VMTN Blog

Mike Laverick of RTFM Education is a regular on the VMTN Forums, a blogger, and a VMware Certified Instructor in the UK. Here's his report from VMworld so far.

VMworld Session Review: VCP Certification

Personally, I’m hoping VMware will develop a new certification which is something like a VCP+. Something that proves as a server guy your cut above the point-and-click guys who only have done the VCP. Now, that’s something that would appeal to me I’ve been told that this might get delivered but the emphasis is going to be on the “architect” certification in short-term. ...

The other thing I have heard bandied about amongst the education-folks with which I swim - is the promise of more CBT/Elearn and Remote Assisted Instructor Lead courses. Now, I’m actually borrowing a HP term (RAIL). This is where not just the kit for course is remote but so are the students and instructor. So, we don’t meet up in a physical classroom but a virtual one. We communicate via conferrence calls and some web-ex style presentation tool. You get to sit at work or home and learn - and get a better quality of life! Believe me, living out of hotels for 6-8 weeks to teach courses is no fun. There is only some many DVD’s you can watch - and one airport looks very much like another when your flight is delayed by airstrike in Finland!

VMworld Hands-on Lab Review: Scripting VI-3

There were 4 slides - what are scripts, why script, what is com and what is perl. Now go ahead and code. Well, I guess I had unrealistic expectations - as someone who just about understands the ideas of objects, properties and attributes - and how these com libraries are “called” in a script - it was over my head. I really needed more guidence.

Fortunately, that came in the shape of my lab partner - former Scot who now works in Switzerland. He had some ADSI and vbscript experience that he was a little rusty on. Together we worked out line-by-line what was going on. Had I been on my own - I probably would have left in the first 30 mins - because it would have been “whoooosh” way over my head!!!

VMworld Session Review: VMTN Community Experts LIVE

So, who shone out from the group. For me it had to be Ken Kline of HP. I’ve message’d Ken quite a bit from the forums. But this VMworld was the first time I had met the man in person. You could meet a nicer, easier going guy… Always there with a subtle insight - that rocked my view of the world.

What came out of this session? Well, something I had heard privately voiced amongst the people who manage the VMTN environment. They want a more “interactive” community. Something that is more real-time and live. For me this could a “Second Life” for VMware. So you better get out there and buy a VMware Island - and build a train station to get those second-life people to the meeting room!

The other thing they seem to leaning towards is a kind of wiki for virtualisation - not specifically VMware.

VMworld Session Review: Troubleshooting ESX Server Faults

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz….

VMworld Session Review: A User Perspective

I really enjoyed this session. Being an instructor the amount of actual real-world deployments I get involved in pretty limited. So it’s always interesting to hear peoples experiences. This one won was pretty cool as laid out in sq feet and kilowatt’s the amount of space and money saved in their datacenter. We all know that space and heat is one of the great saving points of virtualisation. But it was good have a price tag in dollars put on these savings for once. At last a TOC/ROI that was beyond the usual marketing fair presented by vendors…

VMworld Session Review: Keynote on Tuesday

But things became more interesting with industry panel on the impact of virtualisation. So along side all the gunho pro-virtualisation people - there was some interesting Professor from Standford University to remind us that industry back-slapping is not the way forward. Without bashing Microsoft directly - the problem remains with or without virtual machines the guest OS we run and the applications we support within them - aren’t written very well.

You can sense the humour and cheering building as the audience got behind the Professor - a welcome devils-advocate amongst the dancing monkeys…

I'm just out from the ACE 2.0 preview session and I'm psyched.

ACE 1.0 is really starting to show its age as it is based on the Workstation 4 code base. I have several costumers who turned down ACE 1.0 due to different reasons, but as they went through the new features of ACE 2.0 I checked off one issue after the other. It seems like all the issues reported to me by my costumers will be resolved in 2.0.

Some major new features in 2.0 are Linux host support and the integration of VMware Player and VMware Workstation as ACE clients. (and in fact you also do the VM authoring from Workstation now.) All cool but the really promising thing in my view is Pocket ACE. You can now easily deploy and execute your ACE VM from a flash USB drive. As flash memory becomes faster and faster the execution from flash will probably be faster than from disk, as the access time is super fast, and it will be mobile. You still need to install an ACE client on the host you are running from, but I don't see why this cannot be combined with a small boot partition on the USB drive and the option of either boot directly to a secure small linux host with an ACE client pre installed or execute from the USB drive if you already have the client installed.

If you're at VMworld you can sign up for the beta at the ACE booth in the VMworld Exhibit Hall.

- Anders

Jonathan Eunice of analyst firm Illuminata: VMworld is Virtualization

Last year, a colleague visiting the VMworld conference opined that while the gathering was a very energetic meeting place for x86 virtualization, it’s a shame that there isn’t a systematic industry event for virtualization in general. VMware president Diane Greene, in her inimitable way, rapidly disagreed. ‘There is, and VMworld is it!’

While identifying all things virtualization with VMware is still a bit self-aggrandizing, Diane’s argument plays increasingly well. After three years of successive doubling, there are about 7,000 in attendance. By way of comparison, that’s approximately 50% more folks than attend the EMCworld event run by VMware’s corporate parent. ...

Essentially everyone is here. ... [W]ho else really has established such a strong user community and partner ecosystem around virtualization? Who else generates this level of enthusiasm and this level of active change to “the way things are done?” That would be no one.

Allan Bourduis on VMworld:

Had a great hands-on session yesterday on the Consolidated Backup feature of Virtual Infrastructure 3 - can't wait to start demonstrating that to folks!

My complaints with the event are mainly logistical:

1. The conference party last night at Universal Studios started off as a debacle. The lines for food were very long, and it didn't seem like enough eats had been laid on early enough in the event.
2. A better job of people traffic management could have been done within the convention center. There were a lot of big crowds in small spaces trying to get into session rooms.
3. The food at the center wasn't on par with what I've gotten at other events by other companies, but was passable.
4. The variety of session-break snacks wasn't great, and the coffee cups don't have lids!

Patrick from Microsoft has a great post on his experience at VMworld and working the Microsoft booth. VMworld is about bringing together the conversation on virtualization in general -- increased interest in the field and increased interaction with each other benefits the whole industry and benefits the users. Again, different starting points and worldviews give me different conclusions than Patrick, but worth reading the whole thing.

VMworld - hazy shade of winter

Belgian blogger Geert Verbist has been covering his VMworld experience.

VMworld 2 days blogging in one post

Next great thing, at least to the speakers is the idea that the OS is no longer a thing to consider. As a professor from a well know university stated. " We will be looking at applicances which run a application and that application will no longer run on a full blown OS" So, in other words the VMTN virtual appliance could be in the future full application which run without an underlying OS. This kinda caught my attention. Imagine what this would mean for companies who are using ESX throughout there business. Will they only be using appliances in the future? Will companies like oracle provide these pre-installed Virtual Appliance and just sell these without the implementation cost? Let's think about that for a minute.

VCB..is this thing cutting it?

Well, let's say I was kinda dissapointed to read up on VCB at start. Excpecially about restoring stuff. Some cool guys from VMware showed me today that they have found a way (without support by the dev guys) that would make it possible to EASILY restore these VCB backups without the need to open up and modify the catalog files. They do it by using the VMimporter application which is available from the vmware website. When I get back I will post a manual on how you should do this and what the exact procedure is to make VCB backup. Finally a good answer from vmware on this "product".

VMworld photo shoot. More to come .....

Mendel Rosenblum, VMware founder, headlined Wednesday’s keynote focusing on the future of virtualization technology.

Some highlights:

 
• Virtualization allows you to view the hardware in your data center as pools of resources. You map applications onto resources dynamically to optimize how your computing hardware is used. Customers benefit by buying less hardware, using less power, and just adding more memory, disk, and cpu to the pool when needed.
 
• The virtualization layer export four primitive functions: Multiplexing, so you can run multiple virtual machines on the same hardware; Suspend, so you can put a virtual machine into storage; Resume (provision), potentially on a different box; and Migration, so you can move running virtual machines between physical boxes (VMotion).
 
• The audience favorite: The virtualization layer enables you to record all execution steps from a virtual machine and then replay them on another machine. VMware records them in a very compact way, so that you can track all changes in your environment. This means you can now reproduce non-reproducible bugs by replaying the steps that led up to a crash.
 
• VMware is working with hardware vendors to reduce the overhead in mapping virtual hardware to physical hardware. VMware is also simplifying the virtualization layer to increase robustness and make the virtualization layer small enough to trust. This is key for security and reliability -- and even innovation. You're limited by the complexity of the system you build -- by building smaller and less complex, it's easier to innovate.
 
• Multi-core is very exciting for virtualization. On multi-core, there is less overhead for VMotion because the processors are "closer" to each other.
 
• Memory virtualization: With page sharing, you can configure the sum of all memory in all VMs to be greater than the total memory on the hardware. Shadow page tables  store a copy of the page table in the virtualization layer. AMD nested page tables; Intel extended page tables do this mapping in hardware for better performance.
 
• Another interesting area of research is pass-through i/o devices. You get speed with pass-through, but you lose ability to do format conversion (e.g. scsi to SAN), fault tolerance if a link fails, VMotion, resource mgmt (traffic shaping), security policy enforcement, etc. The goal is to get acceleration of pass-through without losing this additional functionality: i/o devices smart enough to export multiple personalities - each one passed through the virtualization layer to a different vm.
 
• Traditional view of OS is to drive the hardware and support abstractions for applications, like files and processes. The industry has come to view the operating system as an extension of the hardware. You think of the system as the operating system.
 
• Goal of OS is to support as many application environments as possible. "People ask me what's the best OS? The best OS is the one that supports the applications you need." The problem is that the OS became too complex because it needed to have features to support a huge variety of applications. Most telling is that it's hard to innovate the OS because it's so complex -- millions of lines of code. VMware can innovate because we keep the VMM layer simple.
 
• So, what's happening to the OS? You don't need hardware management pieces because that's handled by the virtualization layer. You also don't need features to support all apps, just the features that support your app. And then you bundle it into the VA. So the OS becomes much smaller.
 
• An example: BEA Java VM. Currently, it must run on different environments,e.g. Windows, Linux, Solaris. With a virtual appliance, you just build it once as a VA with a highly tuned OS. Another example is a firewall, where you can build Checkpoint and the OS in a virtual appliance. Or you can do the same thing with a CRM, including an app server, crm software, and database as a VA. Looking at the Checkpoint VA, you can run it on the Macintosh
 
• Virtual Man told the audience that there are only 18,324 possible VMware products -- because that's how many combinations of three letter or four letter acronyms starting with the letter V: VMTN, VMDK, VMI, etc.

But  the most interesting factoid from today: 300 people showed up for a lab at 6:30 this morning!

See you all at VMworld 2007, September 11 - 13 in San Francisco.

Alex Weeks of vi411.org is liveblogging the sessions he attends at VMworld. He apologizes in advance for the typos.

ESX Troubleshooting Tips

At first the presenter spoke about basic troubleshooting, and how it relates to the defined 5 areas. However there was some GREAT information that came from this session. Here’s a kind of brain dump of some of the things I took from it ...

CPU VT Technology

This was actually a great session. The presenter drilled down into exactly how VMware has been able to allow the OS to run efficently without actually running at CPU Ring 0.

Typically, Ring 0 is a priveleged mode that the OS runs in. Applications then run in Ring 3. VMware has been using a technique called Binary Translation (BT), to allow the OS to run in Ring 0 with out actually running there. They are then using the concept of Direct Execution to allow the applicationt to run in Ring 3.

What these new CPU virtualition technologies do is create a new CPU mode called “Root Mode”. This new mode allows the VMM to run at a “Ring lower” than the Guest OS. Essentually this allow the Guest OS to run in Ring 0, while the VMM runs below it and eliminates the need for BT.

VMware and Citrix

So far, this has been the best breakout session I’ve attended. The presenters did a lot of extensive testing of Citrix Presentation Server inside a VM on both ESX 2.5.X and 3.0.X. ...

With ESX 2.5.X 80 users ran the CPU at 85%

With ESX 3.0.X 140 users ran the CPU at 80%

(Great Kudo’s for ESX 3.0.X)

The presenters were very clear that they weren’t trying to say you can get 140 users on a Citrix VM, individual results may vary depending on what the users are doing. It also shows the performance improvement from 2.5.X to 3.0.X.

VMark

When I heard about VMmark and that there would be a presentation on it here at VMworld I was very excited. For many of us, proving the performance capabilities of Virtual Machines within ESX has been a challenge. We’ve all come up with our own methods of showing how powerful a Virtual Machine can be. With VMmark, this process is going to be much easier and more reliable. ...

VMmark consists of “tiles”. Each “tile” consists of 6 VM’s running different operating systems and workloads to simulate a complex and diverse environment. ... It’s nice to see this blend of VM’s. This helps show a more realistic represendation of what a real Virtual Infrastructure might look like.

Intel Multi-core Processors

Although the title was extremely bloated, this session wasn’t. It was very clear and informative regarding the benefits of multi-core processors and how newer virtualization features can benefit users. ...

Although the presentator didn’t go into deep technical detail, he did explain how EPT (Extended Page Tables) will allow the VMM to freely modify the underlying page tables thereby providing optimized access to the Guest OS.

The other virtualization technology that was highlighted was I/O virtualization. This “defines an architecture for DMA remapping”. This is going to give the Guest OS direct access to physical hardware device.

Mendel's record/replay demo seemed to attract the most attention.

Alex of vi411.org

During Mendel Rosenbloom’s keynote this morning they demo’d a feature that was pretty cool. This was the concept of recording a VM’s activity and then being able to replay it.

During the demo they used MS paint to dray a picture while they recorded the VM. They then “replayed” the VM and we watched it replay exactly what had just happened. Naturally watching MS Paint wasn’t that exciting, but it was nice thinking about the other possibilities.

Think of a test/dev cycle. The application tester could record his test and allow the developer to watch exactly what happened. In the world of sales, you could record product demo’s and jsut replay the VM.

Scott Lowe:

While nothing was officially announced, Mendel did demonstrate the idea of using the virtualization layer to capture or record a stream of execution by a virtual machine (VM).  This stream of execution could then be replayed against another VM, which he demonstrated using a prerelease version of VMware Workstation 6.0.  This has immediate implications for OS forensics, but I also see tremendous implications in BC/DR (business continuity/disaster recovery).  Think of the idea of a VM running on a virtual infrastructure in one datacenter, with a stream of execution on that VM being shipped across to a hot standby VM in another datacenter in an entirely different city.  It’s like using SAN replication between geographically separate datacenters, but includes real-time changes to memory state and CPU activity—not just disk changes.  That’s very exciting stuff.  The possibilities of what could be done with that kind of information are almost endless.

Pascal Meunier is covering his VMworld experience, mostly about security topics.

ReAssure (CERIAS), VIX and Lab Manager (VMware)

The VIX API on Tuesday morning was a very interesting session. It will enable the remaining automation functionality of ReAssure. It allows to automate the powering on and off of virtual machines, the taking of snapshots, transfering files (e.g., results) between the host and guest OS, and even starting programs in the guest OS! It was introduced with VMWare server 1.0 last summer, but I hadn’t noticed. It is still work in progress though; there’s support only for C, Perl and COM (no Python, although I was told that there was a source forge project for that).

Teaching (security) using virtual labs

There are of course other teaching labs using virtualization that have been developed at other universities and colleges; the challenge is of course to be able to design courses and exercises that are portable and reusable. We can all gain by sharing these, but for that we need a common infrastructure where all these exercises would be valid.

How virtualization changes the security equation

As a member of the panel argued, virtualization doesn’t make things better or worse, it still all depends on the practices, processes, procedures, and policies used in managing the data center and the various data security and recovery plans. Another pointed out that people shouldn’t assume that virtual appliances or virtualization provide security out-of-the-box. Out of all malicious software, currently 4-5% check if they are running inside a virtual machine; this may become more common.