Every time a vendor releases a new hypervisor, it’s always more reliable and stable than all the previous versions and certainly better than the competition. But was the previous version all that bad?

Of course with the addition of more and more advanced features it becomes more and more difficult to create a reliable and stable product simply because of the immense amount of code and the interdependency between all the different components. VMware has always had a dedicated hypervisor and with the release of ESXi they further reduced the code base of vSphere ESXi to minimize the attack surface. This also reduces the amount of code to patch which further improves reliability, stability and security.

Last week I visited a customer who, much to my surprise, still ran some VMware ESX 2.5 servers. According to the customer the servers ran fine and they had never had any problems.

When we opened the console, we found out that these ancient ESX 2.5 servers have had an amazing availability during the last 4 years.

Check this out!

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As I said earlier this week, VMware memory management is still a topic which a lot of VMware administrators don’t understand.

Tuesday I discussed the virtual machine memory allocation graphs. Today we will deal with  VMware vSphere uses transparent page sharing (TPS), memory compression, host swapping and ballooning.

VMware ESXi, a crucial component of VMware vSphere 5.0, is a hypervisor designed to efficiently manage hardware resources including CPU, memory, storage, and network among multiple, concurrent virtual machines. In this article I will  describes the basic memory management concepts in VMware ESXi and describe the performance impact of these options.

ESXi uses several innovative techniques to reclaim virtual machine memory, which are:

• Transparent page sharing (TPS)—reclaims memory by removing redundant pages with identical content;
• Ballooning—reclaims memory by artificially increasing the memory pressure inside the guest;
• Hypervisor swapping—reclaims memory by having ESXi directly swap out the virtual machine’s memory;
• Memory compression—reclaims memory by compressing the pages that need to be swapped out.

So how does it work.

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VMware memory management is still a topic which a lot of VMware administrators don’t understand. I often come across people who have no idea when VMware vSphere uses transparent page sharing (TPS), memory compression, host swapping or ballooning. They even mention disabling or removing the ballooning driver without knowing why.  I also meet a lot of VMware administrators having trouble explaining the virtual machine memory allocation graphs.

Let’s start with the last one.

We all know the nice graphs with all different colors, 9 different memory classifications and reservations and limits.

This screen shows the following values:

Host memory

• Consumed memory;
• Overhead consumption;

Guest memory

• Private memory;
• Shared memory;
• Swapped memory;
• Compressed memory;
• Ballooned memory;
• Unaccessed memory;
• Active memory.

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At VMworld 2012 VMware announced the newest version of vSphere, version 5.1.
Today this new version is finally available! So, in DOLBY DIGITAL available NOW

You can download VMware vSphere 5.1 from the VMware download site.

If you’re wondering what’s new in vSphere 5.1, check out Alex’s article from August 27th.

One of the major changes is the disappearance of the vRAM limit for VMware vSphere 5.x.

As a vExpert, we have a special place with VMware. Not just socially, but really, in the community pages. Usually this place is filled with news about new stuff coming out, reviews about software, technical questions, opinions and so on. A few months ago Mike Laverick, one of the valued members and a vExpert, posted a request to help him with the review of a book he and Barry Coombs were writing. There were no financial benefits, just a helping hand for charity.

So, I jumped on the bandwagon and a few weeks later I received my chapter to review in the mail. It was a very fine piece of work. And now the good news is, you can read it too! Not just one chapter, mind you. The whole book is finished and ready to download!

It’s all about building a desktop on VDI with VMware View. It’s all new and up to date and gets you up and running quickly as it is written by people who do this for a living all day, not just another theoretical dude. It’s a must-read if you plan to go the VDI way.

Now, why is this different, you say? Well, the digital version of the book is for sale for only 12,72 Euros at LuLu but that isn’t the best part. The best part is, you’ll be supporting Unicef when you buy it! The printed version will follow soon after, but as this is hot from the (virtual) press today, we didn’t want you to miss out on this brand new book.

Finally there’s a second VMware partner who decided to create a third part distributed virtual switch for VMware vSphere. On February 14th IBM announced their IBM 5000V Distributed Virtual Switch. The planned availability date for this product is February 23, 2012.

The IBM System Networking Distributed Virtual Switch 5000V, which  requires a VMware vSphere 5.0 Enterprise Plus license, replaces the native distributed virtual switch in a VMware vSphere 5.0 environment and provides managed, advanced networking functionality for virtual machines.

IBM System Networking Distributed Virtual Switch 5000V is a manageable, distributed virtual switch for VMware vSphere 5.0 Enterprise Plus environment. IBM DVS 5000V provides advanced networking features and troubleshooting features, which make it ideal for deployments in large-scale Server Virtualization and Cloud environments.

The IBM DVS 5000V appears as a standard network switch, which enables network administrators to configure and manage the distributed virtual switch as a regular physical switch using familiar IBM switch user interfaces.

Today I attended session VSP1682 ‘VMware vSphere clustering Q&A‘ hosted by Frank Denneman, Duncan Epping and Chris Colotti.

After a short introduction the Q&A started and below you will find my top 10 questions.

Q1. Are the old, vSphere 4, constraints in vSphere 5 still current?

Until vSphere 5 the best practice is a maximum of 8 hosts in a cluster, because of linked clones in VMware View and the primary/secondary ESX(i) hosts setup in an HA cluster. In vSphere 5, VMware changed this to a master/slave setup. When the master ESXi host goes offline a new master is elected within 15 sec. So, the cluster boundary limits VMware vSphere had in the past are gone. This is a huge advantage of vSphere 5.0.

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After the release on July 12th, you can now download VMware vSphere 5 and enjoy the 150 new features.

You can find the downloads here.

For more information visit:

• VMware ESXi and VMware ESX Info Center
• VMware vSphere 5 release notes.

If you want to upgrade your existing VMware vSphere installation, check out my previous article on how to upgrade to vSphere 5.

Want to know more regarding VMware’s new licensing model? Check out the latest changes here.
Hint: Read carefully and calculate the impact on your environment before forming your opinion!

Now, don’t let me keep you, GO and try out vSphere 5!

On July 12th, VMware announced the release of vSphere 5.

With the release comes the challenge to upgrade your existing installation.

However, there are a few caveats:

• vSphere 5 is the first version which comes in a ESXi version ONLY! ESXi 5 is available in an embedded or installable version. If you’re running ESX 3.x or 4.x you should do a clean installation. You can find more information here.;
• VMware changed their licensing method. Familiarize yourself with this and check if you need to upgrade/extend your licenses. You can find more information here.

Because I run a VMware vSphere 4.1 environment, this is a upgrade from vSphere 4.1 to 5.

The upgrade is a straight forward five step process.

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For putting together a business case costs and revenues are an important part of it. If you want to calculate the direct resource costs associate with hosting a server in  your data center, you want to know the direct power consumption by the server in electrical costs and the costs associated with cooling the environment where the server is situated. To do so you will need a few parameters from the device(s) used. You will need the Watts, BTU/h and the electricity costs per kWh.

Where British thermal unit (BTU)  is used as a unit for air-cooling power of an air conditioning system and refers to the amount of thermal energy removed from an area. A BTU is approximately a third of a watt-hour. 1000 BTU/h is approximately 293W.  Kilowatt hour (kWh) is most commonly known as a billing unit for energy delivered to consumers by electric utilities.

Let’s take for example a HP DL-380 Generation 6 with two Quad core CPUs, 24 GB memory, eight  network ports, two  72GB 15K SAS hard disks with two 460 Watt power supplies. This server uses about 307 Watt and generates 1047 BTU.

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Earlier this week I already told you that I’ve build a new ESXi whitebox but I had some problems installing it.

OK, first of all, what was the situation? I wanted to install VMware ESXi 4.1 Update 1 to a USB stick which is VMware certified.I plugged the USB stick into one of the USB ports on the back of my whitebox server and downloaded the ISO-image form the VMware website.

A quick installation and I’m ready to build my new lab environment. WRONG!

The installation fails with the following error:
‘Cannot install VMware ESXi 4.1 “Unable to find the system image to install’

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Last week I decided to buy a new lab server and I doubted between a HP or Dell mini server or an ESXi whitebox. Because most mini servers only have 8GB memory, I decided to collect specific parts to build my own VMware ESXi whitebox.

To find parts which are compatible with VMware ESXi 4.1, I used the following resources:

• Ultimate VMware ESX Whitebox;
• VM-help.com.

I chose a AMD Phenom II X6 processor, socket AM3 six core processor because it’s a lot cheaper than the Intel Core i-processors. As the basis I needed a AM3 socket motherboard and my selection criteria where simple, 16GB memory and onboard video.

As an ASUS fan I had to choose between the ASUS M4A88T and M4A88TD. Both can house 16GB of memory and have onboard video but the TD version has SATA 6Gbps. Because storage will most likely be the bottleneck, I decided to go for the M4A88TD-M but on the above sites there was no entry for this motherboard.

But Google is my friend so I searched for ‘M4A88TD’ in combination with ‘ESXi’. I found a few sites which mention an almost identical combination of motherboard, processor and ESXi 4.1. Eventually I took a gamble and ordered the ASUS M4A88TD-M/USB3.

The last two items where the simple ones, two sets of 8GB dual channel memory and a 6Gbps SATA disk.

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14 years ago, on May 11, 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue II chess-computer won a six-game match by two wins to one with three draws against world champion Garry Kasparov.

In June 1997, Deep Blue was the 259th most powerful supercomputer achieving 11.38 GFLOPS running 30 parallel RS/6000 SP Thin P2SC-based system nodes, with each node containing a 120 MHz P2SC microprocessor enhanced with 480 special purpose VLSI chess chips.

But how does that relate to computing power in 2011 and especially to virtual computing power running VMware vSphere 4.1?

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Yesterday Anne Jan linked me to an article on the VMware website which contained information on a free online training course. The title is Transition to ESXi Essentials. The course is dedicated to ESXi and depending on your learning style it takes about 3 hours to complete. It’s broken up in several chapters so you don’t have to do all at once.

Since VMware is moving towards ESXi, abandoning ESX with its Service Console, it’s a great time to release a course all about ESXi and how to manage it.

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I just fiddled somewhat with the ‘fling’ from the VMware site: PXE Manager. Well, if you ask me, it’s not just a ‘fling’, but it is really, really useful. It’s easy to install and easy to use.

Here’s the summary from the ‘fling’:

PXE Manager for vCenter enables ESXi host state (firmware) management and provisioning. Specifically, it allows:

• Automated provisioning of new ESXi hosts stateless and statefull (no ESX)
• ESXi host state (firmware) backup, restore, and archiving with retention
• ESXi builds repository management (stateless and statefull)

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Tonight VMware released Update 1 for vSphere 4.1 and vCenter server 4.1.

Update 1 for ESX/ESXi contains a few new/improved features:

• Enablement of Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) — ESXi 4.1 Update 1 can be configured to boot with Intel Trusted Execution Technology (TXT). This boot option can protect ESXi in some cases where system binaries are corrupted or have been tampered with. TXT is currently available on Intel Xeon processor 5600 series servers.
• Improvement in scalability — ESX 4.1 Update 1 supports up to 160 logical processors.
• Support for additional guest operating systems — Added support for RHEL 6, RHEL 5.6, SLES 11 SP1 for VMware, Ubuntu 10.10, and Solaris 10 Update 9 guest operating systems.
• Inclusion of additional drivers — ESX 4.1 Update 1 includes the 3ware SCSI 2.26.08.036vm40 and Neterion vxge 2.0.28.21239-p3.0.1.2 drivers.

Furthermore ESX/ESXi 4.1 Update 1 contains a lot of patches and fixes a list of issues.

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In May 2010 HP introduced the new HP Storageworks IO Accelerator modules for HP Blade and ProLiant servers.

So what is this IO module. It is a mezzanine card that is available for HP C-class Blades or a PCI-e I/O card for HP ProLiant servers.

It is available in three different capacities: 80GB, 160GB and 320GB. But the MOST interesting is that it can deliver 100,000 IOPS.

Because it was not certified by VMware this IO Accelerator could not be used in ESX implementations. Until now! And today HP released drivers for VMware vSphere 4.0 Update 1.

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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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