My fellow blogger Scott Lowe has two rather interest blogs about his experience of configuring multiple VLANS with HP Virtual Connect Flex…
http://blog.scottlowe.org/2009/07/09/using-multiple-vlans-with-hp-virtual-connect-flex-10/
http://blog.scottlowe.org/2009/07/09/follow-up-about-multiple-vlans-virtual-connect-and-flex-10/
Also on Chad’s site is how-to-setup the virtual Celerra appliance and make it work with SRM. It’s along the same lines of the kind of work I did in the SRM book with the Lefthand Networks VSA. Chad says the guide is “very explicit, and very comprehensive”.
Hooo-weee. VMware new vStorage impleamentation if vertiable alphabet soup of acyonmns! This week I picked up from Chad Sakac VirtuaGeek blog and quick video on how to install PowerPath for VMware.
Don’t be put of by the alphabet soup. Basically, you can upload and install your <vendors> path-selection-plug-in and make your ESX hosts zing along from storage perspective – and not be restricted by the VMware defaults of MRU, Fixed/Preferred and Round-Robin. I’m still waiting on licenses from EMC, and there’s minor problem with Storage Views in vSphere4 which came to light this week. But in generally its realitive easy. I’ve documented the proceedure for install EMC’s PowerPath for VMware and should just sneak its way into the Storage chapter on my new book on vSphere4.
Brian Madden has written a very unforgiving slant on VMware View. It’s quite a short little missive, and it won’t take you long to read.
Please do remember to come back here once you’ve read it.:-)
It pretty much slates View and VMware VDI strategy. It’s quite a brutal assessment – the trouble is I find myself aggreing with it. In fact its quite difficult to think of any counter argument. The especially biting line was this one:
“VMware is not a desktop company. They tout that “user data disk” crap when they talk about personalization, and their current customers (the server people) are impressed. (And they should be, because they’re server people. The last time they even thought about user profiles was for their NT 4 Workstation exam back in ‘97.)”
I went ouch when I read that bit because I thought – heck, by a couple of years – that pretty much describes me! In fairness to myself I was still in the thick of Citrix MetaFrame/Presentation Server up until 2004 – but once VMware came onto my radar I left it behind…
So what kind I say that would counter Brians view of things. Not much, but I will try – because I think debate is good – and I rather enjoy being a devils adovocate. Firstly, I don’t think VMware was every stupid enough to think its could justify it VDI offering on the basis of the quality of its hypervisor. I’ve never EVER heard a VMware person say the reason you need VDI from VMware is because of ESX. Sure perhaps some dumb-ass sales reps have, who have swallowed their own marketing bull****, but beyond the those folks – No. BUT, I do suspect that VMware hoped its ownership of the “Virtual Infrastructure” (a now passe phrase) would mean that customers would “natural” gravitate towards VMware as opposed to other vendors.
Secondly, Brain talks of Citrix and others as being the masters of delivering a remote desktop/compute environment. Don’t get my wrong – I love Citrix WinFrame/MetaFrame/Presentation/XenApp/WTF! server – but I’ve met many people who ****ing hate it too – both system admins and end-users. The complain about licensing cost and the fact that not every application can run. So these are the very same people who are going to deliver your virtual desktop.
Thirdly, View. Sigh. It really isn’t a very nice product is it? Its web-pages for administration seems a bit crummy – and doesn’t directly integrate with VMware’s flagship management platform vCenter. If find the complexity of linked clones (without all that stuff surrounding parentVM, replica and source) too much. In terms of controlling what users can and cannot do, its “policy” system reminds me something that’s pre-NT4 config.pol. So its quite hard to counter Brian’s negativity. Heck, I’m even adding to it. I’ve felt for sometime that VDM/View has been the elephant in the room – it really doesn’t come across a quality product.
Redeming qualities? Well, I’ve seen VMware customers select View over other products – not because its is technically better. In fact I’ve seen customers who already have a very good broker, ditch that broker in favour of View. Why? Well, its the corporate politics of reducing the number of companies involved in suppport. In short I think View may well be VMware’s “good enough” product. That will certainly get better in time, and eclipse the smaller brokers out there. Does that sound like someone company to you. First couple of release it the software isn’t really that great, but “good enough” wins out in the end – and because it ends up being bundled as part of bigger purchase – it eventually comes to win out all of the others?
I did the VCP4 Beta exam, some 270 odd questions in about four hours… Perhaps I should put my cards on the table, as instructor and educationalist I’m pretty much skeptical about certification in IT generally, and have been ever since I took my first Novell exam sometime in the early 90s. From the outset they limited by the multiple choice format, often poor phrasology, aderance to the pointless facts which leads to memorization by candidates and loaded with the vendors own agenda about their products.
See I told you I was skeptical. But after 15 years in the IT game and having veritable alphabet soup after my name – I would be. I’m sure your in the same boat. Heck, I had A-Z of certifications which have gradually expired at the same rate as my interest in the particular vendors product. I find it hard to think of many other industries or professional through which qualifications expire so rapidly. I guess that’s just the nature of the high-octane changes that rip thru IT on a yearly basis.
So the questions in the VCP4 beta exam came as no suprise. There was a fair few poorly phrased questions. Questions that seemed to be fixed about the configuration maximums PDF. Questions about VMware products that do not relate to the core vSphere4 product. No surprises there because that pretty much tipifies the VCP2 and VCP3 exams I did.
Clearly, I can’t go into specifics and I will restrict myself to information you could easily glean from the blueprint documents that surround VMware exams. Besides which one man’s experience of the exam is likely to be tainted by remembering questions that put a shiver down your spine. I’ve been using the product hard-core nearly everyday since Oct, 2008. I’ve written some 700+ pages on the product – and I found the exam tough going – mainly because of the high volume of questions. I had real headache, and had to take two breaks. I found the exam CLI lite, with high volume of performance questions – both about the VM, Resource Pools and DRS. In fact after a couple of hours out of the testing booth – your memory plays tricks on you – and I’ve begun to think the exam was purely about performance.
I felt I had a high number of iSCSI question, certainly more than I remember from the Vi3 exam – when iSCSI support was a new-whiz bang feature. I guess that reflects that fact iSCSI has experience a surge in use in the VMware Community, especially those who are new to the product.
I had quite a lot of question on Convertor and guided consolidation – the later giving me a lot of grief because my knowledge on Guide Consolidation is quite weak. Personally, I think Guide Consolidation is piss-poor and bit of joke – at best its attractive to marketing types who want to tell SMBs that road to P2V is paved with clicking >>Next. Another area of weakness for me was roles – I had quite a bit of questions on roles – most of which I felt OK but generally everything I do in VMware is as administrator – so very rarely on daily basis have to deal with or think about delegation. For me its an acedemic exercise which I only think about when I have teach others how to set them. So I know the first principles – but ask me what a specific role can and cannot do – I’d be reaching for a PDF file…
Distributed Switch figured in the exam too – there was quite a bit on migrating to/from SvSwitches and DvSwitches – so I was real pleased that I’d spent sometime a couple of months back documenting for my vSphere4 book the process. The only trouble was – that was a couple of months ago – so it wasn’t as fresh in my mind as it had been then. I was please the DvSwitch made a showing in the exam, but given its a Enterprise+ feature not every candidate who takes the VCP4 is going to get their hands dirty in the real world on them… the same goes with host profiles. I really wished DvSwitches & Host Profiles were in the Standard and higher products – then more VMware customers would feel the benefit of them. After all if you have more than a handful of ESX hosts they are they way forward.
So have passed. Dunno. I won’t get the results for a couple of weeks. I certainly hope I have, but I hate exams – and quite like that fact with VMware I only have to do them once every 3/4 years. The idea of having to do multiple exams fills with dread. I shoud say I took a total punt on the exam – didn’t do any studying or boning up at all. It cost £35 for me to do – and I’m figuring if I have failed the experience will help me with the real deal. I’m probably sounding really negative, mainly because I didn’t get the immediate result – so the exam current feels a little like the sword of Damocles. But I would say this exam is no easier or harder than my VCP2/VCP3. It just has different priorities and different features…
This is a rather cute (if that’s the right expression) piece of powershell – that can be used to do a bulk export guest customization specifications out into the .XML format…
http://www.van-lieshout.com/2009/07/export-and-import-customization-profiles-using-powershell/
Well, its surfaced again. The old chestnut of will VMware become the next <insert-former-vendor-who-dominated-the-market-but-then-rapidly-declined> has surfaced again. This time its Gartner who are up to their old predictive tricks. This time is David Cappuccio on the Gartner Corporate Blog:
Similiar Reuters is reporting that the stock market is now bearish about VMW shares, and the company could see its share value fall:
http://www.reuters.com/article/ousiv/idUSTRE5656KD20090706
The answer to this question is yes, if you believe what Karl Marx said that “History repeats itself – the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”. Personally, I’m not a believer in historical inevitabilty or determinism. That just because something happened in the past is is destined to happen in the future. It’s what convinces me that I’m not Marxist.
So what does VMware have to do to aviod becoming the next Novell/NetScape/Lotus? A couple of very simple things, which boil down to the general good things that all businesses should do and they are:
Now in the main I believe that VMware achieves these rules. BUT (and there is always a but…) I increasingly hear gripes from customers about the upgrade from Vi3 to vSphere4 being too pricey. However, it does seem that things are up for negioatation. Without mentioning any names – I have friend who has been sending me emails describing his upgrade costs. Much of this centres around what I would regard is complicated calculations for working out the value of existing Vi3 SnS, and then working out how much that is worth in vSphere4 SnS. The first calculations resulted in what my friend thought were punitive upgrade charges. So expensive in fact as to make him reconsider his upgrade plans. The second calculations for the upgrade he recieved (that’s the “Let me speak to my manager…” part of the story) came back with a signicantly reduced number….
I subscribe to the “there’s no such thing as free lunch” and “You get what you pay for” perspective. But even I recognise that in the current market place as Reuter’s article indicated – that in a recession price becomes a sensitive issue…
Take a business view of your VMware vSphere
Veeam Business View is an add-on that works with other Veeam products to provide business categorization for your VMware vSphere environment. Business View allows you to group, view and manage virtual machines (VMs) based on criteria such as business unit, department, location, purpose, SLA etc., instead of their VMware infrastructure location.
A couple of weeks ago I was asking my buddies on Tweet what their favourite way of repartitioning disks were. You know making a partition (any partition whether it it be the C: or D: drive) larger – ideally with the fewest simplest steps. For some years I’ve been using QParted from the rather excellent Xnoppix Live CD – and it still have some merits because it will more or less work with any guest operating system. But to be honest that’s becoming quite tenious as most of my VMs actually run Windows.
Anyway, Eric Sloof (http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/) put me on to Dell Utility called extpart.exe available from here:
http://ftp.us.dell.com/app/ExtPart.exe
If you are using ESX4/vCenter you can increase the virtual disk whilst the VM is powered on (if your using vi3.5 you’ll you have to power it off) say from 4096 to 10096, thus adding an extra 6000MB to the virtual disk. Once you have downloaded and installed extpart to the VM you can use the command:
extpart c: 6000
To increase the size of the partition. Now all I have to do is make this one continious process! Click a spinner to make a virtual disk big and as if by magic the partition is also the same size. Needless to say I’ve made extpart.exe a standard part of my VM builds…
If you not familiar with the very good VIOPS website run by VMware – then you should add it to your feed burner ASAP because they are pumping out some very good articles recently.
This article explains covers:
Splitting the vCenter Database:
“A centralized model to manage VMware Infrastructure may not be suitable for some VI customers when they start growing into more datacenters. These VI customers may consider splitting the VirtualCenter database into two or more datacenters. This document provides the guidelines on how to accomplish such split. This brief document provides guidelines on how to split up the VirtualCenter database during an upgrade from VC 1 to VC 2.”
http://viops.vmware.com/home/docs/DOC-1134
Virtualizing Microsoft Active Directory:
The purpose of this document is to collect together resources into one useful document on the topic of Virtualizing Microsoft Active Directory.
http://viops.vmware.com/home/docs/DOC-1223
Automating Network Setting Changes and DNS Updates on Recovery Site Using VMware SRM:
The topics discussed in this paper include:
DNS Updates Dynamic DNS (DDNS) vs. Script
http://viops.vmware.com/home/docs/DOC-1449
Linked Mode Best Practises:
Need I say more?
http://viops.vmware.com/home/docs/DOC-1521
Steps to setup 3PAR Inserv arrays for VMware Site Recovery Manager:
Another one that needs need no explaination:
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