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Monthly Archives: June 2008

Check your config & pushing Exchange and I/O to the limits: Communities Podcast #5

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This week’s VMware Communities Roundtable was jam-packed with virtualized goodness and no filler, additives, or high-fructose corn syrup.

First up was Robert DiFalco, Tripwire’s CTO of Products, to talk about the new Tripwire ConfigCheck. Next we had VMware’s own Scott Drummonds, who talked about pushing VI to extreme limits, both with a record number of Exchange mailboxes on one physical server, and with carrying out 100,000 I/O operations per second on a Very Big disk array. Yes, you can do that in a virtual machine.

As always, you can listen by clicking on the widget at right or by directly downloading the mp3. (54:43 duration)

Thanks again to all of our panel of experts from the VMware Communities.

Links you can use:

See you next week!

VMworld.com: Scalent Expert Session

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A VMworld Expert Session lets you interact with an industry speaker. The expert records a presentation and then sticks around for two weeks on a discussion forum to answer questions and keep the discussion going. The lastest expert session is from Kevin Epstein of Scalent Systems, who help keep your data center running smoothly with business continuity and automation solutions. Link: VMworld.com: Scalent Expert Session.

  • Are you responsible for ensuring the uptime and availability of hundreds of server systems?

  • Are you wrestling with the tradeoffs between budget and reliability, availability, performance, and utilization?

  • Have you ever wondered how long it would really take to bring back your business if your data center were hit by a disaster?

Join this presentation and discussion on the big three challenges
facing server failover—software configuration, network connectivity,
and storage access. Contrast several different approaches—from
traditional backup—to the use of virtual machines—to the next
generation of workflow engines (such as VMware Site Recovery Manager)
and complementary real-time data center automation (such as Scalent
V/OE). This presentation features case studies from several Scalent
clients, as well as a discussion of real cost savings based on actual
reduction of disaster recovery hardware, even as reliability was
improved.

Virtual Networking 101

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Guy Brunsdon is starting a blog just on virtual infrastructure networking. He’s kicking off his writing with a little intro over on the VI Team Blog. Link: Networking for VI admins | VI Team Blog.

The world of networking is often unfamiliar territory for
server and VMware Infrastructure (VI) admins. In most enterprises, networking
is the responsibility of a dedicated team of networking experts who may be
unfamiliar with the world of server virtualization. So how does a VI admin
approach networking? How does he or she say to the networking folks, “I want to
roll out VI across these hosts and I need them all connected to the production
network.”

First up, involve the network team early and provide them
with some information on how VI networking works. A good place to start is the
VMware Virtual Networking Concepts paper at http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/997
This paper covers the essentials of VI networking: what is a vSwitch? How do I
use VLANs? What are my options for NIC teaming, and so on? A network admin will
find the concepts presented quite familiar. vSwitches (virtual switches) are
very similar to L2 physical switches. Having the network folks read this paper
will help put you all on the same page.

Virtualized Mac OS X Leopard Server on VMware Fusion 2.0

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Link: Virtual Leopard Server, Uncaged: Virtualized Mac OS X Leopard Server on VMware Fusion 2.0.

 

As you many of you may recall, at Macworld in January, we gave you a preview of Mac OS X Leopard Server installing and running as a virtual machine on Mac OS X. 

Well, in honor of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference,
currently in full-swing in San Francisco, the VMware Fusion team is
excited to announce that Mac OS X Leopard Server will be our 61st
supported virtualized operating system, and will be available in VMware
Fusion 2.0’s next beta (get the current beta here). 

Stage Manager – VMware Communities Roundtable #4

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The VMware Communities Roundtable crew assembled again this morning. This week, our topic was the recently released Stage Manager and our guest was Eddie Dinel, Stage Manager’s product manager. Stage Manager, if you’re not familiar with it, is Lab Manager’s younger cousin, but dedicated to staging and rolling-out the sets of VMs that comprise your business applications. You might think you can do it with snapshots and careful testing and bookkeeping of which linked clone is going where, and which set of servers have what patch on them, but Stage Manager does more and you’re much less likely to screw it up. With a 60-day eval, it’s worth checking out.

We also had special conference correspondent Scott Lowe phoning in a report from Microsoft’s Tech-Ed. Listen by clicking on the player over on the right or download the mp3 directly. (1:02 duration)

Links you can use:

What does B-hive do again?

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As you may know, VMware recently began the process of acquiring B-hive, but you may not know much about what B-hive does. From the press release, B-hive "gives infrastructure
groups visibility into application performance in virtual environments
such as end-user transaction response time, virtual machine utilization
and cross-virtual machine dependencies."  Think of it as providing more raw data for both your existing management solutions and for automated tools like DRS, so you can "proactively
resolve application performance problems by automatically triggering
actions such as dynamically allocating more resources, migrating the
application to a different server, provisioning additional VMs,
changing transaction routing, or system re-boots."

Note also that B-hive is agentless, which means not only do you not have to install software in the guest, but that it is independent of OS, something that fits very well into VMware’s philosophy and architecture.

I wanted to share this description of what B-hive does with you. It’s fairly detailed yet still high level. (I don’t know enough about this space to comment on Bernd’s market landscape observations. Again, I don’t think VMware is going in to the "application performance management" space, but we just want to give you more and better data to start implementing the dynamic cloud data center of the future. You can also go straight to the source and visit b-hive’s site, where you can get a deeper understanding. Their blog is also worth checking out.

Link: Virtualization Management After VMware / B-hive, Who Wins – Who Loses | Bernd Harzog’s "Managing Virtualization" Column.

B-hive – A Quick Look at the Product
The
basic idea of an APM or EUEM solution is to measure either applications
performance (how fast is the application processing transactions or
units of work as they arrive from users or other applications), or the
end user experience, which measures how well the application is working
in the eyes of its end users. B-hive is not a true end user experience
solution since in order to be one of these you have to be able to
measure response time from the perspective of actual end users, and
B-hive does not do this. B-hive measures response time from the
perspective of the presentation tier (the web server if it is a web
based system) of an application system, which is exactly the right
approach if you want to be a leading edge APM solution (older APM
solutions tried to infer applications performance by looking at the
resources used by an application, and this approach simply does not
work for virtualized applications systems). So, here is a quick
overview of what B-hive does:

1. B-hive
attaches to a mirror (spanned) port on the switch that supports the
servers closest to the users (most often the switch that supports the
web servers). This allows B-hive to see all of the transactions that
flow back and forth between users and the applications system.

2. B-hive’s
concept of response time is the time between the arrival of a request
from a user, and the reply to that request on the part of the
application system. By default these transactions are "atomic" or
highly granular and not something that that map to what a user would
view as a transaction of interest. But they are representative of the
overall response time of the system, and since these atomic
transactions can be supported for almost every application with no
configuration, they represent the right level of detail for the IT
staff supporting the virtual infrastructure.

3. B-hive
also understands certain back end protocols like SQL Server and Oracle.
So for two-tier client server applications or any application that
talks to a database, the request/response time to and from the database
server is used as a proxy for response time.

4. The
level of the atomic transaction depends upon the nature of the
application. For web based applications the atomic transactions are
HTTP request/responses. For non-web applications they are lower level
TCP/IP request/responses or database request/response times.

5. With
additional effort, atomic transactions can be combined into true
compound transactions or transactions of interest to applications
owners and the business. In fact B-hive is sold in two flavors, one
that supports just atomic transactions for the IT staff, and another
one that includes the more comprehensive view of higher level
transactions which are of interest to applications owners and the
business analysts.

6. B-hive
will try to get the user ID of the application out of the TCP/IP data
stream. For web based applications this is easy. For some applications
this is not possible, and the notion of who the user is defaults to the
source IP address which is in many cases not unique to a user (due to
NAT). This is one area where vmSight has an advantage due to its
patented Connector ID technology.

7. B-hive
claims to be able to automatically drive actions in the virtualized
environment (for example provision a new server or move a VM) based
upon its response time measurements. This takes DRS to an entirely
different level, since making these kinds of decisions based upon
applications response time makes much more sense than does making them
based upon CPU or memory usage.

Server consolidation & VM sprawl – VMware Communities Roundtable #3

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This week’s VMware Communities Roundtable topic was server consolidation — capacity planning, virtual machine sprawl, and the resulting (and green) cost savings.  Listen to VCR #3 by clicking on the widget on the right or download the mp3 directly. (duration 56:32)

VMware Communities:

IT Knowledge Exchange: Preventing VM sprawl

VMware Capacity Planner

VMware Dynamic Resource Scheduler

Scott Lowe on Cisco Discovery Protocol: Identifying ESX Server NICs in Blades

VKernel capacity planning & chargeback virtual appliances

Green cost cutting:

The VMware Communities Roundtable is a weekly podcast where thought leaders and experienced practioners from the VMware Communities and virtualization blogs come together to discuss current topics in virtualization.

Get to know the new VDM 2.1 – Doug Brown’s Reviewers Guide

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We recently released version 2.1 of the VMware Virtual Desktop Manager (VDM), a way to manage connections between remote users and centralized virtual desktops. See the VDM 2.1 release notes.

Doug Brown has now produced with VMware a VDM 2.1 Reviewers Guide. It’s a great resource, not just for journalists or other reviewers, but for people doing either a technology evaluation of VDI solutions or even if you’re just getting started figuring out how desktop virtualization works. Doug writes about the genesis of the project. Link: VMware Release "Virtual Desktop Manager (VDM) 2.1 Reviewer’s Guide" – Written By: Douglas Brown.

I’ve actually been evaluating and testing VMware’s VDM 2.x solutions since the early beta’s were available. I must admit, I very much liked what I saw in the early beta releases.  I feel the beauty of VDM is that it is easy it is to deploy, administer, and use. That being said, while I was evaluating VDM, I thought it might be fun to document how to install, configure, and use it.  You know, I wanted to document the exact steps I used to install my VDM 2.1 lab environment. I wanted to create a VDM in a Box!

Once I was about 100 pages in to the document I
decided to email a friend of mine who works for VMware to tell him
about what I was working on while "messing around" with VDM and he
ended up asking me if I would be interested in writing it for VMware to
use as a "Reviewer’s Guide". Hence this white paper. VMware’s
goal for this white paper is to give you everything you need to get you
up and running with VDM, as quick as possible, even if you have never
used VDM before. That being said, VMware just posted their version of my VDM white paper for all to download!

Download the VDM 2.1 Reviewers Guide. But Doug’s not done! Back in the day, Doug created the Methodology in a Box, a 900+ page guide for installing and deploying a successful Citrix environment. It was a big boon to the Citrix community, and it’ll be great to get one for the community deploying today’s VDI-style environments. Doug is looking to make this an open collaborative project.

BUT… I’m not done.. I’m still working on my version of the VDM white paper and will soon release it as VDM in a Box 1.0! I
will write more about VDM in a Box 1.0 in the coming weeks so stay
tuned.  I will say I’m looking to turn this document in to a sort of
"Open Source" project where the "VDM community" can collaborate on
making it better!!!  (If you are interested in collaborating on VDM in a Box please email me at dbrown@dabcc.com)

TripWire ConfigCheck sanity checks your ESX environment

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From the TripWire ConfigCheck site:

Tripwire® ConfigCheckTM
is a free utility that rapidly assesses the security of VMware ESX 3.5
hypervisor configurations compared to the VMware Infrastructure 3
Security Hardening guidelines. Developed by Tripwire in cooperation
with VMware, Tripwire ConfigCheck ensures ESX environments are properly
configured—offering immediate insight into unintentional
vulnerabilities in virtual environments—and provides the necessary
steps towards full remediation when they are not.

internetnews.com – TripWire Cures Virtual Misconfiguration:

"There haven’t been any attacks against the hypervisor that could be demonstrated to break through, but misconfiguration could put you in a situation where you can get attacked even if you have no vulnerabilities or are fully patched," [VMware's Nand Mulchandani] added.

There are about 100 configuration settings in VMware that need to be set to ensure the most hardened environment possible, and these have, up to now, had to be manually checked.

NetworkWorld – Did you say: FREE, SECURITY and VIRTUAL SERVERS?

The ConfigCheck tool is based on VMware’s own security hardening guidelines for ESX Server and future releases will also support VMware’s Infrastructure 3 products. The free tool notifies IT managers of potential conflicts in configurations and also offers fixes to the incompatibilities between actual and desired configurations. The tool links back to the vendors’ virtual security resource center

SearchSecurity.com – Virtualization tool assesses VMware security configurations

"It will be eye-opening when they run ConfigCheck against their systems and gauge that relative to best practices," said Mulchandani. "It will get them thinking about configuration and patching in key areas for security."

VMware Communities Roundtable #2

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We had a good time at VMware Communities Roundtable #2, the sometimes-weekly roundup of what’s going on in the virtualization world. This week the main topics were green virtualization, ESXi and still paying attention to security, and VI 3.5 upgrade experiences. Listen by clicking over there to the right or download the mp3 directly. (The podcast lasts 67 minutes.)

Green virtualization:

ESXi, busybox and security

ESX 3.5/VC 2.5 upgrade and features

Thanks to our group of VMware Communities user moderators for calling in. Here’s a link to the first episode of the roundtable if you missed it.

Keep your eyes open for the next irregularly scheduled podcast — upcoming topics include scripting, VDI, and HCLs. Good luck and good night.