Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

VMware

Blades and HA / Cluster design

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After reading Aaron‘s excellent articles(1, 2) on Scott Lowe’s Blog I remembered a discussion I had with a couple of co-workers. The discussion was about VMware HA Cluster design in Blade Environments.

The thing that started this discussing was an HA “problem” that occurred at a customer site. This specific customer had 2 Blade chassis to avoid a single point of failure in his virtual environment. All blade servers were joined in one big cluster to get the most out of the environment in terms of Distributed Resource Scheduling.

Unfortunately for this customer at one point in time one of his blade chassis failed. In other words, power off on the chassis, all blades gone at the same time. The firs thing that comes to mind is: HA will kick in and the VM’s will be up and running within no-time.  [Read more…] about Blades and HA / Cluster design

Virtualization Security Roundtable Podcast

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Most of you are familiar with the VMTN Podcasts by now which are hosted by VMware’s John Troyer. One of the regulars of the VMTN podcast, Edward Haletky (also known as Texiwill on VMTN and Twitter), formed a panel of experts on Security and will start a new podcast: The Virtualization Security Round Table Podcast. Those who listen to the VMTN Podcast know how passionate Edward is about security and virtualization so expect these weekly roundtables to be at least on the same level as the VMTN podcasts.

Info about the podcasts can be found on Edwards website:

Episode 1: First Panel Talkshoe on Thursday 15 January 2009 at 2:30 PM EST / 20:30 (CEST): http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/34217

Expect the following topics to be discussed in the near future:

  • Use of Virtualization in a DMZ.
  • Review of security lockdown standards/benchmarks and tools
  • Virtualization Security in shared and dedicated hosting environments
  • Providing VaaS (VMware as a Service) securely to SMBs for DR.
  • How virtualization security relates to cloud computing security
  • Top 3 security issues
  • Optimal Network configuration and design for security
  • How to accommodate small / medium and home businesses
  • Disaster recovery options – small, medium, large businesses
  • VLANs as a Security measure with vSwitch Security

If you’ve got ideas / topics for the roundtable hit Edward up on the VMTN forum or via Twitter. And off course it’s also possible to just drop your questions during the podcast on the Talkshoe chat. Mark the date in your agenda, every week on Thursday at 2:30 PM EST / 20:30 (CEST)!

VMware just acquired Trango

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VMware just acquired Trango:

VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, today announced plans to bring virtualization and its many proven benefits to mobile phones through the new VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP). Built on innovative technology acquired from Trango Virtual Processors in October 2008, VMware MVP will help handset vendors reduce development time and get mobile phones with value-added services to market faster. In addition, end users will benefit by being able to run multiple profiles – for example, one for personal use and one for work use – on the same phone.

So what is it these guy actually do, or better said what will VMware be doing?

VMware MVP is a thin layer of software that will be embedded on a mobile phone that decouples the applications and data from the underlying hardware. It will be optimized to run efficiently on low-power-consuming and memory-constrained mobile phones. The MVP is planned to enable handset vendors to bring phones to market faster and make them easier to manage.

Scripted installs and nic teaming

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As of ESX 3.5 it was impossible to add an additional NIC to a team as active without resorting to editing the esx.conf file:

# Active and standby setup and maxActive from 1 to 2
mv /etc/vmware/esx.conf /tmp/esx.conf.bak
/bin/sed -e ’s/net\/vswitch\/child\[0001\]\/teamPolicy\/maxActive = \”1\”/net\/vswitch\/child\[0001\]\/teamPolicy\/maxActive = \”2\”/g’ /tmp/esx.conf.bak >> /etc/vmware/esx.conf

So as you can see, a “sed” command changed the maxActive from 1 to 2. But I rather not use these kinds of solutions, editing the esx.conf that is. As of ESX 3.5 U3 that’s not necessary anymore, VMware fixed this issue:

Network adapters lose bonding during scripted installation
The esxcfg-vswitch -L command now works as expected and with the same functionality as in 3.0.x.

During a scripted installation, the following two commands did not result in a bonded pair of active network adapters on virtual switch VS_VM1. Instead, vmnic3 became the active adapter and vmnic4 became the standby adapter.
esxcfg-vswitch -L vmnic3 VS_VM1
esxcfg-vswitch -L vmnic4 VS_VM1

So just use esxcfg-vswitch again and don’t edit the esx.conf anymore!

Installing VMware Workstation 6.5 in Ubuntu…

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I just downloaded the .bundle file for my Ubuntu 8.10 Workstation at home. So what to do next? I’ve been using Debian and Ubuntu off and on for a while so I’m used to “apt-get install”. But this is a .bundle file, so no apt-get for this application. Well the answer was really simple just run the bundle file:

  • sudo sh VMware-Workstation-6.5.0-118166.i386.bundle
So far I really like Ubuntu 8.10! It seems to do everything it needs to do straight out ot the box! By the way, Sven Warren wrote an extensive howto for installing WS6.5 on Ubuntu. It would be nice if VMware would create a debian repository for this download so we can update it with apt-get…