I have the pleasure of announcing a brand new fling that was released today. This fling is called “VM Resource and Availability Service” and is something that I came up with during a flight to Palo Alto while talking to Frank Denneman. When it comes to HA Admission Control the one thing that always bugged me was why it was all based on static values. Yes it is great to know my VMs will restart, but I would also like to know if they will receive the resources they were receiving before the fail-over. In other words, will my user experience be the same or not? After going back and forth with engineering we decided that this could be worth exploring further and we decided to create a fling. I want to thank Rahul(DRS Team), Manoj and Keith(HA Team) for taking the time and going to this extend to explore this concept.
Something which I think is also unique is that this is a SaaS based solution, it allows you to upload a DRM dump and then you can simulate failure of one or more hosts from a cluster (in vSphere) and identify how many:
- VMs would be safely restarted on different hosts
- VMs would fail to be restarted on different hosts
- VMs would experience performance degradation after restarted on a different host
With this information, you can better plan the placement and configuration of your infrastructure to reduce downtime of your VMs/Services in case of host failures. Is that useful or what? I would like to ask everyone to go through the motion, and of course to provide feedback if you feel this is useful information or not. You can leave feedback on this blog post or the fling website, we are aiming to monitor both.
For those who don’t know where to find the DRM dump, Frank described it in his article on the drmdiagnose fling, which I also recommend trying out! There is also a readme file with a bit more in-depth info!
- vCenter server appliance: /var/log/vmware/vpx/drmdump/clusterX/
- vCenter server Windows 2003: %ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Application Data\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\Logs\drmdump\clusterX\
- vCenter server Windows 2008: %ALLUSERSPROFILE%\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\Logs\drmdump\clusterX\
So where can you find it? Well that is really easy, no downloads as I said… fully ran as a service:
- Open hasimulator.vmware.com to access the web service.
- Click on “Simulate Now” to accept the EULA terms, upload the DRM dump file and start the simulation process.
- Click on the help icon (at the top right corner) for a detailed description on how to use this service.