Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Server

New Academic/Tech Paper on FT

· ·

I received this Paper a while back and think it is an excellent read. I just copied a random part of the paper to give you an idea of what it covers. There’s not much more to say about it then just read it, it is as in-depth as it can get on FT. I read it several times by now and still discover new things every time I read it.

The Design and Evaluation of a Practical System for Fault-Tolerant Virtual Machines

There are many possible ways to attempt to detect failure of the primary and backupVMs. VMware FT uses UDP heartbeating between servers that are running fault-tolerantVMs to detect when a server may have crashed. In addition, VMware FT monitors thelogging traffic that is sent from the primary to the backup VM and the acknowledgmentssent from the backup VM to the primary VM.

VMware vCloud wants your opinion. Take our online survey!

· ·

I was asked if I could ask my readers to fill out the following survey. Hopefully all of you will be so kind to fill it out and help VMware taking the next logical step, which ever that might be.

Cloud computing gets a lot of buzz today. But when people talk about cloud, do they mean IaaS, PaaS or SaaS? Who knows? Here at the vCloud group at VMware, we’re curious to hear what you think and why you use (or don’t use) a public cloud service. We’re also interested in hearing what applications and workloads you’re running in a public cloud.

To gather your feedback, we’ve created a quick public cloud survey: http://bit.ly/publiccloudsurvey. Our survey asks why you chose your provider, the type of workloads you’re running, if you use intermediaries with your cloud solution, and what you perceive as the biggest benefits or concerns when it comes to cloud.

The survey only takes about 10-15 minutes to complete, and the first 100 participants receive a $5 Starbucks gift card in the mail. Please note, this survey is open to ALL public cloud users, not just VMware customers.

MSCS Clustered vCenter Server 4.x not supported?

· ·

Yes you are reading it correctly. Today I was verifying links I added to a document. Both links referred to an MSCS based vCenter Server.

Although not everyone will have an environment where a Clustered vCenter Server is a must there are many where availability of vCenter is critical. To those who vCenter Server running clustered please note the following extract of a  newly published KB article:

vCenter Server 4.x has not been qualified with third party clustering products such as Microsoft Clustering Service and Veritas Cluster Services. VMware does not support third party clustering products.

This means that as mentioned in the KB article the only supported method to increase resilience of the vCenter Service currently is VMware Heartbeat.

vSphere 4.1 HA feature, totally unsupported but too cool

· ·

Early 2009 I wrote an article on the impact of Primary Nodes and Secondary Nodes on your design. This was primarily focussed on Blade environments and basically it discussed how to avoid having all your primary nodes in a single chassis. If that single chassis would fail, no VMs would be restarted as one of the primary nodes is the “failover coordinator” and without a primary node to assign this role to a failover can’t be initiated.

With vSphere 4.1 a new advanced setting has been introduced. This setting is not even experimental, it is unsupported. I don’t recommend anyone using this in a production environment, if you do want to play around with it use your test environment. Here it is:

das.preferredPrimaries = hostname1 hostname2 hostname3
or
das.preferredPrimaries = 192.168.1.1,192.168.1.2,192.168.1.3

The list of hosts that are preferred as primary can either be space or comma separated. You don’t need to specify 5 hosts, you can specify any number of hosts. If you specify 5 and all 5 are available they will be the primary nodes in your cluster. If you specify more than 5, the first 5 of your list will become primary.

Please note that I haven’t personally tried it and I can’t guarantee it will work.

32-bit ODBC DSN for VUM 4.1

· ·

My VMware Cloud Team colleague Max Daneri of VMTS fame was building a vSphere 4.1 environment this week. During the installation of VUM(VMware Update Manager) he ran into an issue with the database connection which I thought would be useful to share with you. After some playing around he found out that apparently VUM requires a 32-bit ODBC DSN. Which was a surprise as VUM requires a 64-bit OS.

Of course we should have read the documentation first as it is stated on page 27 of the VUM Install Guide…

IMPORTANT: Although you can install the Update Manager server only on 64-bit machines, Update Manager is a 32-bit application and requires a 32-bit DSN.