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

When it comes to storage, the EqualLogic PS-series amazes me every time.

Last Tuesday I was at a client site investigating performance issues but when I opened SANHQ and the web interface on the PS 6000E one thing stood out. The performance issues were not caused by the storage device. The PS 6000E is hosting 12 virtualized Citrix XenApp servers en 8 supporting VMs and during heavy load the average latency is 1,2ms with a read/write ratio of 28%/72% and a max of 1100 IOPS.

But yesterday we had to swap SANs, a PS 5000XV for a PS 6000E and the ease with which this can be done amazes me every time. The hardest part was the process of endless firmware updates on the PS 5000XV to get it to a respectable level to get it to join the PS 6000 in the same storage group.

We had to upgrade from firmware version 3.3.0 to 4.3.4 but this is no simple task because you cannot directly apply 4.3.4. First we had to upgrade to 4.0.7, then to 4.1.7, to 4.3.4. Every time uploading the firmware using FTP, updating both controllers, restarting. This took us almost 2 hours to complete.

When this was done, all that was left was to join the PS 6000 in the existing storage group and evict the PS 5000 and this is the process that amazes me every time.

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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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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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hey folks!

First of all, a happy newyear to you all!

With 2009 behind us, we look forward to a new and intense 2010. Personally, I think 2010 will be a very interesting year. With the world economy leaving the ruins of the crisis and alot of new trends and technology introductions ahead, we are in for quite a treat. Also, we are eagerly looking forward to VMworld in Copenhagen, later this year. We hope to see a lot of you in Denmark!

However, a quick look back is in order too. (more…)

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.

Earlier this week the following message popped up in my twitter: ‘@Microsoft: Amazon says Windows 7 is the biggest pre-order product of all times, even over Harry Potter in the UK’.

Comparing Harry Potter to Microsoft? Hmm, this got us thinking, what if we compare Harry Potter to VMware, what if Harry Potter lived in the VMware era.

It’s 1995, Paul Maritz (Harry Potter) lives with Microsoft (his aunt and uncle) in a small village. Paul (Harry) spends most of his time locked up in a closet under the stairs. One day Paul (Harry) starts receiving daily messages from the APIs (owls) asking him to come to Palo Alto (Hogwarts) because Mendel Rosenblum (Dumbledore) and Diane Green (McGonagall) have left.

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Last Tuesday was a very good day for me. First of all because the VMware Partner Forum 2009 was very interesting and we got a lot of valuable information but most of all because I won an XBOX360 at the SBK08 competition at the stand of CDG.

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After taking the XBOX360  home and explaining that I won it and did NOT buy it I set it up and of course I had to prove that I was really that quick. After a few practice laps I succeeded and I even managed to improve my time I recorded Tuesday (1.49) by 2 seconds.

Thursday at a Citrix event CDG had the same competition and a colleague almost won the XBOX360 that day but unfortunately he became second.

I’m enjoying myself very much and I definitely know what I’m going to do this weekend.

The hosts were oa Andre Pieterse and Dinesh Raghoenath and not the famous Xzibit but nevertheless……..

THANKS CDG, FOR PIMPING MY LIFE!

So has anyone come up to you to wish you a Happy Sysadmin Day today? No? Why not? You deserve it! Even if you are a Virtual Sysadmin!

Like most Virtual Sysadmins, you spend your days (and sometimes your nights and weekends) installing hypervisors, creating virtual machines, having virtual (coffee) breaks, dealing with virtually angry employees and virtual managers when virtual equipment fails, troubleshooting difficult virtual problems under intense virtual pressure, and setting up the virtual systems that keep your virtual organization running.

Your organization lacks respect? Do you know the feeling? System Administrators get no respect 364 days a year.

Today is your day, congratulations everybody!! Today is the 10th Annual (Virtual) System Administrator Appreciation Day!

The VMGuru.nl-crew congratulates the VMGuru.nl founder and his family with their beautiful new home.

After receiving notice the founder of VMGuru.nl got the keys to his new home, we urged to apply a street name  change to the local government. Unfortunately the request to change the street name sign to reflect VMgurulane was declined.

So we had to think of a new plan to show the world a VMGuru.nl founder and vExpert had landed. So a new offical street sign was released today.

We wish Erik and his family a pleasant and healthy life in their new home and hope the soil is fertile in numerous ways but ofcourse one of them being a basis for some new great blog posts after he gets tired decorating and finishing the house.

The VMGuru.nl-crew

This morning I received a tweet from Duncan Epping, Duncan works at VMware Benelux and is the owner of Yellow-Bricks.com. In the community it was a public secret that Duncan was in the USA to defend his case to become one of the fist VCDX (VMware Certified Design Expert) certified professionals worldwide. And this morning he twittered that he had received his VCDX award at the VMware Award dinner last night.

So Duncan, from the crew of VMGuru.nl, congratulations!

Duncan is the 7th VCDX professional worldwide and what a cool number to have, VCDX007.
From now on you can pick up the phone saying, ‘this is Epping, Duncan Epping‘

Duncan, congrats and enjoy!

It is now April and in October 2008, 6 months ago, we started our own virtualization blog. I registered a funny domain name when applying for a private domain name and Anne Jan, Edwin, Alex and I started this website just for the fun of it.

In the beginning the blog was intended to share our knowledge and experiences with colleagues who work throughout the Netherlands but very soon we attracted the attention of VMware enthusiasts all over the world.

At the end of December the number of hits grew from 80.000 (October) to almost 200.000 hits per month and we started getting positive responses. We then decided to try to walk and talk with the big boys like Erik Sloof, Gabrie van Zanten, Mike Laverick, Scott Herold, Duncan Epping, Richard Garsthagen, etc. The plan is/was to post our real life experiences and bring you as much VMware related news as possible. A part of this was to do a live report from VMworld Europe in Cannes with photos and videos.

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As virtualization freaks on this planet we sell virtualiziation solutions to clients with the motivation that it will save on power, cooling, space, etc and therefore we reduce the CO2-emission (we should receive government funding ) If you support this motivation you will also like ‘Earth hour‘.

In short, on March 31, 2007 people in Sydney decided to take a stand against climate change and 2.2 million people turned off their lights for 1 hour.

This caught the attention of the world and went global. In 2008 the world united and in 400 cities in 35 countries around the world, 50 million people turned off their lights for 1 hour.

On March 28, 2009 Earth hour will return.

Last Saturday I read an article in a well known magazine in The Netherlands. The article talked about that people in the IT/ICT branche lack good communication skills. I often wonder when reading articles: Who’s the author? Is he or she biased in any way?

The same was true for this article. I quickly found out (the names of their businesses were in the article ) that the people interviewed worked for companies that gave “soft skill” courses. Don’t get me wrong. I totally agree that employees benefit from some form of interrelational training, especially when you work with people (don’t we all?).

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Most of the time when I’m frustrated it helps to play some squash, ride my bike or vent my frustration on this blog. As all walls in the area have been smashed to bits due to frustrations in the past and it is too cold to ride my bike, I will try the last one.

Yesterday I attended a seminar from work together with Edwin, Anne Jan and Alex. The subject was virtualization with Citrix and we were invited to keep a good balance between Citrix and VMware but we could not give a presentation due to time constraints. The people who organized this event know us pretty well and know (and share) our love for VMware so we were asked not to mess up the presentation and bash the Citrix guy. And so we did………

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Today I got some great news! Our employer, Centric, has been promoted to VMware VIP Premier Partner! This is great news as there are only 3 other Premier Partners in the Netherlands, SLTN, PQR and Imtech ICT Brocom. This is a great acknowledgment of our hard work so VMware and Maurice thanks for this ‘award’.

VMware Premier Partners have made a commitment to invest in the VMware partnership through dedicated technical, sales and support resources, and have demonstrated this consistently over time. VMware rewards Premier Partners with the highest level of enablement, support and rewards benefits.

Premier partners are authorized to sell the full VMware product line. Taking a solution-oriented approach,  Premier Partners engage in complex solution offerings and demonstrate high levels of skill in areas such as:

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Yesterday there was a session called VMware ‘unplugged’, here you could ask all kinds of questions to a panel of VMware CxOs. The panel constisted of Steve Herrod, Paul Maritz, Mauricio Carli and Tod Nielsen. Anne Jan posted an article on this yesterday and now we have a video with the highlights of this ‘unplugged’ session.

Still not tired I finally found the time to check out the Flickr version of Roy Tancks cloud widget. It shows photo’s from a Flickr RSS feed in the same way as it shows tags in a cloud.

Looks funny. Just hover over the photos and see them move in all directions.

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Veeam sure knows how to promote their backup product. They had a magician doing all kinds of tricks at their booth. Check out the video for a great performance from Robert Strong.

http://www.StrongEntertainment.com

info@StrongEntertainment.com

The process of blogging is through several means from making notes during the session the old fashioned way or by using new technology. (Got the laptop charging again). Also lots of photos or video are shot during the process and we will have to run through them all to filter out the high lights and the remarkable things we noticed. Also seeing my collegues hard @ work translating the handwriting to a nice blog post feels good. The first day is running into the late afternoon and after several sessions today we have picked up lots of new ideas and opportunities for 2009.  The head is spinning already but its worth it. SO stay tuned.

We just enjoyed the General Session for Partner day 2009 and the message is ‘the virtualization business is still growing’, ‘2009 is all about client virtualization’ and ‘get up, register opportunities, close deal, dig deap’.

The keynote was presented to us by Paul Maritz, CEO of VMware. He stated that we can achieve change by two means, evolution and revolution and that evolution is the best as it tends to stay longer. VMware is the platform to achieve this evolution. He revealed a few public secrets, VMware vSphere, vShield zones and VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat. VMware vSphere is the new name for ESX but we knew, and blogged on that, already. VMware vShield zones a security initiative based on VMware Safe.  VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat is VMware’s new feature to create a high available vCenter Server, mostly for implementations where vCenter is still on a physical server.

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Last year when I attended VMWorld Europe 2008 my wife was 9 months pregnant. As a souvenir I brought a little VMware teddy bear and a VMWorld bib with the text ‘Embracing your Virtual World – VMWORLD 2008‘. He is now 8 months old and this weekend I couldn’t resist to take his picture wearing the bib as proof that the love for VMware starts at a very young age. We can’t help it, it is congenital!

Strange thing is that these children still don’t know what a virtual machine is.

As you may have noticed, the VMGuru crew will attend VMWorld Europe 2009 in Cannes at the end of Februari and we recieved a special bloggers invitation. This invitation gives us access to special bloggers seat, the bloggers lounge and an video/interview room. Here we can interview VMware employees and staff.

So here’s our proposal: Do you have any (non technical) questions for VMware?  Do you want us to get answers directly from VMware? Send us you questions and preferably the person we should ask it and we will try to get your answers at VMworld Europe 2009.

Send your question, with a good description, to  meagain@vmguru.nl or tazz@vmguru.nl. The answers will be published on www.VMGuru.nl.

The VMGuru-crew wishes everybody a very happy and healthy new year!

The solution to that problem isn’t hard, just built virtualized workspaces. Last few weeks I have had several dreams how such a place could look like. Imagine a small 1 person office completely surrounded in glass with lots of plants in it like a green house. You would feel lonely in such a place ? Just project your team members in the glass surrounding you, so you can build your surrounding like you have arranged and rearranged your desk for the last couple of years. Just want video without audio no problem mute your colleagues when you have to make a phone call, so you don’t bother them and they don’t bother you at that moment.

This way you can work, with several colleagues, in mixed composition, in a small office, interacting with each other when needed. We don’t want our coffee to be virtual or do we? One machine that can give out any juice you need at that time? Sounds lovely to me.

Most of the techniques needed to build a virtual office is already at hand, so why don’t combine them?

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Three months ago we kicked off with our own virtualization blog, with the intention to share our tips, tricks, news and real life experiences. We hope you enjoyed our effort, the statistics say you do more and more. From the end of October until today, we saw 11.084 visits with 134.787 page views. Together with the RSS feeds, this adds up to 371.328 hits and 5,6 GB traffic. Needless to say we’re pretty proud of that.

In 2009 the four of us will start with our new jobs with Centric MIS headquarters. We hope to give you even more tips, tricks and real life experiences than we did last year. All the signs say it will be a very interesting year. Of course we hope to see even more visitors in the years to come, so spread the word

So from all of us here at VMGuru.nl, a merry christmas, a super (virtual) new year and we hope to see you all again in 2009!

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