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

May 21th VMware released their new flagship product VMware vSphere 4 which should bring us tons of new features and performance improvements.

But how is the vSphere experience almost 9 months later?

Starting with the installation and setup experience, my personal experience with vSphere is very good. During the installation and setup of VMware ESX or ESXi 3.x I experienced a lot of issues like BIOS settings causing HA issues, HA issues when changing the ESX IP addresses, Problems with VMware Update Manager and faulty HP USB sticks. We even created a HA checklist for you to easily address HA issues.

Once up and running ESX(i) 3.x ran fine with the occasional HA error which 99% of the time could be fixed by reconfiguring HA from Virtual Center.

Now with vSphere the installation and setup is simple, error free and straight forward. Setup HA in the cluster properties wait for all progress indicators to reach 100% and you’re done.

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Last week a colleague, who sells applications running on an Oracle Database, had some questions regarding Oracle and running it in a Virtual Machine (VM) on top of a VMware infrastructure with a customer.

1) How to license Oracle in a virtual environment?

I pointed him to an article about licensing the Oracle software in a virtual environment I wrote some time ago.

Oracle can namely be hard- and soft partitioned, where VMware, XenServer, Hyper V and Oracle VM are all marked as soft partitioning, while looking into the way Oracle VM can be hard partitioned I stumbled on the following how to do it:

There are two methods to pin virtual CPUs. You can use the xm command to pin a guests’s virtual CPUs or you can hardcode the CPU mapping in a guest’s vm.cfg file. The difference between pinning CPUs with xm and hard coding the CPU mapping in a guest’s vm.cfg file is the persistence of the CPU mapping. CPUs that are pinned with xm are not persistent between reboots. Hard coding the CPU mapping in a guest’s vm.cfg file is persistent between reboots. To comply with Oracle’s hard partitioning policy, you must hardcode the CPU mapping in a guest’s vm.cfg file.

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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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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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On a regular basis we have info sessions with our most important vendors.  Last week we had a session with HP to tell us more about virtualization in their hardware products. The session was especially targeted at Flex-10. Flex-10 is the way how HP breaks s a 2 x 10Gb Ethernet pipe into a flexible, easy to change, smaller Ethernet ports.

Why is this so important for us virtual friends? Of course it is a huge cost saver not only in hardware but also in management of the environment but the most important thing is that it opens up a lot of new virtual design opportunities.

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One of the coolest things is that we now can make a design for up to 4 blade chassis with each physical 16 server blades and let’s say 320 virtual servers where all the traffic between the servers never leaves the blade chassis. It is all handled with the blade chassis. Also all of the vSphere traffic like VMotion and service console can be handled within the chassis at 10Gb speeds.

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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 ……

Back in April we we’re the first to report the limited management and automation support in vSphere, but now VMware has released version 4.0 of vCenter Site Recovery Manager.

Besides that vCenter Site Recovery Manager can now be used with VMware’s vSphere 4 it has some additional new features and improvements, like:

• Support for NFS storage arrays;
• Support for Shared Recovery Sites;
• Support for VMware Fault Tolerance;
• Support for Distributed vSwitches;
• Maximum number of protected VMs increased to 1000;
• Graphical interface to advanced settings;
• Support for DB2 as an SRM database server;
• Fully compatible with Distributed Power Management.

Licensing remains to be socket based as it was the case with SRM 1.0

For more information visit VMware’s website or see the release notes.

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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After becoming a VCP4 I regularly get questions from my colleagues on how to become a VCP4.

Can I take the VCP410 exam without further training?
I attended the VI3, Install & configure course but didn’t take the exam yet. Can I take the VCP exam instead?

Maureen Lonergan wrote a very neat article on this, ‘Ahead of the learning curve’

In this article Maureen talks about the various road which lead to VCP4 certification. In short?
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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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At VMworld 2009, which started yesterday, VMware launched two new products.

VMware GO and VMware vCenter Product Family.

VMware launched VMware GO which is targets small to medium sized businesses. VMware GO is a free beta service that makes it simple for clients to get started with virtualizing their applications. VMware Go is a web-based service which will let companies run multiple operating systems and applications on a single server. By doing so VMware helps SMBs to spend less money on hardware, energy and server administration. VMware Go beta will start next Monday and will be generally available in Q4 of 2009.

The second product, VMware vCenter Product Family, is actually a suite of existing VMware virtualization solutions . The suite is built on top of VMware vSphere 4 to help enterprises create and maintain dynamic and flexible IT infrastructures.

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On the site www.vReference.com I came across a post announcing the “vSphere 4 reference card”. Wondering what this was I started reading the post.

It seems that Forbes Guthrie made a document containing hard limits for the vSphere 4 products. I found the list of items very wide and should come in handy when looking for limits of the vSphere 4 products.

The reference card is refreshed every now and then, so check out the site periodically. Or subscribe to the RSS feed of the site.

Hopefully this card can help you as future reference. I found it to be very helpful.

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.

May 21th VMware released their new flagship product VMware vSphere 4.

With a new product comes a new set of courses, we (VMGuru.nl-crew) already attended the ‘What’s new in VMware vSphere 4‘ course given by Eric Sloof. And there’s also a new ‘VMware vSphere, Install & configure‘ course.

I now regularly get the question ‘The courses are nice but how do I become VCP on vSphere 4?‘

There are four different scenarios. Check this article on NTPro.nl to find out how you can become a VCP on vSphere 4.

The exam to upgrade your VCP to vSphere 4 (VCP4) will be available on August 1st.

If you are a VCP on VI3 and you have attended the beta program there is a chance to upgrade your certification long before August 1st by taking the beta exam. This exam will be available from June 29th but is not publicly available, candidates eligible for the beta exam will automatically be contacted by VMware and must be VCP3 certified and beta product users.

If you want to know more about the VCP on vSphere 4 exam, the blueprints can be found here.

Personally I would like to take the beta exam but Eric Sloof alerted me to a caveat in this scenario. To become a VMware Certified Instructor you will have to score 85% or more. If you take the beta exam the chance is greater you won’t make a score of 85% and you won’t be able to becme VCI. He also mentioned that it is difficult to re-take the exam to boost your score.

So I’m not sure yet. Become on of the first VCPs on vSphere 4 or have the opportunity to become a VCI? Dilemma!

I think I would like to be one of the first so I will be waiting for VMware’s invitation ……….

We are now 3 days from the day we, VMware enthusiasts, have all been waiting for. The general availability of vSphere 4! According to the information that VMware has published officially goes on sale on Thursday May 21st.

As VMware Premier Partner we received numerous e-mails from VMware with fact sheets, specifications and presentations on ‘What’s new in VMware vSphere 4‘, we even attended the ‘What’s new in VMware vSphere 4‘ course by Eric Sloof a few weeks ago. But so far customers have not been calling or e-mailing me to find out what’s new, were and when to purchase it. Don’t get me wrong, I thinks it’s a great new product with many new interesting features and improvements but our customers are not very interested yet.

I don’t now if this is because of the hypervisor battle going on, the economic situation, their great experience with ESX 3.5 or the release date close to the holiday season?

I’m curious to know what your thoughts are on this issue and if you are experiencing the same situation?

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Yesterday we did an upgrade from an ESX 3.5 host to ESX 4.0 using the VMware Upgrade Manager. I must say it’s cool to see how you can upgrade your ESX hosts and after that you can schedule the updates for your virtual machines with a virtual hardware upgrade version 7 and new VMware Tools.

There are some prerequisites for upgrading ESX 3.5 hosts to ESX 4.0 by using the VMware Upgrade Manager. Make sure you upgrade your vCenter server to vCenter Server 4.0 and make sure you have updated vCenter Update Manager 1.0 to version 4.0 before attempting to upgrade your ESX hosts.

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Today we attended the new ‘What’s new in VMware vSphere‘ 4 training and who better to get us up-to-date than Eric Sloof from NTPro.nl.

Eric already caught us on camera this morning while we were doing the labs so we thought we should return the favor .

Watch Eric Sloof share his thoughts on the first day of the training.

The last few weeks many blogs and forums have spend time on hypervisor comparisons and I have read tons of articles on the subject. Many only compare hypervisors based on performance, features or cost. I think it’s a bit more complicated then that. After Citrix announced that their XenServer product is available for free I spend a fair deal of my time explaining to colleagues and clients that this is a hoax and that cost is not the only reason to base their decision on. Especially in the case of XenServer the choice and the long term effects make it a little bit more complicated.

When I read Chris Wolfe’s article on ‘Production-class Hypervisor Evaluation criteria‘ and saw his VMworld Europe 2009 presentation (DC15) I found someone who read my mind. Chris knows what he is talking about and uses the right criteria to select the right hypervisor for the job. Now you probably think ‘These VMGuru.nl guys are VMware fans so here we go again‘ but the opposite is true.

Like Chris I think every situation has its own ideal solution and you should select the hypervisor based on well-considered selection criteria and because my employer, Centric, focuses on clients with 500+ workstations/employees these criteria are Enterprise-class hypervisor selection criteria.

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With the launch of VMware vSphere this week there are some new features to play with. One of the most interesting features, I think, is VMware FT (Fault Tolerance). Implementation of this features introduces some new caveats, in the case of FT you can not use all CPU’s and you can only apply FT on virtual machines with 1 vCPU. 1vCPU limits the implementations but is very easy to check in contrast to finding more compatible CPUs.

To check which CPUs are compatibel Gabrie van Zanten from Gabes Virtual World published a great article with a matrix of compatibel and incompatibel CPUs.

You can check the list and read the article here.

For those of you who have been following the launch of VMware’s new flagship vSphere 4 and are anxious to upgrade their virtual infrastructure, I ran into a great post on Mike DiPetrillo’s website.

Mike has posted four great video’s with the following scenario’s:

• Video 1 -VMware VirtualCenter Management Components
• Video 2 – VMware ESX Host Migration Methods
• Video 3 – Virtual Machine Upgrades (VMware Tools and Virtual Hardware)
• Video 4 – Implementing VMware vSphere Licensing

Interested? You can check out the videos here.

Today I, and two other colleagues, attended the vSphere 4 prodcut launch in Houten the Netherlands. The subject was Efficiency, control and Choice just as in the webcast from yesterday evening.

Jeremy presented the overall vSphere product and after a short break Ton Hermes presented the Technical track and Stef Koopman presented the Sales track. I attended the Technical track and Edwin and Alex attended the Sales track.

The information presented was not very new to us and probably not to you either as we posted an article on the news and new features yesterday.

The news were the features in the four versions of vSphere …….

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This morning a message from John Troyer popped up on my TwitterFox telling me that on April 20th VMware  announced the general availability of their new flagship product, VMware vSphere 4. Finally after all our time beta testing and filling out reviews vSphere is coming!

PALO ALTO, CA, April 21, 2009 — VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, today announced VMware vSphere™ 4, the industry’s first operating system for building the internal cloud, enabling the delivery of efficient, flexible and reliable IT as a service. With a wide range of groundbreaking new capabilities, VMware vSphere 4 brings cloud computing to enterprises in an evolutionary, non-disruptive way – delivering uncompromising control with greater efficiency while preserving customer choice.

As the complexity of IT environments has continued to increase over time, customers’ share of IT budgets are increasingly spent on simply trying to “keep the lights on.” With the promise of cloud computing, customers are eager to achieve the benefits, but struggle to see the path to getting there.  Leveraging VMware vSphere 4, customers can take pragmatic steps to achieve cloud computing within their own IT environments.  With these “internal” clouds, IT departments can dramatically simplify how computing is delivered in order to help decrease its cost and increase its flexibility, enabling IT to respond more rapidly to changing business requirements.

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After many complaints from the community VMware finally gave in and renamed their next generation ESX, formerly known as vSphere, to vCloudOS. We at VMGuru.nl already complained at the end of 2008 about the new name and many other did the same. Some even claimed that VMware couldn’t have registered the name vSphere as it was owned by another company.

Despite the fact that VMware publically used vSphere as their new name for their virtual infrastructure at VMworld Europe 2009 in Cannes they now changed it.

According to VMware´s spokesman Faril Polos, ´The new name better reflects the role, the opportunities and VMware’s strategy for our line of Virtual Datacenter products.’

For more information visit the VMware website or look here.