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

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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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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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.

Burton Group is in their last day of their annual Catalyst Conference in San Diego (July 27 – 31, 2009). Wednesday they had their announced VMware vs Citrix battle and I just watched their video feed.

It was a very interesting ‘battle’ between VMware’s Scott Drummonds and Citrix’s Simon Crosby but I must admit that I was a bit annoyed a times. I think the the photo on the left captures the atmosphere for the debate quite well.

Simon Crosby constantly attacking VMware on various issues, but mainly on VMware’s standpoint on performance testing, and Scott Drummonds staying very relaxed, not getting into a bitch fight, throwing mud and pulling hair.

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Do you want to monitor your VMware vSphere virtual infrastructure with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager or HP Operations manager? No Problem!

Veeam just released their new nWorks 5.0 which has native support for vSphere, vCenter 4.0 and ESX 4.0. It allows for preconfigured monitoring of new vSphere features like Distributed Power Management, Host Profiles, etc. According to Veeam the new product ’s Management Center offers improved scalability, high availability, simplified deployment and lower administrative overhead.

I know Anne Jan is a big fan of nWorks and will want to try out this new version when he’s back from holiday. If you want to know more or want to try out the new version you can find more information here:

• nWorks VMware Monitoring for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager
• nWorks VMware Monitoring for HP Operations Manager

The post frequency on VMGuru.nl has been a bit low because I have been on ‘holiday’ for the last three weeks. During these three weeks I’ve been very busy moving to my new house.
Now I’m back and the first thing to do is to plough through my Inbox and check all interesting RSS news to discover what has happened in the world of virtualization during my absence.

I decided to create a small and concise update in chronological order.

July 7th – VMware ESX Configuration Maximums Matrix:
In between packing, flooring and cabling I came across a great ‘VMware ESX Configuration Maximums Comparison Matrix‘ on Daily Hypervisor.com.  A great documents which sums up the maximums of ESX 3, ESX 3.5 and 3.5 U1, ESX 3.5 U2 and up and of course vSphere. Very handy when studying for your VCP exam or when designing a new virtual infrastructure.

July 10th – vCenter Server 2.5 Update 5 released:
As of July 10th vCenter Server 2.5 Update 5 (English and localized) is available for download. Virtual Center 2.5 Update 5 fixes some important known issues and includes significant performance and scalability improvements to VMware High Availability. Use or update to vCenter Server 2.5 Update 5 when you have more than 35 virtual machines per host in an HA cluster.

For more information read the release notes. For details regarding compatibility check this out. vCenter Server 2.5 Update 5 can be downloaded here.

July 13th – New VMware Partner Central ONLINE:
On July 13th the new VMware Partner Central came online. VMware Partner Central now has some new/improved features like customized content on your program, partner level, and role. Improved Partner Locator that allows customer and prospect searches on your locations, competencies, partner levels and partner types. Dedicated pages for products & solutions, promotions, sales & marketing tools to help you develop your virtualization practice.

So go to http://www.vmware.com/partnercentral and check out the new features. I think it is definitely worth it.

July 13th – VMware View 3.1.1 released:
On July 13th VMware also released an important update for VMware View 3 which update to version 3.1.1. This maintenance release addresses some customer issues and eliminates some known bugs. It also addresses the following: ‘View clients might unexpectedly disconnect from the desktop when tunneled‘ described in knowledge base article 1012388.

More information regarding this release can be found in the release notes. The new version (3.1.1) can be downloaded here.

July 14th – vSphere Sales reference sheet:
Today I received a very handy vSphere Sales reference sheet from our VMware Reseller Manager. The sheet shows the different version of vSphere and associated support options with the (European) prices. So if you want to compare vSphere version and pricing, check out this vSphere Sales reference sheet. Maurice thanks!

July 15th – New vCenter Management products:
VMware picked my birthday to release their new vCenter Management products, vCenter Lab Manager 4, vCenter AppSpeed and vCenter Chargeback.

VMware Lab Manager 4 .0 automates management of internal cloud resources for development and test environments, providing self-service access for end users while ensuring IT control.

vCenter AppSpeed enables virtual infrastructure administrators to ensure performance levels for virtualized-multi-tier applications.

vCenter Chargeback provides cost modeling, accounting and reporting/billing for virtual resources.

July 16th – vSphere upgrade exam material:
Today I received an e-mail from a colleague which some nice information to prepare for the vSphere 4 upgrade exam. The VSP 4 Upgrade guide and the VMware vSphere Software compatibility matrix combined with the VMware ESX Configuration Maximums Comparison Matrix is a good foundation for the upgrade exam. Edwin thanks!

So far the 7 most important VMware/virtualization facts from the last 3 weeks out of my Inbox.

Yesterday Tripwire Announced their new VI monitoring and automation tool, vWire, which gives you full control over virtual infrastructure. With vWire you monitor the health of your virtual infrastructure, correlate this information to provide context and insight into potential issues, and act to prevent and resolve problems which reduces downtime and operating costs while inspiring confidence in virtualization across your organization.

Tripwire is giving away fully functional evaluation copies of vWire at www.vwire.com You can download it, take it for a test drive and take the mystery and complexity from virtual environments while further automating your environment.

Browsing through Planet V12n I stumbled upon a great article by Steve Kaplan, which I didn’t want to keep from you.

As we all know we’re in the midst of a hypervisor battle. VMware vs (Microsoft / Citrix).

VMware focuses on their broad range of products for server-, desktop- and application virtualization including the necessary management and automation tools and disaster recovery solutions to enable the virtualization of a complete data center and desktops.

Microsoft focuses on the cost perspective and claims that their Hyper-V solution is cheaper then VMware’s vSphere.

No problems so far but if you want to compare cost, keep the fight clean and do an honest comparison. In his article Steve points out the areas were he thinks the comparison is not fair or not clear. I’ve read the comparison multiple times and I must agree this is one of those cases where Microsoft does not play fair as we encountered earlier with Citrix’s misleading comparison of HA, 2.

In my opinion a great job by Steve and a must read article.

A few weeks ago I attended the ‘What’s new in VMware vSphere 4‘ course given by Eric Sloof. Eric pointed us to a very nice and cheap shared storage solution from Iomega which he also uses in his home lab, the Iomega Storcenter ix-series.

I have been scouting the local hardware vendors for the Iomega ix2 but I could decide to go for the cheaper 1TB or the more expensive 2TB version. Today I was browsing through the VMware HCL when I remember the dilemma and was wondering if VMware even knew/supported the little Iomega storage box. And what do you know ………… the Iomega ix-series is on the VMware HCL!

The Iomega StorCenter ix2 and the ix4-100 are supported for all versions of VMware ESX 3.5 and the larger rack mountable ix4-200r is even supported on ESX 4.0 as NAS or iSCSI.

So I will be heading for the shops to get my own home shared storage solution.

The Iomega StorCenter ix is available in the following configurations:

April 25th we published our Enterprise Hypervisor comparison and we got very positive comments on it. A few people were kind enough to provide us feedback so we could improve the document, thanks for that.

I collected all comments and feedback and created version 1.3 of our Enterprise Hypervisor comparison which can be found here.

Again, feel free to contact us when you have feedback for us so we can improve the list.

(Gabrie, thanks for the detailed feedback. I hope  you will find that all points are taken care of.)

Update 4-6-09: Updated to version 1.3 after feedback from Jorge