Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

esxi

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!

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

VIMA and the UPS initiated shutdown, the “lamw” version

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I already predicted that this was bound to happen sooner or later. It only took William Lam, aka lamw, a couple of days to enhance the work that Joseph Holland did. Joseph wrote a procedure that let’s APC’s software initiate a shutdown of the VM’s and ESXi host when a power failure occurs. Joseph’s solution included a modification of ESXi which means no VMware support.

I hinted William via twitter and he came up with a perl script that uses the API to initiate the shutdown of the VM’s and the ESXi host. This script will be run on the VIMA VM. There’s no need to change the ESXi host anymore!

ghettoShutdown.pl – This script initiates the shutdown of all VM(s) within an ESX/ESXi host excluding the virtual machine that’s monitoring the UPS device and then shutdowns the host. It accepts two commandline parameters: –sleep the duration in seconds to wait after a VM has initiated the shutdown before moving onto the next VM (shutdownVM() is non-blocking function) and –ups_vm the name of the displayName of your VM that is monotiring the UPS device [more details to come later].

upsVIShutdown.pl – This script is a wrapper which will hold the configurations of the order of hosts to shutdown. It may be used inconjunction with other UPS monitoring utility, though with our example, it’ll be placed in the apccontrol script to execute upon a power interuption.

Now head over to the VMware Communities, download the script and testdrive it! Awesome work William!

Veeam Backup 3.0 supports ESXi, including free version!

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Veeam just released Backup 3.0 with ESXi(including the Free version) support:

In addition to the ESXi backup through VCB that was introduced with version 2.0, Veeam Backup 3.0 now supports ESXi backup without VCB. Veeam Backup is the only VMware backup solution that lets you backup and restore virtual machines running on all existing editions of ESXi, including ESXi free.

Now head over to Veeam and download your trial and start doing full VM backups. Veaam Backup also provides you with a file level restore:

Veeam’s fast file-level recovery feature allows you to restore individual files from your image-level backups and replicas in seconds, without having to extract the full VM image to your local drive.

Just a tip, I would suggest to do a “zero-out” before running the full VM backup!

Train Signal virt CBTs still 25% reduction

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A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Train Signal, the post included a reduction coupon, YELLOWBRICKS. This coupon gives you 25% reduction on the Train Signal virtualization CBTs. Train Signal was so kind to also provide me with an additional coupon that gives you free shipping:

All you need to do is head over to Train Signal and enter the following coupon code “YELLOWBRICKS” and “FREESHIP”. By buying a CBT you also support Yellow-Bricks.com! Both coupon codes are valid till the end of the month, just two weeks left…