Ken Cline joins the virtualization blogger continuum

March 8th, 2009 by jason No comments »

Ken Cline, a legend among the VMware VMTN community who needs no introduction, has started up a blog called Ken’s Virtual Reality. The recently crowned vExpert’s blog is described as a place where Ken will jot down his thoughts on all things virtual. In addition, I’m happy to report that his primary focus will be VMware technologies, but I know he will be objective when discussing the other virtualization platforms as well.

Ken’s first blog post gives us a nice primer on who he is, where he has been, and what technologies he has worked with. Ken has been around the block. You’ll be hard pressed to find a person with as much extensive experience that Ken has.

In Ken’s next blog post, he digs right in to the technical stuff. Ken responds to a Hyper-V vs. XenServer vs. ESX shootout and helps us make more sense of the data. I hope what Ken has written up to this point is a sign of things to come in the future.

Ken is from the Virgina/DC region and is interested in employment opportunities in that area including those which require government security clearance.  If you know of any, I’m sure he’d appreciate it if you dropped him a line.

Welcome Ken!

Say it isn’t so: Hyper-V and XenServer outperform ESX

March 7th, 2009 by jason No comments »

This isn’t exactly the type of news I like to report but at the same time it can’t be ignored. The February/March 2009 issue of Virtualization Review magazine has an article starting on page 12 where Rick Vanover puts Hyper-V, XenServer, and ESX head to head to head. Some of the conclusions drawn are startling:

“For the first two tests of heavy workloads, VMware underperformed both XenServer and Hyper-V. For the lighter workloads on the third test, the results were almost indistinguishable across the platforms, but ESX had the best results in three of the four categories.”

“After doing these comparisons of ESX to Hyper-V and XenServer, it’s clear that at the hypervisor level, ESX is optimized for a large number of less-intensive workload VMs. For intensive workloads that may not be optimized for memory overcommit apps, Hyper-V and XenServer should definitely be considered-even if that means adding another hypervisor into the data center.”

Rick is saying that both Hyper-V and XenServer deliver better performance for the heavy workloads. ESX is better suited for lighter workloads and actually will handle more of them than Microsoft and Citrix making it the better “scale up” solution. Rick also points out that ESX offers the clear advantage of memory over commit which could not be benchmarked against Hyper-V and XenServer due to memory over commit not being available in the latter two products. For a moment, let’s assume that Rick’s findings are 100% accurate. From an options standpoint, how do you feel about scaling up versus scaling out for the lighter workloads having equal performance across all three platforms? Personally, I’d lean towards higher consolidation ratios, less capital expenditures, less datacenter and utility bill consumption. That’s the ESX option.

I’m concerned that I’m hearing ESX is underperforming against the underdogs. I’m not at all saying Rick’s tests are invalid but I am looking for a response from VMware that is either published, or in the form of ESX4 taking an obvious performance lead once again in benchmark tests. Charging a premium for a lesser performing hypervisor doesn’t sound like the right formula for success.

Update: Slight goof on the title of this blog post. Originally it stated “XenApp” where I meant “XenServer”

Update: Microsoft and VMware have responded to the original article’s performance analysis.

Straighten out licensing in preparation for vSphere

March 6th, 2009 by jason No comments »

There is a lot of buzz accumulating about the anticipated release of VMware vSphere.  Are you ready for it?  Is your license portal ready for vSphere?  Does anyone remember the licesing upgrades from VI2 to VI3?  Did they go smooth for you?

Double check your answers and be sure.  Inaccurate license counts in your license portal are going to lead to frustrating problems when you attempt to upgrade to vSphere.  When you get to vSphere, your new license key(s) may be missing quantities or SKUs you’ve purchased in the past.  Pay extra special attention if you purchase through a reseller to be sure your license counts and SKUs in the portal are 100% accurate.

DO NOT wait until the release of vSphere to sort out your licensing issues.  I would anticipate a long line of people in the support queues who were not proactive in sorting out their licensing issues prior to the release of vSphere.  Taking care of this ahead of time will help guarantee a smooth vSphere upgrade and it will also help balance the call load on VMware’s support staff.

To verify your licensing, head to the VMware licensing portal:

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Click “Find Serial Number”

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Change the filter parameters as follows:

Change “License Category” to Purchased/Registered.  Doing so will show you more licensing than not doing so in some cases.

Change “Sort Results By” to Product then License Type.  Doing so will make the licenses easier to reconcile.

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Now reconcile all of your serial numbers.  Be aware that there may be more than one page of licenses in your portal.  If you’re missing licenses, check for a page 2, page 3, etc.

For more help on licensing, including help in contacting VMware on licensing issues, see the following blog entry I wrote in January.

Alan Renouf has moved

March 2nd, 2009 by jason No comments »

vExpert, PowerShell guru, blogger, and not-a-Frenchman Alan Renouf has moved to a new home on the internet and would appreciate it if those who were following him would continue to follow him at his new location. The new locations are:

Blog: http://www.virtu-al.net/

RSS: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/Virtu-Al

Thank you.

VMworld Europe 2009 videos

March 1st, 2009 by jason No comments »

I’ll use this blog entry as a placeholder to display a few video clips I captured in Cannes, France attending VMworld Europe 2009. I’ve got a few more video clips to process so feel free to check back here for new ones. The videos in HD were captured using a Flip mino HD given to me by Tripwire. It’s a great little camera that does some video processing as well (can trim videos, add credits and music, etc.)


VMworld Europe 2009 datacenter from Jason Boche on Vimeo.


vinternals at VMworld Europe 2009 from Jason Boche on Vimeo. (warning: strong language)


10 Corners from Jason Boche on Vimeo.


Downtown Cannes, France from Jason Boche on Vimeo.


After the Party – Cannes, France – 1am from Jason Boche on Vimeo.


Goodbye VMworld Europe 2009 Goodbye @B_renda from Jason Boche on Vimeo.


Goodbye VMworld Europe 2009 from Jason Boche on Vimeo.

Andrew Kutz joins Hyper9

February 28th, 2009 by jason No comments »

This news is a little over a week old but I just found out two nights ago while reading vExpert profiles and it’s definitely worth repeating.

Andrew Kutz is a recently named vExpert by VMware, Inc. and a well known developer in the VMware community. Andrew has authored a number of VirtualCenter plugins, of which the most famous might be his free Storage VMotion (sVMotion) plugin which provides VMware administrators a GUI interface to hot migrate VM storage from one LUN to another. Andrew has received well deserved praise for his work because he makes the lives of VI administrators easier.

Hyper9 is a startup company in Austin, TX that works in the virtualization infrastructure management space, developing tools that automate the management of virtualization in the datacenter. Hyper9 recently secured an additional round of investment funding and it would seem they are totally serious about delivering quality products to the virtualization community in the hiring of Andrew Kutz. What can we expect out of this? Given what I’ve seen from Andrew in the past, I’ll guess the future will be plugin based architecture which I think makes a lot of sense and is probably what the majority of the community wants.

Congratulations to both Andrew Kutz and Hyper9. I look forward to your accomplishments with great anticipation!

Read the official announcement from Hyper9 here.

VMware next generation datacenter exploration

February 27th, 2009 by jason No comments »

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Following is a VMworld Europe 2009 preview of features VMware is developing for future versions of vSphere. There is no guarantee or time line of when these features will be introduced into vSphere. Furthermore, the features should not be thought of as a group that will be implemented together at one time. A more likely scenario is that they will be integrated independently into major or incremental future builds. With that disclaimer out of the way, let’s dig in to the good stuff.

Pluggable Storage Architecture (PSA). ESX/ESXi will have a new architecture for storage called PSA which is a collection of VMKernel APIs that allow 3rd party hardware vendors to inject code into the ESX storage I/O path. 3rd party developers will be able to design custom load balancing techniques and fail over mechanisms for specific storage arrays. This will happen in part with the use of VMware’s Native Multipathing Plugin (NMP) which VMware will distribute with ESX. Additional plugins from storage partners may also appear. During the lab, I explored the PSA commands using the ESXi “unsupported” console via PuTTY.

Update: Duncan Epping over at Yellow Bricks just wrote about Pluggable Storage Architecture, expanding quite a bit on its components.  View that post here.

Hot Cloning of Virtual Machines. This upcoming feature is fairly self explanatory. Duplicate or clone a virtual machine while the source VM is running. I think this feature will be useful for troubleshooting or base lining a guest OS on the fly without impacting the source by causing a temporary outage to clone the control VM into the experiment environment. Additionally, during the cloning process, VMware is going to allow us to choose a different disk type than that of the source VM. For example, the source VM may have a disk type of pre-allocated but we can change the clone destination disk type to a thinly provisioned sparse disk. Fragmentation anyone? Speaking of pitfalls, you may wonder how VMware will handle powering on the destination VM for the first time with a duplicate network name and IP address as the clone source that is currently running on the network? Simple. We already have the technology today: The Guest Customization process. While guest customization has always been optional for us, it more or less becomes mandatory in hot cloning so I’d start getting used to it.

Update: As a few people have pointed out in the comments, hot cloning of virtual machines is available to us prior to the release of vSphere. VM hot cloning was introduced in VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 2. See the following release notes: http://www.vmware.com/support/vi3/doc/vi3_esx35u2_vc25u2_rel_notes.html

Host Profiles. Simplify and standardize ESX/ESXi host configuration management via policies. The idea is to eliminate manual configuration through the console or VIC which can be subject to human error or neglect. To a good degree, host profiles will replace much of the automated deployment methods in your environment. Notice I didn’t say host profiles will replace all automated methods. There are configuration areas which host profile policies don’t cover. You’ll need supplemental coverage for those areas so don’t permanently delete your scripts and processes just yet. You’ll need to keep a few of them around even after implementing host profiles. Host profiles can be created by hand from scratch, or a template can be constructed based on an existing host configuration. Lastly, profiles are not just for the initial deployment. They can be used to maintain compliance of host configurations going forward. Applying host profiles reminds me a lot of dropping Microsoft Active Directory Group Policy Objects (GPOs) on an OU folder structure. Monitoring compliance across the datacenter or cluster feels strikingly familiar to scanning and remediating via VMware Update Manager.

Storage VMotion. The sVMotion technology isn’t new to those on the VI3 platform already but the coming GUI to facilitate the sVMotion is. Props to Andrew Kutz for providing an sVMotion GUI plugin for free while VMware expected us to fumble around with sVMotion in the RCLI. Frankly, the sVMotion GUI should have been built into VirtualCenter the day it was introduced. The rumor is VMware didn’t want sVMotion to be that easy for us to use, hence we could get ourselves into some trouble with it. Apparently the same conscience feels no guilt about the ease of snapshotting and the risk associated with leaving snapshots open. VMware borrowed code from the hot cloning feature and will allow disk type changing during the sVMotion process. Using the same example as above, during an sVMotion, on the fly we can migrate from a pre-allocated disk type to a thinly provisioned sparse disk.

vApps. vApps allow us to group together tiered applications or VMs into a single virtual service entity. This isn’t simply global groups for VMs or Workstation teams, VMware has taken it a step further by tying together VM interdependencies and resource allocations which allows things like single-step power operations (think one click staggered power operations in the correct order), cloning, deployment, and monitoring of the entire application workload. The Open Virtualization Format (OVF) 1.0 standard will also be integrated which will support the importing and exporting of vApps. I know what you’re thinking – What will VMware think of next? Keep reading.

VMFS-3 Online Volume Grow. I like to read more into a name or a phrase than I probably should. Does this mean we will see online volume grow in VI3 before the release of VI4? Or does this mean that in VI4, VMFS is unchanged and stays at the “3” designation. The latter would be something to look forward to because personally I can do without datastore upgrades, although with the emerging VMware technology, shuffling VMs and storage around, even hot, makes the process of datastore upgrades pretty easy, however, we still need the time to plan and perform the tasks, plus the extra shared storage to leap frog the datastore upgrades. So what is online volume grow? Answer: seamless VMFS volume growing without the use of extents. OVG facilitates a two step process of growing your underlying hardware LUNs (in a typical scenario this is going to be some type of shared storage like SAN, iSCSI, or NFS), then extending the VMFS volume so that it consumes the extra space on the LUNs. For the Microsoft administrators, you may be familiar with using the “DISKPART” command line utility to expand a non-OS partition . Same thing. Now, not everyone will have the type of storage that allows dynamic or even offline LUN growth at the physical layer. For this, VMware still allows VMFS volume growth through the use of extents but doing so doesn’t make my skin crawl any less than it did when I first learned about extents.

vNetwork Distributed Switch. I think VMware idolizes Hitachi. Any storage administrator who has been around Hitachi for a while will know what I’m talking about here. Hitachi likes to periodically change the names of their hardware and software technology whether it makes sense or not. More often than not, each of their technologies has two names/acronyms at a minimum. In some cases three. VMware is keeping up the pace with their name changes. What was once Distributed Virtual Switch (DVS) at VMworld 2008, is now vNetwork Distributed Switch (vNDS). Notice the case sensitivity there. I have and will continue to ding anyone for getting VMware’s branding wrong, but I promise to try to be polite about it because I realize the number of people who are as anal as I falls within the range of nobody and hardly anyone. The vNDS is a virtual network switch that can be shared by more than one ESX host. I think the idea behind the vNDS falls in line with host profiles: automated network configuration and consistency across hosts. Not only will this save us time from having to manually create switches and port groups (or generate the scripts to automate the process), but it will help guarantee we don’t run into VM migration problems which more and more enterprise features are dependent on (basically any feature that makes use of hot or cold VMotion or sVMotion). Add the Cisco Nexus 1000v into the mix and we see that VMware networking is becoming more automated, robust, and flexible, but with added complexity which could mean longer time to resolve network related issues.

Last but not least, Fault Tolerance. Truth be told, this is another VMware technology that has gone through a Marketing department name change but this was announced at VMworld 2008 and I’ve already ranted about it so I’ll let it go. In a single sentence, FT is an ESX/ESXi technology that provides continuous availability for virtual machines using VMware vLockstep functionality. It works by having identical VMs run in virtual lockstep on two separate hosts. The “primary” VM is in the active state doing what it does best: receives requests, serves information, and runs applications on the network. A “secondary” VM follows all changes made on the primary VM. VMware vLockstep captures all nondeterministic transactions that occur on the primary VM. The transactions are sent to the secondary VM running on a different host. All of this happens with a latency of less than a single second. If the primary VM goes down, the secondary takes over almost instantly with no loss of data or transactions. This is where FT differs from VMware High Availability (HA). HA is a cold restart of a failed VM. In FT, the VM is already running. At what cost does this FT technology come to us? I don’t know. VMware is tight lipped on licensing thus far but I can tell you that FT is enabled at an individual VM by VM level, not at a global datacenter, cluster, or host level. Have you figured out the other significant cost yet? Virtual Infrastructure resources. CPU, RAM, Disk, Network. The secondary VM is running in parallel with the primary. That means for each FT protected VM, we essentially need double the VI resources from the four food groups. This is a higher level of protection of VM workloads, in fact, the highest level of protection we’ve seen yet. This level of protection comes to us at a premium and thus I expect to see carefully planned and sparse usage of FT in the datacenter for the most critical workloads. Hopefully all will realize this isn’t VMware gouging us for more money. I expect FT to be a separately licensed component and by that, VMware gives us the choice whether to implement or not. That’s key because not all shops will have a need for FT so why should they be forced to purchase it? Customers want options and flexibility through adaptive and competitive licensing models.

This is an exciting list of new features and functionality that I look forward to working with. Hopefully we see them in the coming year. Those from the competing virtualization camps that think you are catching up with VMware – here’s your answer. VMware will continue to raise the bar while you play catch up. You’ve not done your homework if you thought VMware would sit back and relax, resting on its laurels. When has VMware ever been known for this? VMware has hundreds of ideas in the queues waiting for development. Ideas for innovation larger than you or I could imagine. Personally I think there is room for all three of the major hypervisor players in the ecosystem. Certainly the competition is good for the customer. It forces everyone to bring on their “A” game. Game on.