February 25th, 2010 |
1 Comment
After VMware announced that general support for ESX 3 was about to expire I received several emails with the same question. What’s the difference between general support and extended support? I think the following picture clearly depicts what the difference is between general support and extended support:
As you can see the only difference is that “non-critical bugs” will not be fixed and there will be no support for new hardware. Extended support ends on 2013/05/21 for ESX 3.5.
You can find all info regarding the VMware support policies here. Keep in mind that with vSphere the policy changed! There is no such a thing as “extended support”. General support is 5 years with vSphere and after that it is Technical Guidance only.
February 24th, 2010 |
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The VMTN/PlanetV12n Podcast 83 was all about ESXi with VMware’s Charu Chaubal. You can find the download here or subscribe to the podcast via iTunes here.
February 24th, 2010 |
2 Comments
We’ve spoken about Resource Pools a couple of times over the last months and specifically about shares. (The Resource Pool Priority-Pie Paradox, Resource Pools and Shares.) The common question I received was how can we solve this. The solution is simple: Custom Shares.
However, the operational overhead associated with custom shares is something most people want to avoid. Luckily for those who have the requirement to use share based resource pools one my colleague Andrew Mitchell shared a powershell script. This powershell script defines custom shares based on a pre-defined weight and the amount of VMs / vCPUs in the resource pool. I would recommend to schedule the script to run on a weekly basis and ensure the correct amount of shares have been set to avoid running into one of the scenarios described in the articles above.
Please keep in mind that if you use nested resource pools you will need to run a separate script for each level in the hierarchy.
Eg. If the resource pools are setup like this the following you will need one script to set the shares for RP1, RP2 and RP3, and another script to set the shares for RP1-Child1 and RP1-Child2.
RP1
>>RP1-Child1
>>RP1-Child2
RP2
RP3
Download the script here. Again to emphasize it I am not the author, we would appreciate it though if you could share any modifications / enhancements to this script.
February 24th, 2010 |
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I just received the following announcement and thought it would be interesting for you as well:
HyTrust, Inc., the leader in policy management and access control for virtual infrastructure, announced today that it has secured $10.5 million in Series B financing. New investors Granite Ventures and Cisco Systems participated in the round of financing, as did existing investors Trident Capital and Epic Ventures. Len Rand, partner at Granite Ventures, will take a seat on the HyTrust Board of Directors. HyTrust will use the capital to drive development, sales and marketing, and fuel the company’s next stage of growth.
“We are excited to welcome Cisco not only as a HyTrust partner but now also as a strategic investor,” added Chiu. “It’s great validation for HyTrust when the worldwide leader in networking places its confidence, via financial backing, in our approach to policy management and access control for virtual infrastructure. We look forward to deepening our relationship with the Server Access & Virtualization business unit at Cisco, tightening our existing integration with Cisco Nexus 1000v and Unified Computing System products, and working closely with Cisco’s Security business unit to address the needs of our joint customers. We feel strongly that policy management is key to enabling the ‘next generation data center’ and we couldn’t be more excited to have gained the backing of the company that coined the phrase.”
source
February 24th, 2010 |
8 Comments
Rodos just reported on twitter that it looks like Boot From SAN is supported for ESXi. Unfortunately the KB article Rodos refers to in his tweet, kb.vmware.com/kb/1015000, is incorrect and Boot From SAN is not supported for ESXi. I’ve already reported this internally and hopefully the KB article will be fixed soon. The correct statement can be found in the install guide and is as follows:
Installing on a Fibre Channel SAN is supported experimentally. Do not attempt to install ESXi with a SAN attached, unless you want to try this experimental feature.
Source: ESXi Installable and vCenter Server Setup Guide (page 20)
For those interested in what “experimental” actually means, read this section on the VMware website.
February 23rd, 2010 |
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I’ve been working on an overhauled version of the HA Deepdive Page. I’ve been adding “basic design principles” which hopefully you find useful.Here’s an example of what they look like:
Basic design principle: For iSCSI the preferred isolation response is always “Power off” to avoid a possible split brain scenario.
Another bit I’ve added is the following:
Please keep in mind that if you have an unbalanced cluster(host with different CPU or memory resources) your percentage is equal or preferably larger than the percentage of resources provided by the largest host. This way you ensure that all virtual machines residing on this host can be restarted in case of a host failure. Another thing to keep in mind is as there are no slots which HA uses resources might be fragmented throughout the cluster. Make sure you have at least a host with enough available capacity to boot the largest VM (reservation CPU/MEM). Also make sure you select the highest restart priority for this VM(of course depending on the SLA) to ensure it will be able to boot.)
What I’m discussing here is the impact of selecting a “Percentage” instead of the amount of host failures for your HA cluster. Although you might have enough spare resources left on your total cluster, the reservation of a single VM might cause it not to boot when resources are fragmented. Make sure these VMs are the first to boot up when disaster strikes by using restart priorities.
I created a diagram which makes it more obvious I think. So you have 5 hosts, each with roughly 76% memory usage. A host fails and all VMs will need to failover. One of those VMs has a 4GB memory reservation, as you can imagine failing over this particular VM will be impossible.
February 22nd, 2010 |
10 Comments
I was playing around with VMware Converter and thought it would be cool to create a VMware Converter Appliance. I can’t put this up for download, yet, but I can describe how to build your own appliance. I will use Novell’s Suse Studio to create a thin Linux VM that contains only the necessary bits and pieces.
- Go to susestudio.com and open an account
- Click “Create New Appliance”
- Select “GNOME Desktop” and click “Create Appliance”
- Change the name of the appliance to something that makes a bit more sense…
- I would personally add “File Roller” and “GCC” so that you can actually open archives from the GUI and make modules, which is need to install VMware tools.
- Go to the “Configuration Tab” and click on “Appliance”
- Increase the memory to 1024MB for a better running appliance
- Download VMware Converter Standalone for Linux and add it as a file in the “Overlay Files” tab
- When uploading is finished select a folder where the tar.gz file should be extracted, I picked “/vmwconverter”
- Click on the “Build” Tab and wait for it to complete
It’s as easy as that! With SUSE you have the option to Test Drive it and make changes to the image while test driving it. I would recommend to just download it and install VMware Converter while running the VM with VMware player. Or you could import it with vCenter and run it on an ESX host. This way you can also install VMware tools immediately.
- Open the VMX file with VMware Player
- Install VMware Tools:
Right click VM “install VMware tools”
- Open a terminal session within the VM and type:
cd /media/VMware Tools
tar -C /tmp -xvf <VMware Tools File>
/tmp/vmware-tools-distrib/vmware-install.pl
Agree with all the defaults…
- Now to install VMware Converter open a terminal session and do the following:
cd /vmwconverter/vmware-converter-distrib
./vmware-install.pl
Use all the defaults!
- You can add an icon to the desktop by right clicking the desktop and selecting “Create Launcher”
- Select “/usr/bin/vmware-converter-client”
- And add the correct icon! (/usr/share/icons/vmware-converter.png)
Now your appliance is good to go and can be used everywhere in your virtual infrastructure. I would recommend making it a template or vApp and deploy it multiple times when doing many parallel migrations!
vSphere 4.0 Quick Start Guide