Virtualization

lostcreations "Add Port Groups" Plugin Rocks

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I just used the lostcreations “Add Port Groups” plugin to add 15 VLANs to six new ESX servers. Holy crap, that’s slick. Adding port groups is the thing I dread the most about new ESX hosts since it’s typo-prone and generally annoying. This is the sort of thing I want to see built into management consoles like VirtualCenter: cluster configuration options. Beyond adding port groups, it’s rescanning HBAs, or configuring NTP, firewalls, licensing, DNS, advanced settings, everything. If I can do it to one machine I want to be able to do it to ten of them simultaneously. It’d even be nice if I could add a host and tell it to pick up the configuration from the rest of …

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When Version Numbers Are Our Biggest Problems…

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I just read this post over at SearchServerVirtualization.com[0]. All I have to say is that I will rejoice when version numbering is the biggest issue facing us in the virtualization community. I was going to say more[1] but isn’t there some rule that if you can’t say something nice don’t say anything at all? ———— [0] I didn’t want to link to it, but I couldn’t see a way around it. [1] Those that know me should feel free to speculate. 🙂

Memory Overcommitment

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There’s a lot of discussion going on lately about memory overcommitment in virtual environments. All I have to say is that memory overcommitment is great when you have to treat a VM like you’re buying a physical server. When I buy a physical server (or twenty) I often look for the “sweet spots” in pricing. I might know that the app that will run on a server will need 4 GB of RAM, but for $100 more I can get 8 GB and not have to worry about being short on RAM when something changes two years later. Worth it? Yes, and my customers think so, too, because the cost of me adding RAM later is much more than $100. …

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VDI, 1974-style

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The virtualization community, with all their fancy and generally serious talk of things like live migrations, virtual desktops, and thin provisioning, has completely forgotten their emulation roots. “Emulators? Why would we need emulators anymore?” you ask. To play Oregon Trail, of course! You’ll need to snag an Apple II emulator (I’m using AppleWin) and the Oregon Trail disk images. You may want to turn the sound off if you don’t want folks to know what you’re up to. 🙂 I just scored 7824, which might actually be my personal best.[0] Beat that! —————– [0] Took me what, 20-some odd years to finally get good at this thing?

elevator=noop

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I’ve also written about elevator=noop as part of my series on Linux performance tuning. The Linux kernel has various ways of optimizing disk I/O. One method it uses to help speed I/O reorders requests to the disk so that when the head moves across the disk it can service those requests in an orderly, sequential manner, rather than going back and forth a lot. This is known as an “elevator,” since it’s basically what an elevator does, too. An elevator doesn’t drop people off at floor 11, then 2, then 5, then 3. Instead, it drops people off in order: 2, 3, 5, 11. Same with I/O to disks. This approach is great, but the fatal flaw is that it …

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Storage VMotion GUI, Stepping Backwards

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Scott Lowe’s post about the Storage VMotion GUI beat mine by a couple of hours. I don’t even have to post, because he said exactly what I was going to say. Including his comment at the end. What bothers me most about Virtual Infrastructure 3.5 is that overall it is a step backwards. Sure, there are new features, but each new feature has some Achilles heel that makes it hard to use. The RCLI is a major problem, and any feature that relies on it suffers. ESX 3i? Not with the RCLI, and not until it is feature-identical to normal ESX 3.5. Storage VMotion? Neat, but there are two people in my organization that can do a storage migration now, …

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Update Manager, VMotion, and Me

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This morning I posted about some problems I was having with VMotion after starting to use Update Manager to scan and remediate my ESX 3.5 hosts. I owe people an update after publishing a potentially alarmist article like that. 🙂 I’d just like to report that after removing and readding the VMotion virtual switch everything, including scanning and remediation, works fine. I haven’t seen the problem since. In fact, Update Manager is pretty cool, fire & forget patching. I am still hopeful that VMware can diagnose the problem, but at least there appears to be a workaround if you have the same problem as me. It may not even turn out to be an Update Manager thing, maybe something else …

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Update Manager & Loss Of VMotion Capabilities

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When I discovered that there were new ESX 3.5.0 updates this morning I was happy, as I could finally try using Update Manager to patch my hosts. After I scanned my ESX 3.5.0 hosts for updates, though, my environment’s ability to VMotion stopped. Migrations would time out, and the vmkernel log showed network errors when the migration started: Connect to <192.168.10.15>:8000 failed: I/O error I could ping my VMotion interfaces via vmkping, though. The fix, for a lack of something more graceful, appears to be to destroy the virtual switch used for VMotion and recreate it. This is documented in SR#1101801771 and the tech I worked with is going to escalate it to be made into a KB article (and …

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Keep Your VMware Tools Up To Date

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Over the weekend my storage guys conducted an outage on several of our EMC CLARiiON disk arrays, to patch them, change their IP addresses, and fix some issues with our SAN. Just like any other system these disk arrays need maintenance, too. In the past we’ve had serious issues with updates to these arrays, so we treat each one as completely disruptive and shut down the hosts attached to them. While a complete shutdown is annoying, most system administrators don’t mind because it gives them an opportunity to patch and do maintenance. Us VMware guys are no different. While I might be able to use VMotion to work on my environment at any time, this isn’t the same for the …

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A Week With Virtual Infrastructure 3.5

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I upgraded some of my virtual infrastructure to VirtualCenter 2.5 and ESX 3.5 on December 31st, 2007. It is five days later, and this is what I’ve noticed so far: The Virtual Infrastructure Client 2.5 is kinda slow. It reminds me of the early 2.0 clients, which got speedier with each update. I’ve used Storage VMotion a lot, with great success. Very cool feature, and really the reason I upgraded this soon. My storage guys need to get rid of an array I was sitting on, and instead of coordinating a big move it was just easier to do this. The upgrade process changed the resource limits for many of my VMs, to custom values which were just wrong. This …

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