Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Archives for 2009

VMware Workstation 6.5.2 released

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VMware has just released VMware Workstation 6.5.2. You can find the release notes here.

What’s new:

Support for New Guest Operating Systems
VMware provides support for the following operating systems for Workstation 6.5.2:

  • Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and Service Pack 2
  • Asianux Server 3.0 Service Pack 1
  • OpenSUSE 11.1
  • Ubuntu 8.10
  • Ubuntu 8.04 LTS

VMware provides experimental support to the following operating systems for Workstation:

  • Fedora 11
  • FreeBSD 7.1
  • Mandriva Linux 2009
  • Microsoft Windows 7
  • Novell SLE11.0
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.8
  • Sun Solaris 10 Update 6
  • Ubuntu 9.04

Support for Intel Microarchitecture (Nehalem)
VMware provides support for Nehalem processors (Intel Microarchitecture) from this release.

Of course there are also a whole bunch of resolved issues. You can read all about it here.

vTeardown

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I like to welcome vTeardown.com to the blogosphere! Be sure to update your bookmarks and add them to your rss reader, that is if you’re not following PlanetV12n of course.

You might already know one member of our team from his very popular VCritical blog.  Eric Gray is one of our virtualization management experts and he’s been opening lots of eyes to the real world limitations of Microsoft’s offerings in that space.  At vTeardown, we aim to do the same for hypervisors and other management tools.  So look forward as our team – Michael Hong, Kayvan Montakhab and I(Eric Horschman) – sheds some light on the real capabilities of the products out there in the virtualization market.

vTeardown will mainly focus on debunking the myths and fairy tales some of our friends are spreading. They will give you an insight in the world of hypervisors and management tools. Again welcome, and tear it down!

Disk latency and esxtop

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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.

VMTN Podcast: Join in on the fun!

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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.

DIY Patch for VMware Workstation 6.5.1 on Linux 2.6.29 kernel

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I’m running OpenSuse as my primary OS at the moment. One of the problems I had was getting VMware Workstation to work in a normal way. The problem was that the kernel modules weren’t compiled correctly. It’s been bugging me ever since, but due to the fact that it’s the end of the quarter I never had the time to actually look in to it. Luckily VMTN user Krellan did have some extra time on his hands and managed to fix the problem, Thanks!!

Fixing your broken installation is fairly easy:

To use this patch, download it from the attachment, gunzip it, then go to your /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source directory. Untar all of the files. Apply the patch with “patch -p1”. After the patch has applied, re-tar all the files. Then, run “vmware-modconfig –console –install-all” again, under Linux 2.6.29, and it should now work.

Go to the VMTN Forums and download the patch if you are having trouble getting the VMware Workstation kernel modules compiled correctly!