virtualization

Happy Birthday John Troyer!

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As I’ve gone deeper and deeper into social media it’s been interesting to watch how large companies get involved. Most just assign their public relations people to it, but VMware did something different a few years ago: they put technical people on it. More than that, they put curious, smart, well-spoken, deeply technical people on it, people who want to get involved, have great BS detectors, and are knee-deep in it with the community. And while there are many people that work as part of the VMware Communities group, for many of us we have one person we look to for almost everything: John Troyer. I met John in person at VMworld 2007, him having added my fledgling blog to …

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VMware Scale Up vs. Scale Out: The Big Picture

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Duncan Epping and I were kicking around the whole scale up vs. scale out argument two nights ago on Twitter, which culminated in Duncan’s excellent post on the topic. Aaron Delp also posted some numbers (and a unicorn) where he also adds the consideration for Microsoft licensing. As a Linux guy I hadn’t thought about that style of Microsoft license, and I like that a lot. While Mr. Epping was crunching numbers, so was I. I am firmly of the belief that scaling up is a better idea, because physical infrastructure and its management is not free. It isn’t cheap, either. You need to consider a lot of different things, including storage connectivity, network connectivity, KVM, power, and cooling. You can …

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My Thoughts on Upgrading to vSphere 5

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about upgrading to vSphere 5, mainly the questions of when and how I’d like to get it done. During the launch on July 12th there was a lot of talk about how many QA hours went into vSphere 5 (2 million+). That’s good news. We had some serious problems with vSphere 4 when we deployed it, bugs all over the place, vCenter crashing every couple of days, etc. VMware support wasn’t super helpful in fixing the problems because they didn’t have much experience, and they were unwilling or unable to get Engineering involved. As a result I took a lot of crap from my coworkers about my decision to upgrade things so quickly. To …

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A Look at VMware Licensing & Environment Growth

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My previous post on VMware licensing changes focused mainly on the question of “will I be able to upgrade my current setup to vSphere 5?” I concluded yes, easily, and if you would like to see how I did it I encourage you to go read the post. It’s pretty obvious that futures will change, though. I’ve always subscribed to the “fewer bigger machines” theory, to which I owe a lot to Steve Chambers. Some of his writings espoused the idea that most IT failures are human error, to which I agree. Coupled with that is the idea that the cost of a server isn’t in the price, it’s in the management of it. So why have more machines, more …

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The Five Stages of VMware Licensing Grief

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Update 8/3/2011: VMware announced updated licensing terms (link is to my post on the matter). As part of the vSphere 5 & Cloud Infrastructure Suite announcements today VMware announced a new licensing model. And, as expected, people are having a fit. A few of us were briefed on this new model last week, and I’ve got a four-day head start on the denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance that seems to follow this change. Let me work through it with numbers from my environment, as an IT professional, in a professional way. Hopefully this will let some people pass from the anger stage to bargaining (perhaps with their VMware sales representatives) and on to acceptance. Before I start, I do …

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Why "Bring Your Own Device" Is Seriously Flawed

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I was reading Larry Dignan’s ZDNet article (link at the end) on the security implications of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), and thought I’d take it a bit further. For a while now I’ve been thinking that BYOD has some serious issues in general, and is specifically a symptom of the ongoing war between risk-averse IT and personal productivity in the enterprise. 1. A company still has to provide computing equipment to everybody who doesn’t BYOD. Lots of people aren’t going to bring their own device, because they don’t have one, or aren’t paid enough to buy one. As such, a company is going to have to provide them one anyhow. 2. Everybody is going to buy all sorts of …

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Dell, SSD, CacheCade, and H700/H800 Controllers

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Dell’s announcement last week that their rebranded LSI RAID controllers, the H700 & H800, now have the ability to use certain local SSD disks as a read cache tier. This is the “CacheCade” technology LSI has offered since September 2010, and looks functionally similar to technologies like NetApp’s FlashCache, where SSD maintains a copy of “hot” blocks on the fast storage. There are some limitations to it, namely that it will require the H700/H800 models with 1 GB of NVRAM on them, and comes as part of a certain firmware level. The feature will also only work with certain SSDs from Dell, so you can’t plan to just cram a cheap Intel X-25 in there (which is unfortunate, in my …

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UNIX Utility of the Day: watch

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Not a lot of people know about the ‘watch’ command, part of the standard complement of GNU tools available on most Linux distributions, as well as many Linux-like OSes such as VMware ESX and the VMware vMA. Simply put, it runs a command at a specific interval for you. So if you want to continually see the number of httpd processes running on a host you could use: watch ‘ps -ef | grep httpd | wc -l” Or maybe you want to watch the temperature on a remote physical host using IPMI. The -n flag changes the number of seconds between the commands: watch -n 60 -d ‘ipmitool -I lan -U username -P password -H host-bmc.address sdr type “Temperature”‘ The …

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VMware Fault Tolerance, Determinism, and SMP

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We’re all at least roughly familiar with Fault Tolerance, a feature VMware added to vSphere 4 to establish a mirrored VM on a secondary host. It’s kind of like RAID 1 for VMs. To do this, Fault Tolerance records the inputs to a primary VM, and then replays it on the secondary VM to achieve the same results. There are two important and somewhat subtle points here that help us understand why Fault Tolerance is limited to one CPU. First, the process records the inputs, not the state of the PC after the inputs happen. If you moved the mouse on the primary it moves the mouse on the secondary VM in exactly the same fashion. If you ping the …

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Why Internet Explorer 9's Power Consumption Matters

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Microsoft blogged about how they worked to reduce the power consumption for Internet Explorer 9: Power consumption is an important consideration in building a modern browser and one objective of Internet Explorer 9 is to responsibly lead the industry in power requirements. The more efficiently a browser uses power the longer the battery will last in a mobile device, the lower the electricity costs, and the smaller the environment impact. While power might seem like a minor concern, with nearly two billion people now using the Internet the worldwide implications of browser power consumption are significant. As a virtualization guy I watch power consumption & battery life work closely. Almost universally, their work to extend battery life also means lower utilization …

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