Blog Posts

I read a lot of IT industry magazines, reviews and blogs like so many of us who are in technology. I still find it interesting and somewhat annoying when a reviewer or some other industry writer does not do due diligence and learn or verify things about technology in general and VMware ESX in general.

One magazine article I read in a major technical trade magazine, indicated that IT shops need to assess how they are going to handle problems that may occur when you VMotion a VM from one host to another. Why? Becuase the author said that the IP address changes when you perform a VMotion. I read it a couple of times to make sure I read it right. Now for those who are not familiar with how VMotion works or what it is, VMotion allows you to move a running VM from one physical host to another-without bringing it down. A truly awesome function indeed. There are a lot of prerequisites to do that and I won't go into them here. The point is, the author did not understand what happens when you VMotion a VM. The IP address does NOT change at all. However, by default, the MAC address does change (you can have static MAC address if you do not want it to change-real headache though). Now maybe that's what the author meant but that is a big deal. Imagine a CIO or some other manager reading that article and dismissing the technology because he or she can't have IP addresses changing all the time.

It makes me wonder how many others have found information that is either partially true or wrong about virtualization.

Isn't "Hello World" how all blogs & code are supposed to begin?

I recently provided some commentary on ESX3i and host hardware direction, that got picked up on the VMTN Blog. I figured maybe this would be a decent spot to elaborate a bit further.... but not too far, my lunch break is almost over.

After seeing the announcement of ESX 3i, which was coupled with announcements from HP, Dell, IBM, NEC, eMachines(?), etc, etc, I couldn't help but think back to when I first started working with virtualization. At that time, we had been contemplating the purchase of this somewhat new "blade technology." All the vendors were pushing it, but looking at the premium we would pay it just never made sense (to us)... We were also about to move into new headquarters and Data Center space was the LEAST of our concerns. We saw several limitations in the early generations of the hardware, particularly around network & storage consolidation.

This prompted a look at alternatives, one being virtualization with VMware. Seemed there were several progressive VAR's (and HW vendors themselves) around that had quality example business cases for moving towards consolidation via VMware. Of course, each one also wanted to sell services to come in, inventory our environment, and make recommendations on how to deploy VMware. We didn't need this... we knew what we had and how it was utilized. But I could see that their big push was to identify existing hardware that could be repurposed for consolidation. This made their recommendations look all the prettier... "Look at what you can do without purchasing any hardware!"

Now, fast forward only a few years. Now we have hardware vendors creating servers designed specifically for virtualization workloads. No local storage, increased IO slots, more memory capacity, etc. I am curious as to what level we will be asked to pay higher premiums for specialty hardware! Of course, we'll still have their commodity hardware as an option.

Am I a potential customer for this latest and greatest(?) hardware? Sure. I don't see us moving away from virtualization anytime soon, so I'm not too concerned about hardware that may be "locked" into virtualization workloads. However, if the HP/Dell/IBM's of the world try to pad profit margins beyond what I consider acceptable, then I hope their equipment rots on their inventory shelves.

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Random non-virtualization thought:

Why is it that young couples seem to have this "let's get a dog" mindset to prove they can actually take care of another living being prior to having kids? My wife and I know we're not responsible enough to handle a dog, that's why we had 2 kids instead!

Não podia ser diferente, primeiro blog, primeiro post, tenho que me apresentar e contar um pouco da experiência que tenho com o VMware ESX Server.

Bom, tenho 26 anos, moro em Porto Alegre - RS, recentemente formado na primeira turma do Rio Grande do Sul de Segurança em Tecnologia da Informação pela UNISINOS em São Leopoldo. Meu tema para Trabalho de Conclusão foi Melhores Práticas de Segurança no Ambiente de Virtualização, o qual vou tentar anexar nesse post.

Aonde conheci a VMware? Ao realizar alguns cursos de firewall, protocolos de redes, etc... havia a necessidade de ter várias máquinas para formar um ambiente de testes o mais real possível. No ano de 2002/2003 um amigo me falou de um tal de Virtual PC (produto da Microsoft) e do VMware Workstation, que propiciava a criação de várias máquinas virtuais em um único hardware, na época meu desktop com 512 de RAM . Era a solução então. Não sei porque motivo não me interessei pelo Virtual PC, sorte a minha, e comecei a fazer o uso frequênte do VMware Workstation.

Até então, eu achava que só existia essa versão para desktops. Em 2004 concorri a uma vaga de estágio na empresa que trabalho atualmente, justamente para trabalhar com VMware, porém, com a versão ESX, cuja eu nunca tinha ouvido falar, mas tudo bem, novo aprendizado.

Nesse ano, 2004, fui apresentado ao VMware ESX, que recém estava na sua versão 2.0. Desde então trabalho diariamente, projetando, implementando e migrando as soluções que envolvem o VMware ESX, como por exemplo: VirtualCenter, VMotion, HA, DRS, VCB e etc...

Bueno, no mais era isso.

[]'s Eduardo

I thought it was time to start a blog to describe what we have been doing here at VMware with regard to upgrading from Jive Forums, to Jive Clearspace. I suspect everyone out on the VMTN forums might find regular posts interesting, or at least a little calming.

The VMware web team has been working pretty much round the clock since we put VMTN in read-only mode last Thursday evening. The goal was to convert the existing forum records (well over 500,000) to the new clearspace format, and in the process not lose points, any significant data, and real useability. It has been a tall order, but we all respect and really enjoy the activity and relationships with the community members. So it was important to us to preserve as much as we could, while moving to a platform that would allow everyone to create/upload and share documents.

Possibly we will do some additional posts to give you a sence of the timeline over the long weekend, but I thought I would start at where we are now, and later post a few other enteries of where we have been.

Where we are:

o We have managed to debug some serious issues around points calculations, which was bringing the system to it's knees on Sunday. It turns out, as the big users
logged into the system, we discovered that the points calculation system was not able to handle so many big point folks on all at once. We eventually got a fix and
solved this issue.

o We next ran into a database connection issue, where over time, database connections were not being dropped, this too was fixed.

o We next found a point system bug that was still causing excessive database lookups on points. It was Sunday evening when we got this but fix in, and when we got
it in, performance improved dramatically. We went from 7-20 second page load times, down to 2 second page load times. However, after being in production for over
2 hours, things began to gradually get slower, until the system finally crashed.

o Today, we have been working all day on a memory leak, that we believed was causing the problem. We put a performance script in place that would restart Clearspace when
page loads exceeded 30 seconds. This resulted in a apache restart approximately every 2 hours.

o Tonight (Monday Night) at 8:00pm, we deployed the memory leak fix, which seem to improve performance, and memory remained constant. During this deployment, we were
encouraged due to the average page load hovering around 1 second and as fast as .5 seconds. But, after 58 minutes in production, with an average of 50 users online, and the
team pounding on the system, it crashed. Crash dumps indicate a garbage collection issue, possibly due to an imporper collection model.

o We are done for tonight, we have put an apache restart script in place on the hour, this should keep the site pretty fast (under 4 second page loads consistently) it also will
give people an idea when to save before we restart. At 5 minutes to the hour, save your work, and be ready for the site to reset on the hour, the reset takes 1-2 minutes.

Tomorrow we will be back, in the morning, looking at stack traces, the vendors top engineers, and the founder of the company (Jive Software) is working 14 hours a day to solve these issues. Each day we make progress, tonight the site was very fast for a while, we will keep working on it, and hopefully, will solve the last of our problems this week. If we
fall back to the old forums, we will have to restart the entire process (including the 4 days read only) in a few months when the next deployment window opens. We are hoping to solve these problems this week, so we can all upload documents and do collaboratoin together.

Thanks for all the feedback, and encouragement.. we have gotten some good layout ideas, and have a nice list of upgrades to work on once we solve our pressing issues of system stability and performance. More status tomorrow.

The VMware communities team.

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It is the Day 4, and we are still working on community platform roll out. We did hit some bumps, and are working on ironing out the wrinkles. Performance was the biggest issue causing the site crawl. However with good work from VMware and Jive , we have been making great progress. It continues to be a great experience in learning how we can all make it possible to reach our goal with the common desire of success.

So it is Friday, Sept 21 and we are all working on rolling out Community platform to production. We are about 12-15 folks sitting in the war room, trying to find last minute bugs and issues on the application. It is a wonderful study in group interaction.This has been an amazing collaboration effort by different teams and groups.

Here are some pictures from our effort. We have been working on this for the past 9 months. It has been an awesome experience, working with different teams and bringing this wonderful technology to the VMware community.

Not a lot to share lately. I have been traveling for the last three weeks and will be traveling through the early part of Oct. Last week I
was in London, the VMware VDI team all got together for some great meetings and sessions. I have also been heads down working on a few new
papers and getting ready for VMworld. Just after VMworld I am finally taking some time off for some much needed Fly Fishing! If anyone out
ever wants to go let me know. It needs to be in the Rockies, Canada, New Zealand or South America though, because I like to go WAY out.

Sorry I digressed, can you tell I am ready to go! VMworld is a few short days away and I will do my best to post some
pictures and updates from there. Anyone attending swing by the VMware booth, say hi and share your experiences on how you VMware VDI efforts
are going! There is one session you will not want to miss.

Mark Benson, a VDI Solution Architect with the VDI development team will present the following session on Tuesday 9/11

DV18. Tuesday 9/11 5pm – 6pm.

“VDI with VMware’s Next Generation Connection Broker - Architecture, Security and Deployment Scenarios”

“As many people are realizing the potential of hosting desktop operating systems on VMware ESX Server in the data center, aspects of
access security, scalability and high availability become increasingly important. This session discusses the architecture of VMware’s next
generation connection broker from a design perspective, paying special attention to the security features and deployment scenarios supported.
We’ll also provide insight into how the product was developed to simplify the operational management needs of VDI in large production
environments.”

Just after the session will also be a “meet the developers” session for 90 mins immediately following the session. This will be a great opportunity to meet the team.

See you there!