Archive for October, 2007

Gus Pinto has written a blog entry about the approach technical preview of Citrix “VDI” solution currently referred to as XenDesktop. Citrix is really positioning itself as being the real company to deliver the “dynamic desktop” by offering customers a range/array of different technologies that deliver the application or operating system down-the-wire to the end-user. This includes VDI (XenDesktop), Server-based Computing (Presentation/MetaFrame Server) and steaming-delivery operating systems (Ardence)

You can read more about XenDesktop on Gus’s blog

Link:

http://www.frameworkx.com/contentblogdetail.aspx?blog=56&id=709

and sign up for a technical preview at citrix:

http://www.citrix.com/XenDesktop

This weekend I choose to decommission one of my old servers. This involved “evacuating” it of all its VMs to a new server. Evacuating seems to be a quite an unpleasant term, and sounds like some kind of painful clonic irrigation for ESX. Actually what I mean is “cold migration”. I had two errors. The first said “Invalid configuration for device 1″ and the other “The specified key, name, or identify already exists”. What was annoying about both errors is the failure came at 99% of the progress bar, and cause the VM remain on the source ESX host.

The first was cause by having a locally mounted ISO image – which ordinarily wouldn’t cause a problem at cold migration (but certainly does in VMotion) but at the point of powering on the VM once it had been moved because – the local mounted image wouldn’t be on the destination ESX host. However, in this case the error didn’t manifest itself at power on, as the cold migrate failed at 99%. The cold migration did warn me about this connected ISO, but as I the chance to ignore the warning (not an error) I did. More fool me! Disconnecting and removing the configuration to the local image stopped this problem occouring. Moral: Its worth resolving any errors or warnings rather than finding out they cause a problem later – despite the ability to blag & bluff through error messages.

The second was more complicated. It was like I was trying to move a VM called DC1, to an ESX host that already had a VM called DC1 – which it didn’t. There was no reference to the VM elsewhere in VirtualCenter and no files called DC1 on the destination VMFS volume. The work around which I found on the forums after a google-wack was to temporarily rename the VM before the cold migrate – cold migrate the VM – and then rename it back after the process was completed. I never got down to the bottom of why this happened but I believe it was caused by some database intregrity issue (always a good one to blame, as people just go “mmmmm” and node ignorantly when you say that!) and perhaps that object was still referenced in the database somewhere had become orphaned (another good one to use when explaining something you don’t really understand) and hadn’t been purged yet in the standard knowledge consistancy (even better!!!) check process in SQL…

I pleased to say I finally recieve approval (along with my fellow VMware Certified Instructors -VCI) for the beta (actually Release Candidate 1) programme for ESX 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5. Although I am teaching this week and next, in the evenings I’m working away on an guide which will cover all the major differences from ESX 3.0.0 to ESX 2.5 and VirtualCenter 2.0.0 to 2.5.

The plan is to release this “What’s New” guide for free on the day that Vi3.5 becomes GA (General Availability) as I did when Vi3 first was released. I also intend to allow people who have bought the vi3book.com to be able to download this as an appendix to their purchased book. So far I have written about the ESX 3.5 installation and the VirtualCenter 2.5 installation – I plan for the guide to match the structure of the vi3book.com, the VMware Courseware and previous guides I have authored. The idea is you can still read the original documents (as 99% of that information is still very much valid) and then have the “What’s New” guide side-by-side.

Without having released the book yet its not possible at this stage to say whether there will be a “Second Edition”. It’s actually a very complicated question and depends on a number of factors that unknown at this juncture. After all by the time a second edition is released we might be working on vi4book.com!

The Register has an interesting article discussing Citrix’s acquistition of Xen. Citrix paid $500m for a company that will make $8m this year… Citrix appear to viewing virtualization from their “desktop” end-user perspective, clearly postitioning themselves as the best company to delivery thin-client from Citrix MetaFrame Boxes or from Virtual Desktop machines. Interestingly it appears that Citrix will persist in the user-connection license model rather than using the per-socket model that VMware uses. Anyway, the full story appears here on the Registers website:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/18/citrix_xensource_wasson_virtualization/

The Register has a round up of this new offering from Citrix. Having recently aquired Ardence, Citrix are offering this solution to deliver a streamed OS to either a physical or virtual machine.

Link:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/11/citrix_provisioning_server/

I was just sat on the sofa watching the BBC24 news. Apparently an Ofcom Report (the body that regulates the telecoms infrastructure in the UK) which states that frequently broadband users DO not get the speeds advertised by broadband vendors. Frequently, broadband providers advertise speeds UPTO 8MB, 10MB and 20MB – which they then get no where near meeting. In fact the bigger the speeds advertised, the LESS likely you are to get them. Users on 2MB links on average get 1.33MB – whereas users on links UPTO 8MB actually on average only get 2.5MB.

I’ve been thinking of ditching my totally lame broadband (512Kps) because back when I was on 57K dial-up modem it felt blistering. Now in the world web2.0 and me want to download tons of MP3s for my new IPOD (all from legitimate to-pay-for sites by the way ) it’s just not upto the job. My ISP did analysis of my line, and said on average the best I could expect from ADSL would be 4MB, they feely admitted their 8MB package would not be worthwhile. I respect their honesty.

Anyway, so much for the digital, on-demand age. Here in the UK we still seem to lag behind mainland Europe. Still it could be worse. I could be living in Southern Ireland, where hear nothing but compliants and frustration!

Links:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/10/ocp_isp_speeds/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/12/uk_broadband_domination/

Yesterday, Bogomil Balkansky, Senior Director of Product Marketing at VMware, provided an overview of new products, including ESX Server 3i, Site Recovery Manager, ESX Server 3.5/VC 2.5 with Storage Vmotion and Update Manager. 

You can now register to watch this presentation via web-ex by going to this link here.  Choose “View all recorded events”, Page 2 – and look for October 8th and “What’s New in VMware Infrastructure”

I’ve written a 20 or so page guide to ESX3i. However, it is not yet publically available as ESX3i has not yet been offically released yet. After advice from the program manager for the ESX3i beta – the document is only available to delegates who attended the VMworld 2007 event on the vmworld.com website. If you are VMware Certified Instructor (VCI) I’ve also uploaded it to the Private VCI Forums there.

Enjoy!

Main thing to say that is this is a just an announcement. There’s nothing new dowload and install yet. In fact some of these products (as far as I am aware yet) aren’t even on a private beta yet, never mind a public beta. Some of this was announced at VMworld in th keynotes. I’ll focus on what’s new:

• 128GB of RAM for ESX 3.5
• 64GB of RAM for Virtual Machines
• Suport for Transparent Paravirtualization support for paravirtualizated enabled Linux 2.6.21 kernels
• Support for MMU – Memory Management Unit – support for memory page tables handled by the new CPUs
• Support for NPIV – N-Port ID Virtualization – presenting a WWN to a VM
• Support for TCP Segment Offload and jumbo frames
• Suport for local SATA Drives
• Support for 10GigE
• Storage VMotion – Moving VMs files around whilst the VM is running
• Protect against operating system failures with virtual machine failure monitoring (experimental) in VMware HA. (Continuious HA???)
• One-step restore of VMs using VMware Convertor/VirtualCenter
• Distributed Power Management (Power down ESX hosts when you don’t need them – scarey or what!)
• VMware Update Manager – “Windows Update” for ESX Hosts & the Vi Client and integrated with DRS
• Consolidation Management – Mini-Capcity Planner and VMware Convertor integrated with VirtualCenter
• Site Recovery Manager
• ESX3i

Links:

Offical Press Release:

http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/esx_35.html
http://www.vmware.com/products/vi/features.html
http://www.vmware.com/products/vi/whatsnew.html

This tip comes from a former student of mine, Michael Maher. Michael works as the Principal Infrastructure Specialist in Service Management & Infrastructure section of O2 Ireland. Michael has found a way of getting the vmxnet.sys driver working in the Server Core Edition of Windows 2008. Here’s the instructions that Michael sent me (Michael: Sorry it’s taken me so much time to posting this!)

“For those unfamiliar with Server Core it is a command line only version of Windows Server 2008 (formerly Longhorn). I have been trying to install this on ESX 3.0. On the GUI version of Windows 2008 server, VMWare tools must be installed to get the NIC working. Server Core however is command line only. VMWareTools is a GUI installation so this is not an option for Server Core. The workaround is to transfer VMWareTools (contained in a file called windows.iso) from your ESX server to a local drive. This can be done using Winscp. Use Virtual Center to mount the windows.iso file as a CDROM drive in the Server Core VM. The driver files are located in \Program Files\VMWare\VMWare Tools\Drivers\VMXNet\w2k of the windows.iso file. The command used to install the drivers is

C:\Windows\System32>pnputil -i -a vmxnet.inf
Microsoft PnP Utility
Processing inf : vmxnet.inf
Successfully installed the driver on a device on the system.
Driver package added successfully.
Published name : oem2.inf

Next check the installation of the driver. Vmxnet should be displayed near the end of the list.

C:\Windows\System32>driverquery
ws2ifsl Winsock IFS driver Kernel 18/04/2007 04:52:40
vmxnet VMware Ethernet Adapte Kernel 22/04/2006 23:13:11

You can then enable remote access of Server Core with the command.

netsh advfirewall set allprofiles settings remotemanagement enable

To disable the firewall.
netsh advfirewall set allprofiles firewallpolicy allowinbound,allowoutbound”
Update: After posting this entry I was contacted by RTFM reader, Justin Campbell – who has also worked out a way of installing VMware Tools Server Core 2008 using msiexec. You can read more about Justin’s method at this entry on his blog:

Link:

http://cmsjustin.blogspot.com/2007/09/windows-server-2008-core-not-what-i-had.html