Virtualization

There’s been a lot of discussion and hand-wringing regarding the deprecation of VMware ESX in favor of ESXi. People are worried, the sky is falling, OMG OMG. In contrast, I just finished upgrading my three production clusters to vSphere 4.1 (from vSphere 4.0), and I converted everything to ESXi 4.1 in the process. It’s actually really easy and now I’m future-proofed. Here’s how I did it. 1. Upgrade vCenter Server to 4.1. Frankly, the 64-bit vCenter jump is the most troublesome part of all of this for most people. The VMware vCenter Server Data Migration Tool may help if you’re using the SQL Express database, but I just did a database restore from a full backup file I made. I …

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VMware recently published, or updated, KB 1005760 which “will assist you with the troubleshooting of time synchronization issues within a virtual machine.” I feel it’s noteworthy to point out that this particular KB article is for VMware ACE, Fusion, Server, and Workstation. It is NOT (repeat: NOT) for ESX and ESXi! In fact, for ESX and ESXi the recommendations are directly the opposite. As per KB 1006427 (Linux) and KB 1318 (Windows) you should disable VMware Tools time synchronization and enable NTP or Windows Time Synchronization. You may be asking why you’d want your VMs to do their own synchronization. There are a couple of big reasons. First, the VMware Tools time sync might run the clock backwards. One of …

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Stephen Foskett has a great post today on The Enterprise IT Acquisition Game, wherein he talks about how it’s open season on data storage companies, with a lesser emphasis on networking: So this is the game: Four full-line enterprise superpowers battling each other for datacenter dominance and coveting the extra profits of a few verticals. HP clearly believes they can chip away at EMC and Cisco in storage and networking; Dell and IBM have so far focused mainly on storage; and Oracle hasn’t made a move in either direction, instead challenging the other three in the core server and software space. Right on, especially with the “coveting the extra profits” part. For years, Dell, IBM, and HP have been busy …

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VMware vSphere users should always remember that when you allocate a VM the amount of space it will consume on disk includes a swap file equal to the size of the VM’s allocated RAM. So if you have 96 GB of VMs running you will use 96 GB of your disk as swap, even if those VMs are only actively using 2 GB of RAM. Yet another argument against overcommitment, in my opinion. If you right-size your VMs you not only save RAM, but storage as well.

Beth Pariseau from SearchServerVirtualization.com has a new piece up about the change in VMware licensing for some products, from per-socket to per-VM. First off, and slightly off-topic, I’m quoted in the article, and it’s always interesting to see what reporters choose for quotes from me. This isn’t a criticism, as anybody who has talked to me in real life knows I talk like that. Beth didn’t edit anything, which I really appreciate. However, I now can cross “use the word ‘cram’ in an interview” off my list of life goals. 🙂 Second, and back on-topic, per-VM licensing makes a lot of sense for things like AppSpeed, as well as some of the other management tools. There are a lot of …

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Once again we find ourselves staring at a major release of VMware infrastructure software: vSphere 4.1. It’s been a bit over a year since 4.0 dropped, with two big bugfix releases since. vSphere 4.1 adds over 150 new features and improvements, including some features that were previewed at VMworld 2009 to much applause. Here are some of the highlights, twists, and turns. Storage I/O Control: This is a global, cluster-wide I/O scheduler, working to throttle I/O to ensure that a single VM cannot monopolize a single datastore’s capabilities. If you consider that a datastore’s backend storage can only sustain a certain numbers of IOPS it’s possible, and likely, that a single VM will consume a disproportionate amount of those IOPS. …

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