Archive for the ‘vSphere’ Category

Just a few short weeks ago Dell launch their Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter. I was fortunate recently to be given a guided tour of it’s capabilities, and to discuss with Dell their future plans. I was even lucky enough to be offered remote access to pre-configured environment – that was handy because I don’t run Dell servers in my lab environment, although I recently took on loan two Dell Equallogic’s arrays as part of my ramping up ready to write the next thrilling installment on VMware’s Site Recovery Manager. For now it’s a bit make do and mend with a couple of antiquated HP Proliants that went out of warranty some years ago!  So it certainly was very useful to have one-to-one session with the guys from Dell – because there’s nothing like seeing the technology in action as opposed to steam of endless PowerPoints!

Before I get into features and functionality, lets talk about price and terminology. That’s usually the last thing on my agenda – but I feel there might be chance to clear up a misconception. When in the VMware community we use the word “plug-in” we very often think of some teeny-tiny piece of software that extends the functionality of vCenter by adding a little option here and there. Often these teeny-tiny bits of software are free, and written by enthusiasts trying to make a name for them selves in the vCommunity.  When vendors write these sort of plug-ins often times they are treated like “Easter Eggs” compared to the main course, and a way of ticking the box that says “We integrate with VMware”.

When tweeted I was just about go on the call with Dell, one of my followers tweeted back “Ask them why it isn’t free!” So I was forewarned to raise this on the call, but as the session went on I began to realize how the term “plug-in” is somewhat out of place in this case. The Dell Management Plug-in is so much more than just some teeny-tiny plug-in, and so long as Dell remain committed to it as strategy then I can see how in the long-term vCenter will be the central point from which you manage your VMware, and your Dell assets. It’s precisely this direction that Dell are espousing, so there’s more to this management lark then adding a “connect via RDP” to the VM menu in vCenter.

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UPDATE: My fellow vExpert and Blogger, David Davis – managed to capture some video of the User Awards, together with an interview with the overall winner. Check it out here

On day two of VMworld. I stayed in bed. Yes, I’d been partying hard on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday -  and so when Wednesday morning broke – I found myself supine. But I was still productive – I managed to get some blogpost done from the comfort of my room – before getting my proverbial together to help present the Best of VMworld Europe – TechTarget USER Awards. My co-presenter was Jo Maitland from TechTarget…

Both me and Jo had these crazy mics on which were used throughout the event. Every time I had mine on, I felt an irresistible urge to promote my exercise video, and try out my Madonna impression. Fortunately, no video footage exists of me making a berk of myself!

The very last picture shows Simon Gallagher (best in show) stepping up to win his award – a brand new iPAD…

In San Francisco I helped judge the catagories for vendor awards – but in my heart of hearts I was really looking forward to the User Awards – sponsored by VMware – the intention is to recognize exceptional work by customers in the field. It’s the kind of users/customers/community stuff that floats my boat. Vendors are for ever getting recognition for the work, but this was  a real opportunity to reward outstanding efforts by the virtualization community.

Myself and Tom Howarth – judged the Private Cloud, Virtual Desktop and Home/Remote Office categories, whereas Gabrie Van Zanten and David Davis – judged the Server Virtualization and BC/DR categories. Simon Gallagher won the “Best in Show”…. and not unsurprisingly Simon is really stoked that he won, and his post has been updated to explain in detail how he built the vTardis….

It always makes me smile when I hear that phrase – I’m sure Simon has a healthy coat, strong teeth and healthy bones!

You can hear me and Gabrie discussing the judging process, and what says about the current state of virtulization in a audio podcast recorded just before the event

Here’s an article that gives an overview of the results (there was 80 submission in total)

As VMworld Copenhagen drew to a close – Big John Troyer from the VMTN Communities had me and Simon VMworld-TV to discuss the awards generally, and Simon’s vTardis in particular…

In case you haven’t heard of vTardis yet. Its single box with ESX on it – in turn running 6 “nested” ESX hosts (ESX running inside a virtual machine), and Simon has had upto 60 VMs run on this system. It includes shared storage (OpenFiler as a VM), and firewall (Vyatta), and supports a VLAN configuration to boot! Simon’s vTardis a pun on the popular BBC TV series “Dr Who” where the Dr’s timetravelling machine is larger on the inside, than on the outside. In the same way, Simon gets more servers running side the box, than there are physical servers. Not to rest on his laurels – Simon has been busy improving and upgrading the original vTardis – to include support for VMware’s vCloud Director. Originally vTardis stood for “Trolley Attached Random Datacentre of Inexpensive Servers” (as it was attached to trolley to make it portable), but as time as gone by Simon keeps on dreaming up other names I think its currently ”

Watch live video from VMworld 2010 Live on Justin.tv

I’ve been having an issue with VMware Tools, since I moved over to vSphere4.1. What happens is this. If you do a typical installation after a clean installation of Windows 7 (and I believe W2K8) then midway through the installation the VM is randomly, and arbitrarily rebooted. Of course in a busy day where you doing far to many different things at once, it’s one that easily missed. So convinced of this that I decide to install a fresh copy of Windows 7 and then snapshotted it before making any changes. I then video’d the entire experience. The reboot happens at around 4min and 40second. You might as well scroll to that point unless you want to watch the most tedious video on YouTube!

Anyway, I took the same VM. Reverted the snapshot, and decided to custom installation of the VMware Tools. This time NOT including the SVGA Driver from the installation routine. Hey, presto VMware Tools installs with an arbitrary reboot. It was thought that vSphere4.1 fixed problems with VMware Tools and this pesky SVGA driver. But that doesn’t appear to be the case. I first picked up on this issue from the rather excellent blog from Jason Boche:

http://www.boche.net/blog/index.php/2010/03/28/windows-2008-r2-and-windows-7-on-vsphere/

And became concerned about it because of problems it introduce with vSphere4.0 U2 and PCoIP – a little bit later it gave me PanoLogic evaluation some additional funkiness I would rather have lived without.

For my money I think the KB article – http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1011709 which talks about not installing the SVGA driver STILL applies. Watch out for automatic updates and VUM upgrades which might not read VMware KB Articles…

I think this issue is the real source of the deployment problems I’ve been having recently.

[UPDATE: Sadly, this is the case. And I still have cloning Win7 issues with vSphere4.1]

Anyway, I’m going to be experimenting with my new template (which doesn’t include the SVGA driver) over the next couple of days. And I will soon know if this is related or unrelated…

Incidentally, I thought I might try a clone of a VM without VMware Tools, and was surprised to find that Windows 7 REQUIRES VMware Tools in order to be cloned… It seems to be an issue with the Logical Volume Manager service. So when install VMware Tools, make sure you install it the right way, without a driver which can cause a random reboot!

I’ve been recently doing some video work for VMware/Intel which was brought to my table by friends over at TechTarget on the SearchServerVirtualization.com website. It’s pitched squarely at the SMB market, and those who are new to virtualization and VMware. I think VMware making a big attempt to capture the SMB market, especially with their new “Foundation” SKUs which include VMotion (the live migrate of VMs from one ESX hosts to another…) for the very first time!

There’s 3 videos altogether:

• Lesson 1: Rapid Deployment with VMware Virtual Machine Templates
• Lesson 2: Protecting your  Virtual Machines with VMware HA
• Lesson 3: VMware Data Recovery (Backup)

The guys at SearchServerVirtualization.com have put the videos into a kinda of “classroom” style environment which makes it look quite smart!

I had a funny experience this week. Earlier I completed my upgrade to vSphere4.1 (I think the change is not related, but not 100% sure…). I was inspired to get back to work on my guide on View 4.5. But when I started to create new Window 7 desktops I got a weird error which looked like this: (more…)

I wrote an article recently about VMware U2. And I made this god awful pun associated with U2… Update 2 and the rockband U2. Geddit?

Sadly, that reference didn’t really make the article on TechTarget. I dunno, perhaps Bono rang them up and said they couldn’t use it. The article was written sometime before the recent release of vSphere4.1 which has introduce a new set of possible gotchas (32-bit DSN for VUM on a 64-bit OS, Incompatible with View 4.0x, and the 8-character password issue…)…

This was prompted by the U1 incident with HP SIM Agents, and the U2 incident with PCoIP Protocol…

Read on MacDuff…

This is the final article in a series about the new vSphere4.1 release. To be honest as I begin to the use the software on a daily basis I’m beginning to count a significant number of tiny enhancements here and there, that went totted up together really make difference. So I’m thinking at some stage I will write a 10 new things about vSphere4.1 that if you blinked you would miss them article. Snappy title.

Anyway, this article is all about the enhancements to HA/DRS/DPM and so forth or to be brief… VMware Clustering. By far I think some of the changes to the HA algorthim and its relationship with DRS will be the most significant if unseen aspect of vSphere4.1 – that the new DRS groups…

Read on MacDuff…

Other articles in my series include:

VMware VAAI pros and cons and the hidden fourth primitive

What’s new in ESXi 4.1: Active Directory integration, Tech Support Mode and more

VMware boosts performance with vSphere 4.1

Today Yesterday, I embarked on an upgrade from vSphere 4.0 U2 to vSphere 4.1. There’s a couple of caveats here and some gotchas. Firstly, I backed up my vCenter DB, and also shutdown my SQL2K8 and vCenter VMs, and took a snapshot of them before beginning.

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Intriguing blogpost title?

I’m hoping your wondering – hey, Mike what on earth is a “primative”. What is the fourth one, and why is it hidden. Well, it’s all about how VAAI was meant to have 4 components. And there are. But folks are just being quite quiet about the 4 component.

I think this a little-mini-scoop, and I’m hoping it will set me apart from the other guys (who I know and respect greatly) Anyway,

Read on McDuff

Following on my series of blogposts about vSphere4.1 this article is all about the ch-ch-ch-changes to ESXi. For me, personally – these changes are the MOST important ones in vSphere4.1. Without them, I think VMware would have a real fight on its hands to prize the Service Console from the cold-dead hands of hard-core VMware COS men. Personally, I think VMware’s biggest challenge in the next 12-18 months is going to be convincing business to move from welterweight hypervisor to a skinny-latte version.

There will some folks who might hope, pray, delude themselves that VMware might have change of thought about the end of ESX “Classic”. If VMware did it would be the biggest uturn of recent years…

Read on McDuff

[Note: Article is currently missing screen shots, they are in the process of being prep'd, and should appear very shortly...]