Archive for December, 2009

Chad – you know he’s isn’t a virtual geek – he’s a real geek – nothing virtual about that! As an EMC-er Chad has been excellent in releasing docs on EMC issues generally and stuff on the whole VCE thang.

First up is a blog post which is as fresh as a daisy – from yesterday. It’s about FAST from EMC (yes, now one every comes up with acryonms that are S.L.O.W do they). What is FAST – well, its Storage VMotion done within the array between tiers of storage to improve performance. Think of it as DRS for storage. To learn more visit:

EMC FAST (the storage equivalent of VMware DRS) is GA…

Chad has some interesting clarification about vBlocks and some stuff on ionix as well

More VCE Vblock Details including EMC Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager

Finally, Chad has flagged up two very important bugs and their work arounds. The first is about a performance dip when using the built-in multipath policy of “Round Robin” in vSphere4

vSphere 4 NMP RR IOoperationsLimit bug and workaround

and the second is this one – which concerns what happens if you just de-present a LUN without first doing the correct steps in vSphere first. Personally, I wouldn’t call this a bug per se – just unexpected behaviour when an admin does something without engaging brain first – hopefully the best practise is something folks do as naturally!

An important vSphere 4 storage bug and workaround

Now, I’m not sure how people will react to wanting to view Steve’s Virtual Black Hole it all sounds quite intrusive to the extent you would need to be qualified doctor. But its well worth a visit. Especially for Steve’s article on “Where to download VMware Cold Clone“. I was once (OK, for a nano-second) at the top of the VMTN forum boards for P2V back when it was called P2V and not this girly “Converter” thing (Only joking). It’s a funny one VMware Converter. I learned last week, that although v4 does NOT support the hot-clone of NT4SP6 – the previous version (that would be v3 then) does. Steve points out that the older (some would say more reliable/dependable) cold-clone .ISO is still about – it your prepared to go hunting about for it. Does VMware care about VMware Converter anymore… or is it looking forward to the day where P2V was a dim and distant memory?

Additionally, Steve has good old debate about that old chestnut about how to partition up ESX – which is especially more pertinent now the Service Console uses a virtual disk. To be honest I’ve never really been 100% sure what the benefits are of a virtual disk for the Service Console. There must be some – just can’t think of them right now…

http://www.thevirtualblackhole.com/uncategorized/vsphere-service-console-partitioning

Well, this is quite new – and alliance between NetApp and MS surrounding cloud-computing. Although the new VCE (VMware, Cisco, EMC) coalition ISN’T meant to drive other vendors into the arms of other hypervisor vendors – some might argue that this story is evidence that it has. I’m not so sure. It seems like hardly a day goes by one vendor doesn’t swear undying affection for another as part of some strategic alliance designed to benefit customers. It seems like this whole cloud thing is much bigger than individual companies, and the pack of cards is being shuffled about somewhat – its seems clear that no-one wants to be dealt a single card which see’s them out of the cloud-in-the-sky poker game.

I’m not being cyncial about the MSN coalition (Microsoft-NetApp, can you see what I did there?). But I can see how a lot of bloggers will go – “told-you-so – told you that VCE would make VMware less independent…”. I don’t think so. Are they right? Am I wrong? Let me know – leave a comment…

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/08/microsoft_netapp_lovein/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/08/ms_netapp_alliance/

http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/archive/2009/12/08/more-on-today-s-announcement-with-netapp.aspx

In case you don’t know Scott is a VMware employee – he focuses on performance and scalability – and taking on Citrix/Microsoft at the how-got-the-best-product game…

Anyway, Scott’s a good resource for information (in fact some of it quite technical, but written in an accessible way) on performance.

Performance of Thin Provisioned Disks

This article debunks the popularly held myth that thin provisioning = poor performance. It doesn’t, so long as the underlying storage and VMFS is configured correctly. Actually, the performance is comparable to the old thick format. Don’t about you – but I’d rather be thin, than thick any day.

Additionally, my pal and fellow blogger – Steve Beaver has some interesting (and some would say more guarded) thoughts on thin-provisioning.

http://www.thevirtualblackhole.com/vwire/some-thoughts-on-thin-provisioning

esxtop Analysis With esxplot

This one allows you to download a graphing tool that take the raw date from an esxtop -b output – and doesn’t suffer from the column and row limitations of conventional systems – such as Microsoft Excel

Well, the new year will soon be upon us – and its this time of the year folks seem to like to reflect what the year brought us – and what the future will bring to us. David Marshall on his popular vmblog.com has kicked the show off with a series of guest writers giving their predictions of the future. My prediction is that 2010 will look and feel a lot like 2009/2008/2007, but will be slightly different too. How’s that for a confident prediction?

Predictions for Cloud Storage in 2010

Predictions for 2010: Enterprises gain the upper hand in virtual environment spending

2010 Virtualization Predictions – The Year the Network Becomes Fluid and Virtual

My follow bloggers and contributors to the Virtualization Community -  Alan Renouf, Bernie Baker, Stuart Radnidge have put together a quick start guide to vSphere4 which is now on Amazon. I managed to pick up a couple of this books when I was in VMworld this year. Pocket sized they are really handy – unlike some of the more weightier tomes on the subject – this does fit inside your kit bag. They are great as freebies – so I was able to carry them on planes and hand them out to students as prizes. I’d really recommend it:

Well, I thought I’d take sometime out to get some long overdue blogging out of the way. Nothing high-level just a lot of linkage! I’m away next week at my last event for the year – and then Xmas will kick in and so if I don’t get these done now it will be the New Year by the time it gets done.

First off some links from the viops website which are specific SRM related:

Install and Configure SQL Express 2005 for use with Site Recovery Manager V4

Enabling SSL Communication between VMware vCenter SRM and NetApp FAS Storage Arrays

Steps to setup VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 4.0 with NetApp NAS Replications

That last one is written by Cormac Hogan from VMware who is based in Cork. I’ve met Cormac a couple of time, a great guy and really keen to share his knowledge with other folks. If you new to SRM you should check out his “Steps to Setup…” series of guides which cover the fundamentals of setting up SRM with various storage arrays from many different vendors.

OK, so you are very new to blogging. But even you realize that cutting & pasting other peoples stuff from their blogs to your own – if not illegal – is very morally, ethically and professionally suspect. Especially, if you company retails services from the same web-page. I mean, no-one would be so stupid/fool-hardy/bereft of business ethics to do such a thing. OR would they?

Unfortunately, a company called Nexus Technologies in Ireland doesn’t seem to understand the basic principles of author citation. They have whole sale copied my friend Gabrie’s blog posts on ESXi (and other peoples work). In case you don’t Nexus Technologies this is what they say about themselves:

“Nexus Technologies has the experience of over 10 years in the IT industry.  From working on large scale projects in Dell Computers, Microsoft, University College Cork, Data Centres and 5 years on numerous large scale IT projects within the Fleming Group  Avast level of experience has been gained and numerous contacts have been created. Some of these projects include Fota Island Resort, Cork, Rockbrook, Sandyford, Dublin.  We have also been involved in the planning of a 50,000 sq. Ft. Data Center in the West Cork Technology Park, Clonakilty Co. Cork, and investigating the greener element of computing and energy conservation.”

You would think a company with such eminent experience and credentials would know better. However, when Gabrie took this up with Damien Sherdian at Nexus Technologies he was met with with the following excuse:

“Gabrie,

I did not accept or dent any disclaimer with the below information on it. Therefore any reference to the information is public access and can be used accordingly.

Any further issues feel free to contact me directly.

Nexus Technologies.”

The offending blog post (amongst many others is here)

http://www.nexustechnologies.tv/?p=1064

and Gabrie’s original is here:

http://www.gabesvirtualworld.com/?p=829

EVENING UPDATE:
It looks like Gabrie’s post has been deleted. But Nexus still have a Tech Republic post originally written by Scott Lowe which is straight copy & paste:

http://www.nexustechnologies.tv/?p=1078

Here’s the original that they just cut & pasted…

http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/tech-manager/?p=660

It seems to be that Damien is using legal technicality – to essentially gloss over the whole sale theft of someone elses intellectual property. Even if Damien is legally right, I don’t think his position is morally or ethically correct. I wonder what Nexus Technologies customers think of this kind of behaviour?

I dunno maybe I am wrong. What do you (30K readers a week) think? Damian does invite people to comment – his email address is damiens@nexustechnologies.tv perhaps you would like to drop him an email explaining what you think. Is he right or wrong?

Anyway. I thought it would be nice to explain to Damien and others by simple lesson how you cite other peoples work. Here it goes:

Hey, there – blog readers. To do it came to my attention a really good script. This script can be run remotely against your ESX hosts to find if your VMs support the right disk format for VMware FT. It was written by William Lam. If you don’t know William he’s very active in the VMware Community and contributes many scripts to help administrators. You can find William’s FT Disk script here:

http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-11554

You can become one of Williams followers on twitter here: http://twitter.com/lamw

His other scripts are available from his website here: http://www.engr.ucsb.edu/~duonglt/vmware/

[Was that so hard?]

Following from my popular (according to me!) blog post theme – of “what I learned this week…” a irregular round-up of stuff that seems really obivious – but actually has escaped me.

vCenter DB Retention Policy:

A couple of weeks ago I made a point about how the vCenter DB grows in size day-by-day and week-by-week – and that wasn’t away to control it size or FIFO its data. I turned out I was wrong. If you look in the vCenter Server Settings. In vCenter 4.0 there is actually something called the retention policy.

What I was hoping for was the ability to FIFO the performance data. As far as I know the only way to clear performance data is with SQL Transact commands to delete the redundant data.

VMware Tools won’t upgrade:

I’ve a couple of VMs who’s VMware Tools won’t upgrade. I think it maybe because the uninstall data was deleted – erm, by me. Opps. Anyway, I think I might have found a work around in this KB article.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1001354

ESXi lacks RPMs for VMware Tools for Redhat Linux 64-bit:

This is little bit of an obscure one – and it was drawn to my attention by one of my students. If you create a Red Hat Linux 64-bit (RHEL5) on an ESX ‘Classic’ host you will find you have both the ability to install VMware Tools with either an .RPM or extract it from a .TGZ file. NOW, if you try the SAME thing on ESXi host you will find the RPM version isn’t there. Presumably this is done by VMware to reduce the footprint of ESXi.

Find out if your virtual disks are the right type for VMware Fault Tolerance:

This one came thru twitter. Specifically from William Lam. Thanks William this is great find. William has a great resource of scripts on his website:

http://www.engr.ucsb.edu/~duonglt/vmware/

My previous method of finding this out was pretty lame. It involved using vmkfstools and vmkernel log files – and looking at very obscure values therein. This is MUCH easier; MUCH clearer, and MUCH simpler.

Why is this important. Well, let say your VM has the ordinary thick type of disk (technical term is zeroedthick) or you have used the thin type – AND these disks are quite large (let say 2TB). To convert these disks the Fault Tolerance format (eagerzeroedthick format) requires a power off of the VM, and it can take a long time. That’s got to be factored into your maintenance window.

Of course none of this matter if the vSphere Client/vCenter actually showed the correct format. Unfortunately, both the zeroedthick and eagerzeroedthick format are both referred to as “thick” in the GUI.

Here’s how you do it.

Just cat & grep the last vmware.log file of the VM which you can see in the directory where the VM is located. So here’s a VM with three types of disk. Thin (scsi0:0), EagerZeroedthick (scsi0:1) and Thick (scsi0:2). In the screen grab you can see scsi(0:0) is thin

If you then PuTTy to a ESX host, and the type the following command:

[root@esx1 mail03]# cat vmware-1.log  | grep  ‘FT enable’

This will produce the output of:

Dec 02 00:38:08.505: vmx| VM has thin disk scsi0:0; FT enable will be disallowed
Dec 02 00:38:08.507: vmx| VM has zeroedthick disk scsi0:2; FT enable will be disallowed

Alternatively, if you use

[root@esx1 mail03]# cat vmware-1.log  | grep  ‘scsi0:0′

[root@esx1 mail03]# cat vmware-1.log  | grep  ‘scsi0:1′

[root@esx1 mail03]# cat vmware-1.log  | grep  ‘scsi0:2′

This will print out much detailed information. The difference between each output is the “allocation type” field. These are are as follows:

allocation type: 0 – EagerZeroedthick Virtual Disk

allocation type: 1 – Zeroedthick Disk (Default)

allocation type: 2 – Thin Virtual Disk

Since writing this blog post – Marco has been in touch and he has modified his blog to more properly acknowledge the work of others. Thanks for listening to our collective concerns, Marco. I look forward to subscribing to your blog – and reading your own exploits in the cloud.

http;//www.vclouds.nl

A. When it shamelessly copies and pastes other work by other people – without any acknowledgement to the originator.

Now. I’m not talking about useful aggregation which scrapes the heading and first couple of lines – leaving you with a handy link to the original blogger. What I’m talking about here is someone who is so technically unskilled, un-opinionated – and able only to master the rudiments of cut & paste. Such a blog is www.vclouds.nl – and its “author” marco@broeken.nl

That’s his email address by the way. If you would like to send him an email – asking him to stop plagarising other peoples work then that might be handy. Affected people include such luminaries as Simon Long, Scott Lowe, Duncan Epping, Scott Vessey.