Virtualization

Intel 7400 Memory Population

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Intel’s The Server Room blog has an interesting tidbit of information for those of us thinking about servers with the Intel 7400 series of CPUs in it: As mentioned before, an MP Xeon 7400 series server will provide four channels of FBD memory. There are a couple of considerations here. First, latency to memory increases for every DIMM added to the system. This is important to note because you can keep the memory latency to a minimum by adding fewer high capacity DIMMs. Second, be sure to evenly distribute the DIMMs across all the channels. In other words, don’t fill up all the slots on one channel and then lightly populate the rest. Some systems get faster when you have …

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The Beauty of Logs

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I’m not sure how many times I’ve been asked by coworkers, friends, and random people if I know how to fix a problem. The conversation always goes something like: “Hi Bob. I am getting error XYZ when I try to use scp with public keys to copy a VMDK file from one ESX host to another. Can you tell me what I’m doing wrong?” “Hi Joe. It could be one of thousands of things. You might try looking at /var/log/messages or /var/log/secure to see what SSH thinks the problem is.” “Bob, thanks! It was a permission problem for my authorized_hosts file.” Neato. The nice thing about logs is that they often give you information that helps you solve a problem[0]. …

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Solutions to Match Your Problems

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One of the big things I like about virtualization is that you can find or build solutions that match the size of the problem you have. Need live workload migration? Buy VMotion. Need dynamic load balancing? Buy DRS. But if you only need to move your workloads around once in a while maybe you can get by with something like Mike DiPetrillo’s quick migration script. Cheap, easy, right-sized, and it has a well-known path for growth when you decide you really do need VMotion or DRS. Which, by the way, is why I’ve been telling folks to skip VMware Server and go straight to the free ESXi. That way, when they decide that virtualization is cool and want more of …

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Good Ideas and Lies

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Daring Fireball linked to Paul Krugman’s NY Times op-ed post which includes a great quote from Daniel Davies: “Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance.” He was speaking of war, but it’s true of just about anything. Especially technology. A good idea just sells itself. The first thing that comes to my mind is the mudslinging that Microsoft and Citrix are doing lately over virtualization. Why is it that VMware has 80% of the market? Because it sells itself. I wonder why, instead of spending all this money on “get the facts” and “costs too much” web sites, Microsoft doesn’t just focus on why VMware keeps beating them, and fix …

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VMworld 2008 Day 2 General Session

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Dr. Stephen Herrod is the featured speaker of the VMworld 2008 day 2 general session. He’s the CTO & senior VP of R&D. This post will be more notes than a coherent piece. I’ll follow up with some thoughts later today. Goal of the infrastructure layer is to aggregate resources and be as efficient as possible. vCompute layer: things like FlexMigration. Focused on the VM, making it as powerful as possible. Grown from 2 vCPUs to a future 8 vCPUs, 40 Gbps, 256 GB per VM, 200000+ IOPS. Next generation of resource pools, up to 64 nodes in a single cluster, 4096 processor cores, 64 TB of RAM, 6 million IOPS, all running under DRS. Distributed Power Management continuing in …

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VMworld 2008 Keynote

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Considering that VMware was founded in 1998, 2008 is definitely the year when virtualization became a teenager. Announcements at VMworld are indicating a certain level of maturity in the thinking of vendors, in that they are solving problems and wrapping up a lot of the loose ends that have plagued virtual infrastructure implementations. By wrapping all those problems up it frees time to work on more interesting things, like clouds. On stage at VMworld 2008 Paul Maritz’ outlines the VMware strategy going forward. He commented that we’re moving away from a device- and hardware-centric world to one that is information- and people-centric. We’re also starting to think of our IT infrastructure as one giant computer. This is the basis behind …

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How To Identify VMworld Attendees

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Wondering if that other person in the elevator with you is a VMworld attendee? There are lots of clues: 1. Have they forgotten to take their conference badge off? A dead giveaway, for sure. 2. Are they carrying their blue & black VMworld bag? Also a dead giveaway. 3. Are they holding a folded piece of paper, twirling it around as if they are trying to find ‘north’ on a map? While IT folks like myself are usually used to not being able to see the sun the lack of right angles in the Venetian interior sometimes confuses us. 4. Are they wearing a Hawaiian shirt and shorts? IT folks live in climate controlled environments and this 100 degree weather, …

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VMworld 2008!

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Three days until VMworld starts! Heck yeah! I’m looking forward to blogging from the conference. I am also working with TechTarget to judge the Best of VMworld 2008 awards. That should be great, there’s a lot of new stuff being announced. I’m in Tonopah, NV right now. If you look at the map the big gray spot south of us is Area 51. We traveled down the Extraterrestrial Highway (NV Highway 375) last night, but all we saw was a closed Little Ale’Inn, some deer, and a bunch of hares. No aliens. 🙁 Today’s agenda: back to Vegas via Death Valley, and the Pioneer Saloon in Jean, NV. Photos to come shortly.

VI 3.5 Update 2 Hardware Status

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I had seen this in the release notes for Virtual Infrastructure 3.5 Update 2: Display of System Health Information – More system health information is displayed in the VI Client for both ESX Server 3.5 and VMware ESX Server 3i. but only today noticed that my Dell PowerEdge 1950s now have health information listed (and that I lost a drive this morning in one of my test machines… DOH). My PowerEdge 2950s do not, though. Hopefully they’ll make the cut next time. I like the trend of integrating all the elements of server management back into the VirtualCenter server. Now if I could just have Update Manager update the BIOS, RAID, management controller, and HBA firmware when it updates ESX …

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Why This VMware Time Bomb Issue is a Big Deal

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Why is this VMware time bomb issue such a big deal? You can’t fix it without breaking some of your environment, in that you have to set the physical hosts’ time back to get it to work. Then the VMs pick up the time change. You can’t uncheck the “Synchronize guest time with host” option from VirtualCenter while a VM is running, basically condemning you to going to each host to uncheck that option, or letting the time get unsynchronized briefly. [kb,kb2].vmware.com had been mostly unavailable all morning, preventing people from actually getting to see the articles on the problem. In my environment, Windows VMs with Tuesday/Wednesday maintenance windows to pick up Microsoft Patch Tuesday updates had problems where the …

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