Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Archives for January 2010

Hyper9 Named One of 10 Virtualization Vendors to Watch in 2010

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Just noticed this press release from Hyper9. Congrats on making this list…

AUSTIN, Texas – Jan. 20, 2010 – Despite a tough economy and increased competition in the virtualization market, Hyper9, Inc. today announced the close of a banner year in 2009, capped off by a fourth quarter that was the company’s strongest quarter to-date. Demonstrating positive momentum across all areas of the business, Hyper9 won numerous industry accolades in 2009, most recently landing on CIO.com’s third-annual list of intriguing innovators in virtualization management, 10 Virtualization Vendors to Watch in 2010.

“Virtualization is no longer a buzzword that people just talk about,” said Bill Kennedy, CEO of Hyper9. “In 2009, more enterprises embraced virtualization as an effective way to optimize IT operations. As organizations continue to face the challenge of doing more with less, virtualization will play a strategic role in enhancing the performance and agility of key business initiatives.”

NIC Teaming load balancing does not work with global vSwitch configuration on ESX 3.5

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A week ago a colleague contacted me about the fact that he had issues with load balancing on “Virtual Port ID”. Only a single NIC was utilized while running over 10 VMs on a single host. When changing the order of the NICs the traffic would flip over but again no load balancing. I remembered a KB article from months ago and pointed him to the article. Yesterday on the VMTN Community someone reported a similar issue with his ESX 3.5 environment. I referred to the article again and it solved the problem. Might be worth checking your setup in terms of load balancing. Is your second NIC actually being used? And if not here’s a short description of the problem and the solution:

Source

  • Symptom: NIC Teaming load balancing properties do not take effect with global vSwitch configuration settings.
  • Resolution: Override the load balancing order at the port group level, under Policy Exceptions, select the checkbox and choose the proper load balancing from the dropdown menu. Please note that this workaround only works until the next reboot of ESX.

My Homelab

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This weeks VMTN podcast is about Homelabs. John  Troyer asked on twitter who had a homelab and if they already posted an article about it. Most bloggers already did but I never got to it. Weird thing is that the common theme for most virtualization bloggers seems to be physical! Take a look at what some of these guys have in their home lab and try to imagine the associated cost in terms of cooling, power but also the noise associated with it.

I decided to take a completely different route. Why buy three or four servers when you can run all your ESX hosts virtually on a single desktop. Okay, I must admit, it is a desktop on steroids but it does save me a lot of (rack)space, noise, heat and of course electricity. Here are the core components of which my Desktop consists:

I also have two NAS devices on which I have multiple iSCSI LUNs and NFS shares. I even have replication going on between the two devices! Works like a charm.

There’s one crucial part missing. On my laptop I use VMware Player but on my desktop I like to use VMware Workstation. Although VMware Player might just work fine, I like to have a bit more functionality at my disposal like teaming for instance.

That’s my lab. I installed 3 x ESXi 4.0 Update 1 in a VM and installed Windows 2008 in a VM with vCenter 4.0 Update 1. Attached the ESX hosts to the iSCSI LUNs and NFS Shares and off we go. Single box lab!

Top-25 virtualization bloggers

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Eric Siebert just published the results of the Top-25 bloggers poll. Over 700 people voted and several bloggers entered the top-25 like Frank Denneman and Alan Renouf. I would like to thank everyone for voting on me. It’s a true honor to be part of a list like the following, let alone being voted as the number one virtualization blogger…

  1. Yellow Bricks – Duncan Epping – 158 #1 votes – total score of 4,191
  2. Virtual Geek – Chad Sakac – 111 #1 votes – total score of 2,938
  3. Scott Lowe’s Blog – Scott Lowe – 56 #1 votes – total score of 2,889
  4. NTPro.nl – Eric Sloof – 22 #1 votes – total score of 2062
  5. RTFM Education – Mike Laverick – 7 #1 votes – total score of 1,734
  6. Virtualization Evangelist – Jason Boche – 13 #1 votes – total score of 1,482
  7. VM/ETC – Rich Brambley – 5 #1 votes – total score of 1,138
  8. Gabe’s Virtual World – Gabrie van Zanten – 8 #1 votes – total score of 1,096
  9. Virtual Storage Guy – Vaughn Stewart – 58 #1 votes – total score of 990
  10. Virtu-Al – Alan Renouf – 18 #1 votes – total score of 831

I borrowed the list from Arnim who blogged about it yesterday, for the full list with all 66 Bloggers check Eric’s new article.

Time for a change…

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A lot of announcements have been done lately(Scott Lowe’s for instance) so I could not stay behind. I will be joining the VMware Advanced Services department as the Cloud Architect for EMEA.

As you can imagine I am thrilled that I have been given this huge opportunity and will be transitioning to this new position over the upcoming weeks. I will be focusing on public clouds primarily; of course in combination with VMware vSphere and a new upcoming product which has already been revealed as Redwood, but not officially announced.

Like I said months ago, blogging does change your life for the better and working hard does pay off. Let’s get ready to rrrrruuuuummmmmbbbbblllllleeeeee!