Planet VMware

These are the changes or updates made to the Guest Operating System Installation Guide since it was last published:

• Added Novell Open Enterprise Server 2 support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 Service Pack 1 on ESX Server 3.0.1, 3.0.2, 3.5, and 3.5 U1. See “SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10” on page 140.
• Added Novell Open Enterprise Server 2 support for Netware 6.5 Support Pack 7 on ESX Server 3.0.1, 3.0.2, 3.5, and 3.5 U1. See “NetWare 6.5 Server” on page 235.
• Added missing support for NetWare 6.5 Support Pack 7 on ESX Server 3.5 U1. See “NetWare 6.5 Server” on page 235.
• Removed support that was incorrectly listed for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 Service Pack 4 on ESX Server 3.5. See “SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9” on page 143.

PDF: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/GuestOS_guide.pdf

HTML: http://pubs.vmware.com/guestnotes/

VMware Project Northstar (formerly Thinstall) Beta 2 release is now available. If you're a little fuzzy on application virtualization, here is our description:

VMware application virtualization (powered by Thinstall) technology lets you deploy applications without conflicts quicker then ever before. Application virtualization extends the reach of desktop virtualization from the operating system to the application layer and simplifies the delivery of applications. See how application virtualization is enabling organizations to ease their Vista migrations while reducing application conflicts, deployment costs, and empowering a mobile workforce.

Go to the Project Northstar Beta Portal for more information. New features in Beta 2 include:

• Application Link: allows administrators to dynamically link Thinstall packages to one another, making it possible to create separate packages for interdependent components (such as Java or .NET) and use them across multiple Thinstall packages.

• Application Sync: allows customers to execute updates to virtual applications through a secure Internet connection, increasing application portability while reducing security and patch risks to offline and out-of-network machines.

Edwin Friesen over at thinstallguru.com is looking at this release. In this post Preview VMware Project NorthStar Beta 2 | Edwin Friesen - Application Delivery Blog he gives great step-by-step screen shots of the user interface.

Edwin just posted a little test drive of the new Application Link. Link: Project NorthStar Beta 2; Application Link | Edwin Friesen - Application Delivery Blog.

I did a lot of testing with Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5 (before SoftGrid) and figured out that linkíng virtual applications works very well for Microsoft Office plugins but when you want to use it for middleware applications such as Oracle, DotNet Framework or Java it is not so terrific. In the mean time VMware-Thinstall (Project NorthStar) is also building a powerfull solution to create an ‘Application Link’ between two virtual applications. I did some research and tried to package a Thinstalled application which is build on DotNet Framework 2.0. ... The result is great!!

You can download the beta today. The beta portal has a beta license key, release notes, community discussion, and more.

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi35_systems_guide.pdf

Last Updated: May 7, 2008

What’s New

Changes since the last edition of this guide include:

• Modified support information for Bull NovaScale B260 and B260+. See “Bull Server Support,” on page 5.
• Modified support information for Dell PowerEdge 2900 III and R905. See “Dell Server Support,” on page 6.
• Added support for Egenera PB200703. See “Egenera Server Support,” on page 8.
• Added support for HP BL465c G5, BL685c G5 and DL385 G5. Modified support information for HP DL385 G2 and DL585 G2. See “Hewlett Packard Server Support,” on page 12.
• Modified support information for IBM LS41. See “IBM Server Support,” on page 16.
• Added support for Intel ESAA SR1560SF/S5400SF, Pogo Linux Ion 4400 and Vahal(R) NetFlex. Changed ServMax X1110 to Enterprise 95FC4. Modified support information for Intel ESAA S5000PSL and S5000XALR. See “Intel Server Support,” on page 19.
• Added support for Sun X4140 and X4440. See “Sun Server Support,” on page 37.

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi35_io_guide.pdf

Last Updated: May 7, 2008

What’s New

Changes since the last edition of this guide include:

• Modified support information for HP E500 and P800. See “Hewlett Packard Storage IO Devices,” on page 12.

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi35_san_guide.pdf

Last Updated: May 7, 2008

What’s New

Changes since the last edition of this guide include:

• Added support for HP MSA2212fc. See “Hewlett Packard,” on page 11 and “SAN Array Model Reference,” on page 45.
• Added support for BlueArc Corp Titan 1100, 2100, 2500. See “BlueArc Corp,” on page 24 and “SAN Array Model Reference,” on page 45.
• Added support for NetApp FAS900 Series and StoreVault S550. See “Network Appliance,” on page 26.
• Added support for Sun StorageTek 5220 NAS. See “Sun,” on page 27.
• Added support for BlueArc Corp Titan 1100 and Titan 2100. Modified support information for Titan 2200. See “BlueArc Corp,” on page 30.
• Added support for HP MSA2012i. See “Hewlett Packard,” on page 35 and “SAN Array Model Reference,” on page 45.
• Added support for NetApp StoreVault S550. See “Network Appliance,” on page 41.
• Modified support information for Hitachi BR 50, BR 150, SANRISE AMS 200, AMS 500, AMS 1000, WMS 100, SMS100, HDS TagmaStore AMS 200, AMS 500, AMS 1000, WMS 100, Nihon Unisys SANARENA 1830, 1870, 1890, 1895, 18AS. See “SAN Array Model Reference,” on page 45.

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_systems_guide.pdf

Last Updated: May 7, 2008

What’s New

Changes since the last edition of this guide include:

• Added support for Pogo Linux Ion 4400 and Vahal(R) NetFlex. Changed ServMax X1110 to Enterprise 95FC4. Modified support information for Intel ESAA S5000PSL and S5000XALR. See “Intel Server Support,” on page 21.

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_san_guide.pdf

Last Updated: May 7, 2008

What’s New

Changes since the last edition of this guide include:

• Added support for BlueArc Corp Titan 1100 and 2100. See “BlueArc Corp,” on page 49 and “SAN Array Model Reference,” on page 68.
• Modified support information for FalconStor NSS‐S12. See “FalconStor,” on page 55.

Our partners at Dell have published the first VMmark results using the new AMD quad-core Barcelona processors. Both the 2-socket (8-core) R805 platform and the 4-socket (16-core) R905 platform have been tested. You can find all of the details on the VMmark results page. If you do the math, you will see that Dell achieved an excellent 1.8x throughput scaling from the 2-socket system to the 4-socket system. Another thing I'd like to point out is that some of the VMmark workloads utilized AMD's Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI) technology to improve performance. VMware supports a wide range of virtualization techniques and is able to uniquely leverage both hardware and sofware virtualization technologies in order to provide optimal performance.

I’m starting a new tutorial this year at Usenix — all about performance and tuning of VMware ESX server. The session is on Tuesday, June 24, 2008 in Boston, and is an all-day class.

Who should attend: Anyone who is involved in planning or deploying virtualization on VMware ESX and wants to understand the performance characteristics of applications in a virtualized environment.

We will walk through the implications to performance and capacity planning in a virtualized world to learn about how to achieve best performance in a VMware ESX enviroment.

Take back to work: How to plan, understand, characterize, diagnose, and tune for best application performance on VMware ESX.

Topics include:

• • Introduction to virtualization
  • Understanding different hardware acceleration techniques for virtualization
  • Diagnosing performance using VMware tools
  • Diagnosing performance using guest OS tools in a virtual environment
  • Practical limits and overheads for virtualization
  • Storage performance
  • Network throughput and options
  • Using Virtual-SMP
  • Guest Operating System Types
  • Understanding the characteristics of key applications, including Oracle, MS SQLserver, and MS Exchange
  • Capacity planning techniques

A recent comment about ‘bench-marketing’ caught my attention. I much prefer to see performance analysis of real-world benchmarks, because well-designed studies server as reference examples to guide solid decisions when planning for virtualization. The specific comments were about wanting to see more examples of scale-out performance - a term I use to describe when multiple VMs are stacked onto a single server.

Given my background, one of the first things I asked about when I arrived at VMware was about scaling. I was highly skeptical about how well the scheduler and virtual machine monitor could scale up and out. We ran some simple microbenchmarks using components of the SPECcpu suite on a 16-core Sun x4600 system, using 4-vcpu guests. The results were a surprising to me at least, since I know how hard it is to scale operating system algorithms.

It wasn’t however much of a surprise to the people who had done a lot of the hard work on making the scheduler scale — there is a significant amount of differentiated scheduling technology in the ESX kernel. The primary goal of the scheduler is to provide as close to linear as possible scaling — scale up (adding virtual CPUs to a single guest), and scale-out (adding more guest VMs).

In ESX 1.x, scheduling is done based on single virtual processor (vcpu) guests. In ESX 2.x, the scheduler can provide multiple virtual CPUs in the guest, and uses gang scheduling to co-schedule multiple CPUs at the same time. This ensures that virtual SMP performance in the guest works well (specifically, to avoid having synchronization inside the guest having to wait for another virtual CPU to be ready…). In addition, the ESX scheduler provides a facility for relaxed co-scheduling, so that if a virtual CPU is idle in the guest, the physical CPU can be released for other guests to use.

You can see from the above graph that the scheduler handles multiple VMs handily. For 1-4 VMs, we are under-commited — because we are placing 1-4 x 4vcpu guests, the workload fits nicely on 1-16 physical CPU cores; we see linear performance increase from 1 to 4 VMs, using 4-16 cores. For 5-8 we are overcomitted; i.e. we are attempting to schedule 20-32 virtual cpus on 32 physical cpus. A less optimial scheduler would exhibit a drop-off in performance in the overcommitted system. The ESX scheduler is linear to 16 cores, and then once all CPUs are saturatued, performance is capped. It’s important to note that the throughput doesn’t go down once we over-commit…

My next question was about real workloads. It’s fine to run a microbenchmark with simple CPU intensive jobs, but one might argue that that is an easy target to schedule. I suggested we try Microsoft Exchange and then Oracle, since there are many intervals of sleep/wakeup as these workloads have many wait-events, such as waiting for disk I/O completion and waiting for work via the network ports they listen on.

The scaling study shows that 1 through 8 Microsoft Exchange VMs on a single server provides excellent scale-out performance — we see over 95% scaling from 2 to 16 cores, with a near linear latency.

Also, since Microsoft exchange can be easily horizontally scaled, it leaves a wide set of configuration options open — we can pick and choose the best of scale-up and scale-out to achieve the best performance on a given server configuration. Also, we noticed that the gains for scale-out provide much bigger oppportunity for performance improvement than trying to scale-up a single instance — so when we run Exchange on a virtualized instance we actually get much better performance than native! This is possible because we can take the best scale-up point and then consolidate multiple instances of that on a single server — if the ESX scheduler does a good job we should see better performance!

The other recent study is for scaling 1 through 7 heavy Oracle VMs on a single server. We ran 1 through 7 2vcpu Oracle instances of the DVDstore benchmark on a single Sun x4600 server. At 7 VMs, the machine was using ~15 cores, and scaled to 256GB of RAM… Once again, the latency was almost flat as the VMs scaled out. I use this study often when talking to customers about planning Oracle consolidation on VMware…

With the availability of multi-core systems it’s even more important to have good scale-out performance. Today, the commonly available servers have 16-cores. Just around the corner we’ll see 24, 32 core systems, and if multi-threading makes a return, a single server will soon have 64 logical CPUs. Taking advantage of all those logical CPUs is becoming an additional major reason for using virtualization.

I was all set to talk about the My Switch to VMware Fusion video contest. Over at the Team Fusion blog, Pete has posted some of the incoming videos -- I'm not sure I have a favorite yet.

But tonight we released VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta 1 -- and announced that 2.0 would be a free upgrade  to all registered users.Link: More Displays. More 3D. More to Love: VMware Fusion 2.0 Public Beta 1 Now Available | Team Fusion.

The VMware Fusion team is proud to announce VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta 1.   

This public beta, a free download, boasts a handful of industry firsts for Mac virtualization, including true multi-display support for virtual machines and experimental DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 2 3D acceleration.

And after I watched this demo video, I knew that I'd need to post the Switch to Fusion videos later, because you should watch this one now. I laughed out loud after display # 4, and there were plenty of monitors to go.

Go visit

• VMware Fusion 2 Beta 1 home
• Blog post: More Displays. More 3D. More to Love: VMware Fusion 2.0 Public Beta 1 Now Available | Team Fusion
• VMware Fusion Beta Program community and download portal

In "Refresh Now!" I used cash flow (for the finance folks) and GAAP analysis (for the accountants) to prove that you could make a business case for replacing physical servers with VMs, even when those servers are not yet "due" for a refresh.

Sometimes, there is a disconnect between IT, finance, and accounting when it comes to spending money. To make it easier on the IT managers, the CFO gives them a budget to work within. Usually the budget is split between capital and operating buckets, which helps them manage balance sheets and cash flows better than a single, large bucket of money.

So, when talking to people working within a capital budget and operating budget, we can't use common financial measures such as NPV, ROI, payback period, or (my favorite), EVA. They need to justify their spending within the boundaries they are given, and it takes a higher level (e.g. CFO) decision to adjust those boundaries.

So, let's assume an IT manager at Acme, Inc. is operating under the following constraints:

• Capital budget is $2 million for 2008. $250,000 of that is meant to refresh 50 existing servers, and $125,000 is for 25 new servers (for new projects)
• Operating budget is $3 million for 2008. Of that, $200,000 is for power and cooling of the data center, and $300,000 is salary costs to manage the servers (our total server population is 200)

If we assume that all other elements of the capital and operating budgets stay the same, we can focus on the elements of the budget that are affected by server virtualization:

• We have a capital budget of $375,000 for the purpose of purchasing 75 new servers.
• We have an operating budget of $500,000 to keep all of our servers running

Working within these constraints, I can do the following:

• Instead of purchasing 75 servers, I am going to purchase 5 large (2-socket quad core) servers (with a VM-to-host ratio of roughly 15:1 – very, very conservative). Each costs $20,000, so my total server cost is $100,000 (from the capital budget)
• I'll need to purchase 5 licenses of VMware Infrastructure 3 (Enterprise Edition), at $5,750 list price each: total cost of $28,750 (ignoring discounts). Let's assume we already have the management infrastructure in place (e.g. Virtual Center)
• I'll also need some shared storage to really take advantage of virtualization. Let's say it's another $35,000 (about $15 per GB if we're using NAS or iSCSI)
• I would normally need more network ports for those extra 25 servers – with consolidation, I don't need them. That saves me $10,000.
• Therefore, my net capital cost is $100,000 + $28,750 + $35,000 - $10,000 = $153,750. That leaves over $150,000 in my capital budget to replace servers that aren't due for a refresh yet!

On to the operating budget…

• VMware support and subscription is roughly 25% of the original purchase cost – so, roughly $7,100 per year
• A normal server in the US costs $1000 in power and cooling expenses. ESX hosts are usually larger, so let's say it's $1500 per year. So, for the 75 servers in this study, we are saving (75 x 1000 – 5 * 1500 = ) $67,500 in energy costs
• My IT department tells me that the current staff can manage 20% more VMs than they can physical servers (template-based provisioning, more standardization, the use of snapshots, consolidated backups, cloned copies of production for testing, etc). Since I am adding (25/200=12%) more servers, then I am avoiding a 12% addition to the salary budget (or, 0.12 x 300,000 = $36,000)
• So, even though I am adding $7,100 in software maintenance, I am saving (36000+67500) $103,500 in operating costs
• Those savings are even higher if I pull in next year's servers into the refresh plan, since I can lower my energy costs and (possibly) my salary costs even more

So, in this simple case, I can refresh twice as many servers as I normally would with the same capital budget, and have a huge impact on the operating budget. Again, this is a simple case, but the assumptions are quite conservative.

Registration for VMworld 2008 is now open.

Come to VMworld 2008

Join your peers, September 15-18, at The Venetian Hotel, Las Vegas as VMware hosts VMworld 2008, the leading virtualization event. Now in its fifth year, VMworld is a must-attend event for all IT professionals looking for actionable ideas, innovative products and best practices for virtualizing your enterprise— from the desktop to the datacenter.

What’s new at VMworld 2008

• Access to more hands-on labs - both instructor-led and self-paced
• Seven new tracks, including Virtualization 101, for those new to virtualization
• Repeated sessions-giving you a second chance to attend the most popular sessions
• More opportunities to network with like-minded professionals
• Expanded Solutions Exchange hours, with over 175 sponsors and exhibitors participating

Also, the call for papers is still open, but all proposals for VMworld sessions must be in by May 9.

See you in Vegas!

Just a quick note to announce that we have released version 1.1 of the VMmark benchmark to our hardware partners. As many of you know, VMmark 1.0 utilized only 32-bit workloads, which was a reasonable mix when the benchmark was first defined roughly three years ago. However, 64-bit applications and OSes are becoming much more prevalent and we need the ability to characterize this more complex reality. To address this, we have transitioned three of the VMmark workloads - Java server, database server, and web server - to 64-bit. In order to maintain comparability with the existing version 1.0 results, we have retained the underlying virtual hardware definitions and load levels for each workload. We need to tie up a few remaining loose ends, but we intend to make VMmark 1.1 generally available very soon. Please stay tuned.

Google Summer of Code 2008 is on, and soon students will begin coding, which means mentors will be reviewing code. While the Review Board project is not a participating project in this year’s Summer of Code, we felt Review Board could help with the whole process, improving things for both the students and the mentors.

Starting today, and for the duration of this year’s Summer of Code, we at the Review Board project would like to supply up to 30 projects with free Review Board hosting at gsoc.review-board.org. We’ll handle maintenance of the server, support, and provide assistance to get students and mentors set up.

Doing code reviews with Review Board is simple and saves time over reviewing standard raw diffs, with features such as a powerful diff viewer with syntax highlighting and inline commenting, interdiffs, status reports, and support for a wide variety of revision control systems. We believe it can be as effective a tool for open source development as Bugzilla and Trac have become.

Th Summer of Code server is intended for Summer of Code-related changes only. While we’d love to provide hosting for projects in general, we have limited resources. However, should your project decide to set up its own Review Board server in the future, we’ll be able to assist in migrating your Review Board history to your new server.

If you’re interested in trying out Review Board for your Summer of Code project, you can find out how to apply on our Summer of Code Hosting page.

To learn more about Review Board and how it works, you can look at our project website or watch our presentation from this year’s LugRadio Live USA.

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi35_systems_guide.pdf

Last Updated: April 30, 2008

What’s New

Changes since the last edition of this guide include:

• Modified support information for Dell 6950. See “Dell Server Support,” on page 6.
• Added support for IBM x3500. Modified support information for IBM x3550, x3650, x3850 M2, HS21‐7995, HS21‐8853, LS21. See “IBM Server Support,” on page 16.
• Modified support information for Intel ESAA Modular Server MFSYS25. See “Intel Server Support,” on page 19.

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi35_io_guide.pdf

Last Updated: April 30, 2008

What’s New

Changes since the last edition of this guide include:

• Changed HP 403621‐B21 (LPe1105‐HP) to 403621‐B21 (LPe1105‐HP) 4Gb/s FC Mezzanine HBA for BladeSystem c‐Class Servers. See “Hewlett Packard Storage IO Devices,” on page 12.
• Changed IBM LP1105BCv to Emulex 4Gb Fibre Channel Expansion Card (CFFv) for IBM BladeCenter. Changed LP1105BC to Emulex 4Gb SFF Fibre Channel Expansion Card for IBM BladeCenter. See “IBM Storage IO Devices,” on page 14.
• Added support for Intel SRCSAS144E, SRCSAS18E, SRCSASJV and SRCSASRB. See “Intel Storage IO Devices,” on page 17.

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi35_san_guide.pdf

Last Updated: April 30, 2008

What’s New

Changes since the last edition of this guide include:

• Added support for HP EVA4100, EVA4400, EVA6100, EVA8100, MSA1000, MSA1500, XP10000 and XP12000. See “Hewlett Packard,” on page 11 and “SAN Array Model Reference,” on page 44.
• Added support for IBM N3700. See “IBM,” on page 14.
• Added support for LSILogic 1932 Storage System. See “LSILogic,” on page 15 and “SAN Array Model Reference,” on page 44.
• Added support for NetApp S300. See “Network Appliance,” on page 40.

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_systems_guide.pdf

Last Updated: April 30, 2008

What’s New

Changes since the last edition of this guide include:

• Added support for Sun X4440. See “Sun Server Support,” on page 40.
• Modified support information for IBM x3650, x3550, x3500, x3400. See “IBM Server Support,” on page 17.
• Modified support information for Intel ESAA Modular Server MFSYS25. See “Intel Server Support,” on page 21.

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_san_guide.pdf

Last Updated: April 30, 2008

What’s New

Changes since the last edition of this guide include:

• Modified support information for HP EVA 4000, 6000 and 8000. See “Hewlett Packard,” on page 19.
• Modified support information for IBM DS4200, DS4700 and DS4800. See “IBM,” on page 25.

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/esx_SAN_guide.pdf

Last Updated: April 30, 2008

What’s New

Changes since the last edition of this guide include:

• Added support for HP 4400. See “HP,” on page 11 and “HP,” on page 32.

In my article ("Virtualization Adoption Lifecycle") I introduced the concept of "Transient VMs".

At around the same time, I started hearing other people at VMware talking about "Transient VMs" – so, I'm not going to take credit for coining the term (unless our product management organization regularly reads vmMBA.com).

When I discussed this with a co-worker (who recently moved from the San Francisco Bay area), he said "yes, we really need to do something about those transients". (Probably funnier when you're sitting through day-long product update presentations like we were). No, I'm not talking about homeless people.

What are Transient VMs?

Consider two types of virtual machines:

1. Traditional VMs: deployed with the intent that it remain powered on and managed indefinitely
2. Transient VMs: deployed for a specific purpose, with a non-permanent lifespan; may or may not remain powered on constantly during its lifespan

Traditional VMs can be managed and priced in a way that is somewhat similar to physical servers. Although there are efficiencies gained through portability, replication, snapshots, and various automation touch points, a traditional VM is a server (or desktop) that must be managed on a day-to-day basis, and consumes resources even when it is idle.Transient VMs give us a lot more flexibility in management and allow us to optimize resource utilization. We can take advantage of transient VMs in several ways today, and there are several technologies that are on their way that will make transient VMs even more prevalent.

Here are some examples:

Example 1: Legacy Application Servers

In my days in outsourcing, I came across a lot of servers that had long outlived their usefulness, but administrators were afraid to turn them off. Development servers for applications that had reached a stable state are often not used for years. Production servers for applications that had been sunset often have regulatory requirements to remain accessible.

Legacy servers are scary. They typically run on unsupported operating systems, which do not even have driver support for new servers. They are left in place, because no one even knows how to rebuild them. If we convert them to VMs, we immediately improve availability if they are left running (VMs are hardware-independent, run on newer hardware, and have HA built-in for VI3 Enterprise). Or, we can archive them, knowing we can recover the full state (configuration, OS, application, and data – not just data). We could even leave them powered off and keep them up to date on patches with Update Manager, with minimal human intervention.

Example 2: VMware Lab Manager

Traditionally targeted to the myriad of test lab sandboxes, Lab Manager gives a subset of control over to the development, test, and application management staff, allowing them to build entire application stacks from templates and collaborate on bug fixes (while IT still maintains templates and performs system and security management). Lab Manager is also evolving into a general-purpose tool for managing Transient VMs as customers find new and unique ways to use it (for example, in training labs).

Example 3: VMware Stage Manager

Announced at VMworld Europe, Stage Manager will allow application administrators to march an application through phases such as Unit Testing, Integration Testing, QA, Staging, and User Acceptance testing, while following prescribed change management processes, approvals, and archival, as applicable. Test systems can also be created as copies of production. The intent is to minimize configuration drift while also minimizing management costs (higher quality and lower costs, wow!) – and Transient VMs are a big part of it.

Example 4: VMware Lifecycle Manager

With the introduction of Lifecycle Manager last quarter, VMware fundamentally changed the way VMs can be requested and provisioned, and give customers an easy option for an "expiry date" for VMs. Although the automated provisioning features are very helpful, the fact that VMs can have defined approvals, ownership, costing, and set expiry dates means ongoing infrastructure and management costs can be reduced significantly.

Example 5: Instant Test Servers

Most of the servers deemed "test" are used very infrequently. Let me differentiate "test" from "staging", "user acceptance testing" or "QA" servers: in this case, "test" servers are used by IT staff to test configuration changes, patches, or upgrades.

Whereas production servers are used constantly, and development/qa/staging/UAT servers are used in bursts of activity, test servers are typically used before making a change on a production server. When we use traditional VMs (or physical servers), we "manage" the server (monitor it, keep it up to date on patches, and troubleshoot when certain things go wrong).

Conversely, we could create a test environment from a clone of production (or an image-level backup) when needed. We could even create multiple test environments to test multiple scenarios – thus improving our test quality. The overall result should be a lower management cost and higher quality of service.

Example 6: VDI

Changing gears: in many virtual desktop scenarios, user sessions can be defined as non-persistent. If user data and profiles are stored outside of the VMs themselves, and users do not self-install applications, "permanent" VMs aren't required. In these cases, the only image that is patched and managed is the master image – the non-persistent VMs can be destroyed at logoff (and re-created from the master for the next login).

How do we design for Transient VMs?

Transient VMs require a new way of looking at the way we build architectures for the data center. When faced with some key events such as migrations, refresh projects, or new implementations, we should evaluate whether 100% of migration candidates are actually needed. Some typical candidates for transient VMs include:

1. Test servers: could point-in-time test servers (clones of production) be more useful than dedicated test servers?
2. Development servers: would developers be better served with a flexible self-service environment that facilitates better collaboration (and would this ease the burden on server operations staff)?
3. Legacy applications: are there servers with no active users, but are kept powered on to satisfy regulatory requirements or out of fear?
4. Bursty workloads: are there applications that require a set of servers for brief periods in order to satisfy cyclical or intermittent workloads, such as tax season, end-of-year processing, or peak sales periods? Web and SOA applications that are componentized are usually good candidates for a more flexible approach with transient VMs. Additional web and application server VMs can be created as needed, added to the pool, and destroyed when no longer required.

When we go through a server list to decide upon a migration plan, build plan, or refresh plan, we should be thinking about how transient VMs could be used to reduce costs and/or improve flexibility for IT operations, application developers, or the business units themselves.

How do we account for Transient VMs?

This is the challenging part. It's complex enough to determine the fixed, variable, and semi-variable costs, along with the shared and dedicated components when all of our VMs are powered on and running 100% of the time. Transient VMs have some unique features that affect the cost model:

1. Infrastructure costs are not "free" for powered-off VMs. There needs to be enough reserve capacity to handle the maximum number of transient VMs that are powered on at one time. When the use of transient VMs comes in bursts (several at a time – such as during enterprise application performance testing activities), it may be easier to assume that 100% of their capacity is required at all times
2. Energy costs may be reduced if the number of powered-on hosts can be easily managed based upon changing workloads (i.e. using Distributed Power Management)
3. One-time costs should be minimized: if system administrator intervention is required for each power-on and power-off (and/or archive) operation, it can hurt the value proposition for transient VMs. Automation and self-provisioning can help
4. Storage costs can be better managed with an Information Lifecycle Management strategy for transient VMs to move them off to low-cost storage when not in use. This is made easier with Storage VMotion, or with storage virtualization technologies such as EMC Invista, Hitachi's USP, or IBM's SAN Volume Controller
5. Monitoring costs can be lower, but there must be a streamlined way to update the monitoring tools when VMs are archived or removed (so that it does not trigger a false positive downtime event). In many cases (e.g. Lab Manager), the VMs themselves may be unmonitored
6. Management costs should be lower for transient VMs. Automation helps. Lab Manager, for example, is a self-service environment, and the VMs themselves are often "unmanaged". With Lifecycle Manager, many of the typical provisioning and configuration workflows are automated. VMware Update Manager can patch VMs even when they are offline. Even without automation, a VM that is powered on only infrequently should be easier to manage than one that is continuously powered on (as long as server operations are streamlined for transient VMs). Even better are VMs that are truly temporary and created for a specific short-term purpose (e.g. a clone of production for a temporary test activity).

At some point in the future, I'd like to build a cost model that addresses transient VMs. If anyone has any that they can share with me, please forward.

It may seem counter-intuitive that VMware is finding ways to reduce the number of VMs in a customer's environment. The assumption is that the prospect of Transient VMs will do much more than previous waves of virtualization to transform the way infrastructure is designed, built, and managed, and thus move more servers (and desktops) over to a virtual world than is possible with standard processes.

Recent articles of interest in the trade press. (And check out Planet V12n as well -- I'm very impressed these days with the quality of blog conversation, both strategic and tactical/technical that's going on there. Check out Scott's take on what's been going on: Virtualization Short Take #6)

• Virtually Speaking: It's Good to Be King (ServerWatch)
• VMware’s R&D Lab: A Little Piece of Palo Alto in the Heart of Kendall Square (Xconomy)
• Hyper-V won't sail past VMware on price alone, users say (TechTarget)
• VMware Claims Citrix Isn't Telling Whole XenDesktop Story (eWeek)
• Virtualization's Dirty Little Secrets (InfoWorld)
• VMware talks green after strong Q1 (Techworld)
• Lenovo Agrees To Sell VMware In China (Information Week)
• AMD Announces Deals With Dell, VMware (Virtualization Review)
• The 5 quickest returns on your green investment (Computerworld)
• Virtualization creates shift in IT job market (SearchServerVirtualization.com)
• Virtualization has come a long way, baby (Geek.com)
• Wanted: Virtualization Engineer, Referee Exp. Pref. (GigaOm)
• IBM Offering Macs To Some Workers Using Windows (Information Week)
• How to Be Green in Your Data Center: Four Suggestions (eWeek)

Thanks, Nina!

(Note to self: drop a line to Dugie now that he's been on board for a while. I want to know what's making him go Phwaar too!)

A few weeks ago I blogged about using PowerGadgets to create custom dashboards to monitor Virtual Infrastructure performance. It was a great example of how easy it is to combine different domains within PowerShell.

Today I want to talk about a slightly different type of monitoring: alarms. VirtualCenter provides a very sophisticated alarm generation system. The problem is, what if you're not in VirtualCenter watching the alarm tab? Wouldn't it be better if alarms would reach out and find you wherever you are?

Again, PowerShell provides a very easy solution, due to the ease in which it combines different domains. The VI Toolkit (for Windows) makes it easy to get alarms from VirtualCenter, and /n software's NetCmdlets makes it really easy to send instant messages. Combine the two and you have a monitoring solution that just about anyone can write and customize.

First, a bit of background: NetCmdlets provides a lot of really useful functionality to PowerShell, including sending email, logging into servers via SSH, downloading files via FTP and a lot more. As usual, the cmdlets come with a very easy syntax, built in documentation and are very easy to learn and use.

Taking that, and combining it with the VI Toolkit (for Windows), I wrote a script that monitors VirtualCenter for alarms and, when it sees new alarms, sends an IM using NetCmdlets. (Note that when you run the script, you are prompted for a login. This login is the login to your Jabber server, not to VirtualCenter.) NetCmdlets currently only supports Jabber as an IM protocol, but more protocols may be added in the future. If IM is not your thing, it's also really easy to get NetCmdlets to send email instead.

Here's an example of the results:

The best thing about this is it only took me a couple of hours to put together, and that was mostly due to alarms not being easy enough to access from the current version of the Toolkit (we'll fix this in a later release, but the script above also contains a script cmdlet that returns all alarms.) Developing a solution like this using other technologies would have taken substantially longer, and wouldn't have been as easy to customize when they were complete. This, to me, is the real power of PowerShell.

So, if you haven't tried the VI Toolkit (for Windows) there's no reason you shouldn't download it today.

We here at VMware often get requests by people who are trying to tweak the default resource allocations that VMs have. This post shows you how easy it is to automate configuring and changing resource allocations is when using PowerShell.

First, a bit of background information. Each VM has a certain level of CPU and memory shares. In addition these levels may be limited or unlimited. Even further, a VM can have CPU or memory reservations, which means the VM will always have at least this minimal level of resources available to it. When shares are unlimited, a VM may receive more resources than its share allocation, provided these resources are not being used by some other VM.

By default, a VM gets normal CPU and memory shares with no reservation and no limit. This is a sensible default, but many times you want to tune this to improve performance for some applications.

This first example shows you how to set all VMs in your entire Virtual Infrastructure to high CPU shares and no limit.

Get-VM | % {Get-View $_.ID} | 
    % {$spec = new-object VMware.Vim.VirtualMachineConfigSpec;
        $spec.cpuAllocation = New-Object VMware.Vim.ResourceAllocationInfo;
        $spec.cpuAllocation.Shares = New-Object VMware.Vim.SharesInfo;
        $spec.cpuAllocation.Shares.Level = "high";
        $spec.cpuAllocation.Limit = -1;
        Get-View($_.ReconfigVM_Task($spec))}

This script works whether you have 1 VM or 1,000 VMs. The next example shows how to set a VM's memory allocation to normal, with no limit, and ensure that each VM has at least 1 GB of memory.

Get-VM | % {Get-View $_.ID} |
    % {$spec = new-object VMware.Vim.VirtualMachineConfigSpec;
        $spec.memoryAllocation = New-Object VMware.Vim.ResourceAllocationInfo;
        $spec.memoryAllocation.Shares = New-Object VMware.Vim.SharesInfo;
        $spec.memoryAllocation.Shares.Level = "normal";
        $spec.memoryAllocation.Limit = -1;
        $spec.memoryAllocation.Reservation = 1024;
        Get-View($_.ReconfigVM_Task($spec))}

Chances are these are not quite the policies you're looking for, but you easily determine what values you want by referring to the VMware API Reference Guide.

This is extremely powerful, but it's even more so when you consider that you can combine it with cmdlets like

Get-ResourcePool

and

Get-Folder

to select exactly the VMs you want to modify. For example, using

Get-ResourcePool

you could very easily set all VMs in one resource pool to have CPU resources set to high and all VMs in another resource pool to have CPU resources set to low.

This is just one of the great things you can do when you manage VMware with PowerShell, so if you haven't looked at it yet you should definately download the VI Toolkit (for Windows) Beta.

Here are a few posts found recently on Planet VMware -- blogging here at VMware seems to be accelerating!

VMware Fusion 1.1.2 Launches: Enhanced MacBook Air, Time Machine Support. Adds Simplified Chinese Localization. from Team Fusion

The VMware Fusion team would like to announce the general availability of VMware Fusion 1.1.2, a free update for all VMware Fusion users.  You can download this newest version here.

VMware Fusion 1.1.2 now provides better support for the MacBook Air, enables Time Machine backup of virtual machines, adds support for Windows XP SP3 Boot Camp partitions, and is now available in Simplified Chinese.

VMware Earnings and the Value for Partners from Mike DiPetrillo

Today (April 22) VMware announced 1st quarter earnings. The company did quite well and surpassed analyst expectations. Overall the company did $438 million in revenue for the quarter. What really gets me excited about this is the opportunity for the 14,000 partners out there selling VMware solutions. Every day I go to customers with partners or go to partner sites to do training. Whenever I'm with a partner they always want to know what's in it for them. Why should they be selling VMware when they're also Citrix and Microsoft partners and both of those companies have virtualization solutions. Here's my take....

Using the VMware Visual Studio plugin from Workstation Zealot

Last year for Workstation 6.0, one of the features we added was a plugin for Visual Studio 2005 that allows developers to debug a project (native and managed C/C++, C#, or Visual Basic) inside of a Windows virtual machine (specifically Windows 98, Windows 2000, and later). All of you Windows developers know how much of a pain it is to support multiple versions of Windows, but this tool is designed to make that process much, much easier.  The Visual Studio Integrated Debugger (VSID in short) plugin utilizes Visual Studio remote debugging technology to allow you to debug a project inside of a VM as if you were debugging on your host computer with the click of one button.

New and Updated VMware Security Advisories for ESX and VC from VMware Security Blog

Recently ESX and VirtualCenter (VC) patches were released which - among others - fix several security issues. These issues are detailed in a new advisory, VMSA-2008-0007, and in the updated advisories VMSA-2008-0002.1, 0003.1, 0004.1, 0006.1. Please take some time out of your busy schedule to review your deployments and update where appropriate.

You can manage VMware Server with PowerShell too. from VI Powershell Blog

Blogger John Tuffin has made an entry about his experiments managing VMware Server 2.0 Beta with PowerShell. To summarize, you can manage VMware Server with PowerShell, in much the same way you manage VMware ESX.

Free Downloadable Version of VMware Server 1.0 Training Now Available from VMware PhD

The downloadable version of the VMware Server 1.0 training currently posted on the VMware eLearning YouTube and Blip.TV channels is now available!