Posted by Brian on Mar 15, 2010 in VMware | View Comments
The web team at VMware added a few new features to the KB area. You will now have the options to add to your Google buzz or tweet feeds with the standard social buttons found on most sites. My favorite new feature would be the ability to search by KB article ID number. Other new features include the ability to subscribe to the articles RSS feed for future updates. Probably the most important new feature is the link to request new product features. I know these are not Earth shaking features but they are nice options. See the new release from VMware here.
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Posted by Brian on Mar 15, 2010 in VMware, Workstation | View Comments
The brilliant Workstation team over at VMware continues to push ahead. They have made version 7.1 available for Beta testing and can be downloaded here. The new release offers updated Open GL support, 8 Way SMP and several other new features and a truck load of minor improvements. See a list of new features below.
- OpenGL 2.1 support for Windows 7 and Vista guests: The addition of hardware accelerated OpenGL 2.1 support to the WDDM driver enables many more graphics applications to run inside of your virtual machines.
- Improved graphics performance: Significant enhancements have been made to the VMware WDDM driver that have produced benchmark results that are up to 80% faster. The updated driver also produces smoother video playback and addresses many reported rendering issues. Of course games run better as well!
- 8-way SMP support plus virtual disks up to 2TB in size: The virtual hardware continues to become more powerful to meet the needs of Workstation customers who are running server class applications.
- OVF 1.0 support: Including the OVF Tool with this release enables users to easily import or export virtual machines and vApps and move them to vSphere or up into the cloud.
- Direct Launch: Blur the distinction between running native and virtual applications by launching an application installed in a virtual machine directly from the start menu or taskbar of the host system.
- Automatic software updates: These VMware applications can now detect when a new version is released and are able to update at the click of a button.
- Fedora 12 virtual machines: We are excited about finally offering support for running one of the most popular Linux distributions on the planet!
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Posted by Brian on Mar 9, 2010 in VMware | View Comments
For newer admins or those without a storage background, this is a common question that I hear often. What type of RAID should I use for my data stores to host Virtual Machines. This is not meant to be a high level storage best practice document. I’m just covering some basic details that should help new admins and SMB customers.
First thing you need to do is do some research on what type of servers you will be Virtualizing and what their IO needs might be. The main reasons for choosing different RAID levels will be performance and redundancy. Most people tend to lean towards RAID 5 which provides good performance with a high level of redundancy. See the chart below for some more details. You can also review some details from VMware here.
Summary of the different RAID types
| Type |
RAID 0 |
RAID 1 |
RAID 1+0 |
RAID 5 |
| Method |
Striping |
Mirroring |
Mirror and striping |
Stripe with Parity |
| Description |
The data is striped across all the disks in the set. Not true RAID because it is not redundant. |
Exact copies of the data are kept across paired disks or disk sets. |
A striped array whose segments are a mirror set. Not to be confused with 0+1 |
The data is striped across all the disks in the RAID set, along with the parity information needed to reconstruct the data in case of disk failure. |
| Performance |
Good. All IO is spread and no parity overhead |
Twice the read rate but writes occur twice |
Combines speed efficiency of the RAID 0 (stripe set) with a fault tolerance of RAID 1 (mirror). |
High read and medium write performance. A good balance of performance and availability. |
| Typical use |
Data you can afford to loose, such a pre-production, image/video editing. |
Data requiring high availability, such as accounting or payroll. |
Transactional type data such as database logs. |
File and application servers. Typically everything that does not have a specific requirement. |
| Parity Calculation |
None |
None |
None |
Yes |
| Redundancy |
None |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Minimum Disks |
2 |
2 |
4 |
3 |
| Storage Overhead |
0% |
100% |
100% |
Capacity of one disk in the set. 33% for a 3 disk set. |
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Posted by mike on Mar 7, 2010 in VMware | View Comments
Welp I finished up the two books I set out to read initially today. I’m moving on to the last VI3 book I’ve got, then it’s on to the Vsphere books. I’ve also got a copy of the Train Signal Vsphere dvds to peruse, which sounds like they are quite good. I’m going to, for good luck, eat a burger at Boston Blackie’s on the Monday evening I get in to Chicago. It’s on the walk from the train station to the la quinta where I am staying. I hear great things about such tasty bovine delicacies.
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Posted by Brian on Mar 4, 2010 in Featured, Performance, Tools, Troubleshooting, VMware | View Comments
By now everyone should know that esxtop is a great tool that you can use to find out what might be causing performance issues on your ESX host. I don’t plan on writing a post on how to use esxtop. You can refer to Duncan’s ESXtop post for details on thresholds or to VMwares esxtop bible for good base information.
This post is more of a starting point on what ESXplot is and how to install and use. By now most of you should know that ESXplot was born out of the mind of Geoff White of VMware. Geoff is a coworker of Scott Drummonds the well known ESX performance expert. Esxplot is a GUI application that lets you explore the data collected by esxtop in batch mode. The program takes a single command line argument which is the esxtop batch mode output file.
Why would you want to use esxplot? Well in the past your options to examine these files were to use Excel or Perfmon. Both options were very slow, sometimes taking hours to import the file before viewing. With esxplot your dump file will open within seconds usually. For more details you can read Scott’s post on version 1.0.
If you are using Windows to view your files you have 2 options. You can use the Windows binary file or run the python script. If you wish to run the python script you will need the following applications installed.
Python 2.6 or higher but not Python 3.x – Download
wxPython – Download
NumPy is also needed – Download
Once installed the application is very easy to use. First thing to do in capture some data from esxtop in batch mode using the command below. Then copy the file over to your workstation that you will run esxplot on. Open the app and the File ->Import->Dataset option from the menu to view your file. Then from the lower left section that will list your Hosts name open the tree to view all the captured values.
esxtop -b -d 2 -n 100> esxtopcapturefile.csv
You can download esxplot from here.
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Posted by mike on Mar 3, 2010 in VMware | View Comments
I’m scheduled for my class at the Microtek facility in Chicago for a March 23rd – 26th class. I’m taking the train down as parking is 36 bucks a day, ouch! I’ve been working on preparing for the class by reading 4 books (mostly because I had them already). The first two are these (oldies but goodies):
Now, I know, I am taking the Vsphere class, but I’ve got the quick start guide that I’ll be devouring shortly. In these posts, I’ll also talk about the lab environment I have built in the spare room in my apartment (which warms up a cozy 8 degrees when the servers are on). Plus I’ll be sure to document my experience with the class and my (fingers crossed) eventual success at the certification test. Then I need to get a job with a larger VM implementation 
- Mike
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