VMTN Blog

Today VMware is proud to unveil the VMware Express during its inaugural stop at the 2010 VMware Partner Exchange in Las Vegas, NV.  This state of the art mobile datacenter, demo environment and briefing center has been built to bring VMware solutions directly to our customers across the USA and Canada during the 2010 Virtualization Tour. The VMware Express is sponsored by Cisco, EMC, Dell, MDS, NetApp, Xsigo, ChipPC, Amulet Hotkey and Teradici.

There are 5 demo stations covering both VMware desktop and server virtualization solutions. Customers will have the unique opportunity to get hands on and dig deep into solutions with VMware Experts. There are demos highlighting the following products and solutions:

VMware View

• Best User Experience – Highlighting the power of the PCoIP display protocol to deliver a rich user experience, perfectly adapted for the network connection and end-point device.

• Follow-Me Desktop – Enabling immediate access to desktops, applications and data while ensuring a consistent user experience across sessions and endpoint devices.

• Access Across Boundaries – Providing access to desktops, applications and data anytime, anywhere regardless of network availability.

• Windows 7 Migration – Reducing the costs and complexity associated with desktop and application migration.


VMware vSphere

• The industry’s most reliable platform for datacenter virtualization offering the highest levels of availability and responsiveness for all applications and services.  Optimize IT services and deliver the highest levels of application service agreements with the lowest total cost per application workload by decoupling your business-critical applications from the underlying hardware for unprecedented flexibility and reliability.

vCenter Server

• Learn about this scalable and extensible platform that forms the foundation for virtualization management with the family of vCenter products including CapacityIQ, AppSpeed, Chargeback and many more focused on providing advanced operational controls.

For a lot of people it has been a crazy week. Some of you might wonder why, some of you know what I'm talking about. VMware Partner Exchange 2010. With PEX coming up for many of you that means GTJD, GTJD? Yeah, Getting The Job Done! Being away for a week in my case means I need to wrap up project and answer a lot of emails before it gets out of control. That doesn't however mean that I don't have time to create a top-5.... This weeks list contains the all-star bloggers:

• Scott Drummonds - PVSCSI and Low-IO Workloads
  At low IOPS the CPU is doing very little work to access storage hardware.  In these environments it is simply not worth anyone’s time to implement and use a special driver storage driver.  But when 10-50k IOPS are streaming through the virtual SCSI bus, a new approach that halves the number of cycles spent on each IO will noticeably decrease CPU utilization.  This is why we created PVSCSI. The current design of PVSCSI coalesces based on OIOs only, and not throughput.  This means that when the virtual machine is requesting a lot of IO but the storage is not delivering, the PVSCSI driver is coalescing interrupts.  But without the storage supplying a steady stream of IOs there are no interrupts to coalesce.  The result is a slight increase to latency with little or no efficiency gain.
• Frank Denneman - Sizing VMs and NUMA nodes
  ESX is NUMA aware and will use the NUMA CPU scheduler when detecting a NUMA system. On non-NUMA systems the ESX CPU scheduler spreads load across all sockets in a round robin manner. This approach improves performance by utilizing as much as cache as possible. When using a vSMP virtual machine in a non-NUMA system, each vCPU is scheduled on a separate socket.
• Jason Boche - Configure VMware ESX(i) Round Robin on EMC Storage
  The answer was buried on page 88.  The nmp roundrobin setting useANO is configured by default to 0 which means unoptimized paths reported by the array will not be included in Round Robin path selection unless optimized paths become unavailable.  Remember I said early on that unoptimized and optimized paths reported by the array would be a key piece of information.  We can see this in action by looking at the device list above.  The very last line shows working paths, and only one path is listed for Round Robin use – the optimized path reported by the array.
• Scott Lowe - Using IP-Based Storage with VMware vSphere on Cisco UCS
  From the VMware side of the house, since you’re using 10GbE end-to-end, it’s very unlikely that you’ll need to worry about bandwidth; that eliminates any concerns over multiple VMkernel ports on multiple subnets or using multiple NFS targets so as to be able to use link aggregation. (I’m not entirely sure you could use link aggregation with the 6100XP interconnects anyway. Anyone?) However, since you are talking Cisco UCS you’ll have only two 10GbE connections (unless you’re using the full width blade, which is unlikely).
• Gabe - Licensing problems with VMware VIEW4
  The problem Jon was facing, was that it was impossible to just add those 20 (2×10) licenses to vCenter without assigning them to a host. Because, in our believe, there should just be 20 licenses in some sort of pool that each VDI VM would take one license from. It is possible to assign multiple hosts to one license so they can share the number of available VMs in that license. What you can’t do is have a host connect to more than one license, which in our opinion would also be feasible.

I'll keep it short this time as I seriously need to get some sleep.

• Scott Sauer - VMware Data Recovery (vDR) Overview
  The underlying backup technology behind vDR is the new vStorage API (Not VCB), it takes advantage of a new feature called change block tracking.  After the first full backup is performed, Change block tracking examines the virtual disk being backed up and only backs up the differences from the first backup.  This means less backup traffic going across your network.
• Hany Michael - Diagram: ESX Memory Management and Monitoring v1.0
  diagram madness
• Theron Conrey - vmware view linux live cd howto
  It’s interesting to note, with some additional configurations within susesudio, some tweaking to lock down the gnome desktop, and some more polish, you could easily provide the full thin client experience, completely removing the users ability to launch any other applications, as well as the option to install this “os” locally for longer POCs.
• Eric Siebert - The top blog full voting results
  Here’s a table with the vote totals for all the VMware/virtualization blogs included in the survey, there were a few others that only had 1 or two votes that I didn’t include. Total votes includes any vote a blog received whether it was 1 through 10. Total points is the sum of each vote times it’s appropriate weight for the position (#1 vote = 10 points, #2 vote = 9 points, all the way down to a #10 vote = 1 point).
• Simon Seagrave - VMware P2V – Easy Method to Remove HP Agents and Utilities
  When running an HP Proliant server whether it be Windows or Linux based chances are that it has management agents and a handful of utilities relating to the HP server installed and running.  Of course this is fine whilst the operating system is running directly on the physical HP hardware but once it has been P2V’ed and abstracted from this physical layer the OS is running on what it thinks is generic non-HP hardware.  This means that there is no need for any of these drivers or utilities. So as to free up valuable system resource and reduce the risk of any issues from any of these HP utilities or agents continuing to run on this non-HP hardware it is best practice to remove them all.

Week 4 already. Just one week before VMware Partner Exchange kicks off in Las Vegas. I'll be around, but not for PEX we're doing VCDX panels. I guess this week was all about the NetApp/Cisco/VMware announcement. And for those who missed, be sure to read this article by Vaughn as it captures the essence of the announcement. Now without further ado; here's the top 5:

• Luc Dekens - dvSwitch scripting – Part 6 – Private VLAN
  Another post in the dvSwitch series. This time I’ll tackle the creation and use of a private VLANs (PVLAN) on a dvSwitch. For those that are not that familiar with PVLANs have a look at KB1010691, that article gives a good overview of the PVLAN concept. And there were several sessions during the last VMworld that talked about PVLANs. The most noteworthy being TA2525 VMware vSphere 4 Networking Deep Dive. In short, PVLANs allows isolation for guests on a shared IP subnet.
• Steve Chambers - Cisco UCS: different workload, different configuration, same blade. Simple.
  With Unified Fabric you have a drastically reduced amount of physical connections: instead, you run multiple workloads over the same bit of string and separate them using network and storage virtualization. On one 10GbE pipe you can run IP, NFS, iSCSI, FC. Remember those “which protocol is best?” arguments: consign them to the bin, you can now run whatever you want over Ethernet. Just tell a Service Profile what VLAN or VSAN to present to an OS, with a click of the mouse, and you’re done. No cabling or network card work required. Different workload, different network connections, same blade. Simple.
• Eric Siebert - Lessons learned in a power outage
  Know your ESX command line, if your vCenter Server and other workstations are not available you’ll need to start VM’s using the command line. Even if your DNS server is on a local VM you won’t be able to start it without the vSphere Client. Therefore you’ll have to log into the ESX console and manually start it, if you don’t know the command to do this that could be a problem. Keep a cheat sheet by your hosts with the basic commands that you’ll need like vmware-cmd to get things up and running using the console.
• Rodney Haywood - Viewing the vCloud future
  In 2008 VMware were talking about "application workloads" and "vApps" which were essentially just containers for servers. The fear was the requirement to rewrite applications to be usable on the Cloud. I think many in the Infrastructure space (VMware's existing customer base) focused on this server focus. Yet there was the key phrase in the speech, the workloads of today and tomorrow. "How do I take my collection of infrastructure resources and increasingly see them as a single giant computer on which I can flexibly run both todays application workloads and tomorrows application loads." How could we forget Maritzs love for Ruby.
• Nicholas Weaver - Look I'm A Tool! : vSphere Session Monitor 1.0
  I bet at this point you are thinking: “Well Nick, that is cool and dandy but I can get that info from my vSphere client! Way to reinvent the wheel…” Well… now for the best part. This is the real reason I wrote this little app. It all started with my senior engineer, Justin. He had a nasty habit of yelling out “What are you doing?” every time someone did something on a vCenter server. That got me thinking; “It would be cool if something popped up telling Justin someone logged in. And it would be even cooler if you didn’t have to have the vSphere Client running to do it.”

We haven't posted a post with podcast notes in quite a while, but we're still going strong. If you aren't familiar with our curious tradition, every Wednesday at noon California time a gang of motley VMware admins, gurus, newbies, troublemakers, jokers, kibitzers, and seekers of knowledge gather around a virtual campfire and record a podcast. All are welcome, and a good time is had by all. You can listen to the podcast via the widget on the right, the mp3, or via iTunes. If you ask those in the know, however, they'll tell you that showing up live is much more fun, because the chat is usually going strong before, during, and after the show. We get about 30-50 people live every week, and if you dial in (via POTS or VOIP) you can ask a question or give a comment at any time, because we try to keep everybody unmuted. It's the closest thing you'll get to a VMUG or VMworld without leaving your desk. Follow @jtroyer on Twitter to catch the topic earlier in the week.

The VMware Community Roundtable podcast is up to episode #79, and our topic this week was white boxes and home labs. I get that question a lot for people who want to prep for their VCP (and it's even come up for VCDX, but if you're thinking about getting a VCDX you'd better be able to McGyver a home VMware lab with a toaster, an IBM PC XT, and an iPod).

The topic of building a home lab is an interesting one to me right now for two reasons: first of all, you can now build a complete setup running vSphere and virtual storage appliances right on VMware Workstation. All you need is some reasonably modern hardware and you can set up ESX and VMs, turn knobs, and explore most features of vSphere, all virtually. But if you do want to be touching the hardware, you can still be buying surplus off eBay, but the latest generations of modern servers and storage are affordable, performant, quiet(er), and thrifty with power. It might be worth your while to investigate some new hardware and sell that wind turbine to somebody else.

Links we discussed, with source material compiled by our own Duncan Epping over at Yellow Bricks:

• Simon Seagrave was our keynote guest, and he compiled a great overview to the discussion. Highly recommended: – VMware ESX(i) Home Lab – Why, What and How? Considerations when building your own home lab
• Duncan Epping – My Homelab
• Gabrie van Zanten – White box ESX home lab
• For the overkill crowd Jason Boche – EMC Celerra NS-120
• and Chad Sakac: Building a Home VMware Infrastructure Lab
• Bouke Groenescheij – v-Water: ESXi overclocked, watercooled
• Simon Gallagher – vT.A.R.D.I.S – 10 ESXi node cluster on a trolley as demonstrated at London VMUG
• Dave Mishchenko – Whitebox HCL. Dave's vm-help.com is highly recommended, as is the Ultimate ESX Whitebox and the VMware Hardware/Software Community.
• Eric Sloof’s articles on whiteboxes
• David Davis -- My Home VMware vSphere Lab
• Eric Siebert's white box picture and
• Maish Saidel-Keesing – Install ESX on your Laptop – I had a Crazy Idea
• Iomega IX4-200D

As I said in the podcast, this is a topic of high interest and the specifics matter, so if you want to post any details about your own lab or white boxes, just let me know (jtroyer@vmware.com or the comments) and I'll add the links here.

• Vladan Seget - Having an Idea for an Ultimate White Box? Or Multi Usage Ultimate White Box.
• Rick Vanover - My Home Lab Setup

Join VMware SAP Alliance Manager Joachim Rahmfeld on this 45 minute webcast tomorrow, Jan 21, at 2pm PST. Virtualized SAP Applications: From the datacenter to the cloud. There's a whole day of good cloud and virtualization talks over at Brighttalk tomorrow - recommended. For more information on running SAP on VMware, see the Virtualization for SAP Solutions blog and the SAP and VMware page on VMware's site.

It was a very exciting week as I announced that I will be transitioning to a new team. Of course that wasn't the only exciting thing this week. A lot of bloggers have been waiting for Eric Siebert to reveal the new Top 25 blogs... On twitter it was noticeable that some of the bloggers started to get nervous about their position. I am honored to be in such an amazing list. Anyway enough blabbering... check out the top 5:

• Eric Siebert - And the winners of the top VMware/virtualization blog are…
  Well I’m not saying, watch the presentation to find out, I’ll be doing another post later on with the full results as well as some detail on the process I used to sort through the votes and score them to determine the winners. Congratulations to all the winners, there were many newcomers to the top 25 blog roll. I’ll be sending you graphics that you can display on your website to reflect your achievements.
• Simon Gallagher - Using the VCE/vBlock concept to aid disaster relief in situations like the Haiti Earthquake
  Whilst providing physical, medical, food and engineering relief is of paramount importance during a crisis, communications networks are vital to co-ordinate efforts between agencies, it is likely that whatever civil communications infrastructure, cell towers, landlines etc. are badly impacted by the earthquake so aid agencies rely on radio based systems, however as in the “business as usual” world the Internet can act as a well-understood common medium for exchanging digital information and services – if you can get access.
• Chris Hoff - Cloud: Over Subscription vs. Over Capacity – Two Different Things
  This complicates things when you consider that at this point scaling out in CPU is easier to do than scaling out in the network.  Add virtualization into the mix which drives big, flat, L2 networks as a design architecture layered with a control plane that is now (in the case of Cloud) mostly software driven, provisioned, orchestrated and implemented, and it’s no wonder that folks like Google, Amazon and Facebook are desparate for hugely dense, multi-terabit, wire speed L2 switching fabrics and could use 40 and 100Gb/s Ethernet today.
• Scott Drummonds - Virtual Storage Design: Application Consolidation
  Fixed recommendations for consolidation ratios are cancerous.  Whether we are talking about vCPUs per core, virtual machines per host, or VMDKs per LUN, there is no single number the represents the “right” ratio.  Accurate guidance requires workload characterization and fine tuning using vSphere’s performance counters.  Today I want to highlight one experiment that shows application choice impacting VMDK-to-LUN consolidation.  The inescapable conclusion is that sequential access data must be separated from random access files!
• Scott Lowe - Resetting the Root Password on VMware ESX 4.0
  Because this is a lab environment we just wanted to assign a simple password that anyone on the team could easily remember. (I’m sure the security purists out there are screaming right now.) Unfortunately, once I had the ESX host booted into single user mode, the passwd command insisted on making me use a complex password. There didn’t seem to be any simple way around the restriction.

Today, VMware announced the general availability of VMware Go™, a free web-based service that lets users set up a virtual machine environment with just a few mouse clicks. We at VMware are very excited about this release, which directly addresses the skill barrier for starting down the virtualization path, especially for small businesses who may have limited IT resources. VMware Go guides users through the installation and configuration of the industry-leading hypervisor, VMware ESXi, and then enables them to set up and manage virtual machines running server application workloads. Since our public Beta of VMware Go was released in Sept, 2009, we’ve had over 1,000 users successfully set up an ESXi server and a total of 3,000+ VMs running on those servers.

How it works —Virtualization in Three Simple Steps:

1. Initial ESXi server setup
   • Unique web-browser interface and intuitive wizard guides and accelerates installation and setup process
   • Built in hardware compatibility check automates the process of selecting physical server environments
2. Virtual machine creation
   • Leverage existing physical server configuration, install a prebuilt virtual appliance, or start with a new clean virtual machine.
3. Manage ESXi servers and virtual machines
   • Centralized management interface simplifies changes to a virtual environment.
   • Monitor virtual machines for basic performance and resource utilization.
   • Scan and update virtual machines from a central console.
     

Useful links for more information:

·         Learn more about VMware Go.

·         Get started using ESXi and VMware Go.

·         For more technical information of VMware Go, see the VMware Go FAQ.

·         Video demo of VMware Go in action.

Posted by Joe Andrews, Group Manager, Product Marketing

Another year, another week. Here we go again. Extremely busy week and announcements of companies acquiring other companies all over the place. Bloggers joining vendors or just changing jobroles. Crazy week, and same goes for the quality of the articles this week.

• Steve Kaplan - Microsoft’s attempt to commoditize virtualization
  Despite these many unique attributes, VMware's most compelling differentiator may be its astounding reliability. Unlike Hyper-V, it offers data center stability, performance and security that is independent from the bloat, reliability and patching issues of a general-purpose operating system. Even Redmond Magazine, "The Independent Voice of the Microsoft IT Community" gave its 2008 Editors Choice award for the most reliable IT technology to VMware ESX (the IBM mainframe came in #2).
• Duncan Epping - esxtop values/thresholds!
  I am a huge fan of esxtop! I read a couple of pages of the esxtop bible every day before I go to bed. Something I however am always struggling with is the “thresholds” of specific metrics. I fully understand that it is not black/white, performance is the perception of a user. There must be a certain threshold however. For instance it must be safe to say that when %RDY constantly exceeds the value of 20 it is very likely that the VM responds sluggish. I want to use this article to “define” these thresholds, but I need your help. There are many people reading these articles, together we must know at least a dozen metrics lets collect and document them with possible causes if known.
• Martin MacLeod - Follow the moon, data center virtualization – a short essay
  We introduced the world to server virtualization where instead of having a server per application, we could buy a server with a bit more memory, a bit more storage and have that ‘cut up’ and shared amongst the business units. It worked on the whole very well, but IT was still a bit confused and still is in many ways about how we charge for it and how we ‘make a profit’ for their cost center, you see we can only absorb so much before someone has to pay for the underlying infrastructure the 400TB of storage, the 32GB of RAM in each server, and compare that with the 1u special that might be good enough for a given application, keeping the per unit virtual machine cost competitive could be a challenge if we didn’t look at the way we billed for capacity, for delivering IT service.
• Gabrie van Zanten - Putting your storage to the test – Part 2 NFS on Iomega IX4-200D
  I was surprised to see so much difference in performance, I had expected some difference, but no difference as big as this. Looking at the data of the first “Super ATTO Clone pattern” test I ran, I can see the biggest difference between NFS and iSCSI being the short peak in read speed where iSCSI remained stable after reaching its peak performance at 41 MB/sec. NFS peaked to 110 MB/sec testing block sizes from 32K to 512K and dropped in speed to 57 MB/sec on blocks of 1M and larger.
• Steve Chambers - Four economic variables and approaches to make your VDI solution successful
  Put yourself in the shoes of a business manager: “Why should I pay Internal IT $250/qtr for a hosted desktop when I can buy physical for less/similar, or use a cloud offering?”  The common response by Internal IT to this question is: “You HAVE to buy from us!” (footnote: even if we cost more and are worse).  That kind of mandate might seem smart, but it’s a key indicator that Internal IT is losing the battle and has lost the war.  If this is an Outsourcer saying this, then the writing is on the wall for them and I can 100% guarantee they are going to have to go through a tender at the end of their contract (expensive for outsourcer).

This is without a doubt the most difficult top 5 ever. There were so many great article in 2009 that it is impossible to call out 5 specific articles This article will have a different approach than you are used of the top 5 series so far. I will list 5 bloggers which have contributed to the community in a unique way. Unique can be by the amount of in-depth details that each post contains but also for instance unique scripts that are published.

Please keep in mind that this is my personal opinion and does not reflect popularity of the blogs in anyway. Here we go:

• Chad Sakac - There are way too many excellent articles to mention each of them specifically. Two of the top articles were co-authored, but almost every article Chad writes contains a huge amount of in-depth info. His insights on especially storage related topics are invaluable.
  
  • VMFS best practices and counter-FUD
  • Multivendor post - NFS
  • Multivendor post - iSCSI
  • VMware I/O queues and microbursting
• Ken Cline - Although there has not been much activity on Ken's blog lately his series on networking in a virtual environment were real eye openers for many. (Start blogging regularly Ken!) Ken started many discussions in the blogosphere/community and wrote must read articles for everyone implementing or designing virtual infrastructures. Part 7 of "The Great vSwitch Debate" contains links to number 1 - 6 so I will not link these explicitly:
  
  • The Great vSwitch Debate - Part 7
  • The Great vSwitch Debate - Part 8
• Hany Michael - If there is anyone who managed to create unique articles then it is Hany. His diagrams are insane. The details that he puts into every single diagram are just unseen. The following were my favorite, and let's hope Hany keeps up posting these excellent diagrams:
  
  • Diagram: VMware High-Availability
  • vSphere 4.0 vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS) – Video Demonstration + Architecture Diagram
• Alan Renouf - The king of PowerCLI. Those are the only words I usually need to describe Alan. I don't know a single person who has created so many valuable VMware PowerCLI scripts. The crown on his work is most definitely the VESI & Powergui Powerpack. The vCheck is most likely one of the most used PowerCLI scripts written so far, which does exactly what it is named "Check" your virtual environment.
  
  • VESI & Powergui Powerpack
  • vCheck 3.1
• Eric Siebert - Eric's Launchpad on vSphere-land.com is the homepage for many. But that's not the only reason why Eric made this list. His link lists and the articles Eric publishes on TechTarget are always top of the bill. Besides blogging, linking and tweeting he also manages to write books. Eric must have days of 28hrs.
  
  • VMworld 2009
  • Changed Block Tracking

I could go on for ever I guess but that would make it a top 1000. Some of the usual suspects are missing like Scott Lowe, Jason Boche, Gabe, Steve Kaplan, Mike Laverick, Steve Chambers, Eric Sloof, Vaughn Stewart and again I can go on forever but I won't. This is it, I needed to pick five people and these are my personal top 5 for 2009.

I want to thank every blogger out there for making 2009 amazing. The amount of info, tips, tricks, scripts, knowledge and expertise shared is something you don't often see in other communities. I love the VMware Community, I really do. Thanks,

This is the last Top 5 for this year, well almost. Of course I will try to capture 2009 in a Top 5 or a Top 10 blog posts article. Not sure though as it will take some time to re-read and "grade" all articles. This week was a bit chaotic for me personally. I had the week off which means that I have to do "real" work. Play with the kids, clean up around the house and we left to Disneyland Paris the day before Christmas. We, especially the kids, had a great time and enjoyed ourselves with Mickey, Mini, Donald, Buzz, Goofy and the rest. I guess those are my Top 5 for this week but that is not why you are reading this article:

• Steve Kaplan - Cisco UCS vs. HP Matrix: strategic vs. tactical approach to virtualization
  The initial HP Matrix press release appears to be the first public mention of the product; it is hard to imagine that it resulted from a long-term data center strategy. The HP-sponsored April, 2009 IDC white paper, HP BladeSystem Matrix: Enabling Adaptive Infrastructure, says "HP is not introducing any brand-new technologies". Matrix not only lacks innovation, it feels like a work in progress. Even the "adaptive infrastructure" messaging used to introduce Matrix last April appears to have been replaced by "dynamic infrastructure".
• Duncan Epping - IOps
  So how do we factor this penalty in? Well it’s simple for instance for RAID-5 for every single write there are 4 IO’s needed. That’s the penalty which is introduced when selecting a specific RAID type. This also means that although you think you have enough spindles in a single RAID Set you might not due to the introduced penalty and the amount of writes versus reads.
• Steve Chambers - Does your Desktop Service Strategy look a bit like this?
  If using VDI technology to deploy Desktop Services is a great idea (according to the alleged market size, and vendor/consumer bustle in that market place, it seems to be so) then how do you do it? Well, according to ITIL, you start with a Service Strategy. I’m no ITIL kung fu master, and this is by choice because I consider ITIL a minor tool that, at best, needs to be used in conjunction with other tools to do the job and it’s not the be-all or end-all. ITIL’s better than nothing, but it’s not everything.
• Chethan Kumar - Using solid-state drives to improve performance of SQL databases on vSphere hosts when memory is overcommitted
  Performance of certain applications such as databases running in a vSphere based virtual infrastructure can be affected when demand for memory increases beyond what is available on the host. vSphere uses complex memory reclamation techniques to acquire and reallocate memory to VMs that need it. Swapping memory pages of a virtual machine to a swap file located on physical storage media is one such technique. Swapping is known to have a negative effect on the performance of the application in the VM. The degree to which the performance is affected depends on the I/O performance of the storage media used to host the swap file. Recently, I ran a few experiments to study the possibility of using a solid state device (SSD) as swap storage in virtualized SQL environments.
• Tom Howarth - How To: configure sudo on ESX
  Now if the invoking user is root or if the target user is the same as the invoking user then no password is required. Otherwise, sudo requires that users authenticate themselves with a password by default. Once a user has been authenticated, a timestamp is updated and the user may then use sudo without a password for a short period of time (15 minutes unless overridden in sudoers).

Last week I blogged about the lack of View oriented bloggers or articles. This week 3 articles of the top 5 are View centric. That can't be a coincidence can it? Anyway I am in a hurry... so no time for a huge introduction. Here is the top 5:

• Ian Gibbs - Cleaning up orphaned replicas in View
  If, like me, you have been through all the versions of View Composer and the broker since its introduction, various bugs and broken recompositions will have left you with a large amount of detritus in your VMwareViewComposerReplicaFolder, making it hard to keep an eye on the proper operation of the Composer, and in my case, causing a datastore to run out of space and subsequent operations to fail. Time for a clean up. This is decently documented here, but how do you know which ones you can delete...
• Arne Fokkema - PowerCLI: Find Resourcepool or VMs with Memory Ballooning/Swap Usage
  In this post I will show you how to report Resource Pools and VMs with active Memory Ballooning with the use of the PowerCLI/Ecoshell.
• Chad Sakac - What’s what in VMware View and VDI Land...
  Let’s say once again that your peak workload is 12 IOps per client, and you have 15,000 desktops you want to virtualize.  That’s a total of 180,000 IOps, which is a very, very large workload for common storage configurations.   It would hammer a large CX4, for example.   You would need to carefully scale out all the aspects of the design, and consider it just like you would consider the system design for a MASSIVE database.    Can it be done?  Of course – but there’s a reason why the “what’s the single ESX host maximum IOPs” test at the vSphere 4 launch (365,000 IOPs) was backended by 3 CX4-960s with 30 solid-state disks.   That’s a whackload of IO.
• Ruben Spruijt / Herco van Brug - Understanding how storage design has a big impact on your VDI!
  It should be obvious by now that calculating the amount of storage needed in order to properly host VDI is not to be taken lightly. The main bottleneck at the moment is the IOPS. The read/write ratio of the IOPS that we see in practice in most of the reference cases demonstrate figures of 40/60 percent, sometimes even as skewed as 10/90 percent. The fact is that they all demonstrate more writes than reads. And because writes are more costly than reads - on any storage system - the number of disks required increases accordingly, depending on the exact usage of the users and the application.
  
• Vittorio Viarengo - Virtualize Production Databases first
  So, how does a database run faster in a virtual environment? Well, most of these databases were running on relatively old and under-utilized machines. By upgrading them to a new modern server running VMware, these customers could allocate more resources to each database instance therefore achieving better performance. Moreover, thanks to VMware HA and FT, they could provide their internal customers with better business continuity without deploying more complex clustering solutions from the database vendors.

VMware today announced the results of a compelling survey focused on operational efficiency, disaster preparedness, and use of virtualization among Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs). At a time when analysts have forecasted rapidly increasing adoption of virtualization solutions by SMBs, it’s interesting to dive into what’s really been driving that adoption. A fascinating take away from the survey is the focus on improving business continuity and disaster recovery. Most IT folks are aware of the server consolidation benefits from virtualization, but improving disaster preparedness is a somewhat “hidden” benefit, especially among SMBs.

High level summary of results

1. Eye opening data about the risks and implications of IT systems downtime among SMBs. A large number of SMBs have had their bottom line impacted by downtime and yet, less than half of them have a business continuity plan.
   • One-third (33%) of SMBs have had an IT systems outage within the past two years 
   • More than one in five (21%) has lost critical business data as a result of an accident or disaster
   • Of those, more than three in five (62%) have lost sales or customers as a result.
   
   
2. SMBs that have adopted virtualization have yielded great benefits, with those citing significant improvements in these key areas:
   • Time spent on routine IT administrative tasks (73%)
   • Application availability (71%)
   • Ability to respond to changing business needs (68%)
   • Backup and data protection (67%)   
   • Business continuity preparedness (67%)
   
   
3. Companies that have implemented virtualization see their IT departments as more effective and more responsive to business needs.
   • 71% of companies that use virtualization rate their IT department as somewhat or very effective, versus 45% of companies that have not implemented virtualization.
   • 73% of companies that use virtualization rate their IT departments as somewhat or very responsive, versus 57% of companies that have not implemented virtualization.
   
   
4. The top initiatives in 2010 are:
   •  Improving security (61%)
   •  Data backup & protection (52%)
   •  Maintaining current infrastructure (42%)
   •  Reducing energy use (39%)
   •  Business continuity & disaster recovery (39%)

Conclusions and next steps

It’s a great time to virtualize if you haven’t started already. Improved server utilization and consolidation are primary and already well known benefits of virtualization. However, virtualization can also improve operational efficiency by helping IT departments spend less time on routine administrative tasks, like server provisioning and maintenance. Another powerful, “hidden” benefit of virtualization is business continuity and disaster recovery. By making IT systems less likely to fail, and by making server restoration substantially faster, virtualization enables SMBs of all sizes to reduce the cost of downtime — in terms of lost productivity, lost sales or damaged reputation.  Given SMBs’ relatively limited disaster preparedness, virtualization can act as an important insurance policy.

Companies new to or considering virtualization should be aware of low-cost and easy solutions that will help them get started. For example, VMware’s market leading hypervisor, ESXi, along with VMware Go, let you easily start down the virtualization path for free. When you are ready to step into low-cost complete solutions, the VMware vSphere Essentials editions add central management and business continuity features. You can support your business case with a financial analysis from VMware’s free online ROI calculator. Learn more about VMware’s solutions for SMBs here.

You can read a complete report of the survey results here in our white paper The Benefits of Virtualization for Small and Medium Businesses: VMware SMB Survey Results.

Posted by Joe Andrews, Group Manager, VMware Product Marketing

What happened this week... Yes the Dutch VMUG! The Netherlands is just a tiny country but when we are talking about technology it seems that we can beat any country out there in terms of enthusiasm. This years anual VMUG meeting had over 600 attendees, I repeat over 600 attendees. It's almost like a dutch VMworld. Keynote by VMware's evangelist Richard Garsthagen and a welcome message from Steve Herrod. Eric Sloof did multiple blogs about the VMUG meeting but this one contains a video which captures the atmosphere. That's enough introduction blabla... here are the articles that made it to the top-5:

• Frank Denneman - Impact of memory reservation
  I have a customer who wants to set memory reservation on a large scale. Instead of using resource pools they were thinking of setting reservations on VM level to get a guaranteed performance level for every VM. Due to memory management on different levels, using such a setting will not get the expected results. Setting aside the question if it’s smart to use memory reservation on ALL VM’s, it raises the question what kind of impact setting memory reservation has on the virtual infrastructure, how ESX memory management handles memory reservation and even more important; how a proper memory reservation can be set.
• Joep Piscaer - Virtualizing vCenter with vDS: Another Catch-22
  To make matters worse: I could not select the correct network label (Port Group) in the drop down list. After some long and hard thinking, I figured out why: ESX couldn’t communicate with vCenter to update the dvSwitch’s status. This is simply because the vCenter VM was one of the migrated VM’s, and thus suffered from the same problem: it wasn’t connected to the network. How’s that for a catch-22! As I said earlier, the physical hosts run on a single vmnic. No easy fix here then, I cannot create a standard vSwitch, create a port group on it, add a vmnic and migrate the vCenter VM to this port group to get the VM online and thus be able to get the other VM’s attached to the right (dvSwitch) Port Group, after which I can migrate the vCenter VM to the right PG.
• Hany Michael - Diagram: VMware High-Availability
  This is not an introduction to the VMware HA, and it's not a very advanced diagram for it either. I assume here that you have a general idea on the topic before looking into it to appreciate this incredible technology. If you are a VMware professional you may also find this useful to keep your information sharp and present about the topic at any given time. You really don't have to re-read the documentation every time you'd like to remember a small detail about the subject.
• Forbes Guthrie - vSphere 4 card - version 2
  Its been a long time coming. Version 2 of this card has many changes that I’ve wanted to make since writing these cards. It’s taken a good couple of months of hard (and frankly a bit boring :0) work, which had pulled me away from blogging about more interesting things and playing with some of the newly released products. The best bit is you probably won’t notice much of a difference. A lot of the work is under the covers, to make the most out of the paper real estate.
• Massimo Re Ferre' - From Scale Up vs Scale Out... to Scale Down
  One of the implications is that servers are now memory-bound. If you ask 10 virtualization architects in the x86 space they will all tell you that the limiting factor today in servers is the memory subsystem. Put it another way, you are reaching the physical memory usage limit far before you manage to saturate the processors in a virtualized server. Have you ever wondered why that is the case? As users move backwards from 8-Socket servers to 4-Socket servers to 2-Socket servers the number of memory slots available per server gets reduced. That's how x86-based servers have been designed over the years: the more sockets the server has, the more memory slots that are available. What is happening now is that customers tend to use much smaller servers because they can support the same number of partitions per physical host, but the memory requirements haven't changed. That's because the amount of memory needed is a function of the number of partitions running, and if that number of partitions is kept constant you will always need the same amount of memory.

Just a couple of weeks left to make the Top 5 in 2009. I expect every single blogger out there to publish one of their best articles ever in the upcoming weeks. Do you wonder what the criteria are? There are none, it's my personal preference. I list the articles that I enjoy reading. A good example for instance is Bouke's article. It's not an in-depth technical article, but it is really useful and something I have never seen document before... that's what I am looking for unique articles.

• Scott Lowe - What is SR-IOV?
  SR-IOV works by introducing the idea of physical functions (PFs) and virtual functions (VFs). Physical functions (PFs) are full-featured PCIe functions; virtual functions (VFs) are “lightweight” functions that lack configuration resources. (I’ll explain why VFs lack these configuration resources shortly.) SR-IOV requires support in the BIOS as well as in the operating system instance or hypervisor that is running on the hardware. Until very recently, I had been under the impression that SR-IOV was handled solely in hardware and did not require any software support; unfortunately, I was mistaken. Software support in the operating system instance or hypervisor is definitely required. To understand why, I must talk a bit more about PFs and VFs.
• Bouke Groenescheij - vCenter Client Shortcuts
  Lately I've been having great fun using shortcut keys to control vCenter speeding up administration. There are very useful combinations, like <Ctrl>-<Shift> and <Ctrl>. Here is a list which I use a lot...
• Eric Siebert - What is Changed Block Tracking in vSphere?
  CBT is a new feature in vSphere that can keep track of the blocks of a virtual disk that have changed since a certain point in time. This is extremely useful for backup and replication applications that can use this information to greatly improve incremental backup and replication times. Without CBT these applications have to figure out changed blocks on their own so being able to get this information for free using the vStorage advanced programming interfaces is extremely valuable to them. CBT is not really part of the vStorage APIs but is a new feature of the VMkernel that is built into the storage stack. The CBT feature can be accessed by third-party applications as part of the vStorage APIs for Data Protection. Applications can use the API to query the VMkernel to return the blocks of data that have changed on a virtual disk since the last backup operation. You can use CBT on any type of virtual disk, thick or thin and on any datastore type except for physical mode Raw Device Mappings. This includes both NFS and iSCSI datastores.
• Kenneth van Ditmarsch - Testing Scenario’s VMware / HP c-Class Infrastructure
  The red lines indicate 10 Gb connections between all individual Interconnect Bay’s, which all tied together form the “Virtual Connect Domain”. The horizontal lines are the X0 ports which are internally connected by the c7000 backplane. The vertical and diagonal lines are 0.5 meter CX4 cables. (Note that since IC1 and 2 and IC 5 and 6 are Flex-10 modules, they are horizontal linked with 2 links  (20 Gb) as designed by HP)
• Vittorio Viarengo - Virtualization Journey: Product Adoption
  When customers enter into the Business Production phase and they start virtualizing business applications and production databases, the value proposition is all around better quality of service and business continuity. This shift is sudden and dramatic. It is like cost savings from consolidation is taken for granted at this stage and customers switch their focus on faster provisioning, better capacity management, reliability and process automation for their business applications.  This is where features such as High Availability (HA), Fault Tolerance (FT) and SRM become important.