In May of 2011 we published our book through Usenix as part of the short topics series. When this book was released as an ebook, shortly after the paper version, it originally was more expensive than the paper copy. I contacted the people responsible within Usenix and asked them if they could do anything about it. As Frank and I went through the same procedure for our own book I explained what some of the benefits were of using a $ 9.99 price and Usenix told me they would discuss it internally. I just received the great news that the book has a new price of just 9.99 and is available on Kindle through the Amazon store. I hope everyone appreciates the effort we’ve put in to it and the fact that Usenix decided to lower the price to $ 9.99!
Here are the details:
Book #24, Cloud Computing with VMware vCloud Director, by John Arrasjid, Duncan Epping, Steve Kaplan Ben Lin, Michael Haines and Raman Veeramraju. This Short Topics book provides use cases, design considerations, and technology guidance to answer your questions about cloud computing. The primary intended audience is those interested in learning about VMware cloud computing products and solutions, but content on third-party technologies is also included where appropriate. Without diving overly deeply into specific design patterns, it provides insight into the tools to fit your design criteria and it explains the concepts used by vCloud ranging from Organization Virtual Datacenters to External Networks.
Authors: John Arrasjid, Duncan Epping, Michael Haines, Steve Kaplan, Ben Lin and Raman Veeramraju
I just finished overhauling the vSphere HA Deepdive page. It now includes details about all versions of HA but is specifically split up in two sections:
4.1 and prior
5.0
I also cleaned up all comments. Although there were a lot of useful details in there the amount of comments made it impossible to maintain. With all changes in 5.0 I wanted to make sure the page was a single source of truth and no myths/rumors would start floating around based on the outdated comments. Please note that I will clean up the comments every once in a while and update the page when needed based on these comments. If there are any questions / comments or things you feel should be explained in this deepdive, feel free to drop them here.
While doing some workshops and presentations for some of our partners and customers one of the comments I usually here when discussing the vSphere Storage Appliance is “Why not just buy a cheap NAS device”? Well there are a couple of arguments:
Support, many lower end cheap devices are not on the HCL
Management, most storage devices require specific knowledge and can be difficult to setup
Resiliency, yes resiliency..
Resiliency is what I want to expand on. I like the vSphere Storage Appliance because of the resilience it offers. Many lower end storage devices have a single storage processor and some even a single power-supply but that is different for the VSA. Lets assume you have a 3 node cluster with each of these three serving up their local storage. What will it look like?
I hope this image is clear but what we see above is a three node cluster. Each node holds 2 volumes. One “active” volume and a Replica volume. Now the Replica volume is where the resiliency comes in to play. If one of the nodes would fail one of the other nodes, depending on which holds the replica, picks up! Yes indeed the VSA volumes are RAID-1 and the failure is literally detected in seconds. Note that this is a synchronous technique, so an acknowledgement is required from both the active and replica of the datastore.
In my example above when ESXi-1 (on the left) would fail then ESXi-2 (middle) would pick up as it is holding the replica. Note that this is a seamless fail-over if the VM is running on a node other than ESXi-1. The amount of time it takes for the fail-over to occur is literally second and the replica will be available through the same ip-address. If the VM happened to be running on ESXi-1 than vSphere HA would restart that virtual machine is in any other scenario.
This video demos what it looks like when a host fails:
For more details on the VSA I would like to recommend the following articles by Cormac Hogan:
** disclaimer: if you don’t care about music / the Foo Fighters stop reading and skip to the next article **
As you know by now, besides virtualization I also love music. I’ve always been active doing articles / interviews and much more in the past but at a point I decided to focus my writing on virtualization. Every now and then I get the urge to write something not virtualization related and this time Foo Fighters is what triggered this sporadic change of topic.
I’ve been a Nirvana fan since one of the first albums. I loved every single song and was always intrigued by their drummer Dave Grohl and one of their guitarists Pat Smear. I already knew Pat Smear as he used to be part of The Germs and I was a hardcore-punk kid. When Nirvana released In Utero, which back then disappointed the more “poppy” fans of Nirvana, I loved it. It was loud and fast, just the way I liked it. Not as loud and fast as most of the music I would normally listen to, but hey it was close enough. Nirvana came to an end and I expected that to be the last to ever be heard of the individual band members…
It didn’t take long before the rumors start spreading around, Nirvana’s drummer Dave Grohl was working on something called the Foo Fighters. When their first album dropped I bought it without hesitating. It was different than I expected and to be honest I was slightly disappointed. I expected a bit less pop and more grunge / punk considering Dave wrote these songs… After listening to the album for 10 maybe 20 times I got used to the sound and the songs started to stick and grow on me. I kept following the band but they never struck me the way Nirvana could. When they released “Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace” that all of a sudden changed. Although it still wasn’t as edgy as I hoped it would be. But things were changing for the better and I was anxiously awaiting their new album… Wasting Light.
Wasting Light is the album I played the most over the last 5 years and maybe even 10. I think I listen to it at least twice a day and it never gets boring. Every single song on Wasting Light is amazing. I’ve read a lot of reviews for Wasting Light and most of them seem to come to the same conclusion that this a great rock album but not much more and definitely not renewing… even call it artistically diminishing but the fact of the matter is that this is Rock. Yes with a capital R! A rock album doesn’t need to be renewing, no a rock album needs to have an edge to it. All things need to come together at the same time, and when that happens you have a classic album. The last 5-10 years I was never really impressed as most rock albums were over-produced. Rock doesn’t need to be perfect.
It was difficult to pick just one song as I love most songs on this album, but I really like Arlandria. The reason for it being that this song could be the seen as the summary of this album. This song contains everything a perfect Foo Fighters song should contain. Arlandria by the Foo Fighters.
I was doing some troubleshooting this week and needed the CDP network info. I did not have access to a vSphere client, only HP iLO access. I remoted into the ESXi box and enable ESXi Shell. I knew that I could dig up the info using esxcfg-info but the amount of details provided are overwhelming and I would rather get only the info back I need without too much hassle. I figured there was another way:
vim-cmd hostsvc/net/query_networkhint
The one thing that I find it very useful for is to check the configured VLAN(s) on the port. Below is the result of the above command:
I saw a couple of questions on the VMTN Communities around running Windows 8 Dev Preview on ESXi 5.0 and support and the fact that it doesn’t work. Although the OS is listed in the dropdown list after you have created a VM it does not mean it is supported. Support for Operating Systems should always be validated through the following page: http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php?deviceCategory=software. Currently Windows 8 Dev Preview is not on the list and as such not supported, which means no guarantee that it will work. As some have already noticed it won’t work (HAL_INITIALIZATION_FAILED), for now… as I am sure the engineers at VMware are working on it as I am typing this article. (That’s no guarantee a solution / workaround will come in the near future though.)
There’s a KB article on this topic http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2006859, if you are interested I would suggest bookmarking it or subscribing to it.
I want to point out though that you can run Windows 8 in Workstation 8 or Fusion 4. Yes I know that these are paid products, but you can download the eval version which is valid for 30 days. Workstation 8 comes with VMware Player 4.0, which is completely free! (Not available as a separate download yet unfortunately.)
Installing Windows 8 is straight forward, just use the Windows 7 – 64 Bit profile that is part of both Fusion and Workstation.
<edit>KB article has been published, including the video I shot</edit>
How do you setup multi-NIC vMotion? I had this question 3 times in the past couple of days during workshops so I figured it was worth explaining how to do this. It is fairly straight forward to be honest and it is more or less similar to how you would setup iSCSI with multiple vmknic’s. More or less as there is one distinct difference.
You will need to bind each VMkernel Interface (vmknic) to a physical NIC. In other words:
Create a VMkernel Interface and give it the name “vMotion-01″
Go to the settings of this Portgroup and configure 1 physical NIC-port as active and all others as “standby” (see the screenshot below for an example)
Create a second VMkernel Interface and give it the name “vMotion-02″
Go to the settings of this Portgroup and configure a different NIC-port as active and all others as “standby”
and so on…
Now when you will initiate a vMotion multiple NIC ports can be used. Keep in mind that even when you vMotion just 1 virtual machine both links will be used. Also, if you don’t have dedicated links for vMotion you might want to consider using Network I/O Control. vMotion can saturate a link and at least when you’ve set up Network I/O Control and assigned the right amount of shares each type of traffic will get what it has been assigned.
For a video on how to do this:
<update: dvSwitch details below>
For people using dvSwitches it is fairly straight forward: You will need to create two dvPortgroups. These portgroup will need to have the “active/standby” setup (Teaming and Failover section). After that you will need to create two Virtual Adapters and bind each of these to a specific dvPortgroup.
Book #24, Cloud Computing with VMware vCloud Director, by John Arrasjid, Duncan Epping, Steve Kaplan Ben Lin, Michael Haines and Raman Veeramraju. This Short Topics book provides use cases, design considerations, and technology guidance to answer your questions about cloud computing. The primary intended audience is those interested in learning about VMware cloud computing products and solutions, but content on third-party technologies is also included where appropriate. Without diving overly deeply into specific design patterns, it provides insight into the tools to fit your design criteria and it explains the concepts used by vCloud ranging from Organization Virtual Datacenters to External Networks.
