This session discuss the affect that VMware FT has on performance. 3 main things – firstly, you can only current protect a 1xVCPU VM with FT. Given that one way to improve performance is add more vCPU that needs to be kept in consideration. Currently CPUs don’t really have a hook to allow VMware to track the memory changes of two vCPUs – whereas the “lockstep” attribute on most modern CPUs do allow this for single vCPUs. 2ndly, latency is the key – the gap between the Primary VM and Secondary VM because the Primary VM cannot massively go quicker than its secondary. Whilst latency is small for outbound traffic (because that is not replayed in the secondary) high amounts of inbound network traffic can have significant impactly. 3rdly, very I/O bound VMs for storage may need switching to secondary method which in test didn’t out perform the default method – this secondary method is labelled as “shared read mode”…
In this keynote session Steve Herrod – outlined the future of VMware virtualization. The coolest part being the demo of a virtual machine running on a mobile phone – shame it was Windows CE! Hee-hee
Here’s my report for the hotel room of the 1st day. In the evening I was out with Hyper9 who put food in my tummy. Got chatting to Gabe’s babe who’s antropologist – who is “studying” VMworld like we are some lost tribe in the jungle. You know what there maybe some truth in that!
This session was a good overview of all the new management features – I kinda zone’d out in place because it was presented by marketing person (no disrespect) BUT, it was useful as a top-level overview of what VMware are doing. Much of this stuff I heard about in the Private-NDA “Instructors” Only session on Monday – but it was useful to have quickly wrapped up – because it means I can zone-in (rather than zone-out) on what I think are going to be stuff people REALLY wanna use. There was tidy sum of stuff you should already have heard about – like SRM and LCM. But there was new stuff too. I kinda embarassed the lady by asking her about VM-free management – will VMware ever manage HyperV and Xen…
This was a great session in the new features of Convertor 4.0 from VMware. As you might know the new version came out recently – and this was a great session for catching up with what VMware doing. Here’s a top-level view. The video is mainly me asking questions at the end!
So the new version now supports:
Linux P2V with a special helper-VM. This affectively runs very like using the cold-clone CD inside a VM. Something we do in the VMware courses to demo the on-line and offline methods
P2V VMotion – Basically, a bit “live state” P2V which uses snapshots and works with Windows Services to get the P2V’d VM closer in state to the physical source
Reduced Time – We shown stats that showed the old method against the new – how different in time it took to the conversion of an SQL Server – down from 3hrs to 13mins!
On the downside the cold-clone CD for 4.0 isn’t (yet available) BUT on the upside when it is – the whole thing will be free…
As reported earlier Paul M@VMware CEO of the company outlined VMware’s Cloud Computing strategy… Here’s a fun video that shows what it was to be there!
Well, I crashed back at the hotel for a short while – and via twitter managed to get myself an invite to the TripWire dinner. Tom Howarth, Steve Beaver and Jason Boche were in attendence… Oh, and so was Joep Piscaer…!!!
Today I’m attending the VCI Day. This morning we looked at the “Next Generation” of VMware technologies – that’s the code word for the product-that-the-lawyers-won’t-allow-you-to-refer-to-because-your-constrained-by-the-NDA!
Still I learnt quite a bit here and there – because although I have been writing about the next generation of techs since October – I’ve been busy making sure the Vi3 book fits with the NG… I’ve been holding of the very brand new features until VMworld Europe 2009 because I expect to learn a lot this week…
Well, I’ve (finally) arrived in Canne – and given I live in Europe (allegedly) it was a bit of nightmare of journey – caused by ****-up on my behalf by booking a flight that required me to switch from Paris-Charles-de-Gaul to Orly by bus. Well, it was all downhill after that – the use of the word “bus” gives a way. It’s hard to think of the last time I had such a crap journey. Unless I shudder and remember a flight back from Athens to London, Heathrow. It was about 3.5hr flight from Greece to the UK… and then a further 2.5 wait for a bloody bags to arrive off the carousel. You see there’s only one thing worse than arriving in France on a plane, and that’s arriving at Heathrow…. Anyway, the delights of modern travel are outlined in this video diary of my journey…
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