Yellow Bricks » vmtn

Investigating the options to bring back VMTN Subscriptions!

Duncan Epping — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 21:42:05 +0000

Mike Laverick started a campaign last week on the VMware Community Forums and asked for the VMTN Subscription to be reinstated, coincidentally the same request came in through the VMUG board. For those who have never heard of the VMTN Subscription program it was similar to MSDN and enabled you to run VMware software in your lab environment for a fixed yearly fee. Ever since the program was cancelled every now and then people asked for it to be reinstated. This time it is different, it is not a few people who are backing the request but so far the community thread has over 10 pages worth of comments and there are literally multiple new blog posts about this topic every day.

During the weekend I dropped my management an email about this campaign and all the traction it had within the community. Literally within minutes I had a reply. I am happy to be able to confirm that we are investigating the option to reinstate the VMTN Subscription program. Keep in mind that starting a program like this does take time and the program will need a serious overhaul. As such I cannot make any promises on when this will happen. I do want to stress that all feedback is highly appreciated, we are listening! All blog posts voicing your opinion on why this should happen are more then welcome and all comments on the VMTN thread will be read by our team.

Head over to the community thread and post your feedback:

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/335123

"Investigating the options to bring back VMTN Subscriptions!" originally appeared on Yellow-Bricks.com. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
Available now: vSphere 5 Clustering Deepdive. (paper | e-book)

VMTN Podcast #83, the links

Duncan Epping — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 22:07:40 +0000

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.

"VMTN Podcast #83, the links" originally appeared on Yellow-Bricks.com. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
Available now: vSphere 5 Clustering Deepdive. (paper | e-book)

VMTN Podcast 80

Duncan Epping — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 21:55:11 +0000

The VMTN/PlanetV12n Podcast 80 was an open topic. You can find the download here or subscribe to the podcast via iTunes here.

"VMTN Podcast 80" originally appeared on Yellow-Bricks.com. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
Available now: vSphere 5 Clustering Deepdive. (paper | e-book)

Meet the vExperts

Duncan Epping — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 07:05:07 +0000

A couple of months ago during the VMTN podcast I shared an idea with John Troyer and Edward Haletky. I thought that it would be cool to have a demo environment at the community booth where the vExperts could show there skills. After some discussions with the VMworld Team I decided to start building a lab and John Troyer asked the vExpert/Bloggers who would be willing to spend an our of their time at the Community Booth.

The list of vExpers that signed up is immense, and I’m really glad to see that guys like Eric Siebert, Scott Herold, Steve Beaver and Scott Lowe are participating. (Amongst many others of course.) I guess the full list will be published soon and I hope all of you take some time to visit the community booth and ask the vExperts some challenging questions! I know I will so you vExperts guys better be prepared.

"Meet the vExperts" originally appeared on Yellow-Bricks.com. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
Available now: vSphere 5 Clustering Deepdive. (paper | e-book)

VMware Developer Communities

Duncan Epping — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 06:02:02 +0000

The VMware Developer Communities have been overhauled and in such a way that Chip Foose would be proud. It contains all automation(SDK&API) related forums and documents including the sample code section! Another new feature I like is the “Hero Spotlight” section which currently features William Lam, Hal Rottenberg, Mike Giles and Luc Dekens. Just visit this new section of the community forums.

"VMware Developer Communities" originally appeared on Yellow-Bricks.com. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
Available now: vSphere 5 Clustering Deepdive. (paper | e-book)

VMTN Podcast, join in on the fun

Duncan Epping — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 08:29:36 +0000

As many of you hopefully know there’s a weekly VMTN Community Podcast. VMware’s John Troyer runs the show and usually most of the active VMTN Members join in on the fun. The best shows so far, in my opinion, are the deep technical ones and especially around storage. This evening(for us Europeans at least, wednesday 21:00 GMT +1 !!) Chad Sakac will join to discuss vSphere and iSCSI. For those who don’t know Chad, read this post on VI3.5 and iSCSI and you probably know why you should join in on this podcast. You can dial in, or just listen and have fun in the chatroom. You can ask your questions in the chatroom and one of the panel members will ask them during the call.

Just be there!!!

"VMTN Podcast, join in on the fun" originally appeared on Yellow-Bricks.com. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
Available now: vSphere 5 Clustering Deepdive. (paper | e-book)

Nehalem CPU and TPS on vSphere

Duncan Epping — Sun, 31 May 2009 14:10:24 +0000

As I wrote a while ago when you enable virtualized MMU for your virtual machine it enables Large Pages and Large Pages don’t get “TPS’ed”. The article I wrote was specifically related to AMD cause it was the only platform at the moment for which enhanced memory techniques where used. (AMD RVI!) As of vSphere 4.0 Intel EPT is also fully utilized. As expected this leads to the same “issue” as with AMD, no TPS when you enable vMMU. VMTN Community User MCWill reported this here. I wanted to specifically point this topic out to you because of the excellent replies from Kichaonline and Rajesh Venkatasubramanian. It’s worth reading the full topic if you want to get a good understanding of TPS/Virtualized MMU.

A small correction — we are currently investigating ways to fix the high memory usage issue also. Regarding TPS, as noted earlier this shoud not lead to any performance degradation. When a 2M guest memory region is backed with a machine large page, VMkernel installs page sharing hints for the 512 small (4K) pages in the region. If the system gets overcommitted at a later point, the machine large page will be broken into small pages and previously installed page sharing hints helps to quickly share the broken down small pages. So low TPS numbers when a system is undercommitted does not mean that we won’t reap benefits out of TPS when machine gets overcommitted.

"Nehalem CPU and TPS on vSphere" originally appeared on Yellow-Bricks.com. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
Available now: vSphere 5 Clustering Deepdive. (paper | e-book)

Disk latency and esxtop

Duncan Epping — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 20:37:43 +0000

We just had a very good and interesting VMTN Podcast on virtualized MS SQL performance and best practices. One of the questions was about disk performance. Hemant Gaidhan talked about esxtop and how to discover possible performance issues, and specifically mentioned latency. I’ve never really looked into this section of esxtop and did a quick search and of course the “Interpreting esxtop Statistics” answered which counters to watch and what each counter represents:

Section 4.2.2 Latency Statistics
This group of counters report latency values measured at three different points in the ESX storage stack. In the context of the figure below, the latency counters in esxtop report the Guest, ESX Kernel and Device latencies. These are under the labels GAVG, KAVG and DAVG, respectively. Note that GAVG is the sum of DAVG and KAVG counters.

I recommend reading the rest of the 4.2.2 section to anyone looking for more indepth info on esxtop and storage performance. Also read page 14/15 of Hemant’s document on SQL Server performance/best practices. Another great read and tip from Hemant was the “Scalable Storage Performance” whitepaper.

"Disk latency and esxtop" originally appeared on Yellow-Bricks.com. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
Available now: vSphere 5 Clustering Deepdive. (paper | e-book)

VMTN Podcast: Join in on the fun!

Duncan Epping — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 09:04:09 +0000

This evening(well at least for us Europeans) there will be another edition of the VMTN Podcast. More and more people are joining the weekly podcast live(Live audio stream and chat) and more people are downloading it every single week, jump on board while you still can! This week John Troyer asked VMware’s Hemant Gaidhan to join us and talk about SQL Server workloads in a virtualized environment and of course best practices.

Hemant will be our guest on the VMware Communities Roundtable podcast tomorrow, Wednesday, April 1, at noon PDT / 3pm EDT. I believe Europe and the US are now back in sync with respect to summer time, but you can always check a time zone calculator.

You can dial in, join the chat, and get streaming audio here. Your homework assignment is read Hemant’s paper and come with questions.

"VMTN Podcast: Join in on the fun!" originally appeared on Yellow-Bricks.com. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
Available now: vSphere 5 Clustering Deepdive. (paper | e-book)

VMworld, the wrap-up

Duncan Epping — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 22:00:20 +0000

VMworld Europe 2009 came to an end on Thursday. I finally traveled back on Friday, after a 5 hour delay.

I’m sorry I haven’t been able to write any technical content but you can’t imagine how busy I’ve been. I’ve gathered all useful links and added them to this post. But just to give you an idea what I was up to during VMworld:

Arrived on Sunday at 15:00, dropped luggage at hotel and went to the Hands-on Labs. Started unpacking the thin-clients and helping with the lab environment till 20:00. Changed clothes and went to the Veeam party.

Monday, 08:30. Preparing the labs again. Testing lab manuals, setting up thin clients and solving SAN issues. Finished at 21:00 and went directly to the Dutch VMUG Meet and Greet.

Tuesday, 08:30. Back to the labs again and do some final testing. At 10:30 first people entered the labs and I had Community Booth duty the rest of the day till 19:30. Quickly changed clothes and back to the VMware Benelux party.

Wednesday, 08:30. Watched the keynotes and hurried off to the community booth again. Helped a couple of minutes at the labs but mainly booth duty. Went to the hotel at 18:30 to change clothes for the VMworld Party Cloud9.

Thursday, 08:30. Lab duty for the first couple op hours. Booth duty the rest of the day. Couldn’t feel my feet anymore after a couple of hours. When the solution exchange closed at 16:00 we needed to put everything in the original boxes again. All thin-clients / monitors / keyboards etc. 19:30, done, change clothes and went out for a decent meal… actually the first decent meal this week.

This, was just a quick write-up. But you can imagine that most VMware employees have been running around all day long, no time to eat / drink / sit down. Talking to people all day long, answering questions or just random chit-chat, there’s even no time to reflect and digest all the announcements. Keep in mind that even weeks before VMworld people are doing preparations. For instance the VI-Toolkit lab had been tested by at least 6 people two week before VMworld. When I visited VMworld as an “attendee” last year I honestly didn’t have a clue how much work an event like this really is.

For the Hands-on Labs: At least 1000 attendees visited each day. Yes a THOUSAND at least. I really loved the format of the labs, the open floor instead of the closed lab sections was also a great idea! I would have never expected that there would have been queues, but there were… Sometimes even over 20 people were waiting just to get in. Definitely a big compliment to all Hands-on Labs staff, they/we did a great job.

And let’s not forget the team that organized this event, great job! Thanks!!!

I hope I will be able to attend VMworld 2009 in San Francisco. Over 15.000 attendees are expected at the Moscone Center:

"VMworld, the wrap-up" originally appeared on Yellow-Bricks.com. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
Available now: vSphere 5 Clustering Deepdive. (paper | e-book)