Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

ESX

VI Powershell: Creating a PSDrive to browse your inventory

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Just stumbled upon this cool article about mounting your VI inventory as a drive via Powershell:

source – Hal Rottenberg aka halr9000:

  1. Establish a connection to your the server using the Get-VIServer command: 
    Get-VIServer -Server


    for example, 

    Get-VIServer -Server 192.168.10.10


    When prompted, provide the administrator’s username and password to authenticate access on the server.

  2. Get the root folder of the server: 
    $root = Get-Folder -NoRecursion
  3. Create a PowerShell drive named VI, based on the server root folder. You can use the built-in New-psDrive cmdlet. 
    New-PSDrive -Location $root -Name vi -PSProvider VimInventory -Root '\'


    In this release, a single backslash is the required value for the -Root parameter.

  4. Access the new drive by typing the following command: 
    cd vi:


    To list the drive content, use Get-ChildItem or its alias Dir.

  5. Navigate through your server inventory using the cd command with the full path to the host. For a fictional VI inventory it may looks like the following: 
    cd Folder01\DataCenter01\host\Web\LiveHost01

New VMware patch download section

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It took me a while before I got used to the new layout of the VMware website, especially the forums and blogs… But the new download section is definitely an improvement. Just tick the patches you need and click download. A “download manager java applet” will be launched which will download the patches into the default location. This is the only thing I would love to see improved, I should be able to change that download location before the patches are downloaded. Don’t leave the download page while downloading by the way!

Overcommiting memory, the war is on…

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I blogged about this yesterday, and a couple of hours later several articles on this topic popped up on the VMware website. Read them, and be prepared for another round of Citrix/MS blogs trying to discredit this feature. In my opinion it’s simple any feature that lets me virtualize more users / servers on the same or less hardware without significantly reducing the performance is worth looking into/testing. Looking at the “Services”(SBC/VDI) that are discussed in these topics I can imagine why Citrix is fully defending their technology and discrediting this feature, this is something that they didn’t think of or have developed yet.

  1. VMware: Memory Overcommitment in the Real World
  2. Scott Lowe: More on memory overcommitment
  3. Cheap HyperVisors
  4. The comment
  5. The Discussion

Talking about competition and cheap hypervisors…. Rumors are going around that Dell will be supplying servers with VMware ESX 3i with any additional costs, free, no license… So the war is on, but before you guys start bashing check the numbers in article number 1… 178 VM’s with 512MB of memory only using 19.07GB instead of the 89GB is would be using otherwise.

Virtualizing Citrix?!

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There’s been so many discussions on whether to virtualize Citrix Servers or not I can hardly keep track. But today I was pointed out to a discussion on the VMTN forum. Especially Jason Boche’s contribution to this thread is very valuable and makes sense on why you actually should virtualize your Citrix environment. Jason discovered the following:

A few of the things we’re seeing:
1. The VM is handling slighly more users with a fraction of the hardware used
2. The VM is managing application memory more efficiently which I think will allow us to get more theoretical users on a VM than on physical hardware because with 4GB of usable RAM, we always run out of memory first. I need to find out if the memory efficiency is is due to VMware’s Content-Based Page Sharing (see http://www.waldspurger.org/carl/papers/esx-mem-osdi02.pdf). My knowledge of VMware’s page sharing thus far was that pages were shared between VMs only. The memory efficiency I’m seeing when running Citrix inside a VM suggests that VMware page sharing is being used to share common memory pages inside of just a single VM of the same Citrix published application that is being run 40 times in 40 concurrent users sessions.

This is also something that’s new to me, VMware is also doing intra-VM page sharing besides inter-VM page sharing. Which indeed can be really beneficial for Server Based Computing. In the end this will enable you to virtualize more servers on the same hardware and taking advantage of those quadcore processors like no other platform does. Especially the dual-quadcore servers nowadays hardly ever get fully utilized with additional memory and VMware you can solve this inefficient usage of hardware.

Not only the usage will be more efficient but the uptime and portability will increase and with the usage of templates and for instance Thinstall it should be very easy to prep new Citrix servers in a matter of minutes. Than again with Windows Server 2008 and Thinstall small to medium companies might not even need Citrix, and I’m not even talking about the new upcoming VDI features like offline working, patch one patch many and linked cloning.

More info on ESX + Citrix can be found in this PDF that VMware released a while back. And be sure to read the topic on the VMTN forum.

SBC and VDI will definitely make a giant leap over the next months!

Lefthand’s Virtual San Appliance

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At the VMworld I had the opportunity to talk with the Lefthand guys about their products. I hardly see these products in the Netherlands but read some great reviews about their products. One of their products that really caught my attention was and is their Virtual San Appliance or VSA in short. I received a demo copy at VMworld and have been playing with it for a couple of days now. [Read more…] about Lefthand’s Virtual San Appliance