VMGuru.nl – I choose (a virtual) life!

With the release of vSphere 4.1 it will be the last version of ESX to be released in an ESX and an ESXi version. After this version only the ESXi flavor will be released. We at VMguru.nl predicted that this would happen a few years back, so we advised our customers to go for the ESXi version, too make it a lot easier to migrate to a newer version in the future.

VMware recommends that customers deploy vSphere 4.1 on the ESXi hypervisor architecture as a best practice.

In the past some features from the ESX architecture weren’t supported on the ESXi platform. As of vSphere 4.0, all the functionality of VMware vSphere is supported on both architectures, including support for Jumbo Frames, Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP), NetQueue, and NetFlow.

VMware ESXi is the latest hypervisor architecture from VMware. It has an ultra-thin architecture with no reliance on a general purpose OS, yet still offers all the same functionality and performance of VMware ESX. For a comparision between ESX and ESXi 4.1 see the following article.

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This week VMworld 2010 is held but unfortunately VMGuru.nl is not there to bring you the latest news from San Fransisco.

But of course we scan the Internet, follow twitter and have close contact with VMware personnel on-site.

First of all, if you can not attend VMworld like us but want to stay up-to-date check out:

VMworld 2010 buzz and the VMworldTV Channel.

VMware vCloud Director

The biggest news from VMworld today is the introduction of the VMware vCloud Director, formerly known as project Redwood. With the VMware vCloud Director enterprises can build secure, multitenant private clouds by grouping infrastructure resources into virtual datacenters and publishing them to users through Web-based portals and other software interfaces as fully automated, catalog-based services. This solution provides a clear path to cloud computing by giving customers the power to leverage existing investments and the flexibility to extend capacity among clouds.

For more information go here.

Or watch the video on VMware KB TV.

VMware View 4.5

The other big announcement was the VMware View 4.5 release in the beginning of September.

For more information see yesterdays blog post.

iPad VMware View client.

Besides the VMware View client for the Mac, which is part of the VMware View 4.5 package, a very nice addition to VMware View will be the upcoming VMware View client for the iPad. VMware is going Apple! Great news in my opinion because now I have an extra excuse to get myself an iPad .

For more information and a short demo visit VMworld TV.

Bye bye ESX.

Another public secret is the end of life for VMware ESX. With the release of vSphere 4.1, VMware announced that this will be the last version which will have an ESX version. At VMworld this seems to be one of the primary messages besides all the new products, features and announcements. New releases of VMware ESX will only come as ESXi.

Visit VMworld TV for an interview with Sean and Charu fro.m the ESXi team about what this will mean for customers. Is ESXi up to the challenge? I don’t think so! Almost all my implementations in the last two years have been based on VMware ESXi and I have never encountered any problem regarding back-up-, UPS- or monitoring agent which couldn’t be solved. So I’m happy, one less choice to make.

VMware acquires Integrien and TriCipher.

Another announcement done at VMworld 2010 is the acquisition of Integrien and riCipher to expand VMware’s stack of cloud enabling software. Integrien is a company which specializes in performance analytics and TriCipher is a federated-access-management software provider.

Integrien’s real-time performance analytics software, called Alive, can be combined with VMware’s vCenter virtualisation products, allowing organisations to derive performance summaries of their infrastructure and virtualised applications.

TriCipher’s software will provide VMware infrastructure with a single set of authentication and security controls that can be used to bridge public and private clouds.

Today, at VMworld 2010 in San Francisco, VMware announced the launch of VMware View 4.5.

VMware View 4.5 is packed with loads of new features which increases VMware View use cases and definitively narrows the gap with Citrix XenDesktop.

In fact, Chris Wolf from Gartner has declared View 4.5 as an enterprise ready desktop virtualization solution.

I’ve attended the View 4.5 beta program and I can honestly say that View 4.5 is a huge improvement. In the past, we had to deploy XenDesktop for VDI deployments with specific customer demands but with the release of View 4.5 these scenarios have decreased significantly.

General availability for VMware View 4.5 is set for early September.

Here are some of the improvements/features in View 4.5:

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A ‘bit’ of history

Some of you might know me as a dedicated MS Exchange junkie. Ever since Microsoft launched version 5.0 of Exchange, I’ve been working with it and I must admit I never found a collaboration suite quite like it. I’ve had numerous discussions with Lotus Notes or Novell  Groupwise folks but they never conviced me (believe me, I tried all suites hands-on). And yes, I am aware of all the problems Exchange had in the past, including being a spamrelaying nuisance, a memory hog, a disk killer and so on (most errors were caused by faulty configurations, btw).

About 8 years ago some folks in, I think it was Germany, started a project with opensource software to create an Exchange equivalent with nothing but opensource software. Actually, it is pretty logical. If you strip down everything around Exchange, you are left with a (pretty ancient) database system (Jet), a webserver (IIS) and an SMTP engine. So, why can this not be done with MySQL, Apache and Sendmail or Postfix? It should be possible.

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While designing and writing administrator guides, I often use pictures instead of words. In my opinion: a picture says more then 1000 words. When VMware vSphere 4 went live I started collecting pictures from  Sphere and the Virtual Infrastructure client, I combined them in a Microsoft Visio 2007 shape so I could track off them and use them more often in pictures and designs accompanying virtual infrastructures.

Using them in memo style documents to tackle known issues or incorrect handling is quit effective. Also with the new menu driven style of the vSphere VI Client combined with VMware vCenter Server some administrators are looking for the right path to get to the correct content.

This Visio stencil is a combination of different icons, shape and such. You can design a Host and Clusters drill down with it or use components to use in manuals or troubleshooting documents.

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We talked about licensing Windows Server on a VMware environment but that’s only one part of the licensing nightmare. You will also need client access licenses also called CALs.

Client Access Licensing

In addition of the Windows Server 2008 License you also need a Windows Server 2008 Client Access License also called CAL. This is required for each user or device (or combination of both) that accesses or uses the Windows 2008 software.

Requirements

Every user or device accessing the Windows Server 2008 needs a CAL. You don’t need a CAL when:

• You access the instance of server software only through the internet without being authenticated or individually identified by the server software;
• You access Windows Web Server 2008;
• If external users are accessing the instances of server software and you have acquired a Windows Server 2008 External Connector License for each server being accessed;
• You only administer the server software with two devices or users;
• You use the Windows Server 2008 solely as a virtualization host.

The last point doesn’t impact us much because we use VMware ESXi solely as our virtualization platform.

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Hello folks,

Yesterday we noticed a huge increase in the amount of traffic. After some in-depth investigation, we discovered that some ‘friends’ in China found a loophole which quadrupled our traffic within a few hours.  Fortunately no real harm was done. Our systems were not compromised.

During this investigation, we also noticed several attempts that were made from within China to ‘probe’ our security. Although China is one of the biggest upcoming markets in the world (if not the biggest), this apparently comes at a price. So, we here at VMGuru.nl decided that we will be avoiding China for the moment. We therefore blocked all known IP ranges appointed to China from accessing our site.

We’re sorry for any genuine followers of VMGuru.nl in China, but the amount of attempts was too big to ignore.

Since Microsoft introduced Windows 2008 back in 2007, there is the opportunity to install a Core Server. It was the first time Microsoft introduced a lean-and-mean server, where a lot of the Linux and Unix admins always complained that the GUI on a server eats so many resources where nobody ever really uses it.

Core server installations have a big advantage above the full installation of windows: it uses up less resources on your (virtual) infrastructure. (more…)

A few weeks ago I got an assignment to review a colleague’s infrastructure design based on VMware.
The design was fine (because they used my design document as template ) but one thing triggered me.

There was a special port group on one of the virtual switches names ‘MSCLUSTER’. No problem so far but I heard the client recently migrated to iSCSI storage.

The combination Microsoft Clustering Services (MSCS) combined with iSCSI triggered  my alarm bells. As I recalled Microsoft Clustering on iSCSI is not a problem but Microsoft Clustering on VMware with iSCSI is not supported (by VMware).

So, I rejected the design based on this support issue.

This message was not well received, as it turned out they had just migrated their clustered Exchange servers and had been running this way for a while now. Proposing to the client to migrate again was no option. So they tried to  question my findings. They had been running this setup without any problems and Exchange CCR clustering wasn’t real Microsoft Clustering because no disks were clustered, only the Exchange services.

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Last year we published an Enterprise Hypervisor comparison and we got very positive comments and feedback on it.

During the last few weeks I received many update requests so I decided to update the old hypervisor comparison but this time I changed the setup a bit.

Changes:

• No beta or pre-release versions are used. In the last document we also compared Hyper-V R2 beta which wasn’t officially released.
  This time all software is available and no features are subject to change due to beta-test, etc.;
• The versions used are the platinum/ultimate/fully-featured versions of the hypervisors. Product features can be limited by lower license versions;
• No free versions have been used in this comparison.

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We’ ve been doing quite a few VMware View POC’s and the question that colleagues keep asking me is:
‘How do I optimize my Windows guest OS for use with VMware View?’.

First of all, I primarily use x86 versions of Windows XP and 7. The disk usage is much less, I seldom need more than 4 GB of RAM and application compatibility is still an issue on x64 systems.

After installation of the guest operating system in the template virtual machine I do the following to optimize the operating system for use with VMware View.

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At a client site we came upon a problem with Windows 2003 VM’s. They would get low network performance when we moved them to a newly formed ESX cluster consisting of HP 460c G6 blades. In some cases logging on to the server with a remote session took about 20 minutes.

As I mentioned this only occurred when we moved a VM to the new cluster, but also VM’s that where newly installed would get the same problem when running on the new cluster. As we are using Altiris to install and configure new VM’s a colleague decided to install a new VM by going through the steps manually which normally would be done by Altiris and found out that after the activation of a security template the performance dropped significantly.

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Hello Folks!

Today Erik celebrates his 36th birthday. We’re happy to have his party today and we all wish him many happy returns!

There was an issue discovered earlier today that prevents View Composer from working with vSphere 4.1.

VMware apologizes for any inconvenience this may have caused you. If you know how to spread the word to your friends and colleagues, please do so.

With yesterdays release of vSphere 4.1 comes the challenge to upgrade your existing installation to this new version. Because I have been testing the beta for a while now, I couldn´t wait to try it in our new testing environment.

However, there are a few caveats:

• VMware released a KB article with the supported upgrade methods for ESX(i) 3.0.x, 3.5 and 4 full, embedded or installable;
• Do NOT upgrade vCenter server to version 4.1 if you are using VMware View Composer 2.0.x. Check out this VMware KB article for more information.

Before you start the upgrade process, back-up the vCenter- and Update Manager databases.

After downloading the needed ISO´s, I started with the upgrade of the vCenter server.

But first of all, I had to uninstall all incompatible vCenter components, in this case Guided Consolidation 4.0.

When this is done, it´s time to update the vCenter server.

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