Yesterday VMware announced that it will be supporting RAID 5 and 6 with their Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA).

With the release of vSphere 5, VMware also released their VSA, a shared storage solution for the SMB market. VMware VSA uses the local storage in each ESXi server, presents it to the VSA appliance which in turn serves it back to the ESXi servers as shared storage.  Each ESXi server needs to run a VSA appliance, and each will contain a replica of the other’s storage.

Until now the VMware VSA only supported RAID 10, which resulted in very low storage utilization. Running VMware VSA with mirroring between two ESXi server, meant that you could only use 25% of your actual storage capacity.

Now with the added support for RAID 5 and 6, VMware VSA offers a greater storage utilization rate.

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More and more applications are supported on the VMware Platform, with the release of VMware vSphere 5 the boundaries of virtual machines have been expanded even more. Often we get questions about which applications are supported on the VMware virtual platform. There is a website page where you can search for specific applications and if they are supported by the software publisher.

You can search for an application by entering its title or the name of the software publisher.  Search results will display all supported software as well as applications that have already been submitted by other users.  If the application is not currently supported, you may Register/Login to vote and help VMware get the application officially supported sooner by the software publisher.

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In my new job I meet many, many vendors and almost all of them have a partner program in which we can achieve bronze, silver, gold, enterprise, premier, business or any other partner status.

In reality the meaning of the term ‘Partner’ is interpreted in many different ways.

According to Wiki, a business partner is:

a term used to denote a commercial entity with which another commercial entity has some form of alliance. This relationship may be a highly contractual, exclusive bond in which both entities commit not to ally with third parties. Alternatively, it may be a very loose arrangement designed largely to impress customers and competitors with the size of the network the business partners belong to.

So, it’s an alliance between two business partners. I get that. An exclusive bond not to ally with other parties, hmm NO. In my line of business a partnership doesn’t imply that I can’t have an alliance with an other vendor. IT service providers collect large numbers of partnerships nowadays to impress others. This matches with the third line, it’s a loose arrangement to impress customers and competitors.

The problem I see with many vendors is the ‘loose‘ part.

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August 2010 I wrote an article on support for Exchange CCR clustering on VMware with iSCSI.

VMware’s response then was very simple and straight forward. Exchange CCR clustering on VMware is not supported on iSCSI!

When asked if VMware had plans to change this support issue in the future the response was promising.

“The Exchange team within VMware requested the vSphere product team to support iSCSI for CCR and DAG clusters. They also would like to remove the RDM requirement for CCR and DAG.
Response from the product team is that they are testing and will update the support stance in a future release.”

Well, the future is now. I stumbled upon a VMware KB article, released May 5, which provides clear guidelines on the vSphere support status when running various Microsoft clustering solutions on VMware vSphere 4.

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Last week I visited a new project at which the client wants to virtualize their desktops.

During the kickoff the client mentioned that they use a variety of applications, clients and operating systems and want to deliver all these desktop flavors to their users.

Nothing new so far.

But this variety of clients and operating systems also includes Apples, MacBook (Pro)’s, etc using Mac OS X. Running a View client on a Macbook Pro with Mac OS X is no problem but provisioning Mac OS X as a virtual desktop is a whole different story.

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A few minutes ago On November 12th VMware issued a Support Alert regarding an issue that affects users with IBM hardware, running ESX/ESXi 4.1.

The symptoms are mentioned below.

When using IBM x3650 M3 or BladeCenter HS22V servers, you may experience these symptoms:

• HBAs stop responding
• Other PCIs devices may also stop responding
• You see an an illegal vector shortly before an HBA stops responding to the driver. For example:
  vmkernel: 6:01:34:46.970 cpu0:4120)ALERT: APIC: 1823: APICID 0×00000000 – ESR = 0×40
• The HBA stops responding to commands. For example:
  vmkernel: 6:01:42:36.189 cpu15:4274)<6>qla2xxx 0000:1a:00.0: qla2x00_abort_isp: **** FAILED ****
  vmkernel: 6:01:47:36.383 cpu14:4274)<4>qla2xxx 0000:1a:00.0: Failed mailbox send register test
• The HBA card gets marked offline. For example:
  vmkernel: 6:01:47:36.383 cpu14:4274)<4>qla2xxx 0000:1a:00.0: ISP error recovery failed – board disabled

The issue is currently under investigation by VMware engineering. At this time, downgrading to ESX/ESXi 4.0 by performing a fresh install is the only resolution.

VMware has created a Knowledgebase article 1030265 – HBAs and other PCI devices may stop responding in ESX 4.1 when using IBM servers. This KB article may be updated with new information if it becomes available. Bookmark the KB, or subscribe to its rss feed here to receive updates.

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In order to reach everyone possible, VMware put out an alert via the VMware toolbar yesterday, repeating the message with regards to the issue users of VMware vCenter Server may experience with performance charts after the time change over the past weekend.

So, again:

Users of VMware vCenter Server may notice the following since the time change:

• Performance charts do not display data
• Past week, month, and year performance overview charts are not displayed
• Datastore performance/space data charts are not displayed
• You receive the error: The chart could not be loaded

Last Thursday we attended the VMware vSphere 4.1, vCenter 4.1 and View 4.5 launch event at Amerongen (NL).

We already brought you all news regarding vSphere and vCenter 4.1 and View 4.5 but we heard some interesting thing we would like to share with you.

VMware View 4.5

With VMware View 4.5 VMware has changed the names for some product related features. Let us welcome Local mode, persistent disk, dedicated and floating pools.

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Some weeks ago I posted an article about some bad network performance when moving VMs to a new ESX host.

Last week I got an e-mail which announced some updates and among it was the one promised to us by the engineer that helped us with our problem.

Description of the patch is exactly what we where experiencing with our VMs:

“When you access remotely using Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) from a client machine to a Microsoft Windows virtual machine with TCP segmentation offload (TSO) enabled and EnablePMTUDiscovery parameter set to 0, the network connection is slow and sometimes, the connection might not work. This issue is reported on Broadcom bnx2x NICs, such as BCM57710, BCM57711, BCM57711E, etc.” http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1026129

After installing the patch on one of the ESX hosts we tested with a test VM on a patched and an unpatched ESX host and there was a clear difference in performance. The logon on the VM was much faster on the ESX host with the patch.

For us the patch fixed the problem and we are now deploying it on all the ESX hosts.

We got a happy customer again.

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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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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The last few months we where asked several times to reset a password set on the main account for Dell EqualLogic storage, also known as the grpadmin account.

If you really don’t know the password set on the grpadmin but still have physical access to it you can start a recovery procedure to reset the grpadmin account back to the default password: grpadmin.

Important: Because you must power-cycle one group member as part of the password reset procedure, volumes with data stored on that member will be unavailable and active iSCSI connections to those volumes will be lost until the member is restarted. You may want to warn users of any impending offline volumes and iSCSI disconnections before resetting the password.

To temporarily reset the grpadmin account password to the default factory-set password, follow these steps:

1.) On one group member, connect the appropriate serial cable to serial port 0 (the correct cable will be different on different models of the PS Array) on the active control module. The active control module is indicated by the green control module status LED labeled ACT. The status LEDs are located on the controllers sometimes on the left side or next to the serial port on other controllers.

2.) Turn off power to the member (if you have dual power supplies, turn off both power supplies). Volumes with data located on the member will be offline and iSCSI connections to those volumes will be lost until the member is restarted.

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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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According to buzz in the blogosphere, last July VMware COO Tod Nielsen met with Charles Phillips President of Oracle with regards to the ongoing support issues/questions customers experience when using VMware virtualization technology.

Tod Nielsen providing Oracle with a list of over 500 VMware customers asking for Oracle to support their apps running on VMware. Charles appreciated this but stated that this is a challenges for him as he has not personally received this request from customers, and until he does, cannot see making this a priority for his team. So the bottom line is that Oracle doesn’t feel that many people run critical apps on Oracle in a Virtual environment.

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A few days ago Edwin and me had some employees from RES software visiting us, giving us a demo of the RES Powerfuse and RES Wisdom products. While both these products introduce interresting features, RES Powerfuse is the one I would like to eleberate on since this product has potential within the virtualisation world.

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Update April 22th 2009: Today the rumor mentioned below was confirmed during the vSphere 4 launch.

Rumor in the VMware community has it that the next version of VMware ESX, vSphere, has very limited support for the VMware management and automation suite. vSphere will of course be available with vCenter for basic management and automation tasks but the rest of VMware’s great product suite is not supported in the initial release of vSphere.

So there won’t be support for:

• VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager
• VMware vCenter Lab Manager
• VMware vCenter Lifecycle Manager
• VMware vCenter Stage Manager
• VMware View

In my opinion this is a mistake. I understand the pressure is on and VMware should  release a new version fast to challenge the competition. But releasing a product which does not support the majority of your former product suite is not a clever move.

From what I understand this is also a discussion within VMware so let’s hope VMware gets wiser and postpones the release or add support for the VMware Management & Automation suite soon.

I get more and more the question does vendor x with application y support their software running in a VMware environment.

There are several questions to ask:

1. Can the application be virtualized? or in other words does the application run without problems in a VMware environment?
2. Does the vendor support running in a VMware environment?
3. Does the vendor give full and/or unconditional  support when running the application virtual?

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