During the last few years we published several Enterprise Hypervisor comparisons and we got very positive comments and feedback on it. With the release of vSphere 5, XenServer 6 and a service pack for Hyper-V it was time for an update.

It very interesting to see how some of the products have improved over the years and how the three major manufacturers look at each other and copy features. But you can’t trust all manufacturers by just a simple green checkbox. Some claimed features need third party add-ons, aren’t suitable for production workloads or are only supported on a limited set of operating systems. You have to investigate further and I hope I’ve done most of that work for you with this new enterprise hypervisor comparison.

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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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Ever since I’ve been working on a Apple Classic II, many many years ago, I was caught by the way of thinking at Cupertino. Design combined with functionality was actually possible! Well, back then we thought it was beautiful, anyway

Now, many years have gone by, a lot of people in the world seem to have recently discovered Apple. With the consumerization of the IT business, more and more Macs appear in the landscape. And why not? Sleek design combined with a stable OS where you don’t waste performance and money on staying free from virii and other malware (at least, for now), who doesn’t want that? So, it’s logical that wishes and demands for a virtual server or desktop in the Windows world, also be true for OS X. With vSphere 5, this might be possible!

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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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Since the announcement of VMware vSphere 5, the attention for the great new features has been swapped by the discussion on the new VMware vSphere 5 licensing model.

Because of the processor association it looks complicated and expensive but if you do the math, most of the time pricing remains the same. Gabrie van Zanten wrote an excellent article on that.

In short, with traditional virtual infrastructures used for server virtualization, the host servers seldom exceed the 96GB per host. This matches with a dual socket server licensed with VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus. In that scenario the number of vSphere 5 ‘processor’ licenses will equal the number of physical sockets, so the total cost for this environment will be equal with the new vSphere 5 licensing model.

But how about the new licensing model with memory dense servers/blades like we use in VDI solutions. When housing 100-200 VDI desktops on a single server you need immense amounts of memory and with the new vSphere 5 licensing model this would cost much much more that with the old licensing model.

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With the introduction of VMware vSphere 5, VMware introduces a new licensing model. VMware will retain a per processor model but they  removed some restrictions which were in the vSphere 4 licensing model. This is mainly regarding the number of cores per processor and the amount of physical memory in a host on which vSphere 4 could be deployed. With vSphere 5 it does no longer matter how many cores or amount of memory a ESXi hosts has.

Instead of the physical restrictions, VMware introduces a single virtualization based entitlement of pooled virtual memory (vRAM). According to VMware, this will simplify the process of purchasing deploying and managing vSphere while facilitating the move to shared infrastructure as a service.

vSphere 5.0 will be licensed on a per-processor basis with a vRAM entitlement. Each vSphere 5.0 CPU license will entitle the customer to a specific amount of vRAM, or memory configured to virtual machines. The vRAM entitlement can be pooled across a vSphere environment to enable a true cloud or utility based IT consumption model.

The vSphere 5.0 licensing model is per processor with pooled vRAM entitlements. According to VMware, this should offer customers the following benefits relative to the previous vSphere 4 model:

Simplicity – Removes two physical constraints (core and physical RAM), replacing them with a single virtual entitlement (vRAM). Customers now have a clear path to license vSphere on next-generation hardware configurations.

Flexibility – Extends the concept of resource pooling from technology to the business of IT by allowing aggregation and sharing of vRAM entitlement across a large pool of servers.

Fairness – Better aligns cost with actual use and value derived,rather than with hardware configurations and capacity.

Evolution – Allows customers to evolve to a cloud-like “pay for consumption” model without disrupting established purchasing, deployment and license-management practices and processes.

In all fairness, with this VMware introduced the much criticized virtual machine based licensing ‘with a twist’. Because they now license based on the amount of allocated vRAM, you’re much more limited in the total number of deployed virtual machines than you where when you were limited by physical memory and processor cores.

I’m afraid this may backfire on VMware, especially when in competition with Microsoft or Citrix.

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Today VMware had planned a webcast named ‘Raising the bar. Part V’. It was a public secret that they were going to announce VMware vSphere 5 and indeed they did. But on top of that VMware also new released new versions of vCloud Director (1.5), vCenter SRM (5.0) and vShield (5.0).

To accomplish this VMware has spent more than a million hours engineering and two million hours of quality assurance to deliver hundreds of additional capabilities which eventually became VMware vSphere 5.

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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Last Friday VMware released the Orchestrator plugin for Active Directory v1.0. With the plugin it is possible to manage Active Directory objects straight from within Orchestrator.

For those of you that don’t know what VMware Orchestrator is:

VMware vCenter Orchestrator provides out of the box workflows that can help administrators automate existing manual tasks. Administrators can utilize sample workflows from VMware vCenter Orchestrator’s workflow library and provide a blueprint for creating additional workflows.

VMware vCenter Orchestrator exposes the building blocks to enable more detailed workflows to be created for VMware vSphere.

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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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Infoworld.com Virtualisation Shootout april 2011

Of course we all knew that already Paul Venezia posted an in depth article on Infoworld where he compares the four main server virtualization software competitors on a selection of criteria.

Now, you can nit-pick on the measurements he made or the criteria he has chosen, but in general I think it’s a solid test of up-to-date versions.

The best conclusions I can draw from his report are these:

VMware might not always be the cheapest, VMware might not always be the one with the highest speeds.. but VMware is still the one with the most diverse OS support (any x86 OS can be virtualized), the best management toolkit and the most reliable architecture.

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A few minutes ago VMware released their long awaited vSphere client for the iPad and it is available at the AppStore for FREE.

VMware’s goal is to provide a tool which can be accessed anywhere to perform essential tasks and view performance metrics in a simplified interface. It is not intended to be the functional equivalent of the Windows vSphere client but it should enable you to perform 80% of the most common Admin tasks.

The functionality for now includes:

• Search for vSphere hosts and virtual machines;
• Monitor the performance of vSphere hosts and virtual machines;
• Manage virtual machines with the ability to start, stop and suspend;
• View and restore virtual machine snapshots;
• Reboot vSphere hosts or put them in maintenance mode;
• Diagnose vSphere hosts and virtual machines using build in ping and trace-route tools.

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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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