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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For a couple of ThinApp packaging machines I didn’t want that the packagers had access to the vCenter Client, but still let them revert to a previous snapshot.

So I wrote a couple of lines to accomplish just that from within the packaging machine itself.

The script below reverts the virtual machine back to the snapshot that was created earlier.

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Last week we got a question concerning the licensing options around vSphere and how to choose the correct edition and options from all the flavors and options offered by VMware. So while answering the questions concerning the licensing I thought back to a nice overview picture we had available a few years back from VMware. So that’s why I compiled two overview pictures where there is one for the SMB market and one for the Enterprise market. In the overview the current situation and options are summarized per edition.

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Luc Dekens and Alan Renouf did a great presentation on PowerCLI.

PowerCLI is based on PowerShell. PowerShell is designed by Microsoft with the SysAdmin in mind. It’s the universal language for Windows data centers.

Most of the time GUI interfaces are single purpose and rigid. PowerShell is the glue between your infrastructure. Microsoft makes it as a requirement for new application releases that it will work with PowerShell like SQL Server, Exchange, IIS7, SCOM and more. Commands (called cmdlets) are pretty easy to remember because they are in the verb-noun format (for example get-host)

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Some of you might already have been there. I know I have:

You have a large organization with more than 10 remote or branch offices. You have virtualized your entire back-end but those nasty site servers still remain a physical nuisance. Some regional offices have a complete data center with more than 20 servers just to make sure everyone can work locally. You want to virtualize it but you can’t convince your management to purchase 10 or more sets of Advanced of Enterprise (plus) licenses for those sites as that is far to expensive.

Now, what do you do? What I’ve done in the past is use a ‘free’ ESXi license and manage it as a standalone server. It is a possibility, but you lack a lot of enterprise features you really want to have. And what if the site is too big for just one host. And what about fail-over? One is None, we always say. So what’s the solution? (more…)

Last month I regularly received requests from colleagues concerning VMFS block sizes. Although it’s a simple setting, it still raises a lot of questions and the introduction of vSphere 4.1 has somewhat changed the game.

The block size on a VMFS datastore defines two things:

• The maximum file size;
• The amount of space a file occupies.

First of all, the block size determines the maximum file size on the datastore. If you select a block size of 1MB on your datastore the maximum file size is limited to 256GB. So you cannot create a virtual disk beyond 256GB.

Also, the block size determines the amount of disk space a file will take up on the datastore. This is theoretical because VMFS3 uses sub-block allocation (see below).

It is not possible to change the block size after you set it without deleting the datastore and re-creating it. Therefore you should create a good design and determine the block size before creating the datastores.

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Yesterday a colleague asked me to add four blades from our old test environment to our new VMware vSphere 4.1 test environment. Of course this was no problem (yet), I had an hour or two to spare, so I started immediately.

Download the ESXi 4.1 installable ISO, connecting this to the four blades, installing and preconfiguring ESXi and adding them to them VMware HA/DRS test cluster. Adjust the zoning for the SAN and configure the correct VLANs and where done. WRONG!

The two running ESX hosts are equipped with Intel Xenon X5660 CPUs, the four extra ESX hosts have Intel Xenon X5430 CPUs. When I tried to do a vMotion the following error message appeared.

Surprise, the CPUs are not compatible. So I needed to setup EVC in this cluster to mask the advanced features from the Intel Xenon X5660 and bring it to the same feature level as the Intel Xenon 5430′s.

But this creates the first ‘chicken or egg dilemma’ of the day.

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As with most products you want to keep them up to date for several reasons, which can include security, availability, reliability or even new features in the product. Keeping products up to date is a process that keeps repeating itself and needs a good plan to keep up with the most recent updates.

A lot of times though you will see that an organization isn’t on top of the update process, either because they aren’t aware of it or just forget to execute the tasks for updating their products.

The following BBC News article shows what might happen when you’re not keeping your system up to date. Several companies have become victims of the the Sasser virus which interrupted their normal operations.

Recently I have been doing a quick look at an VMware ESX infrastructure in which I noticed they did install the VMware update manager. They also had a baseline configured and attached to several ESX hosts and every evening there was a scheduled task to check for new updates available.

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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

I’ve written about Zimbra before. Actually, we here at vmguru.nl use Zimbra for all our email and collaboration. So, today we were invited to join the Zimbra Breakfast Meeting at the Scandic Hotel in Copenhagen.

Zimbra, for the ones who don’t know what it does, is a collaboration suite. It’s the open source exchange alternative. Well, it’s getting more than an alternative. It’s getting competitive in a rapid pace. According to Zimbra, it’s the next-generation Exchange.

A quick overview of the Zimbra features: (more…)

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.

With the release of vSphere 4.1 it will be the last version of ESX to be released in an ESX and an ESXi version. After this version only the ESXi flavor will be released. We at VMGuru.nl predicted that this would happen a few years back, so we advised our customers to go for the ESXi version, too make it a lot easier to migrate to a newer version in the future.

VMware recommends that customers deploy vSphere 4.1 on the ESXi hypervisor architecture as a best practice.

In the past some features from the ESX architecture weren’t supported on the ESXi platform. As of vSphere 4.0, all the functionality of VMware vSphere is supported on both architectures, including support for Jumbo Frames, Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP), NetQueue, and NetFlow.

VMware ESXi is the latest hypervisor architecture from VMware. It has an ultra-thin architecture with no reliance on a general purpose OS, yet still offers all the same functionality and performance of VMware ESX. For a comparision between ESX and ESXi 4.1 see the following article.

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While designing and writing administrator guides, I often use pictures instead of words. In my opinion: a picture says more then 1000 words. When VMware vSphere 4 went live I started collecting pictures from  Sphere and the Virtual Infrastructure client, I combined them in a Microsoft Visio 2007 shape so I could track off them and use them more often in pictures and designs accompanying virtual infrastructures.

Using them in memo style documents to tackle known issues or incorrect handling is quit effective. Also with the new menu driven style of the vSphere VI Client combined with VMware vCenter Server some administrators are looking for the right path to get to the correct content.

This Visio stencil is a combination of different icons, shape and such. You can design a Host and Clusters drill down with it or use components to use in manuals or troubleshooting documents.

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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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Last year we published an Enterprise Hypervisor comparison and we got very positive comments and feedback on it.

During the last few weeks I received many update requests so I decided to update the old hypervisor comparison but this time I changed the setup a bit.

Changes:

• No beta or pre-release versions are used. In the last document we also compared Hyper-V R2 beta which wasn’t officially released.
  This time all software is available and no features are subject to change due to beta-test, etc.;
• The versions used are the platinum/ultimate/fully-featured versions of the hypervisors. Product features can be limited by lower license versions;
• No free versions have been used in this comparison.

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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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There was an issue discovered earlier today that prevents View Composer from working with vSphere 4.1.

VMware apologizes for any inconvenience this may have caused you. If you know how to spread the word to your friends and colleagues, please do so.

With yesterdays release of vSphere 4.1 comes the challenge to upgrade your existing installation to this new version. Because I have been testing the beta for a while now, I couldn´t wait to try it in our new testing environment.

However, there are a few caveats:

• VMware released a KB article with the supported upgrade methods for ESX(i) 3.0.x, 3.5 and 4 full, embedded or installable;
• Do NOT upgrade vCenter server to version 4.1 if you are using VMware View Composer 2.0.x. Check out this VMware KB article for more information.

Before you start the upgrade process, back-up the vCenter- and Update Manager databases.

After downloading the needed ISO´s, I started with the upgrade of the vCenter server.

But first of all, I had to uninstall all incompatible vCenter components, in this case Guided Consolidation 4.0.

When this is done, it´s time to update the vCenter server.

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