Virtualization

ESXi vs. VMware Server

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Wil van Antwerpen of PlanetVM posted yesterday about the future of VMware Server, specifically its rumored demise. That isn’t surprising at all, at least to me. I know a lot of people will miss VMware Server when it’s gone, but in my experience that’s mainly because they were using it as a free copy of Workstation. They aren’t using the web interfaces. They aren’t scripting anything. They aren’t buying support. What I’ve seen people do is buy a $4000 workstation-class PC, install VMware Server on Microsoft Windows, and use Remote Desktop to manage it. Lame? Yeah, I know. The thing is, for what they’re doing with it they’d be better served with a copy of VMware Workstation, or a copy …

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What are P-states and how do I use them in vSphere?

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VMware vSphere 4 added the ability to take advantage of Intel SpeedStep and AMD PowerNow! CPU power management features. These features are commonly known as “Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling” or DVFS, and let an OS cooperate with the CPU to reduce power consumption by reducing the frequency of the CPU and the voltage at which it is operating. It reduces these things in preset tiers, and these tiers are known as P-states. On Intel CPUs they are trademarked as “SpeedStep” and on AMD they are either “Cool’n’Quiet” or “PowerNow!” The Wikipedia article on Intel SpeedStep points out that “power consumed by a CPU with a capacitance of C, running at voltage V, and frequency f is approximately P = …

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If You Don't Like Change…

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“If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.” – General Eric Shinseki, former United States Army Chief of Staff.

Thanks AMD!

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Holy crap, server pricing has come down a lot in the last month! Four weeks ago a Dell R810 with 256 GB of RAM, dual Intel 6550 8-core CPUs, and the standard complement of drives, warranties, etc. was almost $28,000. A couple weeks ago the AMD-based Dell R815 was released, featuring the AMD 8- and 12-core CPUs. A similar configuration to the R810 above comes to almost $17,000, and that’s with more cores in the host than the Intel. Now the Dell R810, same configuration, is a little over $18,000. I’ve not been a big fan of AMD’s technology in the past, because of caching bugs, OS incompatibilities, general BS, etc.  However, for what they just saved me by keeping …

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Vote On VMworld 2010 Content

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Public voting is open now for VMworld 2010 sessions. I’ve already gone and voted for my own session, “Tuning Linux for Virtual Machines – TA8102,” in the Technology & Architecture track, as well as a number of other heavyweight presentations by Duncan Epping, Scott Drummonds, Mike Laverick, David Davis, Steve Chambers, Chad Sakac, Edward Haletky… I’m missing a lot of people in my list here, but the point is that there are tons of presentations by people who really know what they heck they’re talking about. If you are thinking about going to VMworld this year you should go and pick the content YOU would like to see in the conference. It’s pretty rare that attendees get to help set …

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Power Consumption of a Dell PowerEdge R610

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For planning purposes I just did some power draw testing of a Dell PowerEdge R610. Dual Intel X5550 CPUs, 24 GB of RAM, four SSD disks attached to the PERC6/i, and dual 717 Watt power supplies. My testing methodology was to measure the draw using a Fluke 322 clamp meter, both at idle and running a stress test under Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (stress -c 32 -d 8 -i 8 -m 16). I did this with one and two power supplies active. 1 PS, idle: 0.65 Amps @ 202.3 Volts = 131.5 Watts 1 PS, loaded: 1.51 Amps @ 202.3 Volts = 305.5 Watts 2 PS, idle: 0.35 Amps @ 202.3 Volts = 70.8 Watts each (total of 141.6 …

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Cisco & Gartner Censoring ViewYonder

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Steve Chambers of Cisco, blogging over at ViewYonder.com, has had one of his recent blog posts censored by his employer, Cisco. This is really too bad. I don’t always agree with Steve’s opinions but I like that they’re out there. As an example, very few people would have the balls to point out that many IT failures are actually because IT people cause those failures. Very true, in my opinion. I’ve even started referring to “MTBC” in conversation. However, I’m not at all a fan of Cisco, for a few specific reasons, and now I can add censorship to that list.  It’s obvious that Cisco doesn’t want, and cannot handle, passionate employees. Too bad. It’s people like Steve that drive …

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VMworld 2010: CFP Closes Someday, Somewhere

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Vaughn Stewart posted this morning that the VMworld Call For Papers closes on Friday, April 9. Last Friday, I posted that it closed, well, last Friday. I think it’s safe to say that both of us encourage you to get moving! You don’t need slides prepared yet, just a 250 word or less session description, three takeaway points you want to convey, a short biography for yourself, a short description of your speaking history, and knowledge of your own mailing address. 🙂 Took me 30 minutes to do. As for the date, I guess it depends on where you look! The main VMworld page says there are two days until things close. The “Key Dates” page says April 2: I’m …

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VMworld 2010 Call For Papers: Last Day!

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Today, April 2[0], is the last day to submit session proposals for VMworld 2010. Get them in, people! I’m looking forward to being educated and entertained by you all this year in San Francisco. If you’re wondering what you need or whether you have time to do this, I submitted a session proposal and it took me about 30 minutes. You need to have a good description of your session, three takeaway points you want to convey, a short biography for yourself, a short description of your speaking history, and you need to know your own mailing address. 🙂 You don’t need slides or anything yet. Get moving! Go go go! Update: Apparently you have until April 9th, now. —————- …

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I Will Keep Saying It: Align Your Partitions

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ICT-Freak.nl has a nice post on hot-adding & hot-removing VMDKs from a Linux virtual machine. However, like most guides out there, it doesn’t mention the number one thing you need to do for optimal disk I/O: align your partitions. From my Linux Virtual Machine Tuning Guide: Logical Block Addressing is a common addressing scheme for disks on PCs. However, under this scheme the master boot record causes partitions to start at a block that isn’t a power of 2. This isn’t a huge deal for individual disks, but for shared storage where a LUN is actually striped across many different disks a single read or write by the guest OS causes twice as much I/O on the storage array. The …

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