Virtualization

Sometimes computers are counterintuitive. One great case continues to be why a virtual machine with two vCPUs runs more slowly than a virtual machine with one vCPU. Think of virtualization like a movie. A movie is a series of individual frames, but played back the motion looks continuous. It’s the same way with virtual machines. A physical CPU can only run one thing at a time, which means that only one virtual machine can run at a time. So the hypervisor “shares” a CPU by cutting up the CPU time into chunks. Each virtual machine gets a certain chunk to do its thing, and if it gets chunks of CPU often enough it’s like the movie: it seems like the …

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Hmm, just read a post over at virtualization.info about how the latest VMware VirtualCenter build numbers don’t match the web site. I guess I didn’t notice that the web site says build 84782 but my client reports 84767. Yet another detail that didn’t get attended to. It’s always the details that make life miserable. I was talking to another VMware customer the other day who was telling me that they were waiting for Update 1 to come out before they migrated from VI 3.0. At the time I thought that was prudent, but with reports of Update 1 problems on top of this build issue I’d advise anybody running a stable VI 3.0 environment just to stay there.

I made time to apply VMware VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 1 to my test environment. Worked great but it did require a reboot of the VC host at the end. Older VC clients seem to connect just fine to the newer server software, but I upgraded mine anyhow just out of habit. Once that was done I used Update Manager to apply the ESX 3.5 Update 1 patches to my test ESX hosts. The process seems to be getting smoother, as it successfully moved through my test cluster and patched everything. Took a while but it was fire & forget. Overall, looks good so far.

I’ve have a couple of updates for my post about Dell’s SUU 5.4.0 and ESX 3.5. First, “suu -c” will tell you what the updates you need are, but “suu -u” won’t actually apply them. Instead you get an error. While you might think “that sucks!” it’s actually fine, because… It looks like some Dell updates for older servers cannot be applied to a system that’s been up & operational for a long time without a reboot. For me, BIOS updates would complain about not enough contiguous RAM, and RAID controller updates caused ESX to panic with a pink debugger screen of death. A reboot prior to the firmware updates appears to prevent problems. My test environment is two Dell …

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What, did everybody go to sleep?[0] You should be up patching! ESX 3.5 Update 1 and VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 1 are out! Looks like ESX 3i gets HA capabilities, and everything gets support for 10G Ethernet, support for Microsoft Clustering Services, and a general update of backup agent, guest OS, and management agent support. ESX is 5429 builds newer and VirtualCenter is 20590 builds newer, so I’m guessing at least a couple bugfixes made it in, too. Awesome! —————————- [0] If you are sleeping, good for you. Me, I’m a late night guy, though probably not much longer after the last two glasses of that Washington Cabernet I opened last night. Mmm.

I just read Scott Lowe’s post about VMware Workstation 6.5 having Unity, the seamless windowing technology. This is going to be a killer feature for a lot of people, especially Linux folks. Many enterprise software packages require Internet Explorer, or have a Windows-based client, or have a client that requires a specific (read: ancient) version of Windows, IE, or both. It sucks being locked into a certain OS for everything just because of one application. A way around that is very welcome, and I’ve been envious of the Macintosh folks for some time now because of it. I guess I’m going to have to fire up a copy of the beta now, given my piqued interest. I see a desktop …

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With the arrival of a few more physical hosts for my VMware clusters I’ve been on a quest to automate the patching and maintenance of my servers’ firmware. I noticed a few days ago that QLogic has a version of their standalone SANsurfer HBA tool, scli, for VMware ESX 3.5. This is nice because it means I can script both firmware updates and HBA parameter settings, guaranteeing that they are identical among all my hosts and making it easy to update when necessary. For example, my storage vendor recommends certain parameters for my QLE2462 HBAs, which I can script as: /opt/QLogic_Corporation/SANsurferCLI/scli -n 0 FR 2048 RD 5 HL 0 HD 125 CO 1 EF 0 ET 256 ML 256 FL …

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If you’re a Dell sort of person you’ll be happy to know that version 5.4.0 of the Dell OpenManage Server Update Utility DVD works under VMware ESX 3.5. Older versions didn’t work, which made firmware management more difficult. I don’t currently run the OpenManage suite of tools[0]. Instead, I copy the SUU DVD contents to an NFS share, and I have a shell script which handles the mounting & unmounting, and updating my servers. I’m glad that the whole process works on ESX now, too. ————- [0] I might, in the future, especially as things like ESX 3i remove the OS.