Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Archives for 2009

VMware VI3 Implementation and Administration by Eric Siebert

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vI just finished reading a brand new book titled “VMware VI3 Implementation and Administration” by Eric Siebert. I was pleasantly surprised by the in depth information that the book contains. The book is based on ESX(i) /vCenter 3.5 U3 and discusses every aspect of implementing and administering your virtual environment including troubleshooting, installation, backup and monitoring.  What ATDG is for 3.0.x this book will be for 3.5 in my opinion!

Eric’s writing style made the book an easy read and the enormous amount of examples, tips and hints make this book a must have for the toolkit of every VI Admin! In other words, pre-order it now!

Hyper9

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I received an email from Hyper9 last week which was kind of surprising. I planned to do a short article last week but for some reason I never managed to write and publish it. Here’s an outtake from the press release I received a week ago:

Hyper9, Inc. (www.hyper9.com), the leading provider of management information for virtual infrastructures announced today that it has raised $8 million in a series B funding round. Venrock, a highly respected venture capital firm, led the round. Joining Venrock were current investors Matrix Partners, Silverton Partners and Maples Investments.

The company also announced that Mike Maples Sr., a private investor and tech industry veteran, joined its Board of Directors. Formerly Executive Vice President of the Worldwide Products Group for Microsoft, Maples has a proven track record in advising software companies as they expand product lines and enhance business operations such as sales and marketing. Prior to Microsoft, Maples held senior positions at other market leading companies such as IBM, Lexmark, NetIQ, and Sonic restaurants.

In short they raised an enormous amount of money and managed to get Mike Maples Sr. on board. Mike Maples worked for Microsoft as a VP so you can imagine he knows what game needs to be played to bring Hyper9 to the next level.

Besides Mike Maples, Andrew Kutz also joined Hyper9(Source Boche.net). Andrew is well known for the Storage VMotion plugin he created for the vCenter Client.

I haven’t personally beta tested the upcoming Hyper9 product but it seems promissing, it will probably be released at the end of this month! So keep an eye on their website.

Virtualized MMU and Transparent page sharing

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I’ve been doing Citrix XenApp performance tests over the last couple of days. Our goal was simple: as many user sessions on a single ESX host as possible, not taking per VM cost in account. Reading the Project VRC performance tests we decided to give both 1 vCPU VM’s and 2 vCPU VM’s a try. Because the customer was using brand new Dell hardware with AMD processors we also wanted to test with “virtualized MMU” set to forced. For a 32Bit Windows OS this setting needs to be set to force other wise it will not be utilized. (Alan Renouf was so kind to write a couple of lines of Powershell that enabled this feature for a specific VM, Cluster or just every single VM you have. Thanks Alan!)

We wanted to make sure that the user experience wasn’t degraded and that ESX would still be able to schedule tasks within a reasonable %RDY Time, < 20% per VM. Combine the 1vCPU, 2vCPU with and without virtualized MMU and you’ve got 4 test situations. Like I said our goal was to get as much user sessions on a box as possible. Now we didn’t conduct a real objective well prepared performance test so I’m not going to elaborate on the results in depth, in this situation 1vCPU with virtualized MMU and scale out of VMs resulted in the most user sessions per ESX host. [Read more…] about Virtualized MMU and Transparent page sharing

HA and ESX 3.0.x log file flooding

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VMware just released a new KB article. The article is on VMware HA and the log files it can possibly generate when restarting of a VM occurs.

The article contains an extensive description of the sympoms but the most important one is this one:

For any virtual machine that VMware HA is wrongly trying to start, it also generates thousands or tens of thousands of vmware-x.log files (one created every few minutes). Contents of each log file shows the virtual machine starting up then failing to start. Despite these logs, the virtual machines are actually pingable and running, and vm-support -x shows them as available running virtual machines on the host.

The resolution for the problem is the following:

  1. Stop and start HA on the cluster. (This stops the flooding)
  2. # find . -name ‘-*.log’ | xargs rm
    This commands removes all log files. Make sure you run this from /vmfs/volumes!

VCB and Diskeeper

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I just noticed this new KB article:

Diskeeper is a 3rd party defragmentation product that has the ability to defragment unmounted NTFS volumes that are presented to the VMware Consolidated Backup proxy. This means that it can defragment RDM LUNs. Unfortunately, this creates the possibility of inconsistencies in the file system if there is a virtual machine running on that RDM.

The Automatic Defragment option causes the defragmentation to take place.

Consult your Diskeeper documentation to obtain instructions for disabling this feature in the version of the product that is installed on the VCB Proxy server.

Be aware to not use Diskeeper on your VCB proxy!