VMTN Blog

Two new articles from VROOM!, the VMware performance team blog:

Getting the best performance from Workstation 6.0

On top of all the goodness Workstation 6.0 has to offer, we now have a revised performance document as well. You can find it here. We've tried our best to provide tips not only about things that you could tune with Workstation and its features, but things you could tweak on your host operating system and within the guest, and even what to look out for on the hardware level. The reorganization of the document makes it easy to find what you need to achieve the best possible experience.

Windows Vista Performance in VMware Workstation 6.0

We ran a set of workloads to measure the CPU, memory, disk and network performance of the VM. Vista host performance is on par with XP, except that Vista itself consumes more memory than XP. This means that Vista leaves less memory for the use of VM's than XP. ...

While Vista guest performance is on par with XP in most of our workloads, we did find a few cases that perform worse on the Vista VM than on the XP VM. To understand why Vista was slower in those particular cases, we conducted the same measurements on native physical systems, rather than on virtual machines. We found that Vista is slower than XP on native hardware almost to the same degree as on virtual hardware. This made it clear that VMware Workstation 6.0 wasn't introducing any Vista-specific overheads, and that the relative performance on Vista is as good as on XP.

I'm seeing more and more virtualization video come out. Let me know when you spot new good content worth watching.

Scott Hanson has a new white paper in Dell's VMware TechCenter with several nice screencasts showing off VMware Infrastructure's DRS and HA features in action. Definitely worth watching if you've never seen the VMotion magic.

• White paper: VMware HA/DRS Solution Scenarios on Dell PowerEdge Servers (193KB)
• Screencast: VMware HA/DRS Demonstration of Planned Maintenance
• Screencast: VMware HA Demonstration of an Unplanned Outage
• Screencast: VMware DRS Demonstration of Dynamic VM Migration with Spikes in Workload

Mike Laverick shows off his Ultimate Deployment Appliance (a "DHCP/TFTP/PXE appliance which comes with a web-based management tool which simplifies installing an operating system to either physical or virtual machines") in a silent 8:39 screencast.

Jim points us to a funny Novell/Blendtec video about "Blended IT Infrastructure" -- this is how I think about VMware Converter. Now just pour into the container of your favorite virtual infrastructure platform.

And speaking of VMware Converter, although it's not a video, I'm listening to the inaugural Virtual Strategy Magazine Roundtable on Migrating Physical Servers to a Virtual Environment with representatives from VMware, PlateSpin, and HP.

Update: we never linked to this video interview at TSX Nice by virtualization.info's Alessandro Perilli of Scott Herold and Mike Laverick of the upcoming ESX Server Advanced Technical Design Guide.

From Chris Wolf of the Burton Group: Data Center Strategies: Benefits of Virtualization in the Data Center? Priceless!.

I was a bit surprised to learn that another industry analyst firm feels that virtualization is too costly ...

Virtualization provides too many benefits to stand by and watch others improve their availability and IT processes, while saving on power and server hardware costs as a result of virtualization implementations. What's virtualization worth? Ask one of your Windows server admins who is struggling to return a critical server to operation on new hardware. Ask a developer who wants to test a piece of his code but is weighing whether the time to stage a system is worth it. Ask a server team in a data center where there is no more physical room or power to add servers.  You may not get the Dr. Evil answer of "1 Billion Dollars," but I'd bet the administrators operating in the IT trenches see the cost of virtualization as easily justifiable.

The question should not be what is the cost of virtualization, but rather what is the cost of not incorporating virtualization within your infrastructure.

From VMware:

• VMware's addendum to our white paper "Microsoft Virtualization Licensing and Distribution Terms" (some good new developments, a few clarifications, and a few more data points)
• VMworld 2007 registration now open
• You have tried the TCO Calculator, yes?
• Workstation 6.0
  • Christian always nails it: May I present VMware Workstation 6.0
  • virtualization.info: Feature comparison: Workstation 6.0 vs Server 1.0
  • Adrian Kingsley-Hughes at ZDNet: "I have a philosophy when it comes to new versions of software that I use a lot.  What I like to see is a new product that's familiar enough so I can get on and use it without having to dive into the manual too much, but at the same time I like to see a crop of new, useful features.  VMware Workstation 6 delivers on both of these expectations."
  • It's not about paravirtualization per se, but it's about it just working under the hood transparently: InfoWorld Virtualization Report, The Register, and a silly article from Byte and Switch that tries to make a big deal out of either-or, when it's both!
  • Props to Ubuntu for Feisty Fawn's debut that ships with the new paravirt-ops in the kernel (and you can get it from Dell, no less!).

Elsewhere in the virtual blogosphere:

• Huge compendium of good VMware links from esiebert7625, including good forum threads
• New site: xtravirt, including a "utility for automating bulk downloads of ESX patches, a white paper we wrote about the vimsh command, and some webcasts for those new to VI3."
• New blog at ZDNet: Virtually Speaking from Dan Kuznetzky
  • Why choose a virtual environment?
  • Additional reasons to adopt virtualization
  • Virtual Appliances - the good, the bad, and the ugly
• SearchServerVirtualization: "The biggest thing I learned at Analyst Day was the VDI is in fact, not doomed."
• I'm really enjoying watching Martijn bootstrap their VDI project step by step.
• We really try to avoid schadenfreude in this blog, so I'll just point to this VMTN Forum thread since Fred points out the ability to do a "live migration" (vMotion), is really a baseline requirement for an enterprise virtualization solution. See also Scott Lowe, h0bbel,  baeke. 
  
• Virtualization More Powerful Than Ever: "From virtual SANs to virtual PCs and right down to such esoteric matters as disaster recovery and business continuity, it turns out that the virtual environments being installed now have the potential to continue paying dividends well into the future." [via]
• RTFM: Ultimate Deployment Appliance 1.4 Released with support for ESX 3.x.x
• Keep track of what Moka5 and Jumpbox are doing with VMware technology.
• Nixu Software: Hardware Appliances: A Thing of the Past?
• SearchServerVirtualization newsletter: Virtualization Advisor
• Virtual Strategy Magazine podcast: Using VMware Converter for P2V from Mark Gabryjelski of the Expert Server Group
• VMware Converter Experience: "Hot dog! I've got plenty of space for my Oracle 10G install! vdiskmanager , 4sysops and google save the day!"
• daemon_b's Comparison of ESX Server Backup Strategies
• Transcript of a Church IT Roundtable on virtualization. Yes, virtualization is not just for the Fortune 100. (By the way, 501(c)3 orgs do get a education discount at VMworld.)

Virtualization Tips:

• Great blog start from Stefan Schuller:
  • ESX Server: Keeping Time on Your Side
  • Control ESX Server from your PocketPC
  • Guide: performance tips for running Citrix Presentation Server on vmware ESX
• How to install VMware Server on Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) from HowtoForge
• Also, note that you can get VMware Server in Canonical's commercial repository. A blogger approves: "apt-get install vmware-server. Done. That easy. That is the way it should be done."
• How-to install VMware Server 1.0.1 on Windows XP SP2 from Jed Daniels at Network Physics
• Be careful with single vs double CPU settings in your VMs.
• VMware sometimes gives you enough rope to screw up your environment. (Calling Glenn Cochran!)
• Provisioning script from Charles Nathaniel Wyble [via]
• Nightly automated VM builds using psexec
• VMware, PowerShell and much automation
• VMware Player Image Creation from 2006, but still a goodie [via]
• Resize a VMware Disk. Since people keep writing these tutorials, the docs and/or web searches are evidently not clear, so I'll keep linking to them.
• Remotely Start a VMware Server
• Install/Configure VMware Server on CentOS. It's just one rpm call away.
• Ctl-Alt-Del tip

VMware Workstation 6.0 is now generally available.

From the press release:

New features in VMware Workstation include:

• Windows Vista support: Users can deploy Windows Vista as a guest or host operating system, facilitating re-hosting of legacy systems, enabling upgrade and migration projects with minimal end-user disruption and simplifying Windows Vista evaluations.
• Multiple monitor display: Users can configure one virtual machine to span multiple monitors or multiple virtual machines to each display on separate monitors with this industry-first capability, enhancing desktop productivity.
• USB 2.0 support: Users can take advantage of high-performance peripherals such as Apple iPods and fast storage devices.
• ACE authoring capabilities: As a companion to VMware Workstation 6, VMware now offers a VMware ACE Option Pack, which enables VMware Workstation 6 users to create secure, centrally manageable virtual machines. Mobility is one of the primary benefits of this Option Pack, as it allows users to securely transport virtual machines on portable media devices such as USB memory sticks.
• Integrated Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) functionality: Users can create a virtual machine in minutes by “cloning” an existing physical computer.
• Integrated virtual debugger: Users can deploy, run and debug programs inside a virtual machine directly from their preferred integrated development environments (IDEs), accelerating debugging with this industry-first integration with Eclipse and Microsoft Visual Studio.
• Background virtual machine execution: Users can run virtual machines in the background without the VMware Workstation user interface for an uncluttered user experience.
• Automation APIs: Users can write scripts and programs that automate and help quicken virtual machine testing with support for VIX API 2.0.

In addition, VMware Workstation 6 advances the state of the art in virtualization technology with groundbreaking new capabilities including:

• Continuous virtual machine record and replay (experimental): Users can record the execution of a virtual machine, including all inputs, outputs and decisions made along the way. On demand, the user can go “back in time” to the start of the recording and replay execution, guaranteeing that the virtual machine will perform exactly the same operations every time and ensuring bugs can be reproduced and resolved.
• Virtual Machine Interface (VMI) support (experimental): VMware Workstation 6 is the first virtualization platform to allow execution of paravirtualized guest operating systems that implement the VMI interface.