I’m kinda running my labs in hybrid environment – deliberately using ESX4 “Classic” on half of my boxes, and ESX4i on the rest. It means I can validate my experiences on both platforms and spot differences in configuration/behaviour. So, for the most part I’m still doing scripted installations with the UDA, and using esxcfg- commands in the %post to handle the networking.
This afternoon (well my evening actually) I got a sneaky peak at NetApp’s new plug-in to vCenter dubbed the NetApp RCU 2.1. I was joined in the web-ex by fellow blogger Scott Lowe, and by Eric Forgette, the key architect/developer for RCU – in case you don’t RCU stands for Rapid Cloning Utility. Put simply the RCU leverages the functionality of a NetApp array to quickly duplicate VMs, with the strongest usage case being VDI of course. NetApp has been doing this sometime – and the early videos of them creating numerous VMs for VDI via script has gone down in youtube history… Anyway, that functionality of cloning is available to all NetApp customers free of charge, without the need to learn any fancy scripting. Let me give you a walking tour of the new RCU. Full details will be available when it is offically launched at VMworld this year.
This document describes the deployment of BlackBerry Enterprise Server from Research in Motion, along with its other associated component servers, in virtual machines on VMware ESX for VMware’s own business use. This deployment has been in place for more than two years and now serves the needs of over three thousand BlackBerry users within VMware:
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…
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!
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
Again, I was having a bit of day off from work – and didn’t really succeed. I think I might be a work-a-holic! I learned two things today. Firstly:
Hot-add might not be so hot after all:
In my book on vSphere4 I covered hot-add of CPU/RAM to the VM – knowing that that support for this featue was very much dependant on the Guest Operating System (aka Windows & Linux) – I set up a VM using the very latest version of Windows and the highest level – that is to say Windows 2008 64-bit Enterprise (OK, I didn’t have an .ISO of DataCenter Edition). I had pretty good experience.
But it has come to my attention via David Davis and Jason Boche (behind Jason’s name is link that takes you to his testing on hot-add) that hot-add might not be so hot after all. You see I just check the 2nd vCPU was just present in Task Manager. I forgot to check Device Manager and to see if cycles are actually scheduled on the new vCPU. According to Jason Boche – they are not – and in fact it seems like all the various flavours of Windows will require some kind of reboot.
Of the course, the really funny thing about hot-add is… wait for this… it’s not enabled by default AND you have to power down the VM to enable hot-add (Ahem…)… Anyway, I think there maybe a good reason why VMware chose not to enable hot-add as default. It’s incompatiable with VMware Fault Tolerence.
Anyway, not content to just take Jason’s word for it (not that I don’t trust/respect the guy) I want to give this hot-add business another try, and see what gives…
Installing EMC PowerPath for VMware:
For the last couple of days I’ve been playing with EMC PowerPath for VMware. As you might know ESX4 vStorage allows for storage vendors to add their own PSPs (Path-Selection-Plug-ins) and extend the functionality of the ESX beyond the standard PSP supplied by VMware (MRU, Fixed, Round-Robin). I was inspired by Chad Sakac recent blog post and video.
The nice thing for someone like me – is that I was able to download the PowerPath software for free (the same couldn’t be said about the PDFs – hint-hint!) and Chad was kind of enough to allow me some NFRs that last a year. It does appear to be the case that theres some kind of “conflict” between storage views and PowerPath, Chad’s told me that VMware are working on patch to fix this issue – nothing major sounds like just a bit wonky xml.
Anyway, this is likely to end up in my book on vSphere4, but in case it doesn’t – I wrote a little PDF to explain how it is done. (or you could watch Chad’s videos)
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.
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