Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Archives for 2009

The dawn of a new era

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While most virtualization vendors are still catching up on VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3.5, VMware prepares for the official unveiling of the next generation of virtualization software! April 21 – 2009, mark that date! It’s the dawn of a new era! I know that it’s way over the top, but you can’t half imagine how excited I am about this upcoming announcement!

Click the picture for more details, and be sure to sign up!
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Just some highlights of what VMware is launching.

  • Saves enough energy to power Denmark for 10 days
  • Frees up enough storage to host 50 times the current volume of photos on Facebook
  • Offers 4 times more memory per virtual machine
  • Handles 8,900 transactions per second in a virtual machine
  • Handles 3 times eBay’s daily traffic on a single server
  • Supports 4 times more operating systems than the competition

April 21, 2009 – 9:00 – 10:30 AM, PDT – Via live Simulcast – Register NOW!
(thanks Mike for letting me borrow your pic and bullet points!)

Queue depth throttling

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Most of you hopefully read about the new queue depth throttling feature in the release notes of ESX 3.5 U4 which has been released last week. A couple of customers asked me if this would be beneficial for them to set up.

Currently queue depth throttling is only supported for 3PAR Storage Arrays.

This, of course, doesn’t mean that it will not work with any of the other arrays. It actually does… but it probably hasn’t been tested to the full extent. Again, keep in mind that it’s currently not supported with any other array then 3PAR.

Now, what’s this queue depth throttling about? The knowledge base article actually has a good explanation of what it does:

VMware ESX 3.5 Update 4 introduces an adaptive queue depth algorithm that adjusts the LUN queue depth in the VMkernel I/O stack. This algorithm is activated when the storage array indicates I/O congestion by returning a BUSY or QUEUE FULL status. These status codes may indicate congestion at the LUN level or at the port (or ports) on the array. When congestion is detected,VMkernel throttles the LUN queue depth. VMkernel attempts to gradually restore the queue depth when congestion conditions subside.

In laymans terms: It’s an “algorithm” for handling queue sizes. When the array indicates it’s busy and/or that the queue is full it cuts the size of the queue in half so the array isn’t flooded with requests and can recover to a normal situation. When the array gives the green light the size of the queue will be increased again till the max specified queue depth has been reached.

False positive: AVG Anti-virus and Thinapp

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One of colleagues emailed me this weekend that he had a problem with Thinap’ed application and AVG. My AVG updated this morning and I can confirm the issue. When you run or download an application(virtualized by Thinapp) the applications is marked as Trojan horse Constructor.DER infected. As a work around you can of course  add all your applications as exceptions cause it’s clearly a false positive. (I downloaded a brand new application from thindownload.com to double check.) We are not the only ones that noticed it cause someone opened a thread on the AVG forum. Let’s hope AVG will fix this issue asap.

Update: VMFS metadata backup

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Mike Laspina just released a new version of his VMFS metadata backup script. William Lam, the creator of the health check report script I wrote about, helped Mike out to add a new feature “rolling backup” with folder augmented organization based on the host name, store alias, date label and the rolling instance number. This new version saves 10 versions of your metadata instead of just one and gives them a more appropriate name.

You can find the new version of the VMFS metadata backup script here.

VMware Fusion 2.0.3

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I’ve been extremely busy last week and totally forgot to publish this article.

VMware has just release Fusion 2.0.3. You can find the release notes here. Here’s the what’s new section:

  • Resolves an issue where driverless printing stops working for users that run Mac OS X 10.5.6, and installed Apple Mac OS X Security Update 2009-001. The shared printers would disappear from Windows. If you configured your printer differently as a workaround, turn on driverless printing feature again by clicking Virtual Machine > Settings, selecting Printers, and selecting the Enabled check box.
  • Provides experimental support for Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server as a guest operating system. You can now run the current Snow Leopard Server builds (32-bit kernel) in a virtual machine.
  • Resolves an issue with driverless printing, where the Enabled check box on Virtual Machine > Settings > Printers might get deselected automatically.