This was an exciting week again. Especially because "Run the Golden Gate Bridge 2009" is definitely happening during VMworld. Already over 135 people signed up, and all of that because a couple of guys on twitter wanted to go for a run during VMworld. Of course that wasn't the only exciting thing that happen, there were some exciting articles again which I have selected for you guys. Enjoy:
- Cody Bunch – VMDirectPath? Paravirtual SCSI? – vSphere VM Options and You!
When would you use it? Well, I’m glad you asked. Remember that database
that you were not virtualizing, because of it’s high IO requirement?
That graphics rendering app for marketing that let the magic blue smoke
out of your last SAN array? These are good candidates for PVSCSI. - Alan Renouf – PowerCLI: Daily Report V2
Firstly I would like to thank everyone who took the time to comment on my previous Daily Report script, I really appreciate the feedback and have never had so many comments !
Now onto V2…
This one will take a while longer to run than the last script but as its a scheduled task we are not really worried about that, we are hardly going to sit there and watch it running ! - Scott Drummonds – Four Things You Should Know About ESX 4's Scheduler
I spent a great deal of time answering customers' questions about the scheduler. Never have so many questions been asked about such an abstruse component for which so little user influence is possible. But CPU scheduling is central to system performance, so VMware strives to provide as much information on the subject as possible. In this blog entry, I want to point out a few nuggets of information on the CPU scheduler. These four bullets answer 95% of the questions I get asked. - Mike Laverick – Attack of the Clones: NetApp Rapid Clone Video
Some thoughts on the RCU from making the video (it took a couple of time get video working right, due to user errors such as not having the right key for Windows XP!). Firstly, I can spot to very small tweaks that could made with the RCU. It doesn’t allow me to control where the VMs are created from a folder or resource pool perspective. All the new virtual desktops are created in the same folder as the source template – and there’s no ability to place the rapid cloned VMs into a resource pool – and this can lead to big long flat list of VMs – which ain’t pretty. Especially, in a VDI environment where there could be hundreds of virtual desktops. You might think this is a minor issue, after all you can drag & drop the VMs after the cloning process to the right VM folder/resource pool. Erm, well not quite. During the deploy process you can ask the RCU to register the new virtual desktops with VMware View/XenDesktop brokers. I dunno about XenDesktop but currently View is very happy about you moving vCenter objects around. - Eric Horschman – Our position on hypervisor footprints, patching, vulnerabilities and whatever else Microsoft wants to throw into a blog post
The truth is, vulnerabilities and exploits will never completely go away for any enterprise software, but ESX has been remarkably resistant to such issues. If it happens again, we'll find the problem and fix it quickly, as we did for CVE-2009-1244. I'll also point out that a guest breakout is a much more serious issue when it drops you into a familiar general-purpose management OS like the Windows Server 2008 parent OS used by Hyper-V than it is with a design like ESXi where an escape grants access to just a thin, hardened hypervisor like our vmkernel. A hypervisor that relies on an OS like Win2008 with a history of regular and recurring remote vulnerabilities will always make an easier target for attackers and should not inspire false confidence.
