, P2V them into the VMWare environment.

With the introduction of the VM Converter, I can now just run a conversion anytime I want over to our DR VM environment, however I now want more.

I want the ability to automate the migrations on a weekly or monthly basis. The VM converter won't allow me to do this. Platespin, from what I have read would allow me to do exactly what I want but the only problem is that it is totally way too expensive.

Is there any other method to do this? Any other product?

So, in the end I want to automate a P2V to our DR environment on a weekly or monthly basis.

Thanks

Memory or CPU Bottlenneck?

Algorithm — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 15:28:31 GMT

If configuring dual quad core 2.6GHz machines with 16GB ram on a san, will memory typically become a bottleneck before saturating the cpus? Would 2.0GHz be more than adequate if using only 16G of ram? Considering some average mixed environment of installations.

Microsoft iSCSI Software Target support

a.galassi — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 15:53:45 GMT

Hello!
Is acceptable a configuration made up of ESX 3.01 with iSCSI HW initiator by Qlogic QLA4050 from the host side and a Microsoft Windows Storage Server R2 with Microsoft iSCSI software target on the storage side (an HP StorageWork AiO600 in this case)?
WMware on his "Storage/SAN compatibility Guide" states that "HW inititated iSCSI is fully supported in ESX 3.01 with iSCSI array that have been qualified/certified for use with the hardware initiators". Does this mean that MS sw storage target are not certified/supported?
Thanks
Alessandro

Performance Measurement

jpoling — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 13:57:57 GMT

What do you use for tracking historical performance of ESX hosts? I have tried to use VirtualCenter but run into issues with historical data. When I export performance reports there is data missing. . .the virtual center console real-time is good, but I need trends and history (which VC does not seem to do real well today).

Just wondering what others are using to get performance data on hosts. . .

Thanks,

Jeff

Blade Performance with iSCSI

wbeckwith — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 07:17:47 GMT

We have some money left in the budget that we can use, but we need to put a solution together ASAP/PDQ if we're going to spend it for a development and Q/A lab setup. This new setup will not be a production system as we are in R&D, however performance must be better than good. Currently we have been running our ESX servers on 3 HP DL385s and 2 Dell PowerEdge 2800s. The current setup has only been for a single group, however, the new setup will be for all of development and Q/A. Because of power and space we have decided the new system will be blade based and instead of using local disks we will migrate to a SAN to make use of VMotion and maybe DRS if we decide to spring for it.

For the blades we are thinking of HP BL460c with 2 Quad-Core 2.66GHz processors, 8GB RAM, single 72GB 2.5" 10K SAS drive, with the 2 embedded NICs and 1 HP NC373m PCI Express Dual Port Multifunction Gigabit Server Adapter for c-Class BladeSystem. For the servers, I think this config will serve us well although we might add more mem, but where it breaks down is my lack of experience with storage systems and the networking that they require. If iSCSI running across a dedicated network is fast enough then we'd add another NC373 card to the configuration, but if we need FC then we'd add a Qlogic card. For the SAN we are looking at either the Dell NX1950 for iSCSI or if need be the Dell/EMC CX3-20. Is iSCSI fast enough or do we need to do FC if the servers will mainly be used for developing and testing various web applications on Tomcat, Weblogic and Websphere?

If it helps, I can imagine about 20 ESX servers hitting the SAN through the dedicated SAN network.

Question regarding hardware, SAN, and more....

SPTurnage — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 16:50:11 GMT

Currently my company is utilizing Virtual Server 2005 R2 for about 138 VMS. We still have well over 500 physical servers still. I am putting a proposal together to transition as many of those 500 physical to VMS. For the most part MS VS has been OK, however we feel that it won't scale as well as an ESX server would.

Some of my initial thoughts was to use large high end hardware. I was hoping to get about 20-25 VMS per server. Would the Dell PowerEdge 6950 or IBM x3755 be acceptable to those numbers? Perhaps a different recommendation? Can I have more than 25 on those? Any other recommendations?

Our current SAN infrastructure is using EMC Symmetrix with FC. Using the hardware above, would I want to use Dual 4Gb HBAs? Does ESX server support using more than Dual HBAs?

I would assume a Quad GB NIC with some teaming would be sufficient.

Is their a readily available tool available that I can run on a server to give me an indication of how well a candidate a server is, or is perfmon about the only real option?

I am very familiar with MS Virtual Server but I am green to ESX Server, so please bear with my ignorance. I appreciate any feedback. Thanks.

ESX on Blades Vs ESX on Fat servers

james.izzard — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 13:41:09 GMT

We are looking at moving our ESX3.0.1 to a blade infrastructure but I have a few niggles.

In the new infrastructure I would like to have each esx server (blade) service 3 physical networks (eg. 10.x.x.x, 20.x.x.x, 30.x.x.x) and I dont want the traffic to go through our firewalls between them. We would be looking at about 8 Blades and would like to utilise features such as vmotion, DRS, HA.

I'm thinking of

2 x Gb NIC per network (6 NICS to cover the 3 networks)
2 x Vmotion NIC
2 x Service Console

This makes a total of 10 NICS.

Has anyone done anything similar to this? and is this possible? I am thinking of creating a VLAN trunk for the 3 networks but I am unsure how the VLAN trunk would mapout on the back of the blade enclosure (HP).

Cheers,
James

Hardware iSCSI HBA and VMWare VI

Algorithm — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 23:24:50 GMT

Is it possible to use VI Starter Edition with iSCSI if your using Hardware HBA and booting diskless off the ISCSI Target since to the OS it looks like a SCSI controller?

Also, I heard there are some issues with VMWare (namely the advanced features) with ISCSI, is that the case, if so, what issues generally crop up?

Virtual Infrastructure VRS Virtuozzo

Algorithm — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 23:28:58 GMT

Anyone have a lot of experience with both solutions?

I have a good amount of experience with VMWare products but have been looking at the darkside with Virtuzzo and there are some really interesting claims about their product in terms of performance and efficiency. Also with support for backing up images hot natively is very attractive. Unfortunately you cannot use Linux/Windows at the same time and would have to have seperate servers for each environment, it does look very attractive since you do not have to replicate the underlying environment for each installation and you have more control of the resources. Cost of course is very attractive as well.

\Newb Alert pointers appreciated

shmengie — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 05:25:04 GMT

Hi All,

Hope ya'll find this too terribly amusing.

I need a little guidance and have come here for help. I don't expect the world, but I am searching for it.

Quick background. I work for a startup company with a tight budget. I wish to plunge into VMWare to save a lot on hardware expense given our needs. We're locked into windows for our TS/database server needs. Currently we have one 2k3 DELL dual Xeon serving TS clients, database, file and directory services. If something happens to this puppy, well, you know we're not a business anymore.

It would be prudent to segregate these services across a few servers and adding a spare for disaster management, I realize this will exceed our meager budget and seeking an alternative, started researching VM solutions.

Looks like we can't escape most licensing fees, but we can consolidate hardware expenses. This seems to be on par with what you are doing.

Hey Boss, let's put together a couple of inexpensive Opteron servers load up 5 VM servers on each and save a nice chunk of change and have a hot swappable backup server for fault tolerance.

Thanks for reading this far...

I hope you have a fair understanding of my VM ignorance and will be kind enough to educate me a little. Am I fantasizing that I could create a hot swappable pair of servers on an entry level ESX budget?

System specs are a single dual core Opteron w/8gb ram, 1 TB of raid five SATA disk. Putting it together w/hardware from Newegg I'm looking at about $3500 hardware investment per server. The software investment is anticipated near $5000 for 3 Windows 2k3 servers.

It's a bit of fantasy, what I need to know is nightly sync possible with the entry level ESX affording a crutch to stand on in the event of catastrophy?

Thank you for comments or suggestions.

-Joseph "shmengie"

Replication Setup - How to quarantine Servers that are downrev?

John Bergin — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 22:25:13 GMT

Short subject lines hurt - Quick rundown. I run a VC deployment for a testing group and we often have to replicate customer environments like Windows 2000 SP2 which as soon as you turn it on is infected. Does anyone have a good way to keep connectivity without exposing it to the wider world?
I tried an internal network with a firewall app but wasn't thrilled with that because given the requirements of some of the replications I have to share the load among my esx3 boxes.

If they all have to live on one machine any preferred firewall vm appliance? And/Or is there a way to do this across boxes without dedicating a physical nic on each box to a vlan and having them firewall those physical ports?
Let me know if I need to disambiguate this at all.

HP DL 385 - PCI-e vs PCI-x

gjulian — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 13:49:46 GMT

I just received a new quote from HP and it is shows that our LP10000 emulex card that used to be a PCI-X card is now being quoted as a PCI-E card. I was told that I could go back to a PCI-X card with a riser board for $100 but not sure I need to. Anybody out there running the 385 with a PCI-E fiber card? Any issues you noticed if you are? Our setup is Vmware 3.01 with virtual center 2. Thanks in advance.

How to install VC server in a DR scenario

Vliegenmepper — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 15:01:47 GMT

Hi,

I'm currently reviewing several options to make the best choice in how to install a VC server while keeping the focus on DR scenario with SAN replication.

Choices could be:

- Install 1 VC as a VM, the VM gets replicated via the SAN.

What is your VC setup and are you happy with the way it turned out to run?

Thanks for sharing!

Cheers,
Kenneth

Kernel Versions

luizhbedin — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 01:43:26 GMT

Does anyone knows the kernel version of ESX 3.0 and 3.0.1 ??

Tks!

DR Site?

ir1shm1ike — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 04:07:23 GMT

I wonder if someone can give me some help here. If I have Primary Site and DR Site. I have a EVA at both Sites with the vmdk's being replicated from one EVA to the other. At my DR Site, I have a ESX Server. How do I use VM so that if my Primary Site went down with my ESX Servers, the ESX Server at my DR Site kicks on and the VM that were replicated connect and start. Or something that is even done manually if need be?

3 datacenters on a global basis

maalse — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 09:33:00 GMT

We currently have 3 data centers (US, Sweden and Asia). We will have about 15 ESX hosts in Swe, 4 in US and 2 in Asia, all configured as 3 different clusters connected to 3 different SANs. I would like to have everything on the same page in VC and use the same license database but how should I configure this. Should I have 3 VC connected to 1 database? Any network issues with just having one license database?

Requests for Proposal (RFP) help

cjay — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 09:49:49 GMT

I'm at the pre-planning stage in terms of ESX implementation whereby I need to get an RFP together for tender, while it doesn't have to be over the top in terms in terms of content, I'm still struggling to put something together with virtualisation in mind. I'd appreciate if someone could point me in the right direction in terms of a rough draft or template.

cjay

Monitor VMware process lists from the network

Sethwalsh — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 18:42:32 GMT

Hello,

We are going to be moving many of our current windows machines over to Linux and will be running virtual machines for a lot of the programs that are currently on our windows machines. However we need to be able to track how many instances of each program are running at a given time in order to track statistics. The monitoring PERL scripts will be running on 1 server on our network so I will need a way to pull the process lists of the virtual machines that might be running on our linux boxes.

Recently I found some information that it's possible to do that however that information has since disappeared. My questions are is it possible? If so then how might this be accomplished? We'll be using NAT on the virtual machines networking.

Thank you for your help.

Using guest system like firewall.

Danchu — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 11:04:38 GMT

Hello!
We have Win2k3 Sp1 64-bit host system and we want to use this server like firewall host. We decided to install ISA 2006, but it does not support 64-bit systems and only the way we see - install ISA on the guest 32-bit machine.
Is there some way to use one of NIC's of the host like external NIC on guest machine?

Recommended ESX Host Disk Configuration

jabeoc — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 09:28:58 GMT

are there any best practices for safety and performance on how to configure ESX Host Disks for internal SCSI drives?
e.g.

- 3. RAID-5 host drive for VMFS partition
+ 1 spare drive for all host drives

HDS AMS200 with ESX

cicc5 — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 07:03:40 GMT

I'm considering AMS200 with ESX 3 ent and I'm wondering if anyone has any specific feedback and experience using the HA and VMotion features on this solution.

Migration from Virtuozzo to VMWare

gethsemane — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 18:27:56 GMT

Has anyone had any previous experience migrating from Virtuozzo to VMWare? How did you go about doing your migration - were there any tools that you used or methodology you would recommend?

Thanks!

Tulsa, Tigerton and VMotion

Goodiehard — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 10:04:03 GMT

Hiya,

I'm buying two IBM3850's today, our company's standard for ESX servers. They will have the 'Tulsa' dual core cpu's in 'em and they will be the first 2 servers for a new ESX 3 HA cluster.
Later this year, and maybe even next year we will be expanding the cluster with more IBM servers, likely more 3850's. What I'm worried about is that Q3 or Q4 this year these IBM systems (xeon mp multi processor) will only be available with the quad core 'Tigerton' cpu's.

Is there any word yet on VMotion compatibilty between the 'Tulsa' and 'Tigerton'?? Pretty important stuff since we will be investing a lotta money and we really want to make larger clusters by adding more servers over time.

Our first cluster is based on x445's and we are scavenging the serverroom's to be able to keep up with growing demand for vm's. Not fun...

Thx for any advice or input.

Alex

Compatibility Intel 631xESB/632xESB I/O Controller

Thijs2007 — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 11:09:42 GMT

We recently ordered a Dell PowerEdge 1950 which is on the HCL, just as most of it's components (Broadcom NetXtreme NIC, Dell PERC 5/i raid controller) but I can't find anything about the Intel 631xESB/632xESB I/O Controller.

Does anyone know if ESX 2.5.4 works with this I/O controller?

VI3 and EVA8000 with CA

stgepopp — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 07:05:19 GMT

Hello,

i know the (VMware) rule to do the multipathing between host and storage with the order:

vmhba1 - SP A (1)
vmhba2 - SP B (2)
vmhba2 - SP A (2)
vmhba1 - SP B (1)

which leeds to ABAB or BABA.

ABBA or BAAB is not recommended.

How is the order with a 8 path scenario, by example with the EVA8000?

In my opinion a 4 path scenario should be enough (today we use in sum 2 LUNs). Any other opinions?

Are there any recommendations with CA (regarding use of storage ports)?
I can force that order on storage side from the fc switches? right?

thanks

Backup VMWare's

Mertens.technotrans — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 11:32:04 GMT

Hello Everybody,

currently we are running 3 ESX 3.0.1 servers on IBM machines with about 30 VM's located on 600 gb san storage (IBM DS4000)
In the past, we backuped the virtual machines with the vmbk.pl and / or some own scripts (unsing vcb). All these solultion copied the machines to a NFS share.

This causes the following problems:

1. High load on the console nic during coping the files to the nfs share.
2. Cause of the bis size (~ 550 gb) of all VMs the complete copying to the nfs share takes several hours. All these conflicts with our normal backup procedure.
3. Restore also takes a long time for copying the backuped files backup to the vmfs.

In the last days, i checked out several products and solutions for a backup.
What are the requirements for the following solution:

1. Each night, all VM's should be copied to a second SAN storage pool without powering off the VMs (LAN FREE!).
2. These copied files should be backuped up to tape. (LAN)

Advantages of these concept:
1. Quick restore of VMs cause the backuped vm's is still in the SAN and can be copied very fast.
2. I can backup the files on the second SAN storage pool everytime cause the files aren't in use.

Questions:
1. What's the best method to copy the machine from pool1 to pool2.
2. How can i get the files from the second SAN storage pool to tape? Do i have to copy these files again to a fileserver? Can i access the SAN storage directly? When i understand Consulidated Backup the right way, it offers me to do exactly this. It's a framework to provide access to VMFS volumes for backup systems. We are using syncsort backup express. Any way to get it running?
3. What are programs like ESXRanger oder ESXXpress doing?

Who should technically manage Virtualization project

ischurek — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 08:39:40 GMT

Interesting for me to learn from experienced vmware folks, Who they think should technically manage a Virtualization project.

The Physical environment which should be converted consists as follows:
1) Windows Servers W2K, W2K3, including MSCS, NLB, SQL, IIS, File shares, DC, etc. [ about 100 servers]

2) Some of the Servers are mission critical

3) No Unix/Linux boxes

Note - By Technically manage I refer to: Design new virtualized infrastructure, P2V, Storage design, High Availability, DR, manageability, Security, etc

The Dilemma- Unix admin, or Windows Admin

Thank you.
ischurek

When do resource Shares kick in?

juchestyle — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 17:51:00 GMT

OK, so lets say you have a vm on a host that you want to give more processing power to?

Seems like there are 2 ways to do this?

1 We could give it a second, or more processors right.

2. Could we also increase the level of cpu shares? If so does this kick in right away, or only when there is contention? Ultimately, my question is, if we give more shares to a vm, the vm will have more processing capability. It could process more transactions over a given time frame than when it had fewer shares?

Looking to better understand this Resource Allocation.

Respectfully,

Backup Strategy

doubleH — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 17:30:12 GMT

As mentioned in other posts I am getting closer to implementing a VI 3 environment with HA/DRS. I will have 2 ESX hosts connecting to an EqualLogic PS100-E storage array. I am having a hard time deciding what is the best way to backup the virtual machines.

Currently we do not have any VMs so our backups are done the traditional way of having backup agents on all servers. Iâve been doing some research on esxRanger and VCB which sounded promising, but I just read that iSCSI isnât supported with VCB. I love the ability of esxRanger to perform a file level restore.

So that being said Iâm wondering if I could use the EqualLogic built-in snapshot feature to create snapshots of the VMâs and then backup to tape. In this scenario Iâm not sure how I could do a file level restore.

How much CPUS does the ESX Server 3.01.1 supports

zhangfred_vm — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 07:11:30 GMT

What is the max CPUS does the a physical host supported?

It is said in the user manual, the ESX Server 3.0.1 only 8 physical CPU, is it ture?

Query Farm Datastore and export to HTML

gcompton — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 19:47:27 GMT

Is there a way to query the Farm Datastore and export this to an HTML file for easy viewing of the farm.
We have several people building VMs and would like to have a single view of the space availabe on the datastores.

Are planning is going down the drain when people just grab any datastore with no planning.

Thanks

Disaster Recovery: What about Virtual Center?

Gabrie — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 13:57:21 GMT

Hi

I've read many threads here that describe various ways to get my VMs from production site to recovery site. But I was wondering what you would do with Virtual Center.....

We were thinking of the following concept:
main site: 20 esx hosts, LUNs replicated to recovery site.
recovery site: 10 older esx hosts, AllowSnapshot LUNs so they can read the replicated LUNs (read mode).
VC is running as a VM and therefore also replicated.

In case of failure of the main site, the SAN guy has to break replication and put the LUNs in the recovery site in Write mode.

So now I have all my VMDKs in my recovery site, I have 10 ESX hosts that can use these VMDKs. I also have the replicated VC in the recovery site. Is this of any use?

If I would bring up the existing VC, it would be missing all the ESX hosts from my main site. What I could do is release all licenses, add the new hosts from the recovery site and let a script run to register all VMs. But then I could just use an empty VC as well.....

My question: How do you handle you VC in a DR scenario?

Gabrie

Fujitsu San storage.

netbyu — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 14:20:42 GMT

Hi all,

Anybody has work or have any feedback with Fujitsu Eternus 4000 SAN.

We received a verry good offer friday , but i want to have feedback before considering their product.

We plan to purchase this week.

remaining manufacturer are

DELL CX3-20c

Netapp FAS3020c

Fujitsu Eternus 4000 m300

we want 4Gbps + native iscsi support + min 100 Drives

any more suggestion ?

Many thanks

Eric

DataCore/FalconStor supported for ESX?

gus27 — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 17:21:29 GMT

Hi,

I just downloaded the latest SAN Compatibility Guide and saw neither DataCore nor FalconStor products anywhere mentioned. Are DataCore SANsymphony/SANmelody supported SAN products? Or do I have to put a certified SAN storage behind to get a VMware supported environment?

Guido