Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

vcenter

Per processor licenses for your application

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Some vendors license their application per processor, also in a virtualized environment. So if your VM has 4 vCPU’s your vendor will want you to buy a 4 processor license for the application. But you can avoid this by telling the VM that it has cores instead of processors. In others words, instead of having 4 processors you would have 1 processor with 4 cores:

  1. Power off the VM
  2. Right click on the VM and select “Edit Settings…”
  3. Select the “Options” tab
  4. Click on “General” (in the “Advanced” options section)
  5. Click “Configuration Parameters…” (in the pane on the right)
  6. Click “Add Row”
  7. Enter “cpuid.coresPerSocket” in the “Name” column
  8. Enter a value (try 2, 4, or 8) in the “Value” column
  9. Click “OK”
  10. Power on the VM

The VM will now appear to the OS as having multi-core CPUs with the number of cores per CPU given by the value that you selected. For example, if you create an 8 VCPU VM and set “cpuid.coresPerSocket = 2” it will be recognized as 4 dual-core CPU’s by the OS while it’s actually utilizing 8 physical cores.

Keep in mind that this feature is currently unsupported!

vSphere and the Windows Server Virtualization Validation Program

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I just noticed that vSphere has been added to the Windows Server Virtualization Validation Program:

source

Products that have passed the SVVP requirements for Windows Server 2008 R2 are considered supported on Windows Server 2008, Windows 2000 Server SP4 and Windows Server 2003 SP2 and later Service Packs, both x86 32-bit, and x64 64-bit.

Might come in handy when you need to get support from Microsoft….

vSphere HA Isolation Response

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As of VMware vCenter 2.5 Update 2 the HA default isolation response changed from “Power Off” to “Leave powered on”. A lot of people liked this new default setting because it would lower the chances of downtime due to a “false positive”. I’ve never been a fan though, I just don’t like using degraded hardware or a degraded ESX host for that matter.

Those that did like the change should take notice of the fact that with vSphere comes a new default isolation response:

Note that this change is only for new clusters, if you upgrade(d) your vCenter the selected isolation response will remain. For those of you who never looked into the setting “Shut down”, it uses VMware Tools to initiate a guest shut down. If the shut down does not complete within five minutes the VM will be powered off. These five minutes are a configurable setting, if you want to increase or decrease it add the following advanced option das.isolationShutdownTimeout with the new value in seconds.

vSphere, finally available…

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When ESX 3.0 was released people were excited about it but it can’t be compared to the buzz that has been created around vSphere. It’s all over the blogosphere, I think every single blog out there published articles  about vSphere weeks even months before it was released . Now the time has finally come, it’s available! Go to the download section of the VMware website to download it.

Equally important is the update documentation section. Be sure to download all the documents and start reading!

Have fun today guys, while we in the Netherlands enjoy our holiday.