VMTN Blog

Drop by the Communities Roundtable Podcast tomorrow. It's an open topic day, meaning we'll talk about whatever we feel like. We'll talk about whatever you feel like as well. Listen in and join the conversation.

Some interesting things went on this week. Let's go over to Planet V12n and see...

The topic today was VMware AppSpeed, which began life as B-hive Conductor. From the website: "The product "provides virtual infrastructure groups visibility into the multi-tier applications (performance, usage and dependencies) running across both virtual and physical infrastructure." I think it's another example of how you can do something better virtually by sitting outside the VM -- something that would be either impractical, much harder, or hopelessly tied to the OS if you were doing it with an agent inside a physical machine.

Asaf Wexler, former CTO of B-hive and now Sr Director of R&D here at VMware, joined us over an unfortunately poor telephone connection from Israel. Click on the big green play button or download the mp3. (51:00). Podcast info.

Links:

• http://www.bhive.net/ old B-hive site; still has product & technical info.
• AppSpeed at VMworld 2008 keynote (more notes on that keynote)
• AppSpeed video at VMworld 2008 keynote day 2
• More AppSpeed video at VMworld 2008 keynote day 1
• Commentary from Roger Howorth at ZDNet.co.uk
  

  As one attendee put it, this was really exciting because it would provide a quick way to find out where the problem was if users started complaining. Without this kind of technology, it could take hours to get enough insight into the application to enable further debugging. Also, the various departments responsible for the different elements in an application have a habit of denying responsibility and pointing the finger elsewhere.

  The kind of diagnostic information produced by AppSpeed makes this kind of behaviour easier to challenge, because administrators would have real data to back them up. For example, they could say, “Look, queries to your database are taking five seconds, while the rest of the transactions total 200 milliseconds.”

Next week, open topic roundtable with the panel. Drop by -- same bat time, same bat channel (noon Pacific time on Wednesday).

We had a great time with EMC's Chad Sakac last week. As usual, listen via the widget on the right or download the mp3. (1:08) More info on the podcast series.

I've delayed putting this up because I was trying to get the links together first, but I've been swamped. If you have any other links to contribute, feel free to add them in the comments, although Eric is usually the last word in resource links.

• Chad's blog at virtualgeek.typepad.com
• Track Datastore Free Space from peetersonline.nl
• Rescan all hosts for new storage from Virtu-Al
• load balancing active/active SAN’s       from Yellow Bricks
• Search the EMC Reference Library for 'reference architecture' (they use POST, not GET, so you need to do the typing yourself)
• Storage links, including LUN sizing from Eric Siebert's VMware-Land

This Wednesday our scheduled topic is vCenter AppSpeed, but I'm still waiting on a final confirmation. For more information on AppSpeed (nee B-hive), see the old B-hive site and this AppSpeed demo video from VMworld 2008.

VMware Server was our topic this week, with product manager Azmir Mohamed as our guest. One of the most fun parts of these podcasts is that they are decidedly not our standard webinars/webcasts. I come up with the guests, but the agenda is set by both our Roundtable Panel and now increasingly by the live listeners who show up every week to listen, chat, and call in. As always, listen via the widget on the right or the mp3 (56:01 duration). More info on the podcasts. We are on iTunes.

If you want more of an introduction to VMware Server, please register for this VMware Server webcast. And although we did cover the topic, you can also check out this slightly cheesy but informative VMware Server vs ESXi podcast with Azmir and Amir.

Check out the VMware Server FAQ page, but the PDF version of the VMware Server FAQ is a bit longer and more complete.

This week we succeeded in generating more heat than light a few times, but here are a few things I learned this week about VMware Server: You can manage Server v1.x with VirtualCenter, but we don't yet have that capability to do that in version 2.x. The reason is that, frankly, not many people were using that feature (you have to buy a VC Agent license to do it, so we know exactly how many people are taking advantage of it), so even though we demoed an early version of the feature for 2.0, we felt like there were higher priority features we should be working on. Here are some of the new features in 2.0:

• New expanded operating system support
• 64-bit operating system support
• VMware Infrastructure (VI) Web Access management interface
• Independent virtual machine console
• More scalable virtual machines
• Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS)
• Support for Virtual Machine Interface (VMI)
• Virtual Machine Communication Interface (VMCI)
• Support for VIX API 1.6

So, if you need to manage Server via VC, please continue to use Server 1.x, which is far from a first gen product with its roots in GSX Server. If you feel strongly about this or any other topic, make yourself heard over at the VMware Server Community.

Another thing that I learned is that we're running as native 64-bit on Linux.

Best tip from the show: keep a backup copy of your VC Management Server in a VM on VMware Server on a spare machine somewhere in case of emergency.

Join us next Wednesday @ noon Pacific Standard Time with EMC's Chad Sakac. (This week all our European friends were missing because they switched from Daylight Saving last week and showed up an hour late! We here in the US do it this Sunday, so we're back in sync.)

We had a record crowd today to find out more about VMware's vCloud initiative. Bill Shelton joined us as our guest. We talked about topics like REST-based provisioning and lifecycle APIs, service providers, massive VC scalability, VDI, and failover out of the cloud. Listen with the widget at right, the mp3, or iTunes. (1:04 duration)

• VMware Cloud vServices
• Cloud vServices FAQ
• VMware Ready vCloud Service Providers
• VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace
• Building a Virtual Appliance
• Open Virtualization Format
• Rodney Haywood: Gartner validates Nick Carr

  With the current cloud offering one needs to rearchitect your applications or do things in different ways. This is not a standardised approach which is what the utility of computing requires. After all you can plug into any electical point and things work. With virtualisation and the VDC-OS and vApp framework you will not need to change your work loads. This is where I think we will see the Carr vision turn into reality.

Upcoming: We are live every Wednesday @ noon Pacific time. You're more than welcome to join us on the chat or via phone.

• October 29. VMware Server 2.0
• November 5. EMC's Chad Sakac
• November 12. VMware AppSpeed

Upcoming Communities Roundtable podcasts. Please feel free to tune in live -- we take questions from chat & phone, or listen to the recording afterwards

• Wednesday, October 22, Noon PDT. vCloud
• Wednesday, October 29, Noon PDT. VMware Server 2.0 
• Wednesday, November 5, Noon PST. vStorage with EMC's Chad Sakac
• Wednesday, November 12, Noon PST. VMware AppSpeed

Last week, we had an open topic roundtable, and it was a good one. Listen with the widget over there on the right or via the mp3. (1:01 duration). We are on iTunes.

Links:

• Enhanced VMotion Compatibility and Understanding VMware EVC
• VirtualCenter Memory Statistic Definitions
• Memory Overcommit and page sharing
  • Memory Overcommit – Real life examples from VMware customers
  • Cheap Hypervisors: A Fine Idea -- If You Can Afford Them
  • Memory Resource Management in VMware ESX Server
  • Is Overcommiting Resources Bad?
• Storing swap files on VMFS when running virtual machines from NFS
• New Storage Features in VI 3.5
• Hyper-V Server is Finally Here – But What Exactly Is It? [I still think the screen shot of the patches for Hyper-V Server, including IE7, is the funniest part, and I'm surprised nobody else has picked up on that yet.]
• IBM System i supported as iSCSI SAN for ESX

This week we talked about the concepts of the virtual datacenter OS with VMware's own Leena Joshi, and we covered some of the 2009 roadmap material we presented at VMworld 2008 this year. Listen, as always, via the widget over there on the right or the mp3. (52:01 duration) More notification options here, and I'm very pleased to announce that the Communities Roundtable Podcast is now in the iTunes Store -- just search for VMware or go right here.

Links you can use:

• Virtual Datacenter OS on VMware's website
• VMworld 2008 sessions now available on vmworld.com for conference attendees.
• Upcoming webinars - while you're there, check out all the webinars -- many are quite good, some are technical, and they're missing RSS, but you do have to register.
  
  • Next-Generation Virtual Networking for VMware Infrastructure – 10/16, 9am PT
  • Technical Track: Fault Tolerance for VMware Virtual Machines – 11/5, 9am PT

Next week, we'll once again do a live show next Wednesday at Noon Pacific, topic TBD.

Bonus just because you read this far: I think Leena is working on a blog post over at the VI Team Blog, but I'll scoop her with some YouTube versions of the videos over at the VDC-OS site. Same content, crappier resolution, but you can share them with your friends or on your blog much easier. Collect them all!

A few things you should know:

1. We've been doing this podcast for 20 weeks, but we've only been doing the live call-in thing for the last few, so I haven't figured out a good way to give a weekly heads up about times or guests. It's the same time every week, but I'll put up a schedule.
2. I'm also not sure how to send out reminders for those who want to be reminded every Wednesday. The TalkShoe link will give you a text message, but if I were you, I'd rather have an email a few hours before just in case I had time to jump on to the live show. Twitter, maybe.
3. We often do just-in-time scheduling for the guests and topics, because we don't want to leave too many of them stacked up in the warehouse, so some weeks I can't give you much advance warning of who's going to be on.
4. We are friendly and don't bite, and the easiest thing is to jump on the chat link, although much like your Mother, we like it when you call us. I think you could Skype-out from outside the US to the number, and I'm told you can VOIP to our IP address below.

VMware Communities Roundtable #20

On with the show. VMware Principal Systems Engineer Mike DiPetrillo joined us this week for an open topic roundtable. Our subjects ranged quite a bit, from Mike's observations on Linux vs Windows shops, the VMware Linux strategy, Mike's recent hacking projects, such as a proof-of-concept VI Client for the iPhone and new "quick migration" PowerShell script, the myth of 'unsuitable workloads' for virtualization, and more.

Listen with the widget on the right or download the mp3 (63 minutes). More info on feeds/notifications.

• Mike DiPetrillo's blog: From the VMware Field
• Rich Brambley's liveblog of VMware's session TA3201 on our Linux strategy and article on Partitioning ESX
• Mike on his Quick Migration script
• Distributed Power Management
• Eric Siebert: Configuring Distributed Power Management
• VMware's Energy Efficiency Solutions page
• More on Enterprise Application workloads for virtualization

Next week, our guest will be Leena Joshi and our topic the Virtual Datacenter OS. You can listen live online or on the phone and we welcome questions.

Update #2: Leena can't make it, but will be here next week. VMware's own blog firebrand and SE extraordinaire Mike DiPetrillo will be joining us instead to talk about what's on his mind.

We're honored to have Leena Joshi with us in our second half to talk about the Virtual Datacenter OS. Her session was a big hit at VMworld, so please join us for this Q&A session.

Coming this Wednesday -  VMware Communities Roundtable #19

No guest this week (although I have a few calls out  -- if you have something interesting to say tomorrow, drop me a line or just give us a call), but we always have a good time. Have VMworld withdrawal? Then think of this like you were having a pint with the guys at the V-bar after a day of labs and sessions in Vegas.

See you tomorrow!