Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Archives for 2009

HyTrust Appliance 1.5

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HyTrust just published info on their latest and greatest version of their appliance which will be released on the 24th of August and will carry version number 1.5. Hytrust sits between your virtual environment and the admin and enforces granular authorization of all virtual infrastructure management operations, according to user role, object, label, protocol and IP address. If you will attend VMworld I suggest you  head over to their booth and ask for a demo.

Additional New Features:

  • Support for VMware vSphere (ESX 4.0 and vCenter 4.0)
  • Support for VMware ESXi (all versions)
  • Two‐factor authentication including RSA SecureID
  • Label‐based policy enforcement
  • VM‐to‐host and VM‐to‐network segment control
  • VM tag policy import
  • XACML policy import/export
  • AD policy import for virtual machine management

VMware Developer Communities

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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.

Blogs about virtualization for DBAs

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Brent Ozar approached me a couple of weeks ago about a new project he was working on as part of the Professional Association For SQL Server named “The Virtualization Virtual Chapter”. Brent wants to get DBAs acquainted with virtualization and all the caveats and strings attached to it. There’s no better and easier way of course then by simply syndicating some of the best virtualization blogs out there.

Brent announced it and released it officially yesterday.

It’s hard for DBAs to find good virtualization information.

We end up reading brochures and whitepapers trying to figure out the best way to virtualize our database servers.  We don’t have the time to sift through the entire blogosphere to figure out what’s relevant for DBAs.

At the Virtualization Virtual Chapter of the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS), we’re working to change that, and we’ve got some fantastic people helping.  These are some of the top bloggers in the virtualization world today:

These guys blog about virtualization in general, and their material can get pretty technical. I love reading about how Cisco’s new blade system works, for example, but I know most of you don’t have the time to sift through that much information.  That’s why I contacted these guys and asked if they’d be willing to syndicate their beginner-level virtualization stuff and their DBA-related posts in one place.

Starting today, you can get the latest DBA-focused virtualization news, tips and tricks in whatever way works best for you:

The VMworld 2009 Portrait Project

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Greg Lato, one of my VMware colleagues, announced an interesting project today. Greg is a, as he states on his photography website, self-taught photographer and loves photographing basically anything. As thousands of people will be attending VMworld Greg thought that this would be the perfect opportunity to do several portrait shoots.

I think it’s a great initiative and anyone who would like to have, or needs(that’s you mr Boche), his picture taking make sure to visits Greg’s article and leave a comment. It’s free of charge by the way, so you will only be investing a couple of minutes of your time.

Recently I have been wondering if there may be more ways to cross the streams between my day job and my photographic passion. This originally started with me photographing the vSphere launch event back in April. Recently I come upon a way to extend this to VMworld 2009 while also engaging more directly with my readers.

On Friday I was walking from the San Francisco VMware office to the the garage where I parked my car and ended up walking past the Moscone Center. As I walked by my mind was in a photography mode and I started noticing how many great locations there are at Moscone for taking portrait photos (something I have been working on lately with my photography, including location lighting techniques). And guess what, there will be thousands of people coming here for VMworld 2009. Perhaps there might be a few people who either need or would like to have a new portrait photo taken in this great location? Like some virtualization bloggers who haven’t put a photo up on their sites yet to better connect with their readers. Or some of the social media users who would like to update their online avatar. Maybe just some attendees who are just looking for a different kind of memorabilia from VMworld.

Read more here ….. Announcing the VMworld 2009 Portrait Project …..

First Success of VMware’s Performance Service Offering

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Scott Drummonds just posted a new blog article which deals about an upcoming VMware PSO offering. When Scott Drummonds is involved you know the topic of this offering is performance. In this case it’s performance related to SQL databases and I/O bottlenecks, which is probably the most reported issue. As Scott explains briefly they were able to identify the issue rather quickly by monitoring the physical servers and the virtual environment.

I guess the quote of Scott’s article captures the essence:

In the customer’s first implementation of the virtual infrastructure, both SQL Servers, X and Y, were placed on RAID group A. But in the native configuration SQL Server X was placed on RAID group B. This meant that the storage bandwidth of the physical configuration was approximately 1850 IOPS. In the virtual configuration the two databases shared a single 800 IOPS RAID volume.It does not take a rocket scientist to realize that users are going to complain when a critical SQL Server instances goes from 1050 IOPS to 400. And this was not news to the VI admin on-site, either. What we found as we investigated further was that virtual disks requested by the application owners were used in unexpected and undocumented ways and frequently demanded more throughput than originally estimated. In fact, through vscsiStats analysis (Using vscsiStats for Storage Performance Analysis), my contact and I were able to identify an “unused” VMDK with moderate sequential IO that we immediately recognized as log traffic. Inspection of the application’s configuration confirmed this.