VMTN Blog

 As Day #2 starts here at VMworld 2010, if you are a blogger or vExpert, drop by the Social Media & Bloggers Lounge. Along with saying hi, you can get your blogger and vExpert buttons. 

The blogger buttons, aside from letting people know that you are a VIP and should get free iPads, will also give you access to the media briefing activities that are going on at the event. (These are in the South Moscone East Mezzanine - follow the signs to the press area.) You can also get access to the Press Working Room and Press Wifi (ask me for details on these).

The orange vExpert button with the cloudy brain is also available. The blue button for vExperts will get you into our event Weds 5:30pm. Pick those up by giving your name to Registration Customer Service in North Moscone. Ask for the CTO Reception Invitation. (Sorry, vExperts only and strictly one per customer!)

-- John Troyer

Here are the press events you might be interested in:

VMworld  2010 Media Roundtable Schedule of Events

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

10:45 - 11:30 am: Post Keynote: CEO Q&A Session

Location: Theater 2, East Mezzanine, Moscone South

Speaker: Paul Maritz, CEO, VMware

11:30 - 12:15 pm: Media Roundtable: End User Computing

Location: Theater 2, East Mezzanine, Moscone South

Speakers:

Vittorio Viarengo, VP, End User Computing Products, VMware

Noah Wasmer, Director, Product Management, Advanced Development, VMware

1:00 - 1:45 pm:  Media Roundtable: Private Cloud

Location: Theater 2, East Mezzanine, Moscone South

Speakers:

Bogomil Balkansky, VP, Product Marketing, Server Business Unit, VMware

Jordan Janeczko, Program Manager SIS Cloud Initiative, Siemens

Glenn Harper, VP, Chief Infrastructure Architect, Sabre Holdings

2:00 - 2:45 pm: Media Roundtable: Public Cloud

Location: Theater 2, East Mezzanine, Moscone South

Speakers:

Brian Byun, VP and GM, Cloud Applications and Services, VMware

Mark Leonard, CIO, Colt Managed Services

Kerry Bailey, Executive Director, IT Solutions, Verizon Business

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

9:00 - 9:45 am:  Media Roundtable: Application Platform

Theater 2: East Mezzanine, Moscone South

Speaker: Shaun Connolly, VP, Product Management, SpringSource Division of VMware

1:00 - 1:45 pm:  Media Roundtable: Security

Theater 1: East Mezzanine, Moscone South

Speakers:

Neil MacDonald, Gartner

Venu Aravamudan, Senior Director, Product Marketing, Security, VMware

Anil Karmel, Solutions Architect, Los Alamos National Laboratory

2:00 - 2:45 pm:  Media Roundtable: OEM Partners

Theater 1:East Mezzanine, Moscone South

Speakers:

Ed Bugnion, CTO and VP, Server and Access Virtualization Technology Group, Cisco

Timothy D. Webb, Director, Global Data Center and Enterprise Architecture Consulting Practices, Dell

Paul Miller, VP, Solutions and Strategic Alliances, Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking, HP

Jan Jackman, VP, Global Cloud Services, IBM Global Technology Services, IBM

3:00 - 3:45 pm:  Media Roundtable: Zimbra

Theater 1, East Mezzanine, Moscone South

Speakers:

Jim Morrisroe, GM, Zimbra Division of VMware

John Robb, Senior Director, Products and Marketing, Zimbra Division of VMware

Two of my colleagues recently launched a new website. It is probably one of the few vCenter Orchestrator Blogs out there and definitely worth following for anyone who is into orchestration and automation.

Besides of course covering the vCenter Orchestrator 4.1 release extensively they wrote multiple very useful and detailed articles on vCenter Orchestrator.

One of the first articles explains how to create a self provisioning portal with vCO in a detailed stepwise approach. They have just published a follow called "part 2". The article cover the following steps which result in a self provisioning portal:

• How to create a simple Workflow 
• How to map inputs, outputs, and attributes 
• How to launch a Workflow from a webview, using the vCenter Orchestrator Weboperator 
• How to launch a Workflow from the vCenter Orchestrator Client
• How to create a Workflow using subworkflows
• How to map inputs, outputs, and attributes
• How to use user interactions
• How to do basic presentations
• How to use validation presentation properties
• How to handle exception and write to the event log
• How to use vCO Server and System objects in scriptable boxes
• How to use the API search
• How to launch a Workflow from the vCenter Orchestrator Client
• How to launch a Workflow from a webview, using the vCenter Orchestrator Weboperator
• How to set rights on workflows
• How to set up the vCO mail plug-in

We've very pleased to announce the availability of VMware vSphere 4.1 and several other products today. Here's an initial overview of what's new and what's changed. (Updated 7/13 with press releases, blog posts) 

The Press Releases

At VMware, our press releases are very readable and actually worth checking out. Here are the highlights for the two releases that came out July 13:

• VMware Advances Foundation for Cloud Computing With VMware vSphere 4.1 and Expanded Virtualization Management Portfolio
  • Introduces the concept that vSphere 4.1 is a platform to build cloud infrastructures
  • Goes over the big new features -- see also Steve's blog post (below)
  • Talks about new cloud-based (per-VM) licensing models that we're introducing for several of our vCenter management products
  • Talks about bringing over the Ionix acquisitions to new branding and support from VMware
  • Teases the new Essentials pricing (see the next release)
• VMware Introduces Enhanced Virtualization Offerings for Small and Midsize Businesses
  • Some background on SMB use of virtualization - contrary to what you might think, small businesses actually often make use of our "enterprise-grade" virtualization feature
  • vMotion in Essentials and Standard
  • Essentials is now list priced at $495/6 processes
  • ESXi (free version) now called "VMware vSphere Hypervisor". We'll now use ESX & ESXi just to refer to the two different architectures.

Blog Posts

Here are some important blog posts we published.

• VMware vSphere 4.1: Advancing the Platform for Cloud Computing
  

  from VMware CTO Steve Herrod: "And I thought I’d close with a bit tech-y, but great quotation about this release from one of our more than 800 beta-testing customers... "This release has the stability of a ‘dot-1’ release with the advancements of a ‘dot-0’ release". Indeed!"

• vSphere and vCenter: The Foundation of VMware's Cloud Strategy
  

  from VMware Marketing VP Bogomil Balkansky: "VMware is bringing the benefits of cloud computing to internal datacenters by helping customers more efficiently and effectively manage existing applications while building the path to the private and public cloud.  This is what virtualization is all about. By enabling an evolutionary approach to cloud, VMware vSphere and VMware vCenter are the foundation for our cloud strategy"

Steve also contributed this short video introduction to vSphere 4.1:

VMware vSphere 4.1

• VMware vSphere 4.1 product overview "Begin the Journey to a Private Cloud with Datacenter Virtualization"
• What's New in vSphere 4.1
• VMware vSphere 4.1 Release Notes - ESXi Edition 
• VMware vSphere 4.1 Release Notes - ESX Edition 
• VMware vSphere 4.1 product support & downloads
• VMware Scripting - SDK Developer Support available for vSphere SDK 4.1 (Developer Center Blog)
• Performance Implications of Storage I/O Control in vSphere Environments with Shared Storage (VROOM!)
• vSphere 4.1 is Here! Tell Me Something About the Release I May Not Know (vSphere Blog)
• vSphere 4.1 has shipped! (VIX API Blog)
• Got Network I/O Control? (VMware Networking Blog)
• PowerCLI 4.1 is out (PowerCLI Blog)
• VDR and vSphere 4.1 Compatibility (Uptime Blog)
• EMC Ionix Customers Transitioning to VMware Support July 1st (Support Insider Blog)

VMware ESXi

• VMware ESXi and ESX Info Center "Planning your upgrade to VMware ESXi, the next-generation hypervisor architecture."
• t’s here! The latest version of ESXi (ESXi Chronicles)

VMware vSphere Hypervisor

The product formerly known as "free ESXi"

• VMware vSphere Hypervisor product overview
• VMware vSphere Hypervisor community with an explanation of the change
• Introducing VMware vSphere Hypervisor 4.1 - the free edition of VMware vSphere 4.1 (vSphere Blog)

VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat 6.3

• VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat product overview
• VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat 6.3 Release Notes

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 4.1

• VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager product overview
• VMware vCenter SRM 4.1 Release Notes
• Upgrading to SRM 4.1 - including upgrading to vSphere VirtualCenter 4.1 (Uptime Blog)

VMware Studio 2.1

• VMware Studio product overview
• VMware Studio 2.1 release notes
• VMware Studio 2.1 now available for download (blog post)

For more information

For the full picture -- and it's a big picture, because vSphere 4.1 is a big release, I recommend:

• Planet V12n the aggregation of dozens of blogs from the community of VMware users
• Eric Siebert's comprehensive vSphere 4.1 - The Links

Been really busy today with the kids but did manage to get the top 5 ready for you guys.... Read it!

• Thomas Mackay - Understanding ESX/ESXi Equivalency…Are we there yet?
  It is public knowledge that ESX is evolving to a pure ESXi model in the future release cycles of the product, though exact timelines are still under NDA. Convergence to a “console-less” ESX provides a number of benefits to our customers, with which many of you are, by now, well acquainted . It reduces the overall footprint that requires patching (see below) as well as removes the dependency on the vestigial RHEL-based Console Operating System, and sets the stage for future enhancements and technologies yet to be introduced. (Those who are under NDA might know to what I am referring!
• Thakala(vReality) - VMware Data Recovery 1.2 Linux file level restore client
  I have successfully tested it on 64-bit CentOS 5.5, and because so many versions of Ubuntu are listed I’d guess that FLR client works on any recent Debian releases also, just make sure it has support for FUSE 2.5 or later. If you have custom kernel make sure you have all FUSE dependencies compiled in. Note that even though your Linux distribution may be 64-bit version, 32-bit version of FUSE is required. Note the absence of any SuSE or Novell SLES distrubtions from tested and supported list, not that FLR client won’t work on them though, I am sure it will.
• Jon Owings - All out of HA Slots
  As you can see here the slot size is rather giant. We have the largest CPU and Memory reservation plus some overhead (for simplicity) and that blows the size of the slot way up. I didn’t set the reservation, but surely they were there. 8GB of reserved memory. 4000MHz of CPU. Ouch. Where did that come from? It followed the VM from the old host to the new one. One of the reasons I was there was to setup a new cluster since the older ones were performing so slow on the local storage. It seems like someone tried to help some critical VM’s along the way by adding the reservations. I removed the reservations and had plenty of slots as you see below.
• Massimo Re Ferrre - Cloud and the New IT Pillars
  In my previous IT life I was in the business of trying to homogenize heterogeneous virtualization platforms under a single management umbrella so I have to (strongly) agree with my colleague’s statement. In fact, these pillars are very different in the way you manage them. This is true not only from a technology perspective but also, and even more so, from a process perspective. For example, the process to request a partition on a legacy Unix system may be totally different than the process required to instantiate a new physical server, which in turn is totally different than the process to request a new vSphere virtual machine. To complicate things more, the Cloud pillar, by very definition, doesn’t require any process whatsoever to instantiate a new workload from the self-service portal.
• Duncan Epping - vSphere 4 U2 and recovering from HA Split Brain
  I had never noticed this until I was having a discussion around this feature with one of my colleagues. I asked our HA Product Manager and one of our developers and it appears that this mysteriously has slipped. As I personally believe that this is a very important feature of HA I wanted to rehash some of the info stated in that article. I did rewrite it slightly though...

The World Cup tournament just entered the knockout stage. Today England plays against Germany and I guess it is needless to say that I will be supporting England, or should I say "Engerland"? (Hey, no one loves their neighbours.) All of this has of course nothing to do with the reason I am writing this article. This article is about the top 5 Planet V12n articles of week 25. This week we've got a "newcomer", I guess this is my way of saying welcome William. Here we go:

• Kendrick Coleman - Why vSphere Needs NFSv4
  If you are familiar with my blog, you'll know that I'm a huge advocate of the NFS protocol with VMware. I firmly believe that over the next few years, ethernet storage will be the front-runner of VMware deployments. Most of the people that I talk to that have a Fiber-Channel (FC) based environment are in large enterprises that made the switch to VMware but used their existing FC environment. Which is great, but now is the time everyone is starting to virtualize their whole environment and money talks when it comes to scalability. I won't go into Ethernet vs FC because there is boat loads of information already out there, but let's talk about NFS. NFS is that guy sitting in the corner that doesn't get much attention, but NFS is making headway into the marketplace.
• Vaughn Stewart - Data Compression, Deduplication, & Single Instance Storage
  Storage savings technologies are all the rage of the storage and backup industries. While every vendor has their own set of capabilities, it is in the best interest for any architect, administrator, or manager of data center operations to have a clear understanding of which technology will provide benefits to which data sets before enabling these technologies. Saving storage while impeding the performance of a production environment is a sure-fire means to updating one's resume.
• Daniel Eason - VMware DPM usage – My view
  DPM technology is excellent and to be honest plain common sense, it has moved from being experimental into full blown production supportable within the later versions of ESX and now as a de facto proven product within vSphere. Core Main benefit of DPM is simple, it will dynamically turn off virtual hosts that are not needed at non peak times which is great, it avoids the cost that would have been occurred by running even vSphere hosts in an under utilised state. So I’ll get to the point do I think DPM is capability that can be used it to obtain the saving to anyone? well not really to be honest, I am in the non enthusiastic camp when it comes to DPM and the reasons I think this are as follows...
• William Lam - ESXi syslog caveat
  Append the above entries between the ... tags. Once you have updated the vpxa.cfg file, you will want to run the follow command on the Busybox console to ensure the changes are saved and backed up to the local bootbank for ESXi. There is an automated cron job that runs every hour which calls /sbin/auto-backup.sh
• Scott Drummonds - Private Clouds, People Consolidation, and Chargeback
  The beauty of virtualization is that not only can the physical resources be shared, as any VMware demonstration will prove, but the people that support the infrastructure can be shared, too. This concept is already understood by VMware’s more mature customers, who have been telling VMware for years that virtualization can save more money in operational expenses than capital expenses. These savings are coming after thinning the ranks of dedicated infrastructure specialists and refocusing them on higher value opportunities.

As it was fathers day yesterday and I also had to fly out to London I totally forgot to hit the "publish" button. I did however create a Top 5:

• David Davis - VIDEO: Mike DePetrillo speaking on VMware vCloud
  One of the most controversial parts of Mike’s presentation is when he says that vCloud is really sold to the CIO and the message to the IT group is that you will have to change in order to keep your job. In other words, “the cloud” will assimilate the infrastructure as we know it and IT people will have to adapt to that, improving their skill set, in order to move to different roles in the IT organization where they can accomplish the more important IT projects with real ROI (not just maintaining the SAN LUNs, or whatever they do). Watch the video to hear the vCloud message for yourself… Note: Mike doesn’t show a “Project Redwood” demo – sorry.
• Eric Sloof - StarWind iSCSI multi pathing with Round Robin and esxcli
  After you have created a StarWind iSCSI target, it’s ready to service connections. You can established a connection to an iSCSI target and it appears as a new datastore on your ESX server. I’ll show the operations you need to complete to create and format the datastore in the way your ESX server can create virtual machines on it. I’m also going to show how the esxcli command can be used for PSA (pluggable storage architecture) management and explain how to use the vSphere Client to manage the PSA, the associated native multipathing plug‐in (NMP).
• Tod Muirhead - Scale-Out Performance of Exchange 2010 Mailbox Server VMs on vSphere 4
  The performance in the 4000 user tests shows a rise of only 30ms in the 95th percentile SendMail response time between a single 4-vCPU VM and four 1-vCPU VMs. The 8000 user tests show an increase of approximately 140ms in the same metric when comparing the single 8-vCPU VM with four 2-vCPU VMs. Even though this is a significant percent increase, the absolute increase is still relatively small in comparison to the 1 second threshold which is where users will begin to perceive a difference in performance.
• Martin Klaus - Operations Management in the Virtualized Environment – What’s different?
  As the foundation for the Private Cloud, virtualization enables server, storage and networking resources to be shared very efficiently across applications. Virtualization also allows you to standardize your service offerings. Templates for your corporate Windows or Linux images can be provisioned as virtual machines in minutes. Even higher-level server configurations with complete web, application and database server stacks can become building blocks for your Enterprise Java environments or Sharepoint instances, further simplifying the provisioning process and lessening the need for one-off admin tasks. Automated backup, patch and update processes are additional benefits that are easy to realize with virtualized infrastructure.
• Scott Lowe - The vMotion Reality
  In his article, Benik states that the ability to dynamically move workloads around inside a single data center or between two data centers is, in his words, “far from an operational reality today”. While I’ll grant you that inter-data center vMotion isn’t the norm, vMotion within a data center is very much an operational reality of today. I believe that Benik’s article is based on some incorrect information and incomplete viewpoints, and I’d like to clear things up a bit.

As I was watching one of the World Cup games yesterday evening I totally forgot to click "publish". Thanks Jason for pointing this out. Here's this weeks top 5:

• Aaron Delp - Comparing Vblocks
  I believe one of the most interesting concepts to come along in our industry recently has been Cisco/EMC/VMware's Vblock. My best definition for Vblock is a reference architecture that you can purchase. Think about that for a second. Many vendors publish reference architectures that are guidelines for you to build to their specifications. Vblock is different because it is a reference architecture you can purchase. This concept is a fundamental shift in our market to simplify the complexity of solutions as we consolidate Data Center technologies. We are no longer purchasing pieces and parts, we are purchasing solutions.
• Scott Drummonds - VMDirectPath
  The only reason why anyone is considering VMDirectPath for production deployments is the possibility of increased performance. But the only workload for which VMware has ever claimed substantial gains from this feature is the SPECweb work I quoted above. That workload sustained 30 Gb/s of network traffic. I doubt any of VMware’s customers are using even a fraction of this network throughput on a single server in their production environments.
• Jason Boche - NFS and Name Resolution
  A few weeks ago I had decided to recarve the EMC Celerra fibre channel SAN storage. The VMs which were running on the EMC fibre channel block storage were all moved to NFS on the NetApp filer. Then last week, the Gb switch which supports all the infrastructure died. Yes it was a single point of failure – it’s a lab. The timing for that to happen couldn’t have been worse since all lab workloads were running on NFS storage. All VMs had lost their virtual storage and the NFS connections on the ESX(i) hosts eventually timed out.
• Frank Denneman - Memory Reclaimation, When and How?
  Back to the VMkernel, in the High and Soft state, ballooning if favored over swapping. If it ESX server cannot reclaim memory by ballooning in time before it reaches the Hard state, the ESX turns to swapping. Swapping has proven to be a sure thing within a limited amount of time. Opposite of the balloon driver, which tries to understand the needs of the virtual machine let the guest decides whether and what to swap, the swap mechanism just brutally picks pages at random from the virtual machine, this impacts the performance of the virtual machine but will help the VMkernel to survive.
• Duncan Epping - Is this VM actively swapping?
  At one point the host has most likely been overcommitted. However currently there is no memory pressure (state = high (>6% free memory)) as there is 1393MB of memory available. The metric “swcur” seems to indicate that swapping has occurred” however currently the host is not actively reading from swap or actively writing to swap (0.00 r/s and 0.00 w/s).

[Updated Monday 7 June]

The invitations to the VMware vExpert 2010 program have been sent out. Emails were sent out Friday and Monday; the timing had no bearing on the merit of your application! (If you were expecting an invitation, please check your junk mail filters. Although I tried not to use any words like Congratulations! or You Win a Million Dollars! or Free Herbal Prescriptions! I've gotten reports that spam filters did catch a few of the outbound emails.)

We had a great selection of candidates this year, and I'm looking forward to working with all of you. All of the judges were very impressed with the applicants, and we made some very hard decisions about who to accept in the program. 

If you applied but did not get selected, I would be happy to work with you on planning for 2011 and how you might work toward a vExpert designation. The vExpert award looks backward on what you did the year before, and in the seven short months until Jan 2011 you could make quite an impact. Things move very quickly in the social media world, and people who rock it hard can get noticed quickly. 

There were a number of common cases in applications that weren't accepted:

• You didn't demonstrate enough activity. If your claim to vExpert fame is a blog, then you should blog like you mean it. If you are active on the community, then you should be very active. Although we tried to evaluate quality over quantity, blogging or answering questions on the community is an endurance sport, and the way to grow in knowledge and grow an audience is to be consistent over time. Take the time to blog (or speak, or whatever you do) every day. This is hard work. Work hard, but you just have to do one step at a time. After a year, you'll be shocked at how much you accomplished. (Now life may have intervened -- babies, work, health, and happiness are all part of living and should take precedence over virtualization evangelism. We'll catch you next year when you come up for air. No worries.)

• You participated but did not create. You came to events, podcasts, and more. You supported and commented and tweeted. You probably learned a lot, and you now know more people, but you didn't do a lot of sharing of your expertise. Creating is hard work, and we looked for people who sat their butts in their chairs and typed or powerpointed or otherwise instantiated their knowledge so that others could benefit. You have something to say to the world. Say it. What problem did you solve at work today? What are you passionate about? Give back to the world. 

• Your didn't differentiate yourself. There are two related parts to this problem: one you can't do much about, but one that's the key to success. If you are in the English-speaking virtualization world, the bar for evangelism is very high. We're a bunch of smart people, and you're competing for people's attention against both geniuses and overachievers. (Oh, yes, I'm talking about the Dutch.) You can't do much about where you live, but you can figure out how to make yourself stand out. Don't just blog product and press releases. Go beyond. Blog your passion and tell people about what's important to you. Make a picture or a comic or a presentation or a video. Become "that guy that does that amazing thing." Dare to be memorable.

• You didn't demonstrate enough "above and beyond" activity outside your normal job. If your day job is to sell virtualization products, you had to pass a high bar to receive a vExpert award. The judges have a soft spot in our hearts for people who could be lounging on the couch at home or even at a hotel, but instead push it harder. Invest a slice of your time in yourself. Having fun doing something cool is the best way to stand out in your career. It's much better than not having fun and not standing out.

• You need to go deeper. Virtualization is a deep topic. vSphere is a deep product that cuts across all IT disciplines. We all start somewhere in our journey and from the perspective of where we've been. Be humble enough to realize that you might not understand the whole landscape yet. Do your homework. Listen, learn, break out of your silo. 

• You didn't demonstrate enough reach outside your company. The vExpert award is at some level about evangelism. Sharing your expertise internal to your own company is wonderful, but the judges were also looking for people who had created a platform where they could influence beyond the boundaries of a single company -- thus the emphasis on a blog or speaking engagements. Go out and conquer! If you're introverted, write. If you're extroverted, speak. If you're brilliant, teach. If you're not brilliant, hook up with people that are and help organize! Make waves.

• Your application note wasn't detailed enough. Often, the judges couldn't determine exactly what impact you had in your activities, or exactly what you did. If someone else nominated you, they may not have adequately described exactly how awesome you were in 2009. I think we're moving to an application model (vs a nomination model) for next year. Get ready to apply for 2011 - now is not the time to be modest. Allow yourself to excel and then just let us know what you've been up to. 

• Your activity was mostly in 2010. The award was given out for things you did in 2009. The next vExpert selection will be in seven short months, so if you just got going in 2010, you have a great runway to join the program next year. Keep it up!

I hope something in that advice resonates with you. I'd love to work with you throughout this year and next - give me a buzz. For those that did get selected as vExperts, I've got more to say about why and what's coming up, but that came come later. I hope you're as excited as I am. Doors will be opening to our vExpert community site tomorrow!

Cheers,
John Troyer
jtroyer@vmware.com

Week 22 already. Almost half way down 2010. Next week the Fifa World Cup starts. For those of you, probably Americans, who don't have a clue what it is about: World Cup Soccer. And yes this is the most widely viewed sports event there is and the cool thing about it is that you get to watch sports for 45 minutes in a row before you have a commercial break! Anyway, there's one thing left to say before I will list this weeks Top 5: GO HOLLAND!

• Cody Bunch - The Math Behind the DRS Stars
  In our particular case, not much to look at, as well, she is seemingly a well balanced cluster. However let’s work through the formula with the assumption that we have a 2 node cluster and a standard deviation of 0.282 (the “target” from above): 6 – ceil(0.282 / 0.1 * sqrt(2)).
• Eric Sloof - Caveat when using - Percentage of cluster resources reserved as failover spare capacity
  I think everyone knows the three admissions control policies which can be enforced on a VMware HA Cluster.  If you are using the default “Host Failures Allowed” policy, you must keep in mind that the largest virtual machine reservation will decide how big your cluster slot size is going to be. In most cases when you are using reservations that differ, I would prefer to use the “Percentage of cluster resources reserved as failover spare capacity”. But be careful, I’ve pulled two quotes which warn us for scattered resources and the need to set restart priority on large virtual machines.
• Simon Long - VMware ESXi 4 Log Files
  This is the ESXi Host Agent log. It contains information on the agent that manages the ESXi Host and it's VM's. I don't tend to use this log as much as I used to with ESX, purely because it has been amalgamated in the message log. If you are troubleshooting a Host issue and don't want vmkernel logs getting in the way, this is the log for you. The log entries are time stamped (using UTC timezone) which is pretty handy when looking back to see what happened when an error occurred or something failed.
• Arnim van Lieshout - PowerCLI: Reset CPU and Memory Limits
  Today I noticed a memory limit on a vm. After investigating my environment using the vEcoShell and the Community PowerPack, I found more vms with memory limits set. It turned out that there was a template which had the limit set. I could easily reset all limits using the GUI, but I thought I rather do it with PowerCLI. Alan Renouf did a post already on a oneliner to reset all cpu and memory limits back in july 2009. After trying that code I found it rather slow. If you want to speed up things in PowerCLI you need to use the Get-View cmdlet. After some digging in the vSphere API Reference, I came up with a different peace of code that is much faster.
• Duncan Epping - esxtop -l
  As most of you know esxtop takes snapshots from VSI nodes (similar to proc nodes) to capture the running entities and their states. The rate in which these snapshots are taken can be changed with the “s”. The default setting is 5 seconds and the minimum, which most people probably use, is 2 seconds. This means that every entity (worlds, for instance a virtual machine) and the associated info is queried again every two seconds. As many of the metrics shown in esxtop are calculated based on the difference of two successive snapshots, e.g. %USED (CPU), esxtop just rereads all the info(all entities and all values) and calculates the values of the metrics.

You all know the drill by now:

• Simon Long - Using vMA As Your ESXi Syslog Server
  When vMA collects the logs from your ESXi Host, sometimes the logs have the ESXi Host timestamp and sometimes they will have the vMA Localtime timestamp. I'm not exactly sure why this happens, but it does. (You may or may not know that ESXi uses UTC as its timezone when it timestamps the logs. You can read more about that here. VMware have told me this cannot be changed.)
• Didier Pironet - The host does not have sufficient memory resources to satisfy the reservation
  I removed the host from the cluster, made a direct connection with vCenter client and booted up the VM, but still same error. I could say that something was wrong with the host only, and not with the VMware cluster’s resource allocation config.
• Hal Rottenberg - Getting around PowerCLI roadblocks: Tips from the field
  In order to move past this barrier, you have to use the Get-View cmdlet. Get-View is very useful -- it's like having a release valve that lets you bust out some really cool tricks. I'm not going to go into great detail about the cmdlet here, but what you need to know is that the PowerCLI cmdlets present an interface to the virtualization administrator which is customized to be consistent with how PowerShell works. This is great for administrators when it works, but when you hit against limits of the included cmdlets, you have to work with the underlying API objects. In other words, you need to understand a totally different interface -- the same one that programmers see when they develop software for vSphere.
• Duncan Epping - Swapping
  As always the common theme of the discussion was “swapping bad”. Although I don’t necessarily disagree. I do want to note that it is important to figure out if the system is actually actively swapping or not. In many cases “bad performance” is blamed on swapping. However this is not always the case. As described in my section on “ESXTOP“ there are multiple metrics on “swap” itself. Only a few of those relate to performance degradation due to swapping. I’ve listed the important metrics below.
• Frank Denneman - Re: Swapping
  When a virtual machine guest OS starts, there will be a period of time before the VMware tools is loaded and the vmmemctl (balloon driver) is operational. During this timeslot the operating system can access a large portion of its configured memory. Windows systems are notorious for this as they tend to touch every page until it reaches the end of their configured memory. Unfortunately page sharing due to Transparent Page Sharing (TPS) is also at a minimum. Redundant memory pages are not collapsed immediately when a virtual machine is started. TPS is a VMkernel background process and uses a cycle of 60 minutes (Mem.ShareScanTime) to scan a virtual machine for page sharing opportunities.

It's been a while since the last Top 5 has been released. My apologies, but I attended the VMware Technical Summit, was on a holiday for a week in Italy and two close relatives passed away. Anyway it is Sunday again and tomorrow a fresh new weeks start... no apologies any more. We will continue with the Top 5 as of this week again. It took me a while to go through the immense list of articles, but I guess the following 5 stood out. 

• Bob Plankers - What are P-states and how do I use them in vSphere? 
  VMware vSphere 4 added the ability to take advantage of Intel SpeedStep and AMD PowerNow! CPU power management features. These features are commonly known as “Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling” or DVFS, and let an OS cooperate with the CPU to reduce power consumption by reducing the frequency of the CPU and the voltage at which it is operating. It reduces these things in preset tiers, and these tiers are known as P-states. On Intel CPUs they are trademarked as “SpeedStep” and on AMD they are either “Cool’n'Quiet” or “PowerNow!”
• Bouke Groenescheij - Shares: Low-Normal-High
  Well, try to stay away from multi core VMs. If you are running multicore VMs, don't overcommit (at least not too much) and put them on a dedicated cluster. Why not overcommitting? Well, duh, you gave it multiple CPUs, so apparently those VMs need to do some processing which is very important. And since it's that important, don't overcommit. Should make sense. Else give it one vCPU. Also, try not to use the somewhat extreme 'low-normal-high' share setting. I would say: "If a VM is more important, use a custom setting of 1200 shares/vCPU. If a VM is less important, use a custom setting of 800 shares/vCPU". That way the ratio between them isn't that extreme and nature is more balanced.
• Frank Denneman - Resource Pools Memory Reservations
  If a cluster is under-committed the VM resource entitlement will be the same as its demand, in other words, the VM will be allocated whatever it wants to consume within its configured limit. When a cluster is overcommitted, the cluster experiences more resource demand than its current capacity, at this point DRS and the VMkernel will allocate resources based on the resource entitlement of the virtual machine. Resource entitlement is covered later in the article.
• Scott Sauer - VMware Acquisitions – What’s it all mean?
  There has been a lot of activity here at VMware with acquisitions and partnerships over the past few months. A fellow engineer at VMware summarized a lot of these acquisitions and how they are meaningful to VMware as an organization. I wanted to share this information because I think it provides people with a better understanding of where we are going as a company and the overall strategic vision of VMware (Thanks again Andy!).
• Steve Kaplan - Calculating the optimal Microsoft SQL licenses for virtualization
  The ability to consolidate multiple SQL instances onto a single host combined with application server license mobility rules generally make either SQL Server Enterprise or SQL Server Datacenter the best choice for a vDC. A 2-CPU VMware vSphere host, for example, running two licenses of SQL Server Enterprise could run up to eight instances of either SQL Server Standard or Enterprise. Additionally, these instances can either be VMotioned to another host in the cluster or even utilize the continuous availability of vSphere Fault Tolerance without requiring additional SQL licensing for the target host.

Day one at EMC World kicked off today. The day had what was to me a bit of an odd structure, with a product announcement to the press, a keynote that really didn't go into the announcement, and then two more keynotes and an executive panel in the afternoon. 

Here are some pix from the conference:

The big EMC news today was VPLEX, a new federated storage product that, in its current incarnation, should let you VMotion a single virtual machine or an entire data center across 100km or so. It's new enough - even a new category? -- that even the EMCers seem to be struggling to define it succinctly. 

• Chuck Hollis (EMC): VPLEX: The Birth of a New Storage Platform "Like anything relatively new, it will take a while for people to fully understand the rationale and the strategy behind the product.  It took me a good while before I got a full grasp on the implications of this new technology."
• Chad Sakac (EMC): Your Virtual Machine Teleporter is ready ... Are you? "Why is this important?   Well, one of the key tenants of the “journey to the private cloud” is not only being able to consume things differently (via all sorts of self-provisioning models amongst many things), but also being able to break the barriers of the physical datacenter – being able to do things across geographic boundaries."
• Stu Miniman (EMC): VPLEX: Redefining the Boundaries of the Data Center. "When new technologies are introduced into the marketplace, people are most comfortable in making comparisons to things that they already know.  In this post, I’ll compare traditional replication solutions with VPLEX Distributed Federation."
• Storagezilla (EMC): This is VPLEX. "A category creating product which brings Distributed Cache Coherency to workloads in the Private Cloud by providing the ability to make block storage volumes available Always-Active across long distances."
• Stephen Foskett (Gestalt IT): EMC Shouts VPLEX In A Crowded EMCWorld 
• Scott Lowe (EMC) has some additional links: EMC VPLEX Launches Today

The bloggers lounge at EMC World was a great place to network and still do work besides. Along with the discussions on storage, virtualization, and private cloud, we were able to watch a succession of luminaries step into SiliconAngle's TheCube for a live video streaming session. All the sessions will eventually get up on YouTube, but for now you can check them out here. For me, the standout session was a surprise visit by EMC CEO Joe Tucci and new Acadia CEO Michael Capellas. This may be the first on-camera intervew from Michael Capellas since he was was announced at heading up Acadia, the EMC-Cisco joint venture. Check out his reasons for signing up to lead this new company focused on private cloud.

I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that I was also on a live panel discussion on social media. It was a good session, but it really wasn't about virtualization, so if you're interested in hearing us punditize, check out this post at Len Devanna's blog.

Another interesting bit of news via Chuck Hollis was the formation of a Technical Advisory Board at EMC. Nothing very controversial with this group of very very smart people, all of whom I'd love to invite to dinner; but check out who is on the board from VMware:

• Steve Herrod – Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of R&D, VMware
• Rod Johnson – General Manager, SpringSource; Senior Vice President of Middleware, VMware

Now Steve has been our CTO for quite a while and is instrumental in building the private cloud and steering VMware technology to be in alignment with the evolution of IT. But that second member is Rod Johnson, now the general manager of the SpringSource unit of VMware. Rod founded the Spring Framework, the most usable (and most used) Java framework today, and he is now charting out the course of building the most usable and powerful toolset for creating the next generation of cloud-enabled applications.

What does that say about building the private cloud, the platform-as-a-service stack that VMware is building, and the no-longer-even-interesting view of EMC as just a vendor of spinning rust? (Relevant link: Joe Tucci on the number of EMC software vs hardware engineers.) I leave that discussion up to you -- it's just interesting is all I'm sayin' ...

Reporting live from EMC World, this is Dr John Troyer for VMware

[Executive summary: We'll be blogging about private cloud for the next three days here at EMC World 2010. Stuck at your desk? Follow along with EMC World 2010 live video from SiliconANGLE's #TheCube.]

I'm here in Boston to attend EMC World 2010. The theme, plastered everywhere at the venue and across the city (that's a sign at the taxi stand at Logan Airport over to the right) is "The Journey to the Private Cloud Starts Now." Thousands of infrastructure geeks are here to get their EMC on, and I'll be covering the more-virtualization-related activities at the conference.

I'm very interested in what people are thinking now about private cloud and if it's starting to make sense to them. Sometimes I see people have made it easy on themselves by just categorizing "cloud" as a marketing term for now, full of hype. That way they don't have to think about it too much. Others, coming from experiences with the public cloud, can't see how a private cloud makes sense. The reality is far more complex, and far more interesting. Already after talking to some of the attendees and EMC employees at the conference I'm seeing a recognition that private cloud concepts are resonating with the IT professionals. 

What makes private cloud challenging to talk about is that "private cloud" isn't a term the marketing gang cooked up that we can all ignore, like the normal Three Letter Acronyms that every company "is a leader in." Cloud is not a technology -- you can't rack up a Cloud Box and call it a day. Cloud is an operational model, a consumption model, and way of running IT as a value-added part of your business. It's been fascinating so far this trip as everybody is closest to their part of the coalescing cloud -- topics like provisioning, automation, chargeback, policy-based management and compliance were common topics at the opening reception -- and it will be interesting to see how these threads come together over the next three days as we continue to talk public cloud.

EMC's Ed Saipetch has been briefing customers on the virtual datacenter and private cloud this week. He wrote yesterday about the conversations he's having. It seems to be a lightbulb type moment -- to some IT shops, building a private cloud seems obvious, and to others, it still seems impossible. As Ed says in his post talking about some We’re separating but will stay friends:

Some customers saw exactly where I was going and others probably thought I was insane.  I started at a high level and then went into the details but here’s the problem. When we talk about infrastructure becoming a pool of resources that you’re able to push and pull workloads into and out of, some people think it’s fairytale land. ... Infrastructure AND platforms are both part of the “Stack” and “Cloud” conversation.  It’s about businesses being able to let their most valuable asset (their people) work on deploying applications faster instead of provisioning servers.

We seem to be mirroring the same conversation we had when we had to give up being server huggers and virtualize in the first wave of server consolidation. As we're moving to a higher level of abstraction and automation, at first it seems like you're giving up what you've spent all your hard time to build in the first place. 

Sound like an interesting conversation? Let's get started. There's a few ways to follow along over the next few days.

• Follow along here on VMTN Blog and Twitter (@jtroyer) I'll also be checking in on foursquare to support the Spots4Bots charity http://bit.ly/Spots4Bots
• Search for blog posts on EMC World
• Search for Twitter updates on EMC World

And my favorite... streaming video LIVE from #TheCube at EMC World 2010. SiliconANGLE's John Furrier (@furrier) and Mark Rizzn Hopkins (@rizzn) will be broadcasting live Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday from 2:30-5:30pm EDT (and a little more besides). They're set up right outside the bloggers lounge here, and they've already penciled in a great series of guests. You should not miss this show. Check it out at http://siliconangle.com/emcworld2010/. EMC's Stu Miniman (@stu) lays out more information on the broadcast and agenda:

What content are you getting?  THREE keynote speakers (2 of which will be coming directly from the stage straight to the live video), top industry bloggers & analysts, partners (VMware, Cisco, Brocade and others) and more special guests to be announced later.  Topics will span everything from Federation, Cloud and Virtualization to Social Media, Security and Sustainability.

Here's the current schedule:
 

On with the show! Reporting live from EMC World, this is Dr John Troyer for VMware!

John and EMC's @pollypearson after the Counting Crows on Sunday
 

Week 16, no small talks just the facts:

• Eric Sloof - Online Training – Automating vSphere with the VIX API
  The API 1.10 Beta was released last February; this is the preliminary standalone VIX release that runs with VMware vSphere 4.x. This release also bundles earlier VIX libraries, including the libraries delivered for Workstation and VMware Server. I’ve created a new tool called the vmFilemanager; this tool is completely built on the VIX API 1.10 Beta. It’s not available for download yet, but I’ve recorded a demo which show how to copy files into a virtual machine. The awesome part is that I’ll also show you how easy it is to create such a tool in the free version of Microsoft Visual Basic 2008, AKA the Express Edition.
• Maish Saidel-Keesing - ESXi Deployment Solution - Part 1 & Part 2
  The idea is basically the same. There is the same kind of client/server framework. The ESXi host is deployed and when completed it notifies (client) a Powershell script (server) of its existence. The script then performs the configuration steps that you define on the new host. I was not satisfied with the results I was getting from the ideas that were posted above. There are some flaws in the process (at least from my point of view) and the flexibility of being able to make changes was minimal. I find that this new approach simplifies things for me and allows for greater flexibility.
• Scott Drummonds - A Performance Tip for ESX 3.0 and ESX 3.5
  Because hardware assist was once so slow, older versions of ESX would utilize our faster-performing binary translation in many situations. But virtualization assist in today’s processors–and here I am talking about Intel and AMD processors manufactured in the past two years–is generally faster than binary translation. This means your virtual machines running on ESX 3.5 on shiny new processors may not be reaching their full potential performance.
• Luc Dekens - Find unused portgroups in a cluster
  This cmdlet returns a VMware.VimAutomation.Types.Host.VirtualPortGroup object, which contains a very useful property called Ports. In that property it lists all the guests that are connected to a port on the portgroup. That would be the solution to find unused portgroups, I thought. But while the vSphere Client also shows powered off guests that are connected, the Port property returned by the Get-VirtualPortgroup cmdlet doesn’t.
• Steve Kaplan - Cloud computing lessons from bacterium
  This private cloud model of Infrastructure as a Service is still in its infancy, but will undoubtedly prove to be very effective for larger organizations which can easily justify the investment in new equipment and software. They also are more likely to have the qualified IT staff available to manage it. Even so, many are likely to utilize some aspects of public cloud computing such as SaaS or hosted disaster recovery.

What a week. Not only did I start on one of the first cloud engagements in EMEA but also one of the largest clouds was implemented in Iceland and because of this (ash) cloud I got stuck in the UK. I wanted to get the weekly top 5 done in the morning but ended up spending my morning on something else and the afternoon walking around in London. I did manage to squeeze in a couple of minutes this morning to get this article out though, and just before you start reading don't forget the vExpert "awards" for 2010!

• Richard Garsthagen - unofficial SDK for VMware View
  Welcome to this first part of the ‘unofficial SDK for VMware View”. You might wonder, why “unofficial”? Well, simple, VMware View is one of the few products from VMware that does not have an SDK So if you want to script/program/automate anything against VMware View, you are out of luck. That is, officially you can not. VMware View uses Microsoft ADAM (Active Directory Application Mode) to store its data. After a day of googling and puzzling, I was finally able to figure out how to do some of these ADAM calls myself using visual basic and powershell. In this part 1, I want to share 2 beginning powershell scripts with you.
• Scott Drummonds - Windows Guest Defragmentation, Take Two
  Before I describe the test and its results, I want to share an important point on guest defragmentation. Most of the computer literate are aware that file fragmentation–the separation of logically contiguous pieces of a file–can hurt storage performance. But many may not realize that free space fragmentation is as big of an issue. When free space is fragmented, writes take longer and files are re-fragmented rapidly. PerfectDisk defragments files and free space and the results below benefit from both of these improvements.
• Stuart Radnidge - Be Agile
  Agility is another buzzword that goes hand in hand with Cloud, but what I’m referring to here is more aligned with Agile as a philosophy or methodology rather than the conventional interpretation (although of the course the 2 are closely linked). Agile is most often used for software projects, so you may initially think it’s a bit strange to use for something that is as much infrastructure as it is software but trust me, it works exceptionally well.
• Eric Sloof - What’s faster E1000 or VMXNET3 – let’s see what PassMark’s PerformanceTest says
  When both virtual machines are hosted on the same ESX server and only using the “left side” of the distributed virtual switch the network performance is 300% faster. I know these network graphs show details of the TCP/IP network transfer speed (in kilobits / sec) over short period of time and are not really representative, the average network speed may be limited by the LAN card, the CPU or network infrastructure such as firewalls and switches. But I’ve learned two lessons, the VMXNET3 is faster and local ESX traffic outperforms external traffic by 300%.
• Gabrie van Zanten - [Gestalt] vBlock, great product, just not for you
  What I don’t understand though is where the bottleneck is in a Vblock type 1 to use only 48GB? When starting with 2 chassis there is plenty of memory that could be added before adding a 3rd chassis. CPU shouldn’t be the problem, since the Vblock type 2 blades are the same B-200 blades, all running 96GB RAM and are able to host more VMs per blade than the Vblock type 1. Would storage be the bottleneck? Actually, I doubt that, since adding a 3rd or 4th chassis would put more VMs on the storage and ask more IOPS from the storage, which the Vblock can deliver according to the specs. Then why would the balance be gone when adding more memory? I have no answer on that, I can only say that where 4 chassis with each 6x 48GB + 2x 96GB blades will give me 1920GB RAM, a non-supported config with 3 chassis of 8x 96GB blades would give me 2304GB RAM and thus save me buying that 4rd chassis.