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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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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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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If you haven’t upgraded to VMware vSphere 4 by now, you should consider it and rethink your strategy. VMware has removed all but the most recent versions of their Virtual Infrastructure product binaries from their download page on June 17th. As of May 2010, the following Virtual infrastructure products have all reached end of general support according to the published support policy:

• ESX 3.5 versions 3.5 GA, Update 1, Update 2, Update 3, Update 4
• ESX 3.0 versions 3.0 GA, 3.01, 3.02, 3.03
• ESX 2.x versions 2.5.0 GA, 2.5.1, 2.5.2, 2.1.3, 2.5.3, 2.1.2, 2.5.4
• Virtual Center 2.5 GA, Update 1, Update 2, Update 3, Update 4, Update 5
• Virtual Center 2.0

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When we are selling, designing and/or building a virtual infrastructure, we brag about consolidation ratios we can accomplish.

But what’s a consolidation ratio of 8 to 1 or 10 to 1? In this case a picture says more than a thousand words ……..

On the right a part of the servers we collected during a recent VMware implementation.

28 servers, 4 more are placed on the left (out of sight), 7 are stored on an alternate location and 7 will be decommissioned when the WAN issues are solved.

A grand total of 46 servers which do NOT need power, cooling, support contracts, space, etc.

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VMware has given out a VMware Alert for customers who are using VMware View in combination with PCoIP and ESX 4.0 to NOT update with ESX Update 2 yet.

After upgrading ESX 4.0 hosts with Update 2 VMware View clients are unable to connect to the virtual desktops. VMware is currently investigating a workaround for customers that have installed ESX 4.0 Update 2 and are affected see for more information and update the following KB Article: KB Link

This Knowledge Base article will be updated as new information becomes available. If you have been affected by this, please read the KB.

Symptoms are:

• Connections to virtual desktops using PCoIP fail
• You are no longer able to connect to virtual desktops using PCoIP
• You have recently updated VMware Tools

For example, you have installed ESX 4.0 Update 2, which updates VMware Tools, and you are no longer able to connect to virtual desktops using PCoIP.

During the last month I have been very busy building a new infrastructure at a client site. I’m responsible for the overall technical solution and the basis, a VMware vSphere infrastructure build on five Dell PowerEdge R805’s, Dell EqualLogic PS5000 and 6000 storage and Cisco switches for LAN, DMZ and IP storage networking.

Just before the customer initiated their functional test period we discovered that the overall Windows network  performance was slow. We did several test like copying an 8 GB file from local vmdk to local vmdk and VM to VM and found that the storage performance was no issue but the network performance was very slow.

In the last few years that I have been working with virtualization I have always been a fan of a static network configuration. Meaning, when I configure ESX networking I like my network interfaces and physical switch ports to be configured at 1000MB full duplex if the switch/network interface combination allows it. The idea is that if you purchase gigabit network interfaces and switches you know the maximum speeds. So you configure it to run at it’s maximum capacity, eliminating overhead and using as much bandwidth as possible purely for data transfer.

So when we experienced slow network performance I had a colleague check the Cisco LAN switches for errors, drops, packet loss or any other flaw which might indicate a speed or duplex mismatch. None were found so I assumed that the network configuration was not the issue. But as we know by now, ‘Assumption is the mother of all fuck-ups!‘.

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Up until a week ago, I hadn’t had the pleasure to work a lot with vSphere. Now with a test environment at the customer site I was able to freely play a bit with vSphere. One of the features I was curious on trying was Fault Tolerance (FT). I just created a random VM and enabled FT on it which all went fine.

After FT was enabled on the VM we wanted to see how we could upgrade the ESX hosts in that cluster as the documentation states that FT only works on hosts with the same build number.

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While I was updating the Determining VMware vCenter and ESX Build Numbers post I thought I would semi-automate the updating of the post with new build numbers for new releases, while working on it I started too fill an excel sheet and ended up with an excel sheet with the following products and build numbers for easy reference:

VMware vSphere 4 Suite (combines several products)
VMware Infrastructure 3 Suite (combines several products)
Cisco Nexus v1000 (1.0)
VMware ESXi (4.0, 3.5, 3.0)
VMware ESX  (4.0, 3.5, 3.0, 2.5, 2.0, 1.5, 1.0)
VMware Server (2.0, 1.0)
VMware vCenter Server (4.0, 2.5, 2.0)
VMware vCenter Converter Standalone (4.0, 3.0)
VMware vCenter Lab Manager (4.0, 3.0, 2.5, 2.4)
VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (4.0, 1.0)
VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat (5.5)
VMware vCenter Lifecycle Manager (1.0)
VMware vCenter CapacityIQ (1.0)
VMware vCenter AppSpeed (1.0)
VMware vCenter Chargeback (1.0)
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Last week I have been struggling with  the installation of a vSphere 4 infrastructure on Dell hardware at a Belgium client site.

I have done many many many VMware installations and encountered my fair share of issues but apart from the HP USB sticks the hardware never gave me this much trouble.

It all started with a very difficult BIOS/firmware upgrade which, after various downloads and trials, ended with an old-school DOS boot USB and a DOS based BIOS update. Real 1980’s stuff.

With this fixed I installed all ESX hosts and left for the hotel, ready to start the configuration the next day. However, when I started with the first ESX host and wanted to configure the network, I noticed that I only had eight NICs when I should have had twelve. We use Dell PowerEdge R805 servers with two Intel quad port 82576 Gigabit Ethernet Adapters, the first card was already in the server, the second card we added just before the installation.

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About two weeks ago I attended a session at the VMware User Group meeting here in the Netherlands about Project VRC.  After the presentation I asked myself: ‘What is the value of this project?‘.

For you who don’t know what Project VRC is:

“Project Virtual Reality Check (VRC) is a joint venture of Log•in Consultants and PQR, who have researched the optimal configuration for the different available hypervisors (hardware virtualization layers). The project arises from the growing demand for a founded advice on how to virtualise Terminal Server and Virtual Desktop (VDI) workloads. Through a number of researches, Log•in Consultants and PQR show you the scaling possibilities for Terminal Server environments as well as Virtual Desktops.” http://www.virtualrealitycheck.net/

Don’t get me wrong: What they did was a very good initiative, it showed the performance differences between different hypervisors. Although the results were not that surprising it was good to see the validation numbers of the things we already knew.

I also think that the guys who did the project where totally surprised by the attention vendors and customers gave to the project. It was an outstanding (marketing) tool to show the value of virtualization and especially XenApp on a hypervisor. Because of this attention the whole project got out of hand. Although this was not the goal of the project, vendors and customers used it as a reference guide for vitalizing XenApp. That’s the point where I started to wonder what the real value of the project VRC was.

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Based on the real life results when virtualizing XenApp I thought it was about time to summarize some of the best practices for virtualizing XenApp servers.

Why we DO want to virtualize XenApp?

1. For server consolidation:  vSphere enables scale up XenApp deployments;
2. For mixing server editions: 32-bit and 64-bit XenApp VMs can coexist;
3. For management: Better management through flexibility & isolation think about Change Management and VMware DRS;
4. For high availability and disaster recovery: VMware HA and vCenter Site Recovery Manager;
5. For less costs for server hardware, maintenance contracts, power, cooling, floor and rackspace.

Virtualizing XenApp servers is very complex. There are a lot more layers involved, like the type of hardware, the capabilities of the processor, the performance of the shared storage, the hypervisor used, the specific settings per hypervisor, operating system settings in a virtual environment, the XenApp settings in a virtual environment, the Workspace management settings in a virtual environment etc, etc.

In the following sections I tried to summarize some of the best practices we use in our projects:

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I have just updated the list after receiving word the new version is out and the build numbers are known for vSphere 4 and vCenter Server. So I compiled a list of build numbers and updates from the patch notes for VMware ESX and VMware vCenter Server.

vCenter Server 4.0 Update 1 | 19 Nov 2009 | Build 208156

vCenter Server 4.0 | 05 May 2009 | Build 162902

VirtualCenter 2.5 Server Update 5 | 10 Jul 2009 | Build 174791 (English version)

VirtualCenter 2.5 Server Update 4 | 23 Feb 2009 | Build 147633 (English version)

VirtualCenter 2.5 Server Update 3 | 03 Oct 2008 | Build 119598 (English version)

VirtualCenter 2.5 Server Update 2 | 25 July 2008 | Build 104217 (English version)

VirtualCenter 2.5 Server Update 1 | 10 Apr 2008 | Build 84767 (English version)

VirtualCenter 2.5 Server | 10 Dec 2007 | Build 64201

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At the end of May of this year we wrote a article concerning Hypervisor comparisons and we got a lot of positive feedback on it. The downside to that is that people want an update as soon as one of the companies launches a new version of its product, and who can blame them. However the issue is that this takes a lot of research and because of that, a lot of time. And because two of us are ill and in bed wearing a sombrero and the other two are extremely busy, we simply don’t have that time right now.

However, Scott Lowe has written an excellent article on the feature comparison between VMware vSphere 4 and Microsoft’s Hyper-V R2 which is a must read for everybody who’s advising customers on hypervisors.

It’s not as extensive as the Enterprise hypervisor comparison we did earlier but it gives you a good image how both products relate to each other. To extend the picture I added a list of supported operating systems.

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Last night VMware has released Update 1 for ESXi 4, ESX 4, and vCenter server 4.

According to the release notes Update 1 includes the following improvements:

• Support for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2;
• Support for View 4;
• Support for 160 VMs per host in a HA cluster with 8 hosts or less;
• Increased vCPUs per core limit from 20 to 25;
• Paravirtualized SCSI support has been extended to Windows 2003 and 2008 boot drives;
• vDS performance improvements;
• Support for DB2 database;
• Improved support for Microsoft Clustering.

Besides this vCenter server now includes a pre-upgrade checker tool which enables you to proactively check ESX hosts for any potential issues that you might encounter while upgrading vCenter agents on these hosts as part of the vCenter Server upgrade process. You can run this tool independently prior to upgrading an existing vCenter Server instance. The tool can help identify any configuration, networking, disk space or other ESX host-related issues that could prevent ESX hosts from being managed by vCenter Server after a successful vCenter Server upgrade.

The release note can be found here.

vSphere 4 Update 1 can be downloaded here.

Since last week I’ve got a new assignment which is a long way from home. Next to the downsides of traveling 5 hours a day and staying in hotels, it certainly has advantages.

During my 5 hour drive or when I’m staying in a hotel i have time to listen to the VMware Community Roundtable podcasts I put on my iPhone. For those of you who don’t know this. VMware Community Roundtable is a weekly conference call/chat for VMware enthusiasts. Every week there’s a different topic and this is your change to discuss these topics with the experts in the community. For those of you who don’t have time to attend, there’s the possibility to listen online or download the sessions as podcasts.

Last week I listened to a great topic which was called the ‘#66 – iSCSI Super Friends with EMC, NetApp, Dell, HP, VMware‘. This podcast was from September 30 so it was quite an old podcast but this was such a great session that I don’t want to keep it from you. This session discusses the multi vendor blog post by VMware (Andy Banta), EMC (Chad Sakac), NetApp (Vaughn Stewart), Dell/EqualLogic( Eric Schott), HP/Lefthand Networks (Adam Carter) on how to implement iSCSI with VMware VI3.5 and vSphere 4.

So for those of you who already heard it, sorry for the ‘old’ intel, for those of you who haven’t, this is a must read/hear.

The mult vendor blog post discusses can be found here:

• Using iSCSI with VMware VI 3.x
• Using iSCSI with VMware vSphere 4
  

I really liked the conclusion that you can build iSCSI storage solutions which are as fast as fiber storage solutions and that tier 1, tier 2 and tier 3 storage definitions should not be based on the technique used but on the service level agreement with your end user.

Personally I wonder what the future will bring. Will fiber channel disappear in favor of iSCSI? As discussed during this podcast, ethernet is ideal for storage connections, the questions is which protocol to use, NFS, iSCSI or FCoE. We will see ……

This week a colleague called me with a VMware ESX problem. He’s doing a Exchange 2007 implementation and he configured a virtual machine which should function as the Mailbox server. He was complaining that the virtual machine took 13 to 15 minutes just to boot and he suspected a storage issue as they had been struggling with the storage for a few days.

I asked him to check the virtual machine performance tab and asked him if he saw anything strange. Nothing! The server had plenty of memory left and was not using very much CPU.

When I asked him how many resources he assigned to the virtual machine his response alerted me. He configured the virtual machine with 16GB of memory and 4 vCPUs!

When I asked him why he gave the virtual machine so much resources his response indicated that he hadn’t read the Virtual Infrastructure best practices and applied the ‘MS, I might use those resources just once during my lifecycle‘ sizing. When we checked the%CPU ready performance statistics the values were astronomical.

So I explained the behavior of the CPU scheduler to him and asked him to reduce the number of vCPUs to 1 or 2 and try again. When I called him the next day he told me that the virtual machine now booted within a minute.

So bottom line: Give a virtual machine the resources it needs for normal every day operation and be very modest. Monitor the virtual machine and adjust the resource settings according to your findings. In this case, less definitely is more and it’s very easy, especially in vSphere 4, to (hot) add resources. And if you do need 4vCPUs, it can be more effective to deploy two 2vCPU virtual machines instead of one 4 vCPU virtual machine.

For everyone who is new to VMware Workstation 7 and as a refreshment course for all other VMware workstation users, VMware has released a Free online course you can follow.

I must say version 7 of VMware Workstation is a lot faster with starting up and booting virtual machines then version 6.5 was. One very nifty and cute thing I use is I can run ESX 4 in a virtual machine within workstation 7, makes it much easier to show it to customers and colleagues.

The Online Course will give an overview of VMware Workstation 7, helps you getting started and shows tips working with VMware 7. (Also useful for 6.5 users)

[Updated: 8-11-2009 10:00]

Lately I keep receiving questions from colleagues regarding virtual infrastructure design using VMware products. So I decided to sum up the best practices I use when designing a new virtual infrastructure. Some of the best practices are based on numbers and calculations but others are pretty obvious. Nevertheless you would be surprised how many environments I’ve encounter were the most basic best practices have NOT been met.

So hereby my list of best practices on:

• ESX(i);
• vCenter;
• Licensing;
• Storage;
• Networking;
• Virtual machines.

If you have additions or new insights please reply.

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Project Virtual Reality Check finally posted a new document about previous results and possible clock drift when using the “Login Virtual Session Indexer (VSI)”.  Previous test setups and results didn’t take into account how different hypervisors handle passing time.

In my opinion this is a serious setback to Project VRC which is considered an institute in the virtualization world. People will start questioning the results when no new tests will be performed.

Below is a description from the Project VRC website explaining the new whitepaper they published on September 14th 2009. This is a must read for people that already did some testing as well as new tests. In short: ‘Because of Windows clock behavior in virtual machines the results were affected and some hypervisors may come out better than they really are.

This whitepaper is a review and reflection on previous Project VRC publications, the benchmark: “Login Virtual Session Indexer (VSI)” and Windows clock behavior within virtual machines.  This discussion is fueled by the fact that results from the individual Project VRC whitepapers are set side-by-side to compare hypervisors. Project VRC has been in discussion with both vendors and community, and performed additional research in this context. Before Project VRC can publish new results, it is important to address any questions, review the impact of this discussion and improve VSI where possible.

You can download it at www.projectvrc.nl

The major conclusions in this Whitepaper are:

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I’m in IT for more then 12 years and during that period I learned, never to trust something another professional tells you. So as I am studying for my VCP410 exam, coming Friday, I came across the Virtual Machine configuration maximums. I saw the info at Simon Long’s blog, took his VCP vSphere 4 Practice Exam and also took notes.

When running through all configuration maximums I remembered the ‘never trust anyone‘ motto and as I’m in between project I thought it would be cool to check/confirm the presented maximums. Some seem so ridiculous that you can hardly believe them to be true.

After 10 minutes of editing the virtual machine configuration I got my ‘MAXVM‘ and I must say VMware delivers one awesome virtual machine. I can’t imagine anyone using a virtual machine which approaches these configuration maximums.

To sum it up:

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Filtering through my e-mail after a short, one week, holiday I ran into an e-mail from one of my colleagues pointing me to VMware KB Article 1013013. This KB article describes one of the first patches for vCenter Server 4.

The problem is that High Availability in a vSphere 4 virtual environment may not work when a host failure occurs and the node failure detection algorithm fails when using certain IP addresses. VMware found out that this is due to the fact that all of the Service Console Port(s) or Management Network IP address(s) on an ESX host fall within the following range:

3.x.x.x – 9.x.x.x
26.x.x.x – 99.x.x.x

Note: You are not affected if one of Service Console Port(s) or Management Network IP address(s) on your ESX host falls outside of this range.

The problem can obviously be solved by changing (one of the) Service Console Port(s) or Management Network IP address(s) or install vCenter Server 4.0 Patch 1.

More information can be found here.

Usually everybody is on holiday during this period and because of that we lack new projects and great news. ‘Komkommertijd‘, as we call it in the Netherlands. Fortunately (for us) Duncan Epping, known from Yellow-Bricks, isn’t  on holiday (yet) and he pointed me to some great new VMware whitepapers.

So,do you want to get educated on VMware now?

Then you should definitely visit Duncan’s blog or directly download and read the following whitepapers:

• VMware vSphere 4: The CPU scheduler in VMware ESX 4;
• Virtual Machine execution modes in VMware vSphere 4;
• VMware vSphere 4 Fault Tolerance: Architecture and Performance.

And to top it of, yesterday Duncan posted an addition to his ‘HA deepdive‘ discussing HA and slot sizes.

So that’s four documents which will help you through your day.

Across the room Anne Jan is working on an article discussing his first vCenter Chargeback implementation. So after you have read the four documents get back here as soon as possible.