VirtualPro

It would appear that with the upcoming release of VMware vSphere (VI4) there will be an update to the VMware Certified Professional (VCP) certification.

Eric Sloof over at NTPRO.NL has posted an article on his site about this news.  He references a post on the vmware communities site which has the following comments from John Hall (Technical Certification Developer)

There is no time limit between when you take the class and when you take the exam. The only thing I will say is that at some point this year we will announce a new VCP certification that will apply to the new release of our datacenter product. The training you took will apply to the VCP on VI3 certification exam, but there may be some additional requirements in order to apply your training to the newer certification. Even after we announce the new certification, you can still achieve the VCP on VI3 certification using your existing training.

Jon C. Hall
Technical Certification Developer

Certifications, VI4, VMware VCP, VMware, VSphere

I’ve recently been looking at posting something on SRM as there seems to be so much information out there. I will hopefully find the time to write a post that summarises everything I’ve seen so far but I thought this would be a good starter for ten.  Richard Garsthagen over at run virtual has posted a new official VMware video introduction to VMware Site Recover Manager (SRM),  You can view it below.

He also included a handy link to a document which tells you how to setup a full 2 site SRM demo suite with ESX on a single laptop.  Handy for setting up a demo lab if you want to get familiar with the product or if your’re a VMware partner you may want to set this up for a sales demonstration.

http://viops.vmware.com/home/docs/DOC-1235

New Products, SRM, VMware esx, SRM, VMware

I subscribe to a large number of virtualisation feeds and the primary reason is that I never fail to learn something new every single day.

I came across a blog entry by the excellent Duncan Epping over at Yellow Bricks about VMFS Heap size configuration.  I was not previously aware of this setting because we have 3.0.x in our environment and our HP MSA storage only support 3.6Gb fully populated so this scenario would never come up.  I will however be keeping this in mind when designing our new ESX 3.5 environment.  We seem to be utilising bigger hosts all the time and when you add in a new EMC Clariion CX4, the potential for one host to be accessing more than 4TB of open VMDKs goes up.

was talking to a fellow consultant today. He ran into the following error messages at one of his customer sites:

vmkernel: 8:18:59:58.640 cpu2:1410)WARNING: Heap: 1370: Heap_Align(vmfs3, 4096/4096 bytes, 4 align) failed. caller: 0×8fdbd0
vmkernel: 8:18:59:58.640 cpu2:1410)WARNING: Heap: 1266: Heap vmfs3: Maximum allowed growth (24) too small for size (8192)

During the conversation I knew I’d seen this problem before. But the problem that I witnessed was related to a high threshold value in Vizioncore vFoglight. I knew it was possible to change the setting:

1. Open vCenter, and click a specific host
2. Click on the “Configurations” tab
3. Click on Advanced Settings, VMFS3
4. Change the value of “VMFS3.MaxHeapSizeMB”

 

The default value is 16MB, this allows for a maximum of 4TB of open vmdk’s on a single host. The max setting is 128MB which allows for a maximum of 32TB of open vmdk’s on a single host. Keep this in mind when designing your environment.

Keep in mind that this is ESX 3.5 only, you can’t change the heap size in ESX 3.0.x.

ESX, VMware esx, esx 3.5, VMware

I read an interesting blog post on Mike De Petrillo’s blog entitled Microsoft Lies to their customers again.  The article details a discussion with a customer regarding licensing on virtual platforms such as ESX and Hyper-V. 

Customer: I would love to use VMware but the cost savings in Windows licenses from Microsoft with Hyper-V makes it a deal I can’t pass up.

Me: What do you mean by that? Licenses cost you the same for Windows no matter what virtualization solution you’re using.

Customer: That’s not what my Microsoft rep told me. They said I could get unlimited virtual machines with Datacenter Edition of Windows only if I used Hyper-V.

Me: Ah. I see. You know, they’re lying to you, right?

Customer: No. They never lie to me. Where’s the proof.

Now I’ve done a lot of work with company reps from all sorts of companies in the past.  The thing to remember is these guys are sales guys pure and simple,  they are interested in getting your business for their company, bottom line.  If you say “I need to consolidate my server pool and keep the cost down”,  the Microsoft Rep is obviously going to tell you that Microsoft Hyper-V is going to be the best and cheapest way to achieve this.  Fair enough that’s his opinion,  but as an IT Professional it is your job to see through the smoke and mirrors and substantiate any claims made.  I take everything I hear with a pinch of salt (even from VMware) and I will always try to validate any claim made, either through existing customer reference sites, product forums or blog sites. 

I’m still reeling from the fact that Mike is seeing this across a number of customers,  how hard can it be to do a little research.  I did a very quick google search on “licensing for virtualization“ and the top result was the press release relating to Microsoft’s change of licensing to incorporate virtualisation.  The second result was the Microsoft page that details licensing for specific products such as Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008.

Within that page is a link to the white paper I used to clarify the correct approach to be taken by my current employer.  The first paragraph answers the question this guy in New York should have been asking, don’t you think?

 The purpose of this white paper is to give an overview of Microsoft® licensing models for the server operating system and server applications under virtual environments. It can help you understand how to use Microsoft server products with virtualization technologies, such as Microsoft Hyper-V™ technology, Microsoft® Virtual Server 2005 R2, or third-party virtualization solutions provided by VMWare and Parallels.

ESX, ESX 3.5i, Hyper-V, Microsoft, VMware, Windows 2008 esx, hyper-v, licensing, VMware, windows 2008

VMware have announced that VI4 will be renamed VMware vSphere going forward.  Jason Boche of boche.net heard the news at a VMware User Group meeting in Minneapolis and following a quick check with the powers that be at VMware he was given the go ahead to release the news.

Eric Sloof over at NTPRO.NL has however found out that a product already exists with this name. I myself found this company who appear to have the existing trademark on vSphere.  Nothing a fat cheque from VMware can’t resolve I’m sure.

Changing the name of your products, seems to be a popular thing to do at the moment.  Citrix change presentation server to XenApp, Microsoft changed SoftGrid to App-V.  VMware not one to miss out on the action have now changed Virtual Center to vCenter Server and VI4 to vSphere.  We await the official announcement from VMware on the name change and whether it’s going to end there.

New Products, VI4, VMware VI4, VMware, VSphere

Well this weekend I had the job of updating our Virtual Center deployment from 2.0.2 to 2.5 update 3. The primary reason for this was to prepare for the introduction of ESX 3.5 hosts into the Virtual infrastructure.

Due to the importance of our Virtual infrastructure I decided to do as much reading and preperation as possible to ensure it all went smoothly. It’s easier to convince our change management team to let us make changes if we get them right first time,  so this one was important to facilitate an easier path for future change.

So what did I read to ensure I’d covered everything,  here are a few links to get you started

Mike Laverick’s Upgrade Experience PDF
http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/?p=482

vCenter Server 2.5 Update 3 - Release Notes
http://www.vmware.com/support/vi3/doc/vi3_vc25u3_rel_notes.html

ESX 3.5 and vCenter Server 2.5 Upgrade Guide
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_35/esx_3/r35u2/vi3_35_25_u2_upgrade_guide.pdf

The above PDF is a brilliant guide to the process you should follow, including rollback.  You should read this thoroughly so you understand all the pre-requisites and can avoid those silly problems that could cause your upgrade to fail.

Of course vCenter Server 2.5 introduces Update Manager. Although we can’t use it as we have ESX 3.0.1 and 3.0.2 hosts ( supports 3.0.3, 3.5 and 3.5i only ) I decided to install it anyway so it’s there for the future.

Here are some of the links I used to plan out my update manager deployment.

Update Manager Administration Guide
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_vum_10_admin_guide.pdf

Update Manager Performance and Best Practice Guide
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vum_1.0_performance.pdf

Update Manager Size Estimator
http://www.vmware.com/support/vi3/doc/vi3_vum_10_sizing_estimator.xls

One of the main mistakes that people tend to make is to not give the SQL accounts the correct permissions on the new update manager database and the MSDB database.  Make sure you cover this one or you upgrade will fail.

It all went quite smoothly, I initially had a couple of issues which appeared to be related to me attempting to do a custom install. I wanted to ensure I could go through all settings and customise as required, the install however failed with various MSI error messages. I started the install again and didn’t choose the custom setup this time. This however created an issue whereby the Update Manager database appeared to install as SQL Server 2005 Express.  I wanted to put it on the same SQL 2000 server as our Virtual Center database but I never got the option as far as I can remember.  I have today uninstalled Update Manager and re-installed it using the “use an existing database” option and the SQL 2000 database.  It worked fine the second time around.

No immediate problems following the upgrade,  I had read some horror stories about issues with the Virtual Centre Agent on the host not updating.  Luckily for me it wasn’t an issue. Good luck with your upgrade

VMware, vCenter vCenter, virtual center, VMware

VMWare have released a new search utility for searching their hardware compatibility list.  This replaces the old PDF versions which were a bit of a nightmare to wade through.  I’ve just tried it using some components that I had recently looked up in the old PDFs and I have to say I like it,  much easier to use and much clearer.

You can use the new searchable hardware compatability guide by clicking the link. 

General, VMware VMware

There is an interesting post on the VMTN blog today with regard to the ESXi warranty and not breaking it.

ESXi is not your father’s ESX. There is no Service Console, so trying to fit it into the exact same processes that you’re used to with ESX isn’t recommended. I know, I know, you have all those scripts you’re used to running in the console. VMware is building tools to manage and administer your ESXi from outside the box, and while they’re not quite feature complete, they’re well on their way. So don’t pop the hood; it’s welded shut for a reason.

Sometime back I wrote a post on regenerating SSL certificates in ESXi,  a post that a lot of people land on when searching on the subject within Google.  Now to achieve the regeneration of SSL certificates in ESXi you have to use the tech support mode.  however it would appear based on this latest posting that this will potentially invalidate your warranty and support agreements.

So if you want to regenerate your SSL certificates on ESXi then I suggest calling VMware tech support to ensure your not invalidating any agreements.  Eventually if they get enough help calls they may provide a means of doing this through the VI client.  Now they may already have this but I’m not aware of it so if anyone does know of another way of regenerating the certificates I’d love to hear it.

ESX 3.5i, VMware Certificates, esxi, SSL, VMware

I viewed with interest recently the announcement that VMware had purchased Trango, a company specialising in hypervisors for smartphones.

The reason it interested me is that I’d heard about them for the first time only a few weeks before the announcement.  Having read about what they and other companies in this field did I was starting to see the benefits of having a hypervisor in a smartphone.  If we look at the industry at present, having recently purchased the new Iphone 3G, it’s easy to see why developing a software platform for a known hardware configuration ultimately leaves you with a more stable and high performance experience.  Apple have built an entire business utilising this very stringent but successful means of delivering great products to market.

If we look at the alternatives we have Microsoft Mobile or Symbian OS’s trying to operate on numerous different hardware platforms with mixed results. I think this is where the hypervisor comes in to its own and provides great options for the mobile chip manufacturers / mobile phone manufacturers to make the job of the mobile phone OS providers and mobile application programmers easier.  If there is a hypervisor layer which can standardise and simplify what is presented to software then compatibility becomes less of an issue.  Mobile OS software becomes a whole lot easier to write and new mobile phones can be released to market a lot quicker.  The need for extensive test and development is cut dramatically for both the handset manufacturer and the mobile OS manufacturers. 

There are three main players in this market place at present, Trango, VirtualLogix and OKLabs.  Interestingly of the three, only OKLabs actually has it’s hypervisor product in handsets that have actually been released to market. At the point VMWare bought Trango,  they had yet to actually get their hypervisor into any smartphone handsets. 

I’m interested to see which way VMware play it from here on in.  Do they look to use their size and get a hold of the mobile hypervisor market while the other players are just small independents.  Working to make licence sales to chip and handset manufacturers who can in turn improve time to market and OS integration within their own business areas.  This would seem like a sensible area to get a foothold,  I mean VMware have just made Trango the biggest fish in that particular pond.  The expertise and knowledge gained from a foray into this market would only serve to underpin their VCloud vision.

One area you can almost guarantee they’ll be looking to utilise Trango in is within the VMware View universal client.  Take your applications to any handheld device,  regardless of it’s processor, regardless of any of it’s hardware.  This will be an important area that will need to be addressed if the Cloud is really going to be what everyone wants it to be,  freedom to move around, freedom to access what you want when you want from wherever you want.

I’m now waiting to see if Citrix, Cisco, Microsoft, Google or even Amazon make a similar play.  You usually see at least a couple of them go down the same path,  I also imagine buying up one of the other two companies in this particular secotr wouldn’t be that expensive a play to make.

General, New Products hypervisors, Smartphones, VMware

Welcome to VirtualPro’s first posting!

I’ve only recently discovered igoogle and ever since then I’ve been adding blogs to it via RSS on all sorts of subjects.  One of my areas of interest is virtualisation and I’m an avid follower of bloggers such as Mike Laverick at http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk and Eric Sloof http://www.ntpro.nl. 

I started thinking following the recent rounds of blogging on VMWorld 2008 that I might have something to offer the virtualisation community and so have decided to start my own blog site.

Main areas of Interest are VMware and Citrix,  however I try and follow all areas of virtualisation to keep abreast of what’s new in this ever growing sector of IT.

I’ll be posting a few articles in the coming week or two, so please check back regularly as i get to grips with this new world of blogging.

General blogging, Citrix, virtualisation, virtualization, VMware