Virtualization Tips

Memory over commit or Dynamic Memory coming to Hyper-V soon

Brian — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:30:52 +0000

In typical Microsoft fashion they are changing their stance on a very popular feature that Hyper-V could not support yet. Dynamic memory or memory over commit will be coming soon to Hyper-V. You can read the MS release here. It talks about the requests from clients to be able to achieve higher density of VM’s on servers.

Use physical memory as efficiently and dynamically as possible without impacting performance. Customers investing in virtualization hosts are purchasing systems with larger memory configurations (32 GB, 64 GB, 128 GB and more) and want to fully utilize this system asset. At the same time, they’re purchasing this memory to provide superior performance and to avoid paging.
Provide consistent performance and scalability. One frequent comment from virtualization users is that they don’t want a feature with a performance cliff or inconsistent, variable performance. That’s makes it more difficult to manage and increases TCO.

VMware looks to ease your Windows 7 migration with ThinApp 4.5

Brian — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 14:26:09 +0000

With the release of ThinApp 4.5 the wishes of many VMware lovers have been answered. This update provides support for Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2. With this release VMware is providing a Relink utility that will allow you to update existing packages to be able to run on Windows 7. As always VMware recommends that you capture your application on the oldest OS that you plan on using, for many with will be Windows XP.

Relink can be run against existing ThinApp packages in either .exe or .msi format and automatically upgrades them use the latest and greatest version of the ThinApp runtime and package format. Relink accepts wildcard filenames and can work in recursive mode to upgrade all packages located under some parent directory. Relink is very handy if you have packages without associated projects and you want to upgrade them to support Windows 7.

Other new features include faster installing .msi files, support for .msi files as large as 2 GB and the ability to use the system swap file to reduce disk I/O. You can read up on all the rest of the details on the ThinApp Blog.

The week before vsphere: the panic!

mike — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 23:20:29 +0000

Okay, so it’s not really panic. It’s more “I don’t know enough!”. So, maybe panic. Regardless, I wanted to detail my lab environment so folks can realize it’s not retarded complex to get the party started. For my everyday life, anime viewing, and virtualizing, I have a macbook pro (for those inquiring minds, a 13″). VMware fusion is helpful, but it’s not the best to handle the business on a mac laptop. So, I’ve moved things to my lab for managing, and just use fusion for the windows vm for the vsphere client. So, on to the lab!

So this lab I’ve got is somewhat piece meal and on the cheap, so it’s designed to get the job done. Well, it’s not even designed, it’s just how things have rolled out. So, I have an ESXi 3.5 box (DL580 G2 with attached disk cabinet) that runs my vcenter server, sql backend, openfiler server, and a few other odds and ends vm’s. For the real deal, I have two DL360 G4’s that handle the business, so to speak, with esx 4. I need to save up money for a Drobo. So I guess we are taking donations?

Additionally it is my goal to be able to obtain some modern servers so that I can leverage 64bit vm’s in a proper fashion. I’d really like to snag an HP C3000 blade enclosure. Ah, if only I had deeper pockets!

Are you looking for the Best VMware port list

Brian — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 18:52:32 +0000

Everyone has notes and white papers saved that list out ports for the different products from VMware. If you want a quick list that you can refer to I found a great list from the VMware KB site. You can see the port list here. This list covers every thing from Consolidated backup to VMware View.

vSphere standalone eval has no cloning or template options

Brian — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 17:26:58 +0000

I know this might just be me being stupid but I was surprised today to notice that a single ESX 4.0 host in Eval mode does not support Cloning or Templates. I hardly ever work with standalone hosts so it might be common knowledge but it still hit me weird. While in Eval mode every feature is opened up for testing, but I guess VMware feels that cloning is a vCenter feature. All I wanted to do is load in some templates for a client while the rest of the infrastructure is being built and was shocked by the missing option.

So a quick setup of vCenter server in a VM and I was rocking again. So if you ever have a Senior moment like I did today maybe this will help you.

VMware Knowledge Base adds some new features

Brian — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 17:23:17 +0000

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.

VMware Workstation 7.1 Beta is available for download

Brian — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 14:12:24 +0000

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!

Citrix Receiver for Apple Mac has arrived

Brian — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 17:32:14 +0000

You may not even know what Citrix Receiver for the Mac will do for you. But if you do then you are probably pretty happy today. So if you have a Bring your own computer program with Mac users or you would just like a more seamless process to run Windows apps on your Mac. Then this new receiver from Citrix will be worth testing.

So what does Citrix Receiver for Mac do? Well along with Citrix XenApp and Dazzle, you will be able to search for and run all of your favorite Windows apps as if they were locally installed on your Mac. You will be able to select your apps with Dazzle (kind of a iTunes looking enterprise app store), you can then launch your apps from the Applications folder. You can even drag those windows apps to the doc and run them from there.

Guide to choosing raid type on VMware ESX for beginners

Brian — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:57:55 +0000

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.

VCP Studyin’ and on to the next book

mike — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 23:38:30 +0000

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.