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

This month Dell released their  firmware for EqualLogic iSCSI SANs.

A couple of things that caught my attention:

• vStorage API support. Things like snapshot, storage vmotion etc are now handled by the array, instead of the ESX host
• you can create seperate volume administrators. No more need to create group admins if you only need to create volumes
• 2TB disk support for the 4000 en 6000 series. The 6500 series already had support for 2TB disks
• You can mix 5500/6500 in a pool. This is still not recommended

Features like this makes it even a better storage system than it already was in my opinion.

[Updated 12-06-2010]

Not all VMware products return their version number nicely. They often come in a long build number. Edwin has done a nice job collecting various build numbers of the VMware products. Now it is possible to view these build numbers online.

Check out the Build numbers page.

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Today, Gartner published the first-ever Magic Quadrant for the x86 Server Virtualization market, naming VMware as the only vendor in the leadership quadrant, with a sizeable advantage over all competitors. Simply put, from the most trusted voice in the IT market, VMware is the only market leader.

According to this VMware is “clearly ahead in”:

• understanding the market
• product strategy
• business model
• technology innovation, product capabilities
• sales execution (more…)

A couple of weeks ago I had a problem where the connection between a snapshot and its parent disk was gone. The parent was a raw device mapping pointing to a LUN on a SAN. This all happened during a migration from one type of SAN to another. For the migration we had to remove the Raw Device Mappings from a virtual machine in order to move it with Storage VMotion. After the move the original RDM had to be re-added to the virtual machine. The final step was to copy the original data from the RDM to a new disk.

One of the steps in our migration plan was to make sure that there weren’t any snapshots on the virtual machine. This procedure was used during the whole migration. One of my colleagues and I were planned for the last batch of servers.

Everything went OK during the migration of this server. All steps were executed without errors. The server started like it always starts. Even the first check by the administrators looked good.

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Last week Erik encountered a small issue which required him to change the access to almost all volumes on an  EqualLogic storage infrastructure.

Although EqualLogic has a great interface compared to others, it doesn’t allow changing volume access for multiple volumes at the same time. If you have have to change a lot of volumes you have a couple of options: by hand in the GUI, scripting or command line. (I hope this stays that way to be honest)

Changing volume after volume in the GUI is painstaking and prone to errors. So in my opinion is scripting or command line the way to go. Since I needed him for a review for a document I quickly typed some commands for him. After connecting with SSH to the storage group this is all what you need to change a lot of volumes with some easy commands. (more…)

Dell EqualLogic has a integration kit for integrating their storage solution with VMware and various Mirosoft products. In this Host Integration Kit you find AutoSnapshotManager/VMware Edition and the AutoSnapshotManager/Microsoft Edition.

While I was searching for information about when to use which edition of AutoSnapshotManager for EqualLogic I came across the website of Marc Malotke which I think is worth sharing.  If I did my googling right Marc Malotke works for Dell as a Enterprise Solution Specialist.

He had some very interesting posts and news items at his blog:

• EqualLogic: SCOM Management Pack Release
• Equallogic:  ASM editions
• Equallogic: Planning your IP addresses

Blog: http://www.marcmalotke.net

twitter: @MarcDELL

Every year VMware is organizing VMworld. It offers attendees informative sessions and hands-on labs, plus access to a wealth of technology partners. The U.S. edition of VMworld takes place in the Moscone Center, San Fransisco from August 30 till September 2nd. The European edition will take place a little over month later from October 12 till October 14 at the Bella Center in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Register now for VMworld 2010 at http://www.vmworld.com/ and save $250 if you register before June 25th for the U.S. edition or before July 23rd for the European edition.

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VMware really wants to get a piece of the desktop market. After acquiring and/or releasing products for desktop management (VMware View and ThinApp)

VMware announced at VMworld ‘09 that they had an OEM agreement with RTO for Virtual Profiles. VMware wanted to integrate the product into VMware View, it’s Virtual Desktop Infrastructure product. Now, almost a year later, VMware announced the acquisition of RTO Software.

Here’s a quote from the VMware View-Point blog:

We’ve been talking about provisioning users, not devices, and the importance of composition or layering in a desktop virtual machine – that a desktop VM is comprised of independent virtualized component parts that are dynamically brought together on demand into an encapsulated VM. One of those critical parts is the user persona, a user’s profile, data files and settings. Clean, efficient user persona virtualization is vital to our vision and that is precisely what RTO’s industry-leading Virtual Profiles will deliver for VMware View. With persona management, end-user specific information such as user data files, settings and application access is separated from the desktop image and centrally stored, enabling increased flexible access, greater portability and seamless file management and backup.

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It was Valentine’s Day, February 14th, the day the boys and girls at Partner Exchange exchange business cards with their business partners.  They draw hearts and flowers and write funny poems.  VMware awoke early and looked over at the stack of cards ready and waiting to be given to friends, including one very special card for Cisco and NetApp, VMware’s best friends.

At the Partner Exchange, VMware was surprised to see that lots of other partners were already there and every desk was piled high with Valentines.  VMware went to work right away, hurrying to leave a Valentine at each desk before the bell rang for the keynote.

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The Cisco Nexus 1000V is the first switch that can be placed in your vSphere virtual infrastructure, giving back network control back to the people that know the most about networking: The network admins. The Nexus 1000V is built on the distributed vSwitch technology in vSphere and can be managed by the same tools that network admins already use for manging their physical switches.

Cisco is organizing a series of free seminars aimed at sales professionals as well as admins.

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Have you ever wondered what the world of work would look like in 2020? I have. With the huge technological progress, it’s hard to imagine what we will be doing and how the world around will look.

If you look at the way we do our jobs today, it seems to be a lot like factory, blue collar labour. It is somewhat cleaner, but the way we do our work today is just like in the early 1900’s in the Ford factory at the treadmill. The industrial revolution made it possible to automate almost everything with machines. Only the parts that could not be automated, were filled by people. Still we treat them as if they are just a mechanical part of a larger machine.

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Apple finally annoumced their tablet officially,dubbed the  iPad. The last months more and more rumors appeared on the internet. You probably wonder why this is interesting for the virtualization community.

Although a lot of people over at Gizmodo complain that it’s just an iPhone on steroids. I can see some real world applications for it.

Since I’m a real gadgetfreak, together with a lot of you I guess, I wonder how I could use the iPad in the daily operation. I see visions how the daily operation would look like.

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This week I got the question if I could draw up a short lists of pro’s and cons for MED-V. Since I’m doing virtualization in the widest possible way, this fits well in my job description.

But heck, what a question! Before I could even try to  answer the question I really had to dive into the Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization solution (hence MED-V) which is part of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP). Sure, I already seen some comments on the internet about MED-V and I already was somewhat biased. Still I tried to make it an objective report.

Let’s start with what it is not in my opinion. Although it enables management of virtualized desktops it is not a full blown desktop virtualization solution like XenDesktop and VMware View.

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Almost every week I listen to the podcast from the Communities Round-table, just to make sure that I didn’t miss anything important.

What is this Communities Round-table? Well, who better than John Troyer, Sr Mgr VMware Communities, can explain what it is.

Each week, we’ll bring together experts and leaders from the VMware Communities and virtualization blogs to discuss the interesting topics in virtualization. Think of this as if it were a group meeting up at VMworld over a pint to chat about the latest news. We record the call and make it available for your pod cast listening pleasure. Listen with the player over on the right, download directly, or use the pod cast feed from TalkShoe.

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The VMGuru.nl crew wishes you a merry Christmas.

A couple of weeks ago I talked to a co-worker who is responsible for selling VMware licenses and other VMware related stuff. As a VMware partner it isn’t always easy to manage the licenses for customers nor selling or upgrading their licenses if they bought them from another partner in the past.

A lot of the times multiple people register VMware licenses. For example, if I am the person that has to request or register licenses I probably will do it with my own VMware account. If I leave the company the licenses still are connected to me as a person. I know you can use a general account and register your licenses with that, but that goes against anything I ever learnt about security and identity management.

If you already have licenses there is also no easy way to ‘push’ them to another account, for example a general account. You can do this through the support desk, but takes all kinds of effort.

From a viewpoint of the license admininstrator it’s hard to keep track of all licenses that a company has for VMware products.

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In the last week these items are added or edited in VMware’s Knowledgebase at http://kb.vmware.com

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In the last week these items are added or edited in VMware’s Knowledgebase at http://kb.vmware.com

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Gerben Kloosterman put up a video of Eric Sloof while demoing Virtualization EcoShell at http://blog.virtualarchitect.nl

For all the folks that didn’t hear about the EcoShell yet: The Virtualization EcoShell makes it possible to create scripts to automate management tasks for your virtual infrastructure, all from a user friendly user interface.

These scripts can be saved for later use.

This is not only good news for the lazy or time driven admin, but also from the point of making less mistakes. Actions can be run time after time at the same way.

The Virtualization EcoShell divides everything into the following actions:

• gather
• filter
• remediate
• report
• integrate

One of the items that is very interesting is vDiagram. vDiagram automagically creates a diagram of the items you want to report, for example which virtual machines are connected to what vSwitch.

Best Practice Filters are a great addition to the Virtualization EcoShell. For example: Give me all virtual machines with a connected CD-ROM drive that prevent VMotions. ESX hosts with NICs slower than 1GBit/s or VM’s with snapshots older than 7 days are part of the best practice filters.

Alan Renouf has put a lot of his PowerShell scripts he posted earlier on virtu-al.net in a PowerPack for the Virtualization EcoShell. vCheck is one of those things.

Eric has given a demo on his laptop. ESXi in a VMware Workstation 7 installation with a couple of virtual machines in it.

Without a line of programming or scripting he connects to the ESX host. Just by clicking he changes the connection of a couple of VMs to a different vSwitch.

If you want to change the code behind actions, no worry. Since everything is based on PowerShell commandlets you can change the code yourself.

Even creating your own PowerPack is very easy. As a demo Eric created a vmug PowerPack with a script he copied from the site from Alan. Sounds good, a vmug PowerPack.

Checkout  http://www.thevesi.org and ofcourse the site of Eric Sloof, ntpro.nl

Books that Eric mentioned in his presentation:

• vSphere Quick Start Guide
• Managing VMware Infrastructure with Windows PowerShell
• VMware VI and vSphere SDK

Twitter aliases to follow:

• carter shanklin @cshanklin
• alan renouf @alanrenouf
• hal rottenberg @halr9000
• luc dekens @LucD22
• Dmitry Sotnikov @DSotnikov
• hugo peeters @hugopeeters
• Arne Fokkema @afokkema
• Eric Sloof @esloof
• Scott Herold @vmguru

Scott Herold took the stage after Eric. He showed vRangerPro and the integration with the Virtualization EcoShell. From within the Virtualization EcoShell you are able to make charts from your backup times for example and use this in a monthly report.Even integration with vControl, a workflow application, is very easy from within the Virtualization EcoShell.

Scott is out in the exhibition hall to give more info and demo of the Virtualization EcoShell.

In the last week these items are added or edited in VMware’s Knowledgebase at http://kb.vmware.com

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In the last week these items are added or edited in VMware’s Knowledgebase at http://kb.vmware.com

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In the last week these items are added or edited in VMware’s Knowledgebase at http://kb.vmware.com

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I do like advertising from time to time. I think advertising gives away a lot about how companies operate and what their internal values are. You also find out if the company understands their market and their potential users.

When looking for VMware View articles with Google I came across an ad for Citrix, look at the picture to the right. The ad is somewhat funny actually. Citrix says that their solution with HDX is faster than VMware View. Perhaps it is, perhaps it isn’t, I don’t know. It all depends on workloads, hypervisor, storage and so on.

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