VMTN Blog

The beta release of VMware Studio 2.0 and using it to create vApps was the topic of this week's podcast. Studio 1.0 came out last year; this beta moves the bar significantly. We also got into why you as a VMware admin should care about vApps - without being too hyperbolic I think it's going to be the organizing paradigm that will change how we think of applications -- from a VM level to something much higher-level and more manageable. Going back to Studio, here's the high-level description:

VMware Studio 2.0 helps configure, build, deploy, customize and maintain vApps and virtual appliances. These solution stacks can be deployed on VMware vSphere 4.0 or in the cloud and can be managed from the VMware Studio web console or from VMware vCenter Server. In this webinar, software vendors, application developers and IT administrators will get an overview of vApps and virtual appliances followed by what's new in Studio 2.0. We will walk you through the entire build process by starting with an application created in Eclipse (via the Eclipse plug-in in Studio) and demonstrating how it can be packaged as either a vApp or virtual appliance in OVF format. The process will also reveal various automated tools available, for creating a clean out-of-box experience, such as specifying exact OS requirements, building an update repository, adding custom management services and adding existing VM builds as input.

As always, listen in via the widget to the right, the mp3, or via iTunes.

More links:

• VMware Studio 2.0 beta page
• VMware Studio 2.0 webinar recorded for your on-demand viewing pleasure from our VMware Coffee Talk Series  with more details and slides
• vApp Developers Blog <-- brand new! We'll be covering vApps, OVF, Studio, and topics related to building and using virtual appliances here. They are already off to a great start -- check out the opening post complete with very nice video of the vSphere OVF deployment wizard in action; and the second post talking about working with OVF from the command line.

Non-Studio topics we discussed:

• VMworld Technology Exchange Developer Day: announcement, more details, registration is open
• Virtualization Security Podcast with Special Guests Karen Hepner and Steve Beaver from vWire, Scott Lowe and Chris Wolf.
• Dave Convery: Dear VMware: Pick a Common (SUPPORTED) Virtual Appliance OS... Please...

A few of the podcast attendees have already weighed in with their reactions - mostly about the significance of using vApps in the enterprise. I wasn't kidding when I used the word 'paradigm' above.

Stu from vinternals.com, who is known to tell it like it is, liked it, he really liked it.

Rich Brambley:  VMware Studio 2.0 and OVF Exports: Blurred Products or Outside The Box Thinking? | VM /ETC.

I’ll outline potential Studio / OVF usage that may be “outside of the box” from the VMware software’s intended purpose. Or is it? You tell me.

vCenter / Deploy from template

The ability to export any VM as an OVF from the VI Client by itself, let alone VMware Studio, opens the door for template deployment in environments without vCenter. Build a VM to desired corporate standards and then export a copy of it to a shared network drive where it can be used as a master image for future deployments on any virtual platform that supports OVF.

With VMware Studio build a multiple VM apllication as a vApp. Configure the web server and the database for example, and before adding any data export the combination as an OVF. Deploy the vApp OVF as a master template as needed.

Sure, vCenter offers so much more automation for this process, but what about for deployment between ESX hosts that are not managed by the same vCenter or don’t share the same storage? ...

Daniel Eason: Virtually Insane?: The Virtual Glue.

By deploying turnkey Virtual Appliances with for example a new SAP ERP Landscape on 10-20 Machines in a period of say 2-3 days rather than 2-3 Machines in 10-20 days clearly shows that current long deployment processes are redced and less people need to be involved on a deployment when using Virtual Appliances alongside side orchestration and groupings such as vApp. The problem however with this is you get people protective on roles and the oldage turf war developing so it is not something that can be just implemented straight away. ...

vApps functionality in vSphere enables organisations to reduce even more manual and people process. It enables you to compile the complete application stack and configure all associated components by one single master definition. Tie this in with some VMware orchestration capability where you could say deploy via API the Database components as part of the VM build and provision the relevant Networking components and it is clear the potential is going to be huge.

For the Canadians hiding among us, happy belated Canada Day. For the USians, happy Fourth. For the rest of the world, keep on working and we'll see you next week.

It was a good week again. Some awesome blog posts of which the following five were my favorites. It seems like it is getting harder to create a top 5 every week. I picked technical and non-technical articles this week. Enjoy,

• Maish Saidel-Keesing - ESX 4.0 running a vSphere Lab - part 1 & 2
  I have a dedicated Blade server for this purpose, and IBM HS21 E542 CPU (Quad) with 2GB of RAM and 150GB HD. Now you might say - and rightfully so - what can you do with only 2gb of RAM?? Well nothing really - that is why I have upped the RAM on the server to 8GB so I can get some testing done. So since this is going to be a test bed for my full migration for the production system, I wanted to get it as close as possible to what my production system will be like.
• Steve Chambers - Stabilizing vSphere
  Gene Kim said once that “virtualization amplifies bad practice”, and this has been seen commonly out there (just today I saw, on Twitter, that a customer changed their SRM password – no change process – and killed their DR environment). Virtual server sprawl, eggs in one basket: there are many examples why if you are bad at IT, you’re going to be really bad at virtualization.
• Rodney Haywood - Attend VMworld 2009
  This morning on the VMTN podcast John Troyer stated it was time for some blogs post in the community on why go to VMworld. Hey, count me in. I do feel that I am qualified to comment here. I am a VMworld Alumni, having attended the last 3 years. For two years it was funded by my employer (thanks guys). One year, because I was in the period of transition between two employers, my wife paid, serious. Don’t forget, I live in Australia so it’ not an inexpensive exercise. I have lived through and succeeded in the task of negotiating with my wife as to why I should invest in taking an overseas trip just to attend VMworld.
• Duncan Epping - VMFS/LUN size?
  A question that pops up on the VMTN Community once every day is what size VMFS datastore should I create? The answer always varies,  one says “500Gb” the other says “1TB”. Now the real answer should be, it depends.
• Scott Lowe - New User’s Guide to Configuring VMware ESX Networking via CLI
  A lot of the content on this site is oriented toward VMware ESX/ESXi users who have a pretty fair amount of experience. As I was working with some customers today, though, I realized that there really isn’t much content on this site for new users. That’s about to change. As the first in a series of posts, here’s some new user information on creating vSwitches and port groups in VMware ESX using the command-line interface (CLI).

Although VMware Studio 2.0 Beta was originally scheduled to be released on Monday the VMware Studio team worked very hard and managed to release it yesterday.

We are pleased to announce that the beta version of VMware Studio 2.0 has been released and is available for download. We look forward to receiving your feedback - issues, feature requests, suggestions for improvement - through the Discussions forum in the VMware Studio 2.0 Beta Program Community.

If you already have a Store account on VMware.com, register for the beta directly.

If you do not have a Store account, please create an account AND join the beta. The VMware Team

Besides several fixes multiple new features have been added:

• Windows Support (32 bit and 64 bit) 2003 & 2008 Server
• Create multi-VM vApp and multi-VM VA
• 64 bit support for SLES 10.2, RHEL 5.2 & 5.3, CentOS 5.2 & 5.3
• Extensible in-guest Management Framework
• OVF 1.0 support
• Eclipse Plugin
• Enable ESX, ESXi, VC, Server 2.0 and Workstation as provisioning engine
• Automatic Dependency Resolution (Static)
• Publish OVF to VC
• Infrastructure enhancements – GUI and Builds
• Studio-created VM as Input

It was one of those weeks again. I had a lot to do, and there is still a lot left to do. I just finished this top 5 and the quality of the articles is again very high. Especially Chad's article, wow... Anyway, start reading and enjoy. This is my gift to all fathers out there.

• Mike Laspina - Automating vSphere ESX4 Host Installations
  The custom VMware kernel incorporates Linux kickstart scripting functionality to invoke automated installations. The script location is defined as part of the Syslinux functionality and is available as a menu at boot time. A control file located on the boot media provides these variable control elements. Depending on the media type Syslinux uses a respective cfg file to implement this function. The various available Syslinux boot methods that I am aware of are USB, CD, DVD, PXE and gPXE. In this blog I will demonstrate an ISO CDROM method to perform the automated boot cycle. Any of the boot methods mentioned will all work and have varying levels of complexity to achieve.
• Chad Sakac - VMware I/O queues, “micro-bursting”, and multipathing
  A shallow queue somewhere in the IO path (or an overflowing port buffer) will cause the I/O to back off.    You need the queues to be deep enough to withstand the bursts – sometimes increasing the queue depth is important.   Now, if the problem isn’t actually the bursts, but the I/O service time not being sufficient for the sustained workload (aka you have a slow, or underconfigured array), increasing the queue depth will help for only a fraction of a second, after which the deeper queue will still fill up, and now you just have increased the latency even more.
• Bouke Groenescheij - Queue Depth and more
  Last few weeks we have had some issues regarding our HDS USP-V. For some reason a SCSI lock locked the whole VMFS and all ESX servers in that cluster were not able to read/write to the VMFS anymore. The LUN was still available, however the VMFS not. So this crashed all the VMs in the cluster. The incident repeated itself after 6 weeks, on another server, other chassis, other switches and so we contacted VMware and HDS to help us in this situation.
• Duncan Epping - VCDX Defense, the blog article
  The last part of the VCDX certification is the defense. In short: you will need to write a design, fill out the application and defend your design during a two to three hour session. Although I can describe it in 30 words it is not as simple as it may sound. First of all your design needs to meet specific requirements. I can’t go in to the details unfortunately but when you receive an invitation you will receive all the prerequisites. Like me, most of you done numerous designs, but keep in mind it needs to be in English and so will your defense need to be. This is an extra barrier for many of the non- native speakers; I know it was for me.
• Rodney Haywood - VMware vShield
  You can think of vShield as providing firewalls inside your ESX hosts. Each host runs one or more vShields which is a VM (provided as an OVF) which acts as a bridge between the real network and your Virtual Machines. These numerous vShield machines are all managed by a central vShield Manager (also provided as an OVF, one per vCenter Server). The vShield creates two zones, one protected and the other unprotected. The traffic enters the protected zone from the unprotected zone. As it crosses the zones the vShield performs traffic analysis, discovery and stateful firewall protection.

If you can answer yes to any of these questions, this contest is for you

• Are you a VMware® customer or a VMware enthusiast and a firm believer in using virtualization to run business-critical applications?
• Do you currently run business-critical applications using VMware technology for improved availability and manageability?
• Are you considering running your business-critical applications on VMware vSphere™ for breakthrough performance and outstanding reliability?
• Should every IT organization use VMware vSphere to deliver business-critical applications as dynamic, cost-efficient, reliable IT services on internal clouds?

Win Big! Just create a 1-3 minute video that shows why VMware provides the best platform for business-critical applications by July 20th.

• Grand Prize: $5000 Cash
• Four $1000 Second Prizes
• One $1000 VMworld Favorite Prize
• All participants will get one free limited edition Run It with VMware T-shirt!

Not a VMware customer? Not running VMware vSphere yet? Or does your organization restrict you from sharing your VMware story with the public? Not to worry!

1. You don’t have to be a VMware customer to participate. If you love VMware technology and want to share why you think VMware vSphere is the best platform for business-critical applications, you can!
2. You don’t have to run VMware vSphere in the datacenter to talk about it. You can base your video on what you’ve read and heard about vSphere, and why you are excited about running business-critical applications on it. 
3. If you’re not allowed to represent your company, that’s okay! There is no requirement for you to share any information about yourself, your organization, or your experience using VMware at your organization. Just be creative in showing why VMware vSphere is the best platform for business-critical applications! 

Submit your entry by July 20th for your chance to win! Read the full guidelines here. U.S. Residents Only. See Terms and Conditions for details.

It was quite a busy week again on Planet V12n. The amount of blog posts published every week over and over again is amazing. What amazes me even more is the quality of the blog posts which makes picking a top 5 harder every single week. This is what I ended up with...

• Chad Sakac / Vaugn Stewart - A “Multivendor Post” to help our mutual NFS customers using VMware (1 , 2)
  The first core difference is that block (iSCSI/FC/FCoE) use an initiator-to-target multipathing model based on MPIO.   The domain of the path choice is from the initiator to the target.   For NAS – the domain of link selection is from one Ethernet MAC to another Ethernet MAC – or one link hop.  this is configured from the host-to-switch, switch-to-host, and NFS server-to-switch and switch to NFS server, and the comparison is shown below (note that I called it “link aggregation”, but more accurately this is either static NIC teaming, or dynamic LACP)
• Rodney Haywood - Nehalem Memory with Catalina
  In order to increase the number of memory sockets without sacrificing memory bus clock speed, the ASIC adds a small amount of latency to the first word of data fetched. Subsequent data words arrive at the full memory bus speed with no additional delay. The first word delay is in the order of 10% but I have heard from some spies that testing shows this is looking like a non-issue. Its especially a non-issue compared to the constant 10% latency hit and 28% drop in bandwidth you would get if you populated the channels in the normal Nehalem way.
• Brian Noris - Securing ESX Service Console
  Ive been doing a fair bit of virtualization security lately and I thought id share a few tid bits on what Ive done and why. If y0u find this useful then check back every couple of days as ill be adding additional steps and verifying if these apply to VI3, Vsphere or both. Most of you who are familiar with ESX will know  the default “Out Of The Box” behaviour restricts the user root from logging in directly via SSH which generally means either root user must authenticate as a standard user and then SU to root or log in directly from the console.
• Eric Sloof - Diskless Boot of ESX4 and ESX4i with PXE and iSCSI
  Since EDA and UDA are still in their beta phase and there aren’t much alternatives available for installing a VMware ESX4 or ESX4i server unattended, I thought “let’s build one myself”. I’m not a Linux guy so I had to create a Windows distribution server. In my search I’ve discovered a great little piece of software called CCBoot. This windows application enables a diskless boot of an ESX4i with iSCSI. Diskless boot makes it possible for ESX server to be operated without a local disk. The 'diskless' server is connected to a VMDK file over a network and boots up the hypervisor from the remotely located VMDK file. CCBoot is the convergence of the rapidly emerging iSCSI protocol with gPXE diskless boot technology. Remote boot over iSCSI, or CCBoot, pushes the iSCSI technology even further, opening the door to the exciting possibility of the diskless computer.
• Dominic Rivera - DRS and anti affinity rules
  An anti-affinity DRS rule is used when you want to keep 2 virtual machines on seperate hosts, usually because they provide a redundant service and locating them on the same host would eliminate that redundancy. Unfortunately an anti-affinity DRS rule can only be created for exactly 2 VMs. As you can see from the table below, once you get to creating anti-affinity rules for sets of VMs larger than 4, the creation of the rules becomes daunting.

A guest post from VMware's Scott Drummonds:

I made a bad call.

About a month and a half ago, I anonymously posted a YouTube video depicting a controversial test of Microsoft’s Hyper-V.  The video was a bit hyperbolic in its dramatization of Hyper-V’s reliability.

Unfortunately, my intention to stir the pot with eye-poking banter has put my credibility and by association VMware’s credibility in question among some of you.  For this I apologize.

I’ve removed the video from YouTube.  I’ve also sent a note of apology to Jeff Woosley at Microsoft.

My focus, and clearly VMware’s focus, is to help our 140,000 plus customers get the most from their technology investments.  This is our commitment.  We will absolutely work our best to live up to the high standard you’ve come to expect from us.  And when we mess up, we’ll be the first to address the mistake head on.

Scott

Scott is @drummonds1974 on Twitter. His blog is Virtual Performance.

VMware :: Forum 2009 :: Online Forum.

Don't miss this opportunity to learn about vSphere™ 4—The Next Generation of VMware's market leading virtualization products!

Come see how companies within different industries like the Public Sector, Education, Healthcare and Technology are simplifying IT and increasing flexibility while cutting IT costs by 50%.

Attend the Online Virtualization Forum on June 9th and 10th,
8:00am–1:00pm PDT. Don't miss this opportunity to:

• Network with VMware product experts, customers, partners and other IT Professionals.
  
• Attend 30-minute presentations and get the latest info on VMware solutions, products and industry trends.
  
• Access real-time information from industry leaders without the hassle or expense of travel.
  
• Create a multi-media resource kit, including white papers, videos and podcasts.

June 9th & 10th, 2009
8:00am – 1:00pm PDT

p.s. If you were following jtroyer or vmware on Twitter, you'd already know about this and other other cool stuff.

Another week another top 5... No long introduction this time, cause I need to get going and do some "real" work. Enjoy:

• Scott Lowe - vSphere Virtual Machine Upgrade Process
  VMware vSphere introduces a new hardware version (version 7), and vSphere also introduces a new paravirtualized network driver (VMXNET3) as well as a new paravirtualized SCSI driver (PVSCSI). To take advantage of these new drivers as well as other new features, you’ll need to upgrade your virtual machines. This process I describe below works really well.
• Duncan Epping - That's why I love blogging
  As a consultant I get a lot of question on vmfs locking and I assumed, with the current understanding I had, that a larger blocksize would be beneficial in terms of performance. I’m no scientist or developer and I rely on the information I find on the internet, manuals, course material and the occasional internal mailinglists… In this case this information wasn’t correct, or better said not updated yet to the changes that vSphere introduced. Luckily for me, and you guys, one of my colleagues jumped in to give us some good insights...
• Steve Kaplan - Don’t Believe Any Numbers You Don’t Make up Yourself
  McDonald's founder Ray Kroc liked to claim, "We take the hamburger more seriously than anyone else". VMware could say the same thing about virtualization. Every page of its Web site educates viewers on different aspects of virtualization, but the term is not even mentioned on Microsoft's home page. Navigating to Microsoft's virtualization section reveals the biggest emphasis to be on price comparisons between Microsoft and VMware. Videos, white papers, blogs, case studies, analyst quotes and even Microsoft's ROI calculator tool underline the cost competition with VMware.
• Christoph Dommermuth - How to use Novell with VMware View
  Since VMware View does only support Microsoft Active Directory Service as directory service, Novell eDirectory users need another way to get their environment working with the VMware virtual desktop infrastructure. First of all you will definitely need an Active Directory to integrate the View Manager with so that the users can logon and get authenticated. To get the users from the eDirectory in sync with the Active Directory you should use the standard Novell tools.
• Eric Siebert - Select VMworld sessions released for general public
  About 2 months ago, John Troyer asked me for recommendations for 10 or so of some of the VMworld 2008 & VMworld Europe 2009 sessions to be released for free to non-attendees. It was hard picking just 10 and I ended up with about 30 of the ones I thought people would enjoy the most. Well it took a while but they just announced that they are now available for free and it’s almost the exact session list that I picked out back then. So head on over to the VMworld website and check them out, there is some great content there. You do need to have a  VMworld account to view these sessions, if you don’t already have one you can get one by registering for free.

All over the world people are upgrading to VMware vSphere. The upgrade procedure of the hypervisor and the management layer is straight forward. If you want to take full advantage however of all the new features and performance improvements your virtual machines will also need to be upgraded. Scott Lowe wrote an excellent article on this topic and I wanted to bring this post to your attention as it's an important part of the upgrade path in my opinion. Please visit the source article for feedback or comments.

Scott Lowe - vSphere Virtual Machine Upgrade Process

Upgrading a VMware Infrastructure 3.x environment to VMware vSphere 4 involves more than just upgrading vCenter Server and upgrading your ESX/ESXi hosts (as if that wasn’t enough). You should also plan on upgrading your virtual machines. VMware vSphere introduces a new hardware version (version 7), and vSphere also introduces a new paravirtualized network driver (VMXNET3) as well as a new paravirtualized SCSI driver (PVSCSI). To take advantage of these new drivers as well as other new features, you’ll need to upgrade your virtual machines. This process I describe below works really well. I’d like to thank Erik Bussink, whose posts on Twitter got me started down this path. Please note that this process will require some downtime. I personally tested this process with both Windows Server 2003 R2 as well as Windows Server 2008; it worked flawlessly with both versions of Windows. (I’ll post a separate article on doing something similar with other operating systems, if it’s even possible.)

1. Record the current IP configuration of the guest operating system. You’ll end up needing to recreate it.
2. Upgrade VMware Tools in the guest operating system. You can do this by right-clicking on the virtual machine and selecting Guest > Install/Upgrade VMware Tools. When prompted, choose to perform an automatic tools upgrade. When the VMware Tools upgrade is complete, the virtual machine will reboot.
3. After the guest operating system reboots and is back up again, shutdown the guest operating system. You can do this by right-clicking on the virtual machine and selecting Power > Shutdown Guest.
4. Upgrade the virtual machine hardware by right-clicking the virtual machine and selecting Upgrade Virtual Hardware.
5. In the virtual machine properties, add a new network adapter of the type VMXNET3 and attach it to the same port group/dvPort group as the first network adapter.
6. Remove the first/original network adapter.
7. Add a new virtual hard disk to the virtual machine. Be sure to attach it to SCSI node 1:x; this will add a second SCSI adapter to the virtual machine. The size of the virtual hard disk is irrelevant.
8. Change the type of the newly-added second SCSI adapter to VMware Paravirtual.
9. Click OK to commit the changes you’ve made to the virtual machine.
10. Power on the virtual machine. When the guest operating system is fully booted, log in and recreate the network configuration you recorded for the guest back in step 1. Windows may report an error that the network configuration is already used by a different adapter, but proceed anyway. Once you’ve finished, shut down the guest operating system again.
11. Edit the virtual machine to remove the second hard disk you just added.
12. While still in the virtual machine properties, change the type of the original SCSI controller to VMware Paravirtual (NOTE: See update below.)
13. Power on the virtual machine. When the guest operating system is fully booted up, log in.
14. Create a new system environment variable named DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES and set the value to 1.
15. Launch Device Manager and from the View menu select Show Hidden Devices.
16. Remove the drivers for the old network adapter and old SCSI adapter. Close Device Manager and you’re done!

If you perform these steps on a template, then you can be assured that all future virtual machines cloned from this template also have the latest paravirtualized drivers installed for maximum performance. UPDATE: Per this VMware KB article, VMware doesn’t support using the PVSCSI adapter for boot devices. That is not to say that it doesn’t work (it does work), but that it is not supported. Thanks to Eddy for pointing that out in the comments!

AMD Pushes Six-core Chips as Upgrade to Shanghai - PC World.

Advanced Micro Devices on Monday announced six-core Opteron chips, which make them the fastest server chips the company has released to date.

Until now, AMD offered only quad-core server processors, with the fastest being Opteron chips code-named Shanghai. The six-core chips, code-named Istanbul, will offer 30 percent faster performance while drawing the same amount of power as Shanghai chips, said Brent Kerby, product marketing manager for AMD's server workstation group. ...

Dell benchmarked the six-core chip and said it provides better application performance -- up to 61 percent in some cases -- compared to quad-core Shanghai chips. "Customers can get improved performance in I/O intensive applications like databases and technical computing without taking up more floor space or power consumption," said Sally Stevens, vice president of platform marketing at Dell.

If you want to dig a little deeper into features, like HT Assist, check out articles from The Register,  AnandTech, and The Tech Report. The nice thing from a buyer's perspective, aside from being a great platform for high-end workloads, is that it's a drop-in replacement for the previous Shanghai parts -- same footprint and socket interface -- so that VMware has already qualified it and OEMs should be experiencing a quick path to certifying their new server models with vSphere.

And, of course, using VMware Enhanced VMotion Compatibility, you can migrate your virtual machines from older AMD boxes to your new servers seamlessly. [via VMblog.com]

This weeks theme on Planet V12n most definitely was VMworld and all the drama surrounding it. It's been discussed over and over so I will not go in to the details, everyone has his own opinion and let's just leave it at that. Technically speaking it was also an exciting week, VMware View 3.1 has been released and a large number of excellent blogs have been published of which the following 5 where my personal favorites:

• Arnim van Lieshout - ESX Memory Management - Part 3
  The ESX kernel scans VM memory pages regularly and generates a hash value for every scanned page. This hash value is then compared to a global hash table which contains entries for all scanned pages. If a match is found, a full comparison of both pages is made to verify that the pages are identical. If the pages are identical, both physical pages (guest) are mapped to the same machine page (host) and the physical pages are marked “Read-Only”. Whenever a VM wants to write to this physical page, a private copy of the machine page is made and the PPN-to-MPN mapping is changed accordingly.
• Tom Howarth - VMware Release View 3.1
  As you are aware I work in the VDI marketspace and utilize a significant about of  VMware View in my solutions.  These solutions are currently based on VMware View 3.0.1,  but can now be based on wait for it (drum roll please mister musician man) VMware View 3.1. So what is the hype , what is new in VMware View 3.1?
• Dave Mishchenko - The official unofficial vSphere Whitebox HCL
  The Whitebox HCL is a list of servers, PCs, motherboards and storage controllers that are not officially supported for use with VMware ESX and ESXi, but have been found to function properly. If you have a system that you'd like to try that isn't on VMware HCL or the Whitebox HCL, you can check here to see if ESXi 4.0 will recognize your storage and network controller.
• Rawlison Riverra - vSphere Lab on VMware Fusion and VMware Workstation
  I know that running ESX in a virtual machine is not new… that kind of thing has been talked about and done all over the web. But lately several people have asked me how to set that up. I guess now that the new vSphere products are on the market, everyone wants to get the most out of their new features. So, here it is… I’m going to share with everyone how I configure my virtualized test environment of vSphere with VMware Fusion.
• Daniel Eason - Siloed DRS Clusters - Would you, do you or will you have to?
  Getting push back when wanting to Virtualise applications which are still under licensing policies that go back to the dark ages is definitely a kick in the teeth to anyone waxing lyrical about Virtualisation, also its very hard for someone who believes in the excellent benefits of cutting edge technology such as VMware that an ISV could be so backwards and cruel. The most common barrier with the licensing model you experience is you can't virtualise something due to the fact you have to license all Physical CPUs and sometimes even the Cores on 32 hosts in your DRS Cluster just to run it on a single VM instance, the cost just makes it impractical and I think any VM Lover would see sense (after punching a wall) in this.

With vSphere going GA on Wednesday/Thursday I had a backlog of around 500 blog articles to read. Luckily I'm a fast reader and I usually filter the news related articles for this top 5 which is a huge portion of Planet V12n. This week one of my personal favorite bloggers, Scott Lowe, is finally part of the top 5... It's the first time because he has been very busy with writing a book on vSphere the last 6 months. Click here to see all the details, and don't forget to pre-order it! I promise, it will be worth it.

• Eric Gray - VMware ESX 4 can even virtualize itself
  You may be pleased to know that the GA build of ESX 4 allows installing ESX 4 as a virtual machine as well as powering on nested virtual machines — VMs running on the virtual ESX host.  The extra tweaks to make it all work are minimal, and I will show you how without even opening up a text editor.
• Steve Chambers - Virtualization Barrier series... (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
  An old mate from my web hosting days has “CAT5″ tattooed on his arm and a head shaped like an RJ-45. Ok, the last bit was made up, but you get the point. He lives and breathes networking, and much like physicists look down upon every other branch of science (but aren’t the mathematicians king?) he has little regard for other branches of IT - especially server administrators, who he often refers to a “Gollums”.
• Scott Lowe - VMware vSphere vDS, VMkernel Ports, and Jumbo Frames
  Since I started working with VMware vSphere (now officially available as of 5/21/2009), I have been evaluating how to replicate the same sort of setup using ESX/ESXi 4.0. For the most part, the configuration of VMkernel ports to use jumbo frames on ESX/ESXi 4.0 is much the same as with previous versions of ESX and ESXi, with one significant exception: the vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS, what I’ll call a dvSwitch). After a fair amount of testing, I’m pleased to present some instructions on how to configure VMkernel ports for jumbo frames on a dvSwitch.
• Greg A. Lato - Quick Guide to vSphere License Portal
  I’ve had a number of clients already ask me about this portal and working with the new License Keys, so I thought I would help the entire VMware community by creating this quick guide to the new portal.  Keep in mind that the change of licensing in vSphere means that the old VI3 licenses that were associated to a pair of CPUs are converted to License Keys that are associated to a single CPU.  This is the reason why you may see your license counts double.
• Jason Boche - vSphere Has Arrived
  With the vSphere NDA embargo lifted a while back for bloggers, there has already been plenty of coverage on most of the new features so I’m not going to go into each of them in great detail here. I’ll just touch on a few things that have caught my attention. There is plenty more to digest on other blogs and of course VMware’s site.

We've been doing this podcast thing for a year, so happy anniversary! Since this was podcast #48, and that doesn't count the podcasts we recorded at VMworld, that means we were here every single week except for one week at American Thanksgiving and two at Christmas, and I think we can all agree that a full year of weekly podcasts lies firmly between crazy and genius, leaning towards crazy. The only way we made this possible on our budget (zero) is to (1) use a free service; (2) have zero preparation and zero post-production (although I try to remember to run the audio files through a little volume leveling); but most importantly (3) get smarter people than myself on the line every week. That last one is the key. From the beginning I wanted to pull together a panel of smart VMware experts for commentary and get them to ask questions to a smart technical guest. That setup, now with an expanded live audience of a few dozen smart chatters and callers every week, has turned this thing into a winner. I want to thank the tireless roundtable panel for making time week after week to call in and my VMware colleagues who have learned to duck into an office when they see me wandering the halls looking for guests.

Stop by every Wednesday at noon Pacific time to join in the fun -- see below for details on next week's podcast on vSphere performance.

This week we were lucky enough to have Chris Gebhardt and Vaughn Stewart from NetApp as our guests, and obviously storage was the topic -- LUN sizing, dedupe, intelligent caching, VMware View, snapshots, SSDs, and more. As always, listen via the widget on the right, the mp3, or via iTunes.

Links:

• The Virtual Storage Guy blog from Vaughn Stewart 
• The Virtualization Effect blog from Chris Gebhardt
• VMware vSphere and the vStorage API from Rick Scherer
• TR3428 - NetApp and VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 Storage (pdf)
• NetApp Rapid Cloning Utility video (YouTube)
• NetApp VMware View Integration video (Vaughn Stewart on YouTube)
• TR3705 - NetApp and VMware VDI Best Practices (pdf)
• NetApp SnapManager for VMware Infrastructure (SMVI) Demo (YouTube)
• NetApp to acquire Data Domain (press release - this dropped as we were finishing up the podcast)

Other things you'll want to listen to:

• Virtual Thoughts (blog | information) New podcast from Edward Haletky (Texiwill) and Tom Howarth. Topic: vSphere Licensing. Tuesday, May 26, 2:30pm EDT / 1930pm BST.
• VMware Communities Roundtable. Scott Drummonds on What's New In vSphere Performance. information. Wednesday, May 27, noon PDT / 3pm EDT / 2000 BST.
•  Virtualization SQL on VMware with Confidence: What You Should Know and How to Get Started (with Rick Scherer from VMwareTips.com; link takes you to free NetApp webinar registration) Thursday, May 28, 11am PDT  / 2pm Eastern / 1900 BST.
• Online Virtualization Forum from VMware. June 9 & 10, 8am-1pm PDT / 11am-4pm EDT / 1600-2100 BST
• The Hypervisor Huddle #1 "an audiocast for IT pros in the know" from the SearchVMware.com crew. Topic: vSphere Licensing,  Hyper-V R2, and Oracle-Sun. (monthly, pre-recorded)
• Virtualization Security Roundtable Podcast. Every other Thursday 11:30am PDT / 2:30pm EDT / 1930 BST
• You do know about VMware's Webcasts on Demand, right? Look for the ones labeled "Technical Track" for the good stuff.