Virtualization

Features I'd Like To See In VMware Virtual Infrastructure

by

I’ve been doing a lot of work lately in my VI3 clusters, namely bringing new machines online. There are a few things that I’d love to see added to the product that would make my life better. Cluster-wide SAN rescan. I’ve been moving machines around in clusters and changing the storage, and going to each machine to rescan sucks. I wrote a script to SSH in to the boxes and run the rescan scripts, but it would be cool if there was a button in VirtualCenter that took care of it for me. Expose more information about the LUNs in VirtualCenter. It’s sometimes difficult to figure out what LUN I want to deallocate. If I could see more information I …

Read More

Use Descriptive Labels in VirtualCenter

by

(Update on January 25, 2011 – I’ve actually decided that using the subnet information in my setup is confusing, as we’ve grown to have VLANs with the same subnets on them, and VLANs with multiple subnets on them. I talk about this a little in my post “Labels Should Only List Properties of That Particular Object.” I don’t believe in revisionist blog history, and I admit that my techniques grow over time as I learn and my environment gets more complex, so I won’t delete/revise this post. Just keep it in mind.) ————- “The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names” – Chinese Proverb Suggestion: Use descriptive labels wherever possible in your VMware VirtualCenter setup. You …

Read More

VMware Consolidation Ratios Aren't A Competition

by

“I just read an article about an IBM shop that is planning a 50:1 virtualization ratio in their VMware environment,” I told two coworkers. “What’s our ratio?” “19:1 across our whole VMware environment.” “Do we plan to get to 50:1?” “No,” I reply. “Why not?” “Well, that’s just not the way we’re built. They went for fewer, larger servers. Some places go for lots of smaller machines. We’re sort of middle-of-the-road with four way and dual quad-core machines. The bigger the building blocks in the environment the more VMs you can put on them. But the more eggs you have in one basket, too.” “Isn’t it easier to manage two huge machines instead of ten smaller ones?” “Often, yes. In …

Read More

ESX "SMB" Edition Would Rock

by

The folks at EMEA TSX had a brainstorming session for ideas for VMware, called “The Next Big Thing.” There were several ideas thrown out there that are good, but I know what I would have voted on: the “ESX SMB Edition.” Hands-down, this would be sweet. A cross between MogileFS and ESX Server would rock. I talk to a lot of people that just cannot justify the price of a SAN-based VI3 implementation. Yeah, SANs are good for lots of things, but it’s a big chunk of change for a small business. Heck, it’s a big chunk of change for a big business, too, and a major source of IT complexity. SANs add major points of failure to anything they’re …

Read More

For Best Results Add Virtualization Slowly

by

Alex over at Virtual Infrastructure 411 linked to an interesting study done by CA which indicates that 44% of server virtualization deployments were failures. This is interesting to me, and timely, too. Today I spoke to another organization with a failing virtualization project, the third so far. The first group that I spoke with was just overwhelmed. They’d gone in head-first, buying blades, storage, everything. They had no experience with any of the gear and were drowning in it, while their managers were just seeing expenses but no savings and freaking out about it. The three IT guys were already way too busy and could not make time to figure any of the new gear out, much less become experts …

Read More

RHEL 5 and VMware VI3 Work Great

by

Red Hat released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 two days ago. I now have it running in my VMware VI3 test environment, and the VMware Tools install perfectly. The VM appears as OS type “Other 2.6.x Linux.” I’m using VMware Tools 41412, don’t know if that matters. If you have differing results let me know.

How Many IPv6 IPs Does It Take To Hose Linux and VMware?

by

I’ve been doing a lot of IPv6 testing lately. My network engineers allocated a /64 to me, which gives me 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 available IPs. My new goal is to use each and every one of those IPs. A few minutes getting my network guys to trunk the right VLANs into my test VMware setup, one “for” loop, “sprintf(“%x”, $i)”, and one system call (“ifconfig eth0 inet6 add”) and I know a few more things: 1) Somewhere around IP number 4,010 I ran into a limit in Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 4’s networking subsystems, or in VMware ESX Server. No more data in or out on any protocol. Smells like a buffer size needs to grow. I expected this. 2) The …

Read More

ESX Server 3.0.1 & VirtualCenter 2.0.1

by

A) Amen. I’ve been waiting for these releases. ESX 3.0 and VC 2.0 have some rough edges, and from the looks of the release notes it’s a lot of rough edges. B) The documentation isn’t super clear about how to upgrade. Though, it isn’t like I read the docs real carefully. 🙂 For VirtualCenter it’s just like any other VC upgrade. Download, update everything, don’t delete your database. For ESX Server you should download the “ESX Server 3.0.1 Upgrade Package from earlier releases of ESX Server 3” option. – Get it to your ESX Server (scp, magic, whatever you like) – “tar xlzf 3.0.1-32039-full.tgz” – “cd 32039/” – “esxupdate update” It’ll automatically reboot the ESX Server, so look out. Hey …

Read More

Tivoli Storage Manager on ESX Server 3.0

by

Okay, I just installed the Tivoli Storage Manager client, version 5.3.4, on my ESX Servers. This is my concise guide to getting it working, because I couldn’t find any documentation describing any of this in any decent order, at least on VMware’s web site. I don’t intend to back my .vmdk files up, just the service console settings and whatnot (I’m doing the VM backups from inside each VM). Obviously that doesn’t stop you from modifying this, I just state it so you know what you’re getting into. 🙂 0. Log into your ESX Server service console via SSH. 1. Install the client. It’ll complain about not having ksh installed. Try using “–nodeps”: rpm -ihv –nodeps TIVsm-API.i386.rpm TIVsm-BA.i386.rpm I don’t …

Read More

+ More Posts +