vmware Archives

How to Change SCSI Controllers on your Linux VM

September 7, 2011 by Bob Plankers

A question from Matt Vogt prompted this, where he wants to go from the BusLogic SCSI controller to the LSI Logic SAS controller. It’s actually a straightforward conversion if you have the right steps. This is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, 4, and 5, but the principle should be the same for everything. It’s basically: snapshot, change config files, change hardware. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, in contrast, appears to have all the LSI Logic, parallel & SAS, drivers, as well as the paravirtual SCSI drivers, so all you need to do is shut the VM down and change the type of SCSI controller you’re using. I always recommend trying this on a test VM before you try …

Official: Revisions to VMware vSphere 5 Licensing

August 3, 2011 by Bob Plankers

It’s official, VMware is changing the vRAM licensing in response to the feedback they’ve received. And, from the sounds of it, lots of feedback. They read every single vRAM post and thread in the Communities, read all the blog posts and comments, read all the feedback that was sent to them through the sales representatives and technical account managers. As they put it to me, most of the feedback was along these lines: It was less about the conversion to vSphere 5 than future growth, and the fact that the business case for future growth was drastically different now [and quite a bit more costly] than under the vSphere 4 licensing model. The new license model “introduced additional hesitation for …

Tips for VMworld US 2011 & Las Vegas

July 28, 2011 by Bob Plankers

As VMworld US 2011 approaches I’ve been thinking about the things I’ve learned about traveling to & in Las Vegas, and things that I wish I’d been told the first time I went to VMworld. You folks probably also have a bunch of good ideas that I’ll miss, please add them in the comments! Transportation: There are multiple ways for a cab to get to your hotel, but the Interstate 215 tunnel is NOT the shortest way. Ever. That’s a classic cab scam and will result in a 30 minute cab ride, when the Strip is 10 minutes away. Explicitly ask to go to your hotel via Tropicana Avenue. Traffic on Las Vegas Boulevard (“the Strip”) at night is insane, …

VMware Scale Up vs. Scale Out: The Big Picture

July 21, 2011 by Bob Plankers

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 …

My Thoughts on Upgrading to vSphere 5

July 19, 2011 by Bob Plankers

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 …

A Look at VMware Licensing & Environment Growth

July 14, 2011 by Bob Plankers

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 …

The Five Stages of VMware Licensing Grief

July 12, 2011 by Bob Plankers

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 …

Dell, SSD, CacheCade, and H700/H800 Controllers

June 1, 2011 by Bob Plankers

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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