From an email promoting VMworld US 2009, its been made offical that next years VMworld Europe will be in October, which is a move from its usual Spring slot, ever since the first TSX’s started….
The blogs are a buzzing with talk about the “Thrilla in California”. Billed as a boxing match about hypervisor performance between VMware’s Scott Drummonds and Citrix’s Simon Crosby. It’s about 40mins long this video and you can watch the whole thing here:
http://www.catalyst.burtongroup.com/Na09/PlayerVideo011.html
I was quite put off by Crosby’s approach. Billed as discussion about the scaleability of the companies competing hypervisors – he seemed more keen to make an issue of VMware EULA and costs – than to actually talk technical about the capabilities of ESX vs Xen. To be honest I was surprised to hear the first issue being raised, as I thought/assumed that the restriction on people publishing performance data about ESX had been lifted long ago. Back in June 2006, Richard Garsthagen (now VMware’s EMEA Senior Evangelist) made it plain that this restriction had been limited within Vi3:
http://www.run-virtual.com/?p=123
“You may use the Software to conduct internal performance testing and benchmarking studies, the results of which you (and not unauthorized third parties) may publish or publicly disseminate; provided that VMware has reviewed and approved of the methodology, assumptions and other parameters of the study. Please contact VMware at benchmark@vmware.com to request such review.”
Is that restrictive? Or is just there to stop any old tom, dick and harry putting together bogus performance reviews?
Anyway, only this week I had student who had formerly been a Virtual Iron customer – who because of the untimely murder of the product by Oracle – is now looking for alternatives. He’d checked out Citrix Xen but abandoned it because of the bottleneck that Partition0 introduced…
My old Pal, Ricky El-Qasem shows that despite being incrediably busy with his new job at Veeam – still has the time to practise is programming skills. He’s written a little utility to allow you set schedule on resource pools settings. The ideas is that throught the day the scheduler changes the resource pool settings in vCenter based on your needs.
Resource Pool Scheduler
The utility is downloadable from Ricky’s website (virtualizeplanet.com) here
Maish Saidel-Keesing over at http://technodrone.blogspot.com/2009/07/how-heavy-is-your-esx-load.html has an interesting blogpost about troubleshooting a performance problem – which sounds like overuse/ill-thought out use of vSMP. My favourite part of the anecdote is when the guys asks why so many VMs have more than 1 vCPU they answer is “because that is what you get with any desktop computer”. That made me laugh out loud. In the spirit of this joke, I would like to introduce to Nathan Edwards.
Nathan is my step-son. About to graduated from Oxford with computing degree with specialism in graphics and computer animation. Anyway, in his spare time Nathan used to do a cartoon strip called ipage for the Leeds Uni magazine (he’s mate there was the editor). Anyway, here’s two ipages (0111 and 1010 – yes, he counts them in binary!) – the first made me piss myself laughing:
Following on this weeks theme of letting people know I’m just human and learn something new everyday. Here’s what I learned yesterday.
What is the DvSData Folder?
If you are using DvSwitches you might notice on your on one your shared VMFS volumes a .DvSData folder like so:
I was prompted to investigate further via an email from Jeremy Waldrop of varrow.com asking me what the heck this folder was for. In truth I wasn’t 100% sure, pretty clearly it has something to do with DvSwitches, and the fact that although DvSwitches are configured in vCenter fundementally where they stored/live/do there work is down to the ESX hosts. After all that’s where the physical VMNICs are. I’d seen this folder whilst writing my vSphere4 book, and it was one of those “I must double back and check that out” things, which I hadn’t gotten around to working out.
I figured some of my collegues on the private trainer forum had problem come across this – so forum-wacked there. Here’s what the DvSdata folder is all about (by the way this is a cut and paste job, because I can’t think of more succinct way of putting this!)
“DVS switches create a “hidden vSwitch” on each ESX host. This enables the ESX host to continue to use the DVS switch even if the vCenter Server goes down. The data that describes DVS is stored automatically on each ESX host in some shared storage location. The actual location is chosen automatically. One of the things can do is use the net-dvs command to locate where in shared storage information on a particular DVS is. Here is a sample though. Early in the net-dvs output it correlated the HEX code for the DVS switch with the switch name:
./usr/lib/vmware/bin/net-dvs
View all IPs of VM:
This has probably been around for years and years, but its new to me. I frequently give some of my “core” VMs multiple IP addresses. Don’t want to get into the ins and outs of why I do this – but I do. Sometimes I forget what IPs I’ve assigned to which VMs. I don’t have many “core” VMs that I do this too (about 
but the number of IPs is growing, and I’m bit bloody lazy and I’ve never listed these in a spreadsheet. Previously, I would remote console to a VM and do ipconfig /all completely unaware that in vCenter4 their is a View All button that will show you all the IPs assigned:
Of course, if I want to list all my IPs in use (perhaps to put together that spreadsheet I should have) a bit of PowersHell might be handy too:
Get-VM | select name, @{Name=”IP”; expression={foreach($nic in (Get-View $_.ID).guest.net) {$nic.ipAddress}}}
Sysprep.inf & Guest Customization:
This is one I’ve known for a while but never every bothered look into – re-using the sysprep.inf file create a guest customization profile. I alway create a new guest customizations by running through the wizard and saving them at the end. I’ve never just created the guest customization by scratch, and that’s where I saw the sysprep.inf option. Why is this hand? Well, the guest customization wizard only handles a fraction of your deployment needs. Unless your using View3 “Linked Clones” which can add virtual desktops to the right OU, if you using ordinary template deployments, all your new virtual desktops get dumped in the default computers container. Well, not if you use a sysprep.inf file which support computer account placement!
If you follow by blog regularly you will know that – in May I was North Carolina in the Old Smokey Mountains. I bought myself a resonator guitar there (the kind you would play slide blues on). Wonderful instrument, which US Airways prompted damaged whilst I was flying home to the UK.
To give credit to US Airways due, they sent me nice apology letter and completely covered the repair bill. Anyway, a pal of mine twitter sent me this video to make me laugh:
Look, this article is quite long. If you read any of it – read point number 4…. That’s the where the killer punch is…
Well, yesterday was results day. And it does make for some interesting reader. I’m often surprised by how the bigger news feeders interpret these results – I kinda assume that as professional journalists who have to work their way thru sort of press-releases on a daily basis, that they would know more than I do.
What prompted this email was article by the register:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/24/citrix_2q_2009_xen/
The article is entitled “Citrix: A long run to VMware: XenDesktop’s big quarter”. It makes quite a trival point – that despite the fact that VMware is larger company, Citrix made larger profits. But dig a little deeper in the stats and the article you soon realise all is not as rosy in the garden as you might think.
1. Citrix profits are up “UP a meager three-tenths of one per cent when compared to the same quarter last year”. What? We are now measuring in fractions a 1% growth….
2. Product license actually fell by 15%, but what pulled Citrix out of the doldrums was legacy upgrade licenses of $149.3m contributing 8%. Clearly, renewals is important part of any ISVs business – but it gives the impression that Citrix is being held up by products bought in the past, not by a surge of new business
3. In contrast VMware’s sales were “DOWN one-tenth of a per cent to $455.7m and its net income was driven down by the cost of doing business by 37.8 per cent to $32.5m.” Again were talking about fractions of a % which I guess when your talking in billions of dollars is serious money to you and me. The worrying thing I guess here is the growth in costs – which typically happens when a company is growing. You see sales are DOWN, compared to the bonkers years when the market was doing well. This kind of think – always comparing value of companies based on comparing previous quarterly results – without any referrence to the larger econmonic cycle is faulty to me. It reminds me of previous downturns. When companies release profits warnings which I sometimes humourously paraphrase as “You know that totally bonkers growth/sales/profit we had when the good times roll, well know the good time aren’t rolling – we doing slightly less well than we did then…” Que. Panic Selling and all round doom and gloom.
4. The killer statement is one that is tucked away here in the Registers article “Citrix did not provide numbers, but in the first quarter the XenDesktop and XenServer products together accounted for $7m in sales, which means sales of these products in Q2 came to $10.5m.”.
Hang on did I read that right. You buy a company (Xen) for $500m and it’s making a quarterly sales (not profit by the way) of $10.5m? And this is the company that is meant to take on VMware? VMware which is bigger company dervives ALL its sales from selling virtualization products (there’s no legacy presentation server licenses to prop up VMW sales, remember!). Clearly, Citrix has made some in roads by giving their product away for free, whilst charging for the upper-end features – with more than 100,000 download prior to the release of the XenServer 5.1 product in June. But as the register state “…letting people monkey around with freebie software isn’t the same thing as making money.”
What I would I love to see? I would love to see VMW buy CTXS. Then we would have the best of both worlds – the best of server virtualization and the best of desktop virtualization/server-based computing. Man, that would make those guys in Redmond take a step back and think. I doubt however that such a merger would get past the competition regulation! 
As you might have seen I recently released the Vi3 Book on RTFM as one big fat ZIP file. Unfortunately, I forgot to add a chapter – anyway, I’ve add the chapter into the ZIP file – so all should be good now
Prompted by recent twitter by David Davis and a blog post by Jason Boche on Windows support for the new hot-add features of ESX4 – I decided to do my own research. Firstly, with Windows 2008 R2 which has recently become RTM. I downloaded the .iso from the technet subscription website, and installed the x64 edition using the enterprize option. The result, hot-adding a 2nd vCPU caused a BSOD inside Windows, it then did a reboot – and then I certainly did have a 2nd vCPU!
So I went back to the 1st release of Windows 2008 x64 Enterprize Edition. The test? To see if I could safely add a 2nd CPU, and check to see if the HAL was updated, and if actual threads were executed on the second vCPU. The screen grab below is the HAL currently in use before the adding of the 2nd vCPU
I then add the second vCPU. Basically, all you do is edit the VM, and then find the vCPU and use a spinner to increase the value. Not unsuprising after making the change – the 2nd CPU did not show up, despite the fact the option to add a second CPU was available. From reading the Windows 2008 features guide:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/compare-specs.aspx
You can see that only Windows 2008 DataCenter and Itanium support hot add of CPU, despite the fact the option is available in the vSphere4 client.
So why is it there, if it don’t work and isn’t supported by MS you might ask? Good Question. Answer: I don’t know, apart from the fact that perhaps VMware wanted to allow the functionality to be there because of future updates by MS may enable hot-add of CPU for other versions of Windows 2008. There does to be some confusion around what Windows OSes support hot-add of vCPU. For example vmlover.blogspot.com lists Windows 2008 Enterprise. What vmlover also flags up – is its one thing to get the new CPU recognised by the OS, but quite another to then get an application to recognise it.
http://vmlover.blogspot.com/2009/05/hot-add-cpu-vsphere.html
You can now download the Vi3book that I wrote with Ron Oglesby and Scott Herold for free.
You might like to supplement these free chapters with the free guides which I released with Vi3.5
Quick Start Guide to ESX3i
This guide covers the primary configuration of the ESX3i product. It was based around the Beta & RC1 distrubutions.
Upgrade Guide to ESX 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5
This guide is geared up for people already familiar with ESX 3.x.x and VirtualCenter 2.x.x and wish to quickly upgrade their skills to ESX 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5. It was based on the Beta and Release Candidates
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