Archive for November, 2006

This session was an open dicussion/QA Session with some of the TOP players in the VMTN Forums. I was in the audience. So I guess that means I’m not so big a fish in the VMTN Forums as I thought I was!

Joking aside – it was actually quite a relief not to be up there on the platform with the spotlight shinning down on little ole me – with people hoping to have their annoyances elevated and the problems washed away.

So, who shone out from the group. For me it had to be Ken Kline of HP. I’ve message’d Ken quite a bit from the forums. But this VMworld was the first time I had met the man in person. You could meet a nicer, easier going guy… Always there with a subtle insight – that rocked my view of the world.

What came out of this session? Well, something I had heard privately voiced amongst the people who manage the VMTN environment. They want a more “interactive” community. Something that is more real-time and live. For me this could a “Second Life” for VMware. So you better get out there and buy a VMware Island – and build a train station to get those second-life people to the meeting room!

The other thing they seem to leaning towards is a kind of wiki for virtualisation - not specifically VMware.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…. After 10 minutes people were looking at the door – wondering how they could sneak out without being noticed. As ever I was right down at the front with my hand up in the air with my top ten most common problems….

Sorry. Being told be logical, systematic and document EVERYTHING – just drove me to sleep. I was hoping for “War Stories”. So I would go “heck, I’ve had that problem and always wondered why it happened, and how to resolve it”. But nothing doing.

To be fair I have to have to present this kind of stuff on some courses – and it’s as dull-as-ditch-water. The bottom line is if you want improve troubleshooting – you have to see real problems really resolved.

I attended the session “Managing Virtual Infrastructure Level 3: A User Perspective” presented by Philip Cramer from Johnon Controls. I really enjoyed this session. Being an instructor the amount of actual real-world deployments I get involved in pretty limited. So it’s always interesting to hear peoples experiences. This one won was pretty cool as laid out in sq feet and kilowatt’s the amount of space and money saved in their datacenter. We all know that space and heat is one of the great saving points of virtualisation. But it was good have a price tag in dollars put on these savings for once. At last a TOC/ROI that was beyond the usual marketing fair presented by vendors…

Well, all events take a while to get cranked up to top notch speed – and VMworld is no exception. It was quite a long keynote opening (1.5hrs). But things became more interesting with industry panel on the impact of virtualisation. So along side all the gunho pro-virtualisation people – there was some interesting Professor from Standford University to remind us that industry back-slapping is not the way forward. Without bashing Microsoft directly – the problem remains with or without virtual machines the guest OS we run and the applications we support within them – aren’t written very well.

You can sense the humour and cheering building as the audience got behind the Professor – a welcome devils-advocate amongst the dancing monkeys…

from Windows IT Pro by Alan Sugano

“Recently I installed VMware’s VMware Server on an HP Proliant G5 ML370 running Windows Server 2003 Enterprise x64 Edition. Using the x64 version of Windows 2003 has many advantages compared with the 32-bit version when you use it as the host OS of Windows 2003. The two biggest advantages are increased memory support and more efficient use of the 64-bit processor….”

Read more here:

Link:

http://www.windowsitpro.com/Articles/ArticleID/94072/94072.html

Press Release:

“We are proud to anounce the availability of Virtual Solution Box (VSB) Version 3.0

ESX 3 Support: Full support for ESX 3, VSB 3.0 will handle ESX 2 hosts as well.
- VSB leverages new ESX 3 features such as more consistent snapshots.
- Simple windows-based installer
- Replication over the network or locally, LAN free replication when replicating for SAN to local disks.
- Faster web interface using ajax technology.

About the Virtual Solution Box:

VSB is an integrated solution for simplified backup and restore of virtual infrastructures.
- VSB offers full and incremental backup of virtual machines.
- VSB can restore these backups for disaster recovery.
- VSB backs up virtual machines on VMware® ESX Server without the need of Linux knowledge.
- VSB is the base for rapid restore of virtual infrastructures in a disaster scenario, with or without a SAN.
- VSB backs up virtual machines using techniques offered by the host system and is transparent for the guest os.
- There is no need of an additional software on the guest os. Storage administrators can backup systems without deep knowledge of VMware® ESX Server or the guest os.
- VSB comes with a version management for virtual machines. Corrupt guest systems can be replaced by older, runnable versions.

Link:

http://vsb.aexia.ch/

Here’s a cluster of the choicest threads of the last week. Admittedly, most of them are question from students, posted on the Forum on their behalf. So some are largely of acedemic interest whereas others are more telling.

Does VMware support Microsoft Clustering on Service Pack 1 of W2K3?

The short answer is no. The ball is in M$ court to “fix” this. But many forum members say it works reliably (well, as reliably as MSCS is!) but there’s no “offical stamp of approval. Apparently, people have been waiting and waiting…

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=59684
http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2021
http://www.vmware.com/community/message.jspa?messageID=488350

An Old favorite, ESX disk alignment

Does ESX 3.x suffer from disk alignment issues? Does disk alignment effect VM’s using RDM’s to store data? Is this an non-issue or something to worry about? It’s all here in this handy thread

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=54419
http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=59509

“VMotion: A general system error occured: Time out waiting for migration data”

This week I had this problem in my class. My students ended up doing a reboot of the ESX server that was affected. Not something I recommended, as I try to aviod reboots at all costs. I think the problem is with a fault in the NIC driver or in the physical media. The operative word is “time out” which must infer a network problem – as VMotion is essentially a network event. Anyway, I hit the forums looking for people who had similiar and this is what I found:

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=502178

Disabling “web-access” on the ESX 3.x server

Interesting question which at first I misunderstood. My student doesn’t just want to stop the “Web-Access” service (the kinda of end-user, no need for the VI client front-end) but ALSO any web-activity (even the welcome page that gets you the link to web-access but also a link to download the VI client and so forth)

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=59508

Well, I will be at this years VMworld Event in LA. I fly out this Friday to visit some pals who live in Menlo Park, San Francisco – and then grab an internal flight to LA on the Monday morning. If you going to the conferrence please say “hi” to me. I should be easy to spot I should be wearing one of three VMware Polo shirts which I have “customised”. They say “RTFM Education – Mike Laverick” on the back. Subtle huh? But hey, it works as way of networking!

See your there!