Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Blogging

Ken’s view on Service Console redundancy and my take…

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I’ve read Ken’s article on Service Console redundancy a couple of times, When is it OK to default on your VI? As I also wrote on the VMTN Blog I really love Ken’s posts so far. They are in depth and Ken knows what he is talking about. His argument, keep it simple, make sense.

Basically, what we’ve done is to let everything default. All the adapters are active, the load balancing method is virtual switch port based and nothing is overridden by the port groups.

But I actually don’t agree with Ken on this one. I never use “virtual port id” load balancing for the Service Console and VMkernel, especially not if I combine these two port groups on one vSwitch.

Call me a control freak if you like, but I want to know which port group is using which vmnic. I always use an Active/Standby scenario for the vSwitch that holds the Service Console and VMkernel. Let me steal Ken’s excellent diagram to give you an idea what I’m talking about:

If anything goes wrong there’s full redundancy, which is a must have. The setup can be scripted in a couple of lines and if you need to troubleshoot you know exactly which physical NIC is being used for what purpose. The Service Console and the VMkernel/VMotion are just too important to be guessing where they are running in my opinion, especially in large environments. I want every server to be exactly the same, I don’t want to have the Service Console running on vmnic0 on the first server and on vmnic2 on the next. Like I said… I like to be in control, full control.

For those who want to set this up via a scripted install:

/usr/bin/vimsh -n -e “hostsvc/net/portgroup_set
–nicorderpolicy-active=vmnic0 –nicorderpolicy-standby=vmnic2 vSwitch0
‘Service Console’”
/usr/bin/vimsh -n -e “hostsvc/net/portgroup_set
–nicorderpolicy-active=vmnic2 –nicorderpolicy-standby=vmnico vSwitch0 VMkernel”

Virtual Geek Week?

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It must have been Virtual Geek week this week! I guess most of you already know Virtual Geek, and if you didn’t you’ve been missing out on the good stuff. Virtual Geek is being maintained by Chad Sakac of EMC and let’s say there’s a reason why his blog is called “Virtual Geek”. Chad posted a series of blog articles which are a must read for anyone interested in storage related to VMware and storage/VMware in general.

It started out with the “VMFS best practices and counter FUD” article where he sets the facts straight and debunks several myths like max amount of vm’s per VMFS volume and the use of extents. Besides countering this FUD there are also some very valuable tips in this article, for instance the advanced setting “Disk.SchedNumReqOutstanding” and the why/where/when.

In his second post this week he revealed that the upcoming release of ESX/vCenter(vSphere) will include the counterpart of the EMC Storage Viewer (vCenter plugin, youtube demo to be found here.). For all Clarion/Celerra customers who are planning on upgrading to vSphere a nice “little” extra!

The third one was the one I have been personally waiting for, the brand new version of the Celerra VSA. If you want to run a virtual “virtual environment” this virtual storage appliance is a must have. Especially if you want to test SRM this VSA will come in handy. Be sure to also download the how to guide that Chad provided in the “HOWTO 401” article.

Number four and five deal about multipathing and MRU behavior. I fully agree that understanding how MRU works is essential if you are using the policy. Post number 5 contains the script that is demoed in post 4. The script load balances the LUNs on the backend of the array(storage processors) and of course makes sure this is reflected on ESX for an optimal performance.

Let’s hope there’s more to come over the next weeks…

Is your PC overweight? Transitioning from fat to thin…

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Being overweight is probably one of the most common problems we face when getting older, and the same actually goes for PC’s. When they age we start to notice that a “bloated” OS just doesn’t cut it anymore. For most companies this usually means that it’s time to replace their desktops for brand new state of the art equipment. Of course with technology like VDI and/or Terminal Services there’s no need to do so. You can easily keep on using your “old” hardware when utilizing any of these two technologies. (Of course I prefer VDI.)

For an optimal experience I usually advise stripping the fat client OS to it’s bare minimum. But this isn’t always necessary as Justin Emerson(VM Junkie) points out in the two articles he recently published on his blog.

The first solution that I recommend to Microsoft Software Assurance customers is Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs. This is one of those lesser-known Microsoft OS products, but I think it’s pretty cool. It’s a stripped-down version of Windows XP intended for legacy systems that you can run on very old hardware – down to a 233MHz Pentium. It requires very little disk footprint, and what I like about it is that the default install is very small, as you will see.

From Microsoft’s website, one of the primary use cases of WinFLP is “use existing hardware as Terminal Services clients.” While they’re referring to Terminal Services by name, there’s no reason we can’t use it for Citrix ICA or in our case, VMware View!

Justin wrote two excellent articles of which the above is just a short outtake. These articles explain which steps you would need to take to turn your old overweight windows desktops into thin clients and are a must read for everyone interested in Desktop Virtualization! (Screenshots included)

Making a thin client on fat hardware: part 1
Making a thin client on fat hardware: part 2

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.

VMware vLaunchpad top 10 blogs grows to top 20 blogs

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Eric Siebert has tweaked his vLaunchpad. Instead of a top 10 Blogs he changed it to a top 20 Blogs because of the enormous amount of high quality blogs these days. I’m proud that I’m still number one on Eric’s list, heck I’m proud to even be part of the list with people like Mike Laverick, Scott Lowe, Jason Boche, Mike D, Chad Sakad, Tom Howarth and Christopher Hoff…. I guess I could name every single one on the list cause they all write amazing articles. I suggest you go to the vLaunchpad. Set it as your homepage and make sure to check out the top 20 blogs at least, they are most definitely worth your time!

Again, thanks Eric for your support, compliments and thanks for heading all the traffic into this direction!