VMTN Blog

It was very tough to pick a top 5 this time as most posts this week were about vSphere Update 1 and View 4. But I did manage to find 5 excellent articles again. Make sure you read them:

• Scott Sauer - More Bang for Your Buck with PVSCSI (Part 1)
  So let’s first find out if it’s all that.  We need to do some testing to validate the hype.  I created two virtual machines, one with the traditional LSI Logic SCSI driver, and one with the new PVSCSI driver.  The host is the same for each VM, 4 socket Intel Xeon system with 64 GB of RAM, connected to EMC Clariion CX3-80 storage.  The Raid configuration is a 4+1 RAID 5 set (10K spindles), with the default Clariion Active/Passive MRU setup (No PPVE).  Each VM has 2 vCPU’s and 4 GB of RAM and both are running 32 bit Microsoft Windows 2003 R2.  Both Virtual Machines data disks were formatted using diskpart and the tracks were correctly aligned.  Anti-virus real time scanning was disabled on both systems.  This test is meant to get as close as possible to a standard configuration that we can benchmark from.
• Arnim van Lieshout - Geographically dispersed cluster design
  Let’s take it back one step and have a look at an active-passive setup. These setups have some sort of storage replication in place. The most common design I encounter is showed in figure 1. In the main datacenter there’s an ESX cluster with some sort of SAN based replication/mirroring to a second datacenter. In the second datacenter there is a passive ESX cluster available to start-up the virtual servers in case of disaster. Let’s use this setup as a starting point and turn this active-passive into an active-active setup.
• Andre Leibovici - Your Organization’s Desktop Virtualization Project – Part 3
  At the time this solution was designed, the numbers of users per CPU core could range from 3.8 to 4.2, however for most VDI deployments using new processors (Intel Nehalem 5500 and AMD Phenom II) this number can be around 6.0 per CPU core, allowing up to 100 virtual desktop machines in a single dual-quad server.
• Scott Drummonds - Another Day, Another Misconfigured Storage
  You will have to size your storage to peak, to average, or somewhere in between. If you size to the average, you are counting on the peaks occurring at different times. If you are wrong, when two workloads peak simultaneously, a bottleneck will form at the array. Also note that sizing to the average in this case (350 IOPS) is insufficient for VM C’s peak of 400 IOPS. You could size to the aggregate peak of 1200 IOPS but unless all of the virtual machines peaked at once the workloads would never consume the available bandwidth. All you can do in this case is make a best guess and modify later, as needed. I often suggest that a good start is one third of the way from average to peak which equals 633 IOPS in this case. If we assume 150 IOPS per spindle, that means five spindles for this VMFS volume.
• Luc Dekens - Scripts for Yellow Bricks’ advise: Thin Provisioning alarm & eagerZeroedThick
  This script will convert an existing thick VMDK to eagerZeroedThick. As you can read in Duncan’s blog entry there is a serious performance improvement to be obtained by doing this. Note that the guest needs to be powered off to be able to do the conversion ! This is in fact the case for most of the VirtualDiskManager methods. See also my Thick to Thin with PowerCLI and the SDK entry.

It was a normal week again. No exciting announcements just business as usual. Luckily there are always bloggers who publish articles with refreshing views, new technical details or old technical details overhauled. It wasn't difficult to pick this weeks top-5, each article I selected stands out for a specific reason, read them and you know what I mean:

• Frank Denneman - NFS and IP-HASH loadbalancing
  The result of this calculation is 1 (one) The VMkernel chooses the second uplink because it has the same binary representation of the Hash. Hereby balancing outbound NFS traffic across the two uplinks. Using IP-Hash to load-balance is a excellent choice, but you do need to fulfill certain technical requirements to get it supported by VMware and plan your IP-address scheme accordingly to get the most out of this load-balancing Policy.
• Steve Chambers - The end is nigh for Protocol Passionistas
  In the IT world you meet professionals (small p) who have grasped hold of technologies and defend them like their (professional) life depended on it. You don’t have to look far for this in virtualization with VDI desktop protocols (ICA vs. RDP vs. PCoIP etc) or storage protocols (NFS vs. iSCSI vs. FC). Just walk around any data center with one of these professionals and ask them “Why did you choose ” and it’s like you are asking why they chose their wife, like there’s some kind of inferred criticism, like questions and inquisitiveness are bad. Why is this? When the defensive attitude is related to protocols, I negatively refer to these professionals as Protocol Passionistas.
• Jason Boche - Tame Electrical and Heating Costs with CPU Power Management
  A casual Twitter tweet about my power savings through the use of VMware Distributed Power Management (DPM) found its way to VMware Senior Product Manager for DPM, Ulana Legedza, and Andrei Dorofeev. Ulana was interested in learning more about my situation. I explained how VMware DPM had evaluated workloads between two clustered vSphere hosts in my home lab, and proceeded to shut down one of the hosts for most of the month of October, saving me more than $50 on my energy bill. Ulana and Andrei took the conversation to the next level and asked me if I was using vSphere’s Advanced CPU Power Management feature (See vSphere Resource Management Guide page 22). I was not, in fact I was unaware of its existence. Power Management is a new feature in ESX(i)4 available to processors supporting Enhanced Intel SpeedStep or Enhanced AMD PowerNow! power management technologies.
• Maish Saidel-Keesing - Patching your ESXi Host – Without vCenter
  VMware Update Manager is the Enterprise tool for Patching your ESX Hosts and for some also the tool used to patch your Windows / Linux Guests as well. This is all fine and dandy, but what is you do not have all of your ESXi hosts connected to your vCenter? Why would you so that – you may ask? Well in my environment, we have several labs that are running their Environment on a ESXi Whitebox,with the free ESXi License.
  
• Simon Long - Testing Network throughput between VMware ESX Hosts
  Have you ever wanted to check your Network throughput between your ESX Hosts? or even between VM’s? Well I needed to do this, and I couldn’t find any straight forward how-to’s. Having been pointed in the direction of a simple application called IPerf by Simon Gallagher I opted to use the Windows version. I’m not great with Linux, and as this is an open source application, documentation is a little hard to come by. So for me, this post is also to remind me how on IPerf works should i need to use it again.
  

It was an exciting week this week. For some the VCE announcement was not a real surprise for many it seemed to be. Like always some were skeptical and others were enthusiastic about this new initiative. The first post on this Top 5 covers every single aspect, keep in mind that Chad is an EMC employee. I can also recommend the articles by Chuck Hollis on this topic but as he is not part of PlanetV12n he did not make the top 5:

• Chad Sakac - VCE Coverage: Post 1, Post 2, Post 3, Post 4, Post 5, Post 6
  Let’s focus on the “Vblock” management layer. To restate the challenge – the goal is to have a thing that makes utility-like management of a Vblock (or more importantly a series of them), including server + LAN/SAN network (UCS manager does this well for one UCS system) + storage itself. As with all things in the VMware, Cisco, EMC consortium, we know customers need choice – and any one element is replaceable. The value proposition is that the things we build are so tightly focused, so tightly integrated, that if you are looking at something like this – the integration value is so high it’s nearly irresistible.
• Alan Renouf - Virtu-Al VESI & PowerGUI PowerPack & vCheck v3
  I have been teasing people on twitter for a week or so now and have just uploaded my PowerPack to the PowerGUI site, you can download it here. This is a first attempt at providing most of my scripts in one PowerPack and adding to the already great management that VESI and PowerGUI give you.
• Andre Leibovic - Your Organization’s Desktop Virtualization Project – Part 1 & Part 2
  I would anticipate that when your CAPEX is calculated for the next 5 years after the adoption of desktop virtualization your CIO and CEO will not be very impressed only with the numbers, especially if you have incorporated acquisition of Thin Clients to your CAPEX. If you are looking for a justification to adopt desktop virtualization you should focus on your OPEX and cost savings coming from Lower Operating Cost/TCO, Power and Cooling Energy Savings and increased seat utilization, when applicable.
• Mike Laverick - Virtual Compute Environment - VMware, Cisco and EMC Coalition
  So here’s my attempt. It seems the case that whether you like or not - we are creeping steadily away from a best-of-breeds approach to building out datacenters. Everyone yaks endless about the commoditization of IT - and it’s happening right before our eyes. Each of the major OEMs - HP, IBM, Dell have been for sometime junking their valued partner relationships in effort to seal their customers into a one-stop solution. Of course, IBM are probably the company that’s most famous/notorious for this approach. In recent years, HP have been steadily improving their HP ProCurve stuff to the degree that they no longer feel the need to promote/resell Cisco switching gear. To me the VCE announcement amounts to 4th OEM provider coming along to this party. So in short while you will be able to CHOOSE which OEM to shackle yourself too. This choice will be limited to the “Gang of Four”.
• Duncan Epping - How to avoid HA slot sizing issues with reservations
  When you select a specific percentage that percentage of the total amount of resources will stay unused for HA purposes. First of all VMware HA will add up all available resources to see how much it has available. Then VMware HA will calculate how much resources are currently consumed by adding up all reservations of both memory and cpu for powered on virtual machines. For those machine that do not have a reservation a default of 256Mhz will be used for CPU and a default of 0MB+memory overhead will be used for Memory.

This was probably one of the toughest Top-5's to write as I had the week off this week. I basically had to catch-up with a whole week of Planet V12n. One of the most annoying things about it is that half of the blogs on PlanetV12n enabled "content summary only". Yes I know you will have a couple of extra visits, but isn't blogging about getting people to read your content instead of being "numbers"(visits) focused? Now that I got that off my chest lets move on to what this article is about. It's about the 5 top articles this week:

• Vaugn Stewart - VCE-101 Thin Provisioning Part 1 – The Basics & VCE-101 Thin Provisioning Part 2 – Going Beyond
  Like the thick format, thin VMDKs are not formatted at the time of deployment. This also means that data that needs to be written must pause while the blocks required to store the data are formatted. The formatting operation only occurs on demand at anytime an area of the virtual disk, which has never been written to, is required to store data.
• Chad Sakac - Solid State Disk will change the storage world…
  But surely, if you were looking for performance, you wouldn’t use the SATA disk, right? You would probably use a 15K RPM FC disk. Those cost about $1000. They do about 200 random write IOPs. So, you would need 20 of them to do what that $115 SSD could do. That’s 0.2 IOps per dollar – or 170x more expensive than the SSD on a IOps/$ basis. Oh, you think SAS 15K drives are a better deal? They are – than FC disks. A 15K SAS disk on Pricewatch costs about $210, and they also do about 200 IOps. that’s 0.95 IOps per dollar – or 37x more expense than the SSD on a IOps/$ basis.
• Luc Dekens - dvSwitch scripting – Part 4 – NIC teaming
  The double Service Consoles and vmKernel connection might look confusing at first. But when you select one these connections, the vSphere client will show you to which uplink a specific connection is going. To increase the availability of the dvSwitch, I will show how to add two pNics and how to activate and configure NIC Teaming. When I created the dvSwitch I configured it for two uplink ports (per host). Since I’m adding two pNics, I will first have to change the maximum number of dvUplink ports.
• Gabrie van Zanten - Design tips for VMware vSphere 4
  Recently at the Belgium VMUG I gave a presentation in which I covered some design tips for VMware vSphere 4. I talked about some business decisions that, how boring they may seem, are crucial for your design. I covered some security requirements you should check with the security department of the organisation and of course advised good capacity planning which also is very important for your design. What the average geek found most interesting where topics like: “What size of ESX host will you buy?”, “How to run vCenter in a VM”, “VMFS best practises”, “Understanding queue depth and lun size” and more….
• Simon Gallagher - iSCSI LUN is very slow/no longer visible from vSphere host
  Due to too many SCSI reservation conflicts, so hopefully it wasn’t looking like corruption but a locked-out disk – a quick Google turned up this KB article – which reminded me that SATA disks can only do so much :) Multiple reboots of hosts and the OpenFiler hadn’t cleared this situation – so I had to use vmkfstools to reset the locks and get my LUN back, these are the steps I took.. You need to find the disk ID to pass to the vmkfstools –L targetreset command, to do this from the command line look under /vmfs/devices/disks

Compared to the weeks before this week I had an easy week. A design review and some pre-sales related work, it is something else for a change. Something else that's new and exciting; I started working with John Arrasjid and Steve Kaplan on revising a book. It's not going to be a deep technical book, but it will focus more an introduction to virtualization. More on this later. It's top 5 time again, here we go:

• Scott Sauer - Get Thin Provisioning working for you in vSphere
  So now that we have some of the basics out of the way, I wanted to share my thoughts on thin provisioning.  Like many organizations, we get requests from our customers that err on the side of caution.  They want to plan for the worse case and ensure that their project and/or application isn’t setup for failure.  I don’t blame them really, I do it myself all the time when I make coffee at home.  I always end up making more coffee than I typically drink, just in case I might need that extra charge.  The best way to do that is pad it, request more than what you might really need, just in case something comes up down the road.  Virtual machine disk storage in some cases fits this same profile.  If my coffee maker granted me access to hot coffee on demand, I would stop making extra coffee.  Thin disks can give your end users that capacity on demand so you can gain control of the padding effect that typically takes place in most corporate organizations.
• Rich Brambley - Thoughts and Images of vCloud Express
  When vCloud Express was announced along with the vCloud API at VMworld 2009 in September I decided to sign up and try building VMware virtual machines (VMs) in the Cloud for myself. Being able to provision infrastructure as a service (Iaas) virtually with only a credit card has a certain useful appeal to me, and I wanted to see firsthand exactly what can be done and how much it costs. This post summarizes my experience and touches on Terremark’s various options for building VMware Cloud VMs. I also quickly describe/illustrate the difference in charges for Linux versus Windows Cloud servers. This post contains a lot of screen shots, and at the end I’ll offer some opinions on the usefulness of vCloud Express and where this service might make sense for IT shops.
• Chad Sakac - Cloud Storage - what the hell is EMC building?
  The implications on storage infrastructure of these internal/external cloud models profound. Think of it this way… The vast majority of storage users in enterprises today have a provisioning model where the first step is “tell us whether you want 250GB or 500GB, whether it’s SAN or NAS, and the protection level – then wait a couple weeks as we process the request”. Of course, to fulfill the request, they purchased a wad of storage a year ago. How much did they buy? More than they needed – because god forbid they err with not enough (and in doing that ensure that they err completely in the opposite direction!). And, of course, it’s generally pretty “thickly” provisioned – and even if it is thin, it’s doled out and managed app by app, so the “pools” tend not to be too wide.
• Vaughn Stewart - VCE-101: Oracle On VMware Without Limits
  After a brief hiatus I am very eager to return to the ‘Virtualization Changes Everything’ series, and today’s post is an impromptu addition to our syllabus. Recently fellow VMware vExpert Steve Kaplan of INX published a rather thought provoking post rallying for the acceleration of the transformation to a 100% virtualized datacenter. Steve waxes poetic advocating acquisition decisions spanning compute, storage and network should be driven by their contribution to data center virtualization success and I would encourage everyone to read it.
• Duncan Epping - DRS Deepdive Part 1 and Part 2
  Keep in mind that when you change the “Migration Threshold” the value of the “Target host load standard deviation” will also change. In other words the Migration Threshold dictates how much the cluster can be “imbalanced”. There also appears to be a direct relationship between the amount of hosts in a cluster and the “Target host load standard deviation”. However, I haven’t found any reference to support this observation. (Two host cluster with threshold set to three has a THLSD of 0.2, a three host cluster has a THLSD of 0.163.) As said every 5 minutes DRS will calculate the sum of the resource entitlements of all virtual machines on a single host and divides that number by the capacity of the host: sum(expected VM loads) / (capacity of host)

This week was the last week of the VCDX defenses in EMEA. I loved doing it and wished we had these defense panels every week. We certified three people this week and unfortunately some did not pass the exam. I believe we are up to VCDX 028 right now. For those working towards the VCDX Certification, the next opportunity for the Design Defense is Partner Exchange in Las Vegas. But that is not the topic of this article. This article is all about last weeks Planet V12n blog articles. We had numerous excellent articles again and like always it was tough to pick a top 5. This weeks top 5 contains two "new comers" to the blogosphere, welcome Luc Dekens and Andrew Hald. Enough of the small talk here we go:

• Luc Dekens - Scheduled Tasks – MethodAction
  In the PowerCLI Community there was a recent question on how these Scheduled Tasks can be created from PowerShell (see relocate vm’s from csv file and create schedule task in VC). Being able to create a Scheduled Task for a svMotion for several guests from a PowerShell script, instead of clicking away in the vSphere Client, would be another step on the path of vSphere automation. The current PowerCLI 4 (build 162509) unfortunately has no cmdlets for Scheduled Tasks. But the SDK contains the CreateScheduledTask method that can be used for this purpose. The key parameter to this method is the ScheduledTaskSpec object. In the action property of this object you specify which type of action you want the scheduled task to take. If we want to schedule a Task, we will have to select the MethodAction extension object.
• Andrew Hald - The Commodity Hypervisor
  This morning Dan Kusnetsky posted a blog entry discussing how VMware is "Facing Challengers on all Sides." I have followed Dan's blog for some time now and don't always agree with his conclusions. In this post, he outlines each of the players in the virtualization industry and their angle at dethroning VMware as the "King of Virtual Machine Technology." http://blogs.zdnet.com/virtualization/?p=1383 Dan states that the hypervisor is becoming a commodity. While this may be true in price (Microsoft, Citrix and VMware all offer their hypervisors for free), this is not true for customers and real world virtualization deployments. The hypervisor is not even close to being a commodity yet. The other players would like you to believe that they are on par with VMware, but they are not in the same league. A commodity is defined as "some good for which there is demand, but which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market." Thus all hypervisors would have to provide the same features for the same total cost to be defined as commodities. When comparing the players in the virtualization market, we immediately see that this is not the case.
• Eric Sloof - Massive I/O power increase using EMC PowerPath/VE
  You’re about to enter a world where creating a Virtual Machine hot-clone is done faster than powering it off. My former Capgemini colleagues, Ernst Cozijnsen and John van der Sluis recently implemented EMC PowerPath/VE, here's their story. It took the guys in storage land a long time to deliver.... But finally it's there.... A really great kick-ass plug-in to boost your vSphere 4 storage performance through the roof. In prior versions of ESX the Native Multi Pathing “NMP” plug-in was available for balancing the storage load over different Fiber Channel HBA’s and storage paths to your storage array(s). Beside that it’s not really “Multi Pathing” it had another major disadvantage of being able to stress your storage array in such a way it could crash.
• Eric Siebert - What is virtualization?
  If you work with virtualization for a living, inevitably you’ll be asked what virtualization is. Trying to explain it to someone who doesn’t work with computers can often be challenging, and after you explain it they still may not know what it’s about. So how do you explain it to someone for the first time? I find that using analogies that anyone can relate to is a good way to explain things to people. Before I attempt a virtualization analogy I’ll try explaining it in basic computer terms. Virtualization software, also called a hypervisor, emulates computer hardware allowing multiple operating systems to run on a single physical computer host. Each guest operating system appears to have the host’s processor, memory, and other resources all to itself. The hypervisor, however, is actually controlling the host processor and resources and allocates what is needed to each operating system, making sure that the guest operating systems (called virtual machines) cannot disrupt each other.
• Cody Bunch - A Quick PowerCLI Lesson – Digging for Info (Who Powered Off that VM)
  This gives us an idea about the information we’re looking for, as well as provides us a place to start looking. Let’s dip into the PowerCLI: [vSphere PowerCLI] C:\> $vm = Get-VM | where { $_.Name -eq "Wiki" }
  What this does is set the variable $vm to the object that represents our VM. What is an object? For our use an object is anything in your Virtual Infrastructure, and the properties and methods that belong to it. Take a turtle for example (yes… turtle, hang with me). That turtle will have some properties: breed, gender, length, weight, etc.

It was VCDX Defense week this week in Frimley and there were several panels scheduled. I met some cool people and learned a lot during this week. Next week there are VCDX Defense panels in Munich! If you are working towards VCDX, don't forget that panels normally are only scheduled around VMware Events. This means that there are only a couple times per year you can get certified. Blog wise there were a lot of great posts again this week. It was hard to pick only 5, but I did manage to do so:

• Frank Denneman - Lefthand SAN – Lessons learned
  Blocks will be stored on storage nodes according to replication level. If a LUN is created with the default replication level of 2-way, two authoritative blocks are written at the same time to two different nodes. If a 3-way replication level is configured, blocks are stored on 3 nodes. 4-way = 4 nodes. (Replication cannot exceed the number of nodes in the cluster) SAN IQ will always start to write the next block to the second node containing the previous block.
• Duncan Epping -  Slot sizes & Alan Renouf - HA Slot size information
  Five hosts, each host has 16GB of memory except for one host(esx5) which has recently been added and has 32GB of memory. One of the VMs in this cluster has 4CPUs and  4GB of memory, because there are no reservations set the memory overhead of 325MB is being used to calculate the memory slot sizes. (It’s more restrictive than the CPU slot size.) This results in 50 slots for esx01, esx02, esx03 and esx04. However, esx05 will have 100 slots available. Although this sounds great admission control rules the host out with the most slots as it takes the worst case scenario into account. In other words; end result: 200 slot cluster
• Eric Siebert - New Twitter lists for the top bloggers and VMware/Virtualization people
  Twitter is a great tool for communicating with other virtualization professionals, but trying to find interesting people to follow especially if you are new to Twitter can be time-consuming and difficult. For that reason I put together some Twitter group lists to make following people that are related to VMware virtualization easier. The first list is just from my Top 20 blogger list on my vLaunchpad that was decided by a poll I did months ago, consequently that one was really easy to put together. The second list is the top 100 people to follow that are related to VMware & virtualization, this one wasn’t easy at all to put together. The list started at about 300+ people that was part based on my followers and followings of other popular virtualization bloggers. Once I discovered that TweepML had a limit of 100 people I had to really trim that list down a lot, that wasn’t an easy task, especially the last 20 or so. There were some people I really wanted to keep on there but was forced to remove, the 100 person limit made for some difficult decisions.
• Hany Michael - vSphere 4.0 vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS) - Video Demonstration + Architecture Diagram
  The diagram reflects the exact configuration on the video. I’ve done this intentionally to make it easier and faster for any one new to the vDS to understand the concept and the various configuration aspects. As I mentioned above, due to the very short period of time that I had, I will most probably modify small parts in the diagram to achieve better results. You can come back and check the version number of the diagram to download the latest updates.
• Scott Drummonds - Top Five VROOM! Entries for 2009
  I love VMware’s performance blog, VROOM!  It is our most popular performance communication vehicle and its content is backed by a stellar engineering team with unmatched integrity.  Each article details the nuances of VMware performance and educates on application and platform best practices.  I love all the articles but am always surprised as to which our readers find most popular.  Here is a countdown of the five entries most read in 2009.

If you are interested in learning more about VMware ThinApp --  whether you just got started with application virtualization or you've got a particular app you are packaging -- join us at the VMware ThinApp Lounge. This online event, held the first Tuesday of each month at 9am Pacific time, is a great opportunity to talk to members of the product team and learn more about ThinApp. (Tell your boss it's free consulting if he thinks you should be alphabetizing your TPS reports instead.)

I wanted to get more of an idea of what the ThinApp Lounge was all about, so I sat down with VMware's own Dean Flaming, host of the Lounge, to find out what goes on there. The next Lounge is tomorrow, Tuesday, October 6, at 9am PDT (-7 UCT). Join Dean each month in the Lounge -- and say hi for me!

Q. Who should attend the ThinApp Lounge webinar?
A. Anyone interested in getting an introduction to ThinApp, what it is, how it works, and a demonstration of it.  Questions are welcome!

Q. How long have we been doing the ThinApp Lounge?  Why did we start?
A. VMware has had the ThinApp Lounge since the acquisition of Thinstall and the release of ThinApp.  Originally it was designed as a presentation of a technically specific ThinApp topic with Q&A but was revamped about 4 months ago to become more of an introductory piece to assist both customers and partners, as well as others, in spreading the word on ThinApp.  We started the ThinApp Lounge to give people a means to come find out about ThinApp at a time and place of their choosing without having to interact with additional personnel if they didn’t desire to as we found many IT people like to have the option of scheduling when they wish to learn something as well as learn about something without being hampered by sales types. :-)

Q. How hard is it to get started with ThinApp?
A. It’s extremely easy to get started with ThinApp.  In fact, a two-part video exists on YouTube and elsewhere showing ThinApp from Start to Finish in 20 minutes from ground up!  http://t3chnot3s.blogspot.com/2009/04/vmware-thinapp-from-start-to-finish-in.html

Q. Do I need to have a ThinApp Problem to join the ThinApp Lounge or will there be other content presented?
A. No problems necessary!  Only a desire to learn a little about ThinApp as a product is needed.  Currently the ThinApp Lounge is defined to deliver ThinApp Introductory webinars but in the near future as demand grows, we look to have some intermediate level webinars as well (such as “How to use AppLink”, “How to use AppSync”, etc.).

Q. Any good stories or “Ah-ha!” moments from the Lounge?
A. One of my favorite things is seeing the light turn on in peoples eyes when they start to realize just how malleable ThinApp really is and the options it presents to customers.  Two areas I commonly see this around are Security and App Packaging.

With Security, the insecurities of a legacy application that is still required often turn out to be the bane of the customer’s issues as that application’s needs end up driving what the customer can and cannot do – especially when compliance requirements come into play.  When that legacy application is wrapped within ThinApp, it’s insecurities start to become insignificant – and depending upon the app and environment,  almost to the point of not needing updates to fix the insecurities of the app.  This is because the insecurities of the app are contained within the “Virtual Bubble” and are not allowed outside that “virtual bubble” onto the native system.

With App Packaging, it’s always fun to show how one can create a ThinApp package which has no executables in it whatsoever – but rather, executes a natively installed application through the “virtual bubble”.  This “virtual bubble” could have additional settings, configurations, plugins, add-ons, or other items which allow the natively installed application to operate entirely differently than it is configured to on the native system.

Q. In a past life, you were a Citrix expert – how should people experienced in Citrix & Terminal Services deployments be thinking about ThinApp?
A. I spent more than 10 years as a Citrix/Microsoft consultant and solutions provider, developing solutions to customers issues and needs.  In that time, I found many customers implementing Citrix solutions often had one or more applications which wouldn’t play nicely with other applications needed by all employees.  This resulted in the creation of a separate Citrix or Terminal Server SILO where that specific app was housed.  Setting up this SILO always took additional time, effort, and money to do as it was just a pain to get that pushed to everyone who needed it.  ThinApp solves this issue with extreme ease by virtualizing the conflicting components or applications so that one can reduce their Citrix footprint.  I’m usually countered on this point by Citrix’s Application Isolation Environment, but I can safely say (and most likely anyone who has worked with an AIE will attest to this) that AIEs are hard to configure properly, still require the application to be installed, and do not virtualize the application but rather just isolate it’s calls via a hidden redirect.  With ThinApp I can also build completely vanilla Terminal Servers and drop in the applications on a per user basis as they login – very similar to a VDI scenario.

Since SBC (Citrix and Terminal Server), VDI, and Application Virtualization solutions can not only work together but can all solve some of the same or similar issues – even though they are all completely different technologies – it is very relevant to ask oneself what the issues really are and what the solutions are accomplishing with regards to business needs.

With ThinApp, we aim to solve software issues with a software solution – and we believe ThinApp is the best, most powerful, and most simplistic application virtualization product on the market. 

Week 40 already, before you know it it is christmas again. This week we had some excellent posts again, but probably the most exciting thing that happened this week was the VMTN Community Podcast with Vaughn Stewart, Chad Sakac, Andy Banta, Eric Schott and Adam Carter. The vGods of iSCSI. If you didn't join last wednesday you can find it via Vaughn's article here. Here's this weeks top 5:

• John Arrasjid - VCDX Tips from VCDX 001 John Arrasjid
  Practice what you preach and learn from others. Architects listen first. Don’t assume the answer before the discussion starts! Scenarios for VCDX defenses test journey to solution, not necessarily the final answer. Whiteboard, talk and ask questions. Troubleshooting scenarios – think of the architecture and implementation approach to resolution. Logs, design, SC commands.
• Eric Gray - PowerShell Prevents Datastore Emergencies
  When a datastore is about to run out of space, the fastest resolution may be to simply migrate virtual disks to another datastore. VMware Storage VMotion provides that capability with zero downtime for VMs and no disruption to end users. Fortunately, PowerCLI can perform this feat with ease, thanks to the Move-VM cmdlet.
• Chad Sakac - HOWTO: Use Site Recovery Manager and Linked Clones together
  VMware and EMC collaborated on a project recently with a customer, and that project included documenting the detail on why this occurs, and also the workaround. If you’re interested – read on! The key is that the ADAM and View SQL databases actually store the vCenter instance name (in the form of a Moref ID – also known as the MOID), which after SRM failover has changed, which breaks the replica/linked clone relationship. Further, the parent location is explicitly in the vmdk descriptor. You can (without doing anything fancy), you can deploy new desktop pools, but can’t access existing linked clones, or recompose or refresh.
• Massimo Re Ferre' - Ad Hoc Designed Infrastructures: do they still make sense?
  Simply put, IT is comprised of two major building blocks: Functional Requirements and Non-Functional Requirements. This is how Wikipedia defines them: Functional Requirements: "A functional requirement defines a function of a software system or its component. A function is described as a set of inputs, the behavior, and outputs (see also software)" Non Functional Requirement: "A non-functional requirement is a requirement that specifies criteria that can be used to judge the operation of a system, rather than specific behaviors. This should be contrasted with functional requirements that define specific behavior or functions". So the question I have been thinking about for the last few years is simple: in a virtualization context, do I really need - during a customer engagement - to go through a deep level analysis of the applications currently being deployed or soon to be deployed? In addition, defining the new virtualized infrastructure to support the applications mentioned, do I need to analyze all those applications one-by-one (from a Non Functional Requirement perspective) or can I treat them as a whole? You can depict the answer from the following two slides which are included in a set of charts I created back in 2007.
• Duncan Epping - What's that ALUA exactly?
  This “problem” has been solved with vSphere. VMware vSphere is aware of what the most optimal path is to the LUN. In other words VMware knows which processor owns which LUNs and sends traffic preferably directly to the owner. If the optimized path to a LUN is dead an unoptimized path will be selected and within the array the I/O will be directed via an interconnect to the owner again. The pathing policy MRU also takes optimized / unoptimized paths into account. Whenever there’s no optimized path available MRU will use an unoptimized path; when an optimized path returns MRU will switch back to the optimized path. Cool huh!?!

There's an interesting event that has been traveling under the radar until now, but it's a unique opportunity to interact with virtualization experts from both Intel and VMware, so pay attention to this blip on your screen.

What: the Intel Xeon Processor Live Chat
When: Tuesday, October 6, 10am-12noon PDT (-7 UTC)
Where: Intel's Open Port community site

Who will be there? This is where it really gets interesting. I'm still assembling the official biographies of the various attendees, but here's what I know about the attendees on the VMware side:

• Scott Drummonds. Scott Drummonds is responsible for VMware’s technical marketing performance team which is tasked with application-based performance analysis and evangelization of VMware’s performance leadership.  Scott joined VMware from Intel Corporation, where he led Intel’s business applications desktop benchmarking group.  Scott received his bachelors of science from Auburn University in computer engineering and his masters of science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in electrical engineering, focusing on digital test and diagnosis. Scott can be found on Twitter as @drummonds and on his new blog Pivot Point.

• Michael Adams. Michael Adams is Senior Product Marketing Manager at VMware in the Server Business Unit. His role at VMware includes handling all aspects of product marketing for the company’s flagship offering known as VMware vSphere™. Prior to VMware, Mike worked at Symantec/Veritas for seven years as product marketing manager for the Veritas NetBackup product family and at Giga Information Group (now Forrester Research) as an open storage market analyst. Mike holds a bachelor's degree in political science from the University of Michigan. Mike is the editor of the vSphere Blog.

• Ronald Kwan. Ronald Kwan is a Technical Alliance Manager at VMware supporting their strategic Storage and Server partners. Ronald has over 18 years of experience in the IT industry.  Prior to joining VMware, he was a Sr. Systems Engineer at StorageTek and Sun Microsystems architecting and designing infrastructure solutions.

• Jeff Weiss. Jeff came to VMware in 2007, an 11 year veteran in Software and Hardware technical sales by working for companies like Symantec and Sun Microsytems. His specialties have included datacenter continuity and disaster recovery solutions, software infrastructure identity management as well as email security and archiving tools. Over the years, he has architected and sold complex business solutions into a wide array of both public and private accounts, from commercial to government, healthcare to education. Prior to working in sales, he was a networking and datacenter manager at Hughes Aircraft for 14 years.

• Rupert Schultes. Rupert Schultes has been managing the Intel Alliance at VMware for the last 4 years. Prior to VMware he held several technical marketing, product management and alliance positions at Intel, ATI and Elsa AG in EMEA and Phoenix Technologies in the US.

First of all my apologies that this post is a day late. My wife and I went to Köln(or Cologne as most of you probably call it) for the weekend. For me that means no laptop, internet and/or twitter. We had a great time, but I won't tell you all the details just visit it if you are near by. The Cathedral by itself is worth your time! This weeks top 5 is more or less a waste of time. It's only a top 5 because that's what the title of this article is. In my opinion "A “Multivendor Post” on using iSCSI with VMware vSphere" is far above and beyond anything else on the list this week, and probably this year. Although I linked Chad's version this is a collaborative article between VMware (Andy Banta), EMC (Chad Sakac), NetApp (Vaughn Stewart), Dell/EqualLogic( Eric Schott) and HP/Lefthand Networks (Adam Carter). Thanks guys for this great piece of work...

• Chad Sakac - A “Multivendor Post” on using iSCSI with VMware vSphere
  One of the most popular posts we’ve ever done was the original “A ‘Multivendor Post’ to help our mutual iSCSI customers using VMware” that focused on the operation of the software iSCSI initiator in ESX 3.5 with several iSCSI targets from multiple vendors. There’s been a lot of demand for a follow-up, so without further ado, here’s a multivendor collaborative effort on an update, which leverages extensively content from VMworld 2009 sessions TA2467 and TA3264. The post was authored by the following vendors and people: VMware (Andy Banta), EMC (Chad Sakac), NetApp (Vaughn Stewart), Dell/EqualLogic( Eric Schott), HP/Lefthand Networks (Adam Carter)
• Eric Siebert- Master’s guide to VMware Fault Tolerance
  FT works by creating a secondary VM on another ESX host that shares the same virtual disk file as the primary VM, and then transferring the CPU and virtual device inputs from the primary VM (record) to the secondary VM (replay) via a FT logging network interface card (NIC) so it is in sync with the primary VM and ready to take over in case of a failure. While both the primary and secondary VMs receive the same inputs, only the primary VM produces output such as disk writes and network transmits. The secondary VM’s output is suppressed by the hypervisor and is not on the network until it becomes a primary VM, so essentially both VMs function as a single VM.
• Duncan Epping - Using limits instead of downscaling...
  I’ve seen this floating around the communities a couple of times and someone also mentioned this during a VCDX Panel: setting limits on VMs when you are not allowed to decrease the memory. For example you want to P2V a server with 8GB of memory and an average utilization of 15%. According to normal guidelines it would make sense to resize the VM to 2GB, however due to political reasons (I paid for 8GB and I demand…) this is not an option. This is when people start looking into using limits. However I don’t recommend this approach and there’s a good reason for it.
• Vittorio Viarengo - Virtualization Journey Stages
  Confidence can be characterized as selective at this stage. The team carefully selects the first applications to virtualize based on a path of least resistance for their organization. “Do I have a good relationship with that application owner?, “Do I have skills to virtualize the application in question?”, “What are the risks associated with virtualizing it?”, “What are the risks associated with NOT virtualizing it?”, “Does the ISV support the application in a virtual environment?”, “Is there a compelling reason to virtualize this particular app (lack of HA, deploying a new version, non-satisfactory uptime…)?”...
• Steve Kaplan - The desktops may be virtual, but the ROI is real
  While the white paper lacks supporting data, the numbers nonetheless look reasonable. For comparison, I recently calculated annual savings of $455 for an organization virtualizing 1,000 PCs and laptops as part of a phase one View 3 deployment. The payback period of 11.7 months against an investment of $500,000 is in the general vicinity of the IDC averages. Applying the IDC white paper estimate of $130 in user productivity savings further reduces the payback period to 9.3 months.

The dust has settled from VMworld 2009, and I hope everybody is saddled back up and on their horses once again at work. I've been seeing new ideas and new proposals pop up in from Twitter & blog colleagues across the virtualization industry, so I think we can say the conference was a success.

For posterity, I do want to point everybody and The Great Google to two amazing resources to navigate the VMworld-information-o-sphere from Eric Siebert and Duncan Epping:

Eric Siebert: VMworld 2009 Links at vSphere-Land

Duncan Epping: VMworld 2009 (San Francisco) Linkage

I did a similar type of coverage at VMworld 2006 & VMworld 2007, and I've got to tell you, it's a lot of work to put these kinds of links and resources together. If you find them useful, please let Eric (@ericsiebert on Twitter) and Duncan (@DuncanYB) know. Thanks, guys!

It's a heavy weight top 5 this week with three well known community members; Ron Oglesby, Chad Sakac and Scott Drummonds. Yes Scott Drummonds... he started blogging this week on his new blog Pivot Point. Ron Oglesby unfortunately did not start blogging but did a guest post on virtualization.info. Well we don't need Ron to start blogging we need Ron, Scott and Mike to rewrite the Advanced Technical Design Guide for vSphere. Chances of that happening are slim though, but I can still hope can't I? (Both Ron and Scott are flooded with work and Mike is working on a new vSphere book and a SRM book.)

• Ron Oglesby - Is there an optimal adoption curve for server virtualization?
  The second item we need to dispose of (or create a new assumption about) is the idea that everything cannot run in a VM… Yes you heard me. Everything can run in a VM today. Does that mean you will run out and virtualize everything starting tomorrow? No. But for 5+ years I have been doing virtualization assessments, and in each one I have generally recommended candidates that utilize less than 1 processor, less than 2GB of memory, and equally low disk and network utilization. Using this type of criteria I consistently find that 80+% of any customer’s environment can be virtualized. So, since 2004 I have been telling customers that 80% of their environment could be virtualized, yet most of these companies (5 years later) are nowhere near that. Why?
• Joshua Townsend - vCenter Database Stats Rollup Troubleshooting
  I recently migrated an environment from vCenter 2.5 to 4.0 and in the process switched from a Windows 2003 32-bit vCenter host and a SQL 2005 server (remote to vCenter) to a Windows 2008 64-bit vCenter server with a SQL 2008 server (again, a remote SQL server).  I experienced a few issues during the migration and thought I had worked through them all (I’ll post on those at a later date).  However, after a bit of time I found that performance statistics for objects in the vCenter were missing of not rendering at an acceptable pace.
• Chad Sakac - A couple important (ALUA and SRM) notes
  The answer is that vSphere supports Aysmmetric Logical Unit Access (ALUA) – note that there is no support for this in VI3.x. ALUA is a SCSI standard, and is widely implemented across mid-range storage arrays – including the CLARiiON. with ALUA, the LUN is reachable across both storage processors at the same time. Paths for the “non-owning” storage processor take IO and transit it across the internal interconnect architecture of the mid-range arrays (bandwidth and behavior varies). in the example in the diagram below, the paths on SPA advertise as “active (non-optimized)”, and aren’t used for I/O unless the active I/O paths are not working.
• Sean Clark - Killing a hung VM with /proc-FU
  Other VMs opened perfectly fine on this same ESX server, just this one VM was hosed. Couldn’t ping it’s IP either.  Tried restarting mgmt-vmware from the service console, and that removed the VMname from the ESX servers inventory the next time we logged in.  Just some weird placeholder VM instead, which I ended up removing from inventory.  Next tried to re-add the vCenter VM to inventory by browsing to the datastore.  No luck, this process hung.  So restarted mgmt-vmware again.  And this time decided to look at esxtop to see if this VM was still running or something.  And it was..or at least something was running with its name.  So now I set out to restart it with vmware-cmd.
• Scott Drummonds - Performance Troubleshooting: No PhD Required!
  VMware now boasts over 150,000 customers, and I only interact with a relative handful a year.  If I count the experts in our small performance community I can conclude that our performance experts touch a very small percentage of our customer base each year.  That means that the great majority of our customers are solving their performance problems without engaging us.

The week after VMworld is probably even more chaotic than VMworld itself. Not only are you digesting all the new ideas/concepts/thoughts you brought home from VMworld you will also need to pick up all the presents(work) they left waiting for you. On PlanetV12n it was also a busy week. Some cool, really cool, write-ups of VMworld and some great non-VMworld related articles. Although it's a top 5 The first two have two entries each. Mainly because my post and Massimo's post are related. Here we go:

• Massimo Re Ferre' - VMware, SpringSource and What's Not Appropriate to Say - The (Potential) Value of Blogging for Your Career
  When I heard about VMware and SpringSource, all of a sudden I realized the world is changing for all of us virtualization geeks. First and foremost those that have only been bothering about low level infrastructure virtualization details - such as VMotion compatibilities, cluster configurations, storage integrations and so forth - will have a hard time keeping up with what's going on in the industry. Virtualization vendors are "moving up the stack" very quickly so you'd better start familiarizing with concepts and technologies around Development Frameworks, Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and stuff like that. Not the sort of things Systems Engineers (aka infrastructure people) paid too much attention to - until now.
• Duncan Epping - Another year has passed by & VMworld 2009 Linkage
  I can’t remember I ever had so many people congratulating me with my birthday. (Okay it was on twitter but still…) Usually with my birthday coming up I take some time to look back at the past year. Coincidentally a couple of weeks ago John Troyer asked me to do a presentation at VMworld about blogging and where it can lead to. Because of my overbooked agenda (VMworld preperations, VCDX Panels and two projects) I did not have any time to prepare it but it is something that kept me busy the last week. Especially after seeing Jason Boche’s presentation at the vExpert Session at VMworld I started thinking about it again. I had some time on my hands, as I took the day off on my birthday, and decided to look back and try to convince you why voicing your opinion/views and sharing knowledge is important for your personal development and career.
• Joshua Townsend - ESXTOP Batch Mode & Windows Perfmon
  I needed to grab some stats from my ESX hosts for off-line analysis so I fired up my trusty ESXTOP intent on using batch mode to capture a .csv formatted output. I started to manually select the counters I was interested in while working in ESXTOP interactive mode (you can save your selected counters to the esxtop configuration file with the ‘w’ command) and thought that there must be a better way. I found that better way in the VMware Performance Community: http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-3930. There is now a -a switch that can be used to include ALL performance counters. I’m sold.
• Alan Renouf - vTip – A VMware Expert updating your VI
  Jason Boche has recently announced his vCalendar which is a great daily calendar with tip for each day, there is also a blog widget and netvibes or Google widget for this too, so my script takes these wonderful daily tips and adds them to a place we all visit on a daily basis…. The Virtual Infrastructure Client.
• Gabrie van Zanten - I had a dream...
  VMware is still the most innovative company in the field of virtualization and is still that step ahead of its competitors. Therefore VMware remains the number one choice for the most demanding workloads. Demanding not necessarily in performance, but mainly in security, availability and flexibility.

What a week and where do I even begin. For those who have been living under a rock just one word: VMworld. I have met so many people who I have been talking to for a while, and also a lot of people who just came up to me and complimented me on yellow-bricks.com or just wanted to introduce themselves. Thanks everyone for making this an excellent week. Making a top 5 is almost impossible though. The amount of blogs(250+) added over the last 7 days is so insane that I almost had to randomly pick 5. But of course I did not pick them randomly. Here they are, surprisingly most of them have to do with VMworld:

• Rich Brambley - VMworld 2009 Virtual Infrastructure Design – Lab Manager vPODS Enable Conference Cloud
  If you are like me you probably would have loved to get the opportunity to use the vSphere client to connect to a vCenter server managing that entire virtual infrastructure (VI). Although I did not get to do just that, I did get the opportunity to do the next best thing – talk to the manager of the team that does. My VMworld ended by talking to Randy Keener, Group Manager of VMware’s GETO team (Global Engineering Technical Operations). Keener explained to me some of the VMworld 2009 virtual infrastructure design details that VI administrators would be interested to know.
• Rick Scherer - My VMware VCDX Defense Experience
  While most of my readers were already home with their families, or packing up and checking out of their hotel rooms on the way to the airport, I was getting ready for probably the most important 2 hours of my technical career. So here we are, Friday at 7:15am - a few minutes to grab some food and collect my nerves before I enter room Foothill D at the SF Marriott. To my luck, I enter the lobby of the Mission Steak restaurant and guess who’s there….the entire VMware Certification team, including panel members for my VCDX. There goes collecting my nerves.
• Justin Emmerson - VMworld session DV2363 – CVP Tech Deep Dive
  In Direct Assignment, technologies like Intel VT-D or other software techniques are used to pass through a physical device (such as a video card) directly into the VM. This has some advantages such as lower overhead, and if you’re running Windows in your VM then all you need is a set of Windows drivers, which are easy to find. Passthrough is also much easier to program…
• Joep Piscaer - VMworld ‘09 – Long Distance VMotion (TA3105)
  The main challenge to get VMotion working between datacenters isn’t with the VMotion technology itself, but with the adaptations to shared storage and networking. Because a virtual machine being VMotioned cannot have it’s IP address changed, some challenges exist with the network spanning across datacenters. You’ll need stretched VLAN’s, a flat network with same subnet and broadcast domain at both locations.
• Scott Lowe - VMware vCloud Event with Paul Maritz
  Moving away from choice to application compatibility, Paul Maritz again refers to the formal announcement of the vCloud API. The vCloud API is actually a series of APIs that are being/have been submitted to standards organizations (as I mentioned in the keynote coverage, I believe it was submitted to the DMTF). SpringSource takes the stage to talk about what they do and then perform a demo (a live demo?) of their products and technologies. The demo shows off SpringSource and CloudFoundry deploying applications to an external cloud.