Planet VMware

Team Fusion: VMware Fusion 2 University: Import a Parallels or Virtual PC Virtual Machine

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 19:55:14 +0000

Continuing in our theme of the different ways to move to VMware Fusion, today’s video revolves around importing a Parallels-based virtual machine or Virtual PC for Mac-based virtual machine to run on VMware Fusion 2.

Lots of people enjoy the stability, power, and user-friendliness of VMware Fusion, and as such, are switching from Parallels Desktop for Mac to instead use VMware Fusion 2 to run Windows on Mac.

And people who have been using Virtual PC for Mac to run Windows in emulation (NOT virtualization, like VMware Fusion) on their Power PC-based Macs, but who are now moving to Intel Macs, will certainly be looking for a new way to run Windows on Mac.

In fact, recently, people like Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal, and Dave Girard of Ars Technica have been noting that VMware Fusion is the better way to run Windows on the Mac.

Switch to Fusion with Unparalleled Ease

In order to make this really easy for our users to switch and not have to rebuild their VMs, and the work that went into them, we’ve included a feature in VMware Fusion 2 that allows you to directly import Parallels and Virtual PC for Mac (for those people moving from Power PC-based Macs up to Intel-based Macs) to run in VMware Fusion.

Like most things with VMware Fusion, it’s easy, straight-forward, and “just works.” You can check out the video below to see how easy it is.

And as a quick ad, this video is taken from the more than dozen VMware Fusion 2 video tutorials made freely available to help you get the most out of VMware Fusion 2.

VMTN Blog: One Day VMware Fusion Madness: 50% off VMware Fusion. Combine with Competitive Rebate

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 18:14:34 +0000

I think Workstation is 25% off with the same code as well.

Link: VMware: Team Fusion: One Day VMware Fusion Madness: 50% off VMware Fusion. Combine with Competitive Rebate.

From 12:01 AM Pacific Time (well, I think it actually might be live right now) on December 1st, 2008 through 11:59 PM, 24 hours later, VMware Fusion will be on sale for 50% off, worldwide.

That’s right. Using the coupon code “CyberMondayDeal” at checkout, you can buy VMware Fusion at half off its typical list price.

What’s more, in the United States and Canada, this deal combines with our $30 competitive rebate for Parallels and Virtual PC for Mac users. On top of getting Fusion for half off, you can get $30 back when you prove ownership of a competing product.

So yes, you heard that right.

People interested in running Windows on the Mac, can do so with Fusion for half price, all day tomorrow.

And people interested in switching from Parallels and Virtual PC to VMware Fusion can do so for as little as $9.99.

Team Fusion: One Day VMware Fusion Madness: 50% off VMware Fusion. Combine with Competitive Rebate

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 06:41:50 +0000

The VMware E-store team wanted to do something a little crazy to celebrate Cyber Monday—the first Monday after the great annual shopping holiday known as “Black Friday.”

So they decided to go whole hog.

From 12:01 AM Pacific Time (well, I think it actually might be live right now) on December 1st, 2008 through 11:59 PM, 24 hours later, VMware Fusion will be on sale for 50% off, worldwide.

That’s right. Using the coupon code “CyberMondayDeal” at checkout, you can buy VMware Fusion at half off its typical list price.

What’s more, in the United States and Canada, this deal combines with our $30 competitive rebate for Parallels and Virtual PC for Mac users. On top of getting Fusion for half off, you can get $30 back when you prove ownership of a competing product.

So yes, you heard that right.

People interested in running Windows on the Mac, can do so with Fusion for half price, all day tomorrow.

And people interested in switching from Parallels and Virtual PC to VMware Fusion can do so for as little as $9.99.

How’s that for the holidays come early?

VMTN Blog: VMotioning your Service Console?! » Yellow Bricks

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 16:42:46 +0000

Re our post yesterday on ESXi, Duncan dives deeper into one of the tools that VMware is creating so that you don't have to pop the hood -- VMware Infrastructure Management Assistant (VIMA).

Link: VMotioning your Service Console?! » Yellow Bricks.

Some of you might have looked into VIMA already. Those of you that didn’t please check it out because I expect this to be the way that VMware is heading. Note, I don’t know if it really is the way VMware is heading, but a Service Console with VMotion capabilities sounds like a winner to me. A little birdie also just told me that APC, the UPS Company, is finishing their VIMA Compatible UPS software agent!

The cool thing about VIMA is that it includes the RCLI commands, the Perl toolkit and a logger daemon named vilogd. The last one will be the topic for this blog. So what does this logger daemon include? The vilogd daemon collects all the logs that are available through the DiagnosticManager VI API:

VMTN Blog: Keep your VMware ESXi warranty: Don't break the security shell

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 03:15:12 +0000

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.

Link: Keep your VMware ESXi warranty: Don't break the security shell.

Working with VMware ESXi can be frustrating; you're not supposed to enable the Dropbear SSH client or use its technical support mode without the assistance of a VMware support representative. System administrators, however, may be tempted to use tech support mode (or enable Dropbear) to fix problems or manage connections on the fly. Cracking this security shell, however, can void the VMware ESXi warranty and break support contracts. In this tip, I'll explain alternatives that allow you to manage your ESXi virtual machines without compromising its security -- and possibly breaking a support contract.

VROOM!: Virtualized SQL Server Performance: Scalable and Reliable

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 18:10:04 +0000

Database workloads are very diverse. While most database servers are lightly loaded, larger database
workloads can be resource-intensive, exhibiting high I/O rates or consuming large amounts of memory. With improvements in virtualization technology and hardware, even servers running large database workloads run well in virtual machines. Servers running Microsoft's SQL Server, among the top database server platforms in the industry today, are no exception.

An important consideration in SQL Server consolidation scenarios is application performance when packing multiple virtual machines on a single hardware platform. Application performance in virtual machines should continue to meet or exceed required service levels. That is to say, the virtual platform should:

Be scalable.
Ensure that all virtual machines get resources in proportion to their load levels up to specified resource limits.
Provide performance isolation for each virtual machine running on a host.
Ensure that the overall load of a host will have minimal impact on the performance of applications running in individual virtual machines on that host.

We recently published a white paper, "SQL Server Workload Consolidation," that demonstrates the ability of VMware® ESX 3.5 to scale while guaranteeing fairness and isolation under a demanding SQL Server load.

VMTN Blog: Blogs to watch out for: the VMguy

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 07:34:53 +0000

Blogs are a great way learning more about virtualization, getting the best technical tips, and keeping up with the news. (See my last post on Virtualization Alltop.) One of the nice developments of this year is that we're seeing more VMware employees blogging.

One of our newest blogs is from Dave Lawrence, a VMware senior systems engineer. He asked for advice as he was starting his blog, and both Mike and I both told him that people come back if you provide value -- writing about what you know, so it's interesting, and posting every day, so there's something to come back for.

Well, Dave evidently took our advice to heart, because the result is his new blog The VMguy, "Virtualization for the little guy." Dave's focus is SMB, and I hope he keeps going in that direction, because there's a dearth of virtualization resources for small business out there, but really the topics so far will be of interest to everybody. Some recent posts:

Which storage protocol is best?

This question is definitely one of the most common that I receive. "We’re thinking of building a new infrastructure for our virtual machines, which storage protocol should we use?" There are two things to remember for this decision. Performance and functionality.

HCL Update Recap for the week (btw, new feeds will be coming in that area)

Notable KB Articles from the week

What does 80-cores mean to you?

When you're running 32-cores in a server how many apps will utilize that hardware? Virtualization is the only one. AMD and Intel’s "arms race" of processors has left the average software application in the dust. Most applications in customer’s environments don’t even remotely push the CPU capacity in the datacenter. One of the few remaining ways to utilize these types of processors is virtualization. If you have not virtualized as much as you can, keep working towards it. Remember that the 4 or 6 core CPU you purchased this year will be end-of-life in 3-5 years. Perhaps the replacement machine might just have one of the 80-core powerhouses in it. Then you will be able to migrate all of your virtual machines to it, without having to modify a thing inside them.

VMware Converter 4.0 now in beta White Paper: RVI Performance

Redmondmag.com Reader’s Choice Awards announced

What is Enhanced vMotion Compatibility anyway?

One important factor to note. In order to enable EVC for a cluster, you cannot have any virtual machines running on that cluster. All of the virtual machines must be powered down (or a clean cluster with no VMs.) This protects the stability of the existing VMs. If you had a VM running on a host and it changed it’s CPUID while a VM was running, it would appear to the OS and app that the CPU changed while the VM was running, thus adding instability just like our original problem above. Once EVC is enabled for a cluster, there are no more VM outages required to add additional hosts to that cluster. ...

Another thing to be aware of: the FlexMigration (Intel) and Extended Migration (AMD) features do not block the actual instructions themselves. They only mask what the CPUID instruction reports. Back in the 486 days, application programmers would figure out what CPU they were on by trying different instructions. Intel formally added the CPUID instruction in the first Pentium processors in the early 1990’s. They also recommended that developers use this standard method going forward to determine CPU functionality. This is a much better method as it is much more consistent and reliable. The point is that it is possible that there could be code in use today, from the early 1990’s, that has not been upgraded and does not use the standard CPU checking with CPUID and tries to determine CPU capability by "trying functions."

Should I buy blades or standalones for my virtualization platform?

VirtualCenter, run it on physical or virtual?

Dave already has it down -- a mix of news, tech tips, commentary, and discussion, all inspired by his day job interacting with hundreds of small businesses -- and his blog is very worth keeping up with. Please welcome Dave to the virtualization blogosphere.

VMTN Blog: Another sip from the virtualization firehose

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 07:04:21 +0000

You should already be aware of Planet VMware and Planet V12n for all your virtualization blog needs -- technical tips, industry news, commentary.

But now there's a new way to scan the best virtualization blogs -- virtualization.alltop.com. The Planets present a "river of news" linear reverse chronological aggregation, which is a great way for getting a sense of the last week's zeitgeist or catching the day's breaking news, but if your favorite blogger hasn't updated in the last few days their latest post may get lost in the noise.

Alltop takes a different strategy -- their sites give you a grid of blogs and the latest 5 post titles from each. That makes it a good way to check out what's going on with a particular news source, and since it just includes titles, you can scan pretty quickly. Hover over a topic to get an excerpt.

They also had the good taste to steal liberally from the blogroll at Planet V12n, which shows they have taste. I do think they probably aren't virtualization experts, because they are definitely missing some feeds. (Like Alessandro at virtualization.info -- probably the best-known of all the virtualization blogs...)

Guy Kawasaki was one of the founders of the company, which they liken to a "magazine rack." I thought it was a stupid idea when I saw the first set of topics, but they're growing on me. The range of Alltop sites are quite wide, but since you're reading this you might also be interested in the sites covering enterprise and cloud computing.

Virtual Appliances: VMware provides end-to-end solutions for Virtual Appliances

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 01:34:56 +0000

Virtual appliances are bringing a sea-change in the paradigm of how software is developed, distributed, deployed, and managed. Since its inception, various definitions for virtual appliances have emerged in the market. The definition that we propose at VMware is "A Virtual Appliance is a pre-built software solution, consisting of one or more virtual machines that is managed, maintained and updated as a unit".

Most of the Virtual Appliances out there on the Virtual Appliances Marketplace are packaged into single VMs. These appliances contain applications that reside on top of a guest operating system. VMware also announce vApp at VMworld 2008. vApp is a new model for defining and managing applications. These vApps contain one or more VMs and provide enhanced user experience and guaranteed service levels at the deployment site. vApps provide a much more general notion of virtual applications that get built by ISVs, SI/VARs, in-house developers and IT Admins at Enterprises and SMB. Virtual Appliances are a kind of vApp built by ISVs.

We are committed to expanding on a VMware Ready ecosystem where appliances that have been validated, provide a better user experience on VMware Infrastructure. The virtual appliance value chain is typically composed of 5 steps: Authoring, distribution, installation/deployment, runtime platform and management. On Sept 15th 2008, we launched a solution suite and a well-defined strategy for all the above steps of the value chain. Under Authoring, we enable the VMware Ready ecosystem through our partners. While VMware provides VMware Studio , we enable our partners like rPath, JumpBox, VirtualAppliances.net, cohesiveFT, SuSE Studio to build VMware Ready appliances. The distribution channel that we provide is the world's largest repository of virtual appliances, namely the Virtual Appliances Marketplace which has over 900 listed appliances. We also provide opportunities for OEMing VMware Software and bundling opportunities. We have built in virtual appliance deployment and installation capabilities through Studio and easy deployment of OVF template through VI client. Update management functionality for virtual appliances is provided by a close VMware Infrastructure Integration. VMware is thus well-positioned to lead in all aspects of virtual appliance life-cycle.

Team Fusion: Tip: Guest OS Type

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 21:47:49 +0000

Fusion's view of the world is very low-level - when you run a virtual machine, Fusion sees machine-level instructions like "add registers A and B" or "write the contents of C to memory address X". Based on just this information, we might be able to tell you're generating network traffic and there's some video updating going on, but we would not be able to tell what program you're running to do this, or even what guest operating system you're running. Knowing what guest OS is being used in a virtual machine is important because some of them have quirks - one might not like video RAM above a certain size, while another might panic if it sees too many PCI slots, and a third might be unforgiving about how long I/O can take. There might be certain shortcuts that can safely be taken for certain guests. When you create a virtual machine, Fusion needs to know the intended guest OS to correct for the quirks and enable optimizations.

If you ever change the guest OS in a virtual machine (say you upgrade from Windows 95 to XP), you can (and should) use the Virtual Machine Library to change the guest OS that Fusion thinks resides within. Knowing which guest OS is being used is also important for things like Tools install - Fusion automatically picks the correct Tools image to use based on which guest OS you've told Fusion is being used in the virtual machine.

VI Powershell Blog: Some recent highlights from the VI Toolkit community.

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 19:06:03 +0000

One user has suggested we rename the VI Toolkit forum the "Ask Luc Forum", referring to Luc Deken's continuous help and support to other toolkit users. Here's a few recent highlights from the forum, with Luc making quite a few appearances.

A previous post on this blog shows how to modify VMX file settings, but some VMX file setting can't be changed in this way. Changing a VM's boot delay is a good example. If you need to configure VM boot settings, Luc shows a way this can be done, using an API specifically designed for VM boot settings.

If you're accustomed to logging into ESX and using the esxcfg-mpath command, but are looking for something that works at the VirtualCenter level, across all your ESX hosts, Hal has some code that makes it really easy to make storage path reports across all your ESX server.

Hugo shows how you can use the -expand switch of PowerShell's Select-Object cmdlet to easily display a VM's available and used disk space (assuming the VM is running VMware Tools).

If you have VMs with multiple adapters that are members of multiple port groups, Luc has some tips that make it really easy to report on which VMs are connected to which port groups.

Finally, if you're writing reports and want the results emailed to you, Luc shows an easy PowerShell script to generate email.

VMTN Blog: SRM, it’s just too easy » Yellow Bricks

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 01:38:13 +0000

Duncan over at Yellow Bricks has some words of wisdom for your BCDR project.

SRM, it’s just too easy » Yellow Bricks.

There a whole bunch of SRM projects going on globally where VMware PSO, the department I work for, is assisting. These projects typically have a duration of 3 to 9 months, while it seems that with the ease of VMware Site Recovery Manager this should be a matter of days.
People tend to forget that the most important thing about Distaster Recovery / Business Continuity is the business. You need to know the organisation and IT environment very well before you can even start ...
The fact that SRM is so easy to setup makes it really hard to actually explain to a customer why a BCDR project will take much longer then he expected.

Team Fusion: Tip: Switch Virtual Disk Type

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 20:18:38 +0000

Now that you're familiar with sparse, preallocated, split, and monolithic virtual disks, you might be wondering how to switch from one format to another. In Fusion 2.0, this can be done through the virtual machine's Hard Disk settings pane - select the options you want, then press Apply. Fusion will convert the disk's format to the one you specified.

As usual, you can do this only if you don't have any snapshots, and you will potentially need as much free space as the maximum size of the virtual disk.

VMTN Blog: VI, SRM in a (Workstation) Box

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 07:41:00 +0000

There are a few sets of instructions floating around the Internet on how to run ESX or ESXi inside Workstation 6.5. (Let me Google that for you or just go to xtravirt) Lots of reasons you'd want to do this -- for training, testing, lab work, demos, POCs, or even just as a parlor trick to impress your friends. You'll need recent hardware. Now David Davis has published a nice 14 minute video tutorial on the topic at Petri IT Knowledgebase. Link: Running VMware ESX 3.5 and ESXi in Workstation on your desktop PC.

Site Recovery Manager can be hard to evaluate -- you need some shared storage that is going to be replicated and then set up SRM to do all the tricky failover workflow bits. Tomas Ten Dam has laid out a process to set that up in Workstation as well using the NetApp ONTAP simulator: SRM in a Box final release (the complete setup) « Ten Dam. (Looks like you need to be a current NetApp customer to get your hands on it. You should also be able to do this with the EMC Celerra simulator, ~~same conditions apply~~. Looks like you can do SRM with Lefthand VSA as well, and you can at least do that with a 30-day trial. Has anybody set this up with a free or open source, albeit unsupported, tool? How about a set of virtual appliances?)

Completely new to SRM? Check out this new video (parts 2 and 3 coming soon).

[Update: from Chad Sakac in the comments, the Celerra simulator is available to everybody.]

Team Fusion: VMware Fusion 2.0.1 Update Available

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 20:07:22 +0000

Happy Friday everyone!

This is a quick note to let you know that VMware Fusion 2.01 is now available, a free maintenance update to VMware Fusion 2.

You can download the new bits here.

VMware Fusion 2.0.1 features enhancements and fixes in follow up to the release of VMware Fusion 2 and the Apple notebook refresh.

You can read all about it in the release notes, but some quick things of interest:

One of my favorites: AutoProtect postpones taking a snapshot when the user is interacting with the virtual machine. Watch a video demo of AutoProtect, here.
Now shows application badge instead of generic document icons when assigning Windows applications to Mac documents.
Greatly reduced initial pause when opening mirrored or shared folders.
No longer disables certain shared folders and mirrored folders that were nested folders. The potential data loss issue with nested shared folders has been resolved.
No longer publishes Windows guest applications to Mac if “Allow the virtual machine to open applications on your Mac” is unchecked in virtual machine Settings > Sharing.
Brings back the Enable Hints menu item in Help menu.

There are more enhancements and bug fixes 100% broken out the release notes, here.

In the meantime, go get the bits!

Team Fusion: Tip: Control-click

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 13:25:23 +0000

Unlike OS X, most other operating systems require the use of multibutton mice. Most Mac users know you can ctrl-click to simulate a right click, and you can do that in Fusion as well. But what if you actually want to ctrl-click in the guest - say, to select multiple items in Explorer?

In Fusion's Preferences, go to the Keyboard & Mouse tab, Mouse Shortcuts. Uncheck the secondary button shortcut (or map it to something else) - now you can ctrl-click in the guest.

If you still need to right click and don't want to remap to a different shortcut, there may be other options. For laptop users, you can enable two-finger right clicks in System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Trackpad. If you have a Mighty Mouse, you can enable right click in System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Mouse. And of course, since OS X has always supported multibutton mice, you can always plug in your favorite multibutton mouse.

VMTN Blog: Communities Podcast Wednesday - open topic

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 03:14:05 +0000

Drop by the Communities Roundtable Podcast tomorrow. It's an open topic day, meaning we'll talk about whatever we feel like. We'll talk about whatever you feel like as well. Listen in and join the conversation.

Some interesting things went on this week. Let's go over to Planet V12n and see...

VMTN Blog: Virtualization Team vs. Security Team: It is important to remove the “vs.”!

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 02:49:45 +0000

Rob Randell, one of our security specialists here at VMware, is guest-posting over at Mike D's blog. (Guys, you're welcome over here as well.)

Link: Mike D's Virtualization Blog: Virtualization Team vs. Security Team: It is important to remove the “vs.”!.

Unfortunately, very often this situation is the exception and not the rule. Many of the customers that I talk to are only talking to me because they have started a widescale deployment of VMware VI and the security team gets wind of it once it is well underway or worse some sort of audit is initiated (PCI, Sarbox, HIPAA, etc…). At this point the entire architecture needs to be reviewed and very often rearchitected to meet the necessary security and audit requirements. See the following article for a great example of this.

(Emphasis mine.) Sounds like a nightmare, so my guess is that you don't want that to happen to you. Always consult your friendly neighborhood security team first.

VMTN Blog: Join the VMware Referral Program

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 02:35:54 +0000

Save 10% on select VMware products!

We're pleased to announce a new VMware Referral Program that gives you rewards when you recommend VMware products to others. You can participate even without a blog or website, as we give you the tools to send custom emails or bug your friends on social networks, or if you do have a blog, you can get a spiffy widget like you see on the right, and you can customize what it says. (All rewards through this particular widget go to the Red Cross, by the way.) You're also giving out a special "friends & family" offer, which at this point is a 10% discount.

You get $10 credit (which can go straight to your PayPal account or to a gift card or charity) every time two VMware Store purchases are made from your referrals. (That $10 number tells me that we expect to moving more copies of Fusion and Workstation than VI Enterprise through this referral, but go crazy selling ESX if that's what you're into.) In any case, it's a great way to spread the word about the solutions you use every day that make your life easier and got you your last promotion.

So sign up now -- it takes 3 minutes to get started.

Thank you very much, and I hope you make a bunch of dough.

VMTN Blog: Call for bloggers at VMworld Europe 2009

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 02:58:54 +0000

Calling all bloggers going to VMworld Europe 2009. We really appreciate folks blogging from our conferences.

It helps to spread news and announcements.
It gets a lot of technical detail up on the public web so Google can find it.
It helps people who aren't on site feel more like they are there -- and hopefully come next time! It really is a very good tech conference for both beginners and experienced virtualizers.
It helps others create successful strategies for navigating the event, and it gives feedback to the conference team.
It helps continue to cement this global community of virtualization enthusiasts and VMware experts we are building.

Check out the coverage of VMworld 2008 if you weren't there, and you can see some past sessions on vmworld.com as well.

If you're going to show up in Cannes on February 24, please drop me a line (jtroyer @ vmware). Although we're going to reach out to folks we know in Europe, if you're outside of Europe but planning on coming or if you don't blog primarily in English, we might not know to ask, so please speak up.

I'm not making any promises, but last year the folks who were regularly blogging were treated very well by Richard, including custom shirts, a nice place with power and connectivity and refreshments to blog, press passes, and room to shoot video or do interviews. I highly recommend getting on Richard's list.

And if you aren't a current blogger, I don't think we can get you a press pass, but it's a fine time to start a blog. Remember you can always start a free one at vmworld.com/blogs or communities.vmware.com/blogs.

Team Fusion: VMware Fusion 201: Split vs. Monolithic Virtual Disks

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 20:55:52 +0000

In addition to the sparse and preallocated virtual disks, there's another, orthogonal set of options: split and monolithic. You can have a sparse/split virtual disk (the default in Fusion 2.0), a sparse/monolithic virtual disk (the default in Fusion 1.x), a preallocated/split virtual disk, or a preallocated/monolithic virtual disk.

While sparse vs. preallocated affects how the data inside the guest is stored in the .vmdk file, split vs. monolithic affects how the .vmdk file is stored on the host. In a monolithic virtual disk, everything in a virtual disk is kept in one file - this includes metadata about the virtual disk (e.g. size, geometry, parent disk, and so on). Note: You might still have multiple vmdk files in a virtual machine (either because you have multiple disks or because you have snapshots). The previous posts about sparse and preallocated virtual disks showed monolithic disks.

In contrast, a split virtual disk is, well, split into multiple files. There's a small, plaintext metadata file, and a number of slice files. If you have a preallocated/split virtual disk, each slice (except possibly the last) will be 2 GB. If you have a sparse/split virtual disk, each slice can be up to 2 GB, depending on how much data falls into that slice. Preallocated/split virtual disks have a -f### suffix (where ### is a number), while sparse/split virtual disks use a -s### suffix.

So why choose one over the other? Split disks are critical in some cases - for example, some filesystems (such as FAT) can't deal with files larger than a certain size. By splitting virtual disks to be below this limit (typically 4 GB), you can keep a virtual machine on such a filesystem without losing data. Another advantage of split disks is that you don't need as much space to consolidate snapshots or shrink virtual disks. We try hard not to lose data, so rather than doing these operations in place (where something could go wrong if the power fails), we make a copy and only replace it when we're sure it succeeded. Because of this, if you use a monolithic disk, you might need as much free space as the virtual disk occupies to complete such an operation. On the other hand, with a split virtual disk, you only need 2 GB (or less, if you have a sparse slice that's smaller) since each slice can be done individually.

On the other hand, monolithic disks have some advantages too. In addition to more obvious limited computing resources such as CPU or disk space, one of the not as well known ones is something called file handles. OSes need to keep track of which files are being used, and has a limited number of file handles to do this with. If the OS runs out of file handles, no more files can be opened. Remember that you're using a lot more files than just the documents you're working on - programs need to open files to read resources, for temporary use, and lots of other not immediately obvious things. With a monolithic virtual disk, you use only one file handle per virtual disk. With a sparse virtual disk, you use one file handle per slice, which can quickly add up if you've got a large virtual disk with a lot of snapshots.

VMTN Blog: VMware @ TechEd EMEA

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:53:01 +0000

Richard Garsthagen, evangelist extraordinaire, giving the VMware overview at Microsoft TechEd EMEA. It's a good short overview that gets past the "my hypervisor is better than yours" argument to talk about the entire suite of infrastructure and management software that we offer. Also, make sure you watch to the very end. Richard can be very, very sneaky.

(click for the video)

Richard is also coordinating the bloggers (and many other things) at VMworld Europe 2009. If you have a blog and are going to be in Cannes this February, drop me a line (jtroyer @ vmware).

VMTN Blog: Workstation in the running for developer.com product of the year

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 03:27:02 +0000

Most people don't know I'm actually a trained scientist. (I said a trained scientist, not necessarily a good one or a successful one, which is why I'm making my living hanging out with bloggers.) My scientific training usually comes out in overly-long emails where I detail every assumption and caveat and mitigating factor about some conclusion, which is how you'd write a scientific paper. My marketing training then usually kicks in and I edit out most of it, but I still suspect I lose a lot of people in my more epic missives.

So I am officially a Doctor, I've done some statistics tutoring in the past, and this Fall I really got into the political polling geekery at FiveThirtyEight. As a result, I've developed a great respect for a well-made survey -- knowing what to ask, who to ask, and how to analyze the results are not trivial matters That's the main reason I'm not pointing to Alessandro's platform survey over at virtualization.info. It's not a scientifically valid survey of the global virtualization community, just a web poll, but I will be interested in the results. We'll "win" in any case, but I'm more interested in the results if I don't skew it by sending over hordes of VMware users from this blog.

(And I also recognize that just because you print a number doesn't make it true.)

However, there are some polls and surveys where we so clearly deserve to win on the merits that I don't mind calling your attention to them. Workstation wins lots of awards, because it remains the gold standard for desktop virtualization and is insanely useful to working developers and sysadmins. So for your voting pleasure I will direct your attention to the developer.com Product of the Year survey. VMware Workstation 6.5 is up for Development Tool of the Year. Feel free to vote your conscience, as long as you do it before December 15.

VMTN Blog: 10GigE Networking Performance with ESX 3.5

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 03:21:58 +0000

Link: VMware: VMware Networking Blog: 10GigE Networking Performance with ESX 3.5.

Improving managability by reducing the cable and NIC sprawl. 2x 10GigE links versus 6, 8, 10 or more 1 GigE can simplify your infrastructure

Convergence of Fibre Channel and Network traffic using FCoE (Fibre
Channel over Ethernet). The ability to do away with Fibre Channel HBAs
and converge the FC SAN traffic with the ethernet network traffic is
the TCO tipping point for some customers. ...

But, ...how does 10GigE perform on ESX 3.5? Our performance team published a paper this week on that very theme.

VMTN Blog: AppSpeed on Communities Roundtable podcast #25

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 03:03:59 +0000

The topic today was VMware AppSpeed, which began life as B-hive Conductor. From the website: "The product "provides virtual infrastructure groups visibility into the multi-tier applications (performance, usage and dependencies) running across both virtual and physical infrastructure." I think it's another example of how you can do something better virtually by sitting outside the VM -- something that would be either impractical, much harder, or hopelessly tied to the OS if you were doing it with an agent inside a physical machine.

Asaf Wexler, former CTO of B-hive and now Sr Director of R&D here at VMware, joined us over an unfortunately poor telephone connection from Israel. Click on the big green play button or download the mp3. (51:00). Podcast info.

Links:

http://www.bhive.net/ old B-hive site; still has product & technical info.
AppSpeed at VMworld 2008 keynote (more notes on that keynote)
AppSpeed video at VMworld 2008 keynote day 2
More AppSpeed video at VMworld 2008 keynote day 1
Commentary from Roger Howorth at ZDNet.co.uk
As one attendee put it, this was really exciting because it would provide a quick way to find out where the problem was if users started complaining. Without this kind of technology, it could take hours to get enough insight into the application to enable further debugging. Also, the various departments responsible for the different elements in an application have a habit of denying responsibility and pointing the finger elsewhere.

The kind of diagnostic information produced by AppSpeed makes this kind of behaviour easier to challenge, because administrators would have real data to back them up. For example, they could say, “Look, queries to your database are taking five seconds, while the rest of the transactions total 200 milliseconds.”

Next week, open topic roundtable with the panel. Drop by -- same bat time, same bat channel (noon Pacific time on Wednesday).

VMware Networking Blog: 10GigE Networking Performance with ESX 3.5

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 22:36:00 +0000

A few recent conversations with customers have quickly gravitated to the topic of 10 GigE. Some customers are making firms plans for deploying 10GigE in their ESX servers. The reasons vary, but top amongst these customers are:

Improving managability by reducing the cable and NIC sprawl. 2x 10GigE links versus 6, 8, 10 or more 1 GigE can simplify your infrastructure
Convergence of Fibre Channel and Network traffic using FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet). The ability to do away with Fibre Channel HBAs and converge the FC SAN traffic with the ethernet network traffic is the TCO tipping point for some customers.

As you may be aware, FCoE is supported in ESX 3.5u2. Emulex and Qlogic 10 GigE FCoE CNAs (Channel Network Adapters) were qualified and added to our HCL just prior to VMworld in September.

But, ...how does 10GigE perform on ESX 3.5? Our performance team published a paper this week on that very theme.

VI Powershell Blog: Read about the financial meltdown and your VMware meltdown all in one place

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 17:19:01 +0000

If you're like me, and I know I am, you spend an hour or two a day reading through RSS feeds. In fact, I found out about this really cool new script from Hal Rottenberg through my RSS reader, courtesy of Alan Renouf, even though Hal emailed me to tell me about it (I get so much mail from Hal I usually just ignore it.)

The beauty of RSS (in case you've been living under a technological rock for the past few years) is that everything comes to you, rather than the other way around. How many times a day do you really want to log into your VI to figure out what's going on anyway? In VI you can get email notifications, but this is only for alarms, in addition to being a bad idea in general. If you look through Hal's feed you can see that this tells you about everything, including things like an ominous warning from VMware Update Manager that it only has about 500 megabytes of space left. Just add it to your RSS aggregator of choice and suddenly you know everything that's going on with your VI with minimal effort.

Hal hasn't made his script public, it seems he's using it as a teaser for his upcoming book. Let's hope he hurries up, so drop him a note and tell him to stop goofing off all the time.

VROOM!: YouTube Star: VMmark Cluster Demonstrates DPM

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 01:06:07 +0000

We recently posted the results of some experiments running VMmark across a 4-server cluster using DRS (here and here) that demonstrate the power and flexibility of VMware Infrastructure. We have used the same methodology and the same hardware to measure the performance impact of DPM (there wasn't any) as well as the power savings (it was substantial). One of our marketing guys put together a pretty neat video. If you haven't seen it yet, check it out. And yes, I too wish my 8-hour workday only lasted 2.5 minutes.

VROOM!: Sun Shows Value of Large Pages in VMmark

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 23:57:49 +0000

I am fascinated studying the ripple effects seen in overall system performance caused by tuning a subset of workloads in a virtualized environment. Our partners at Sun have provided a textbook case by publishing two VMmark 1.1 results on the Sun Fire X4240 last month. The scores were 7.92 @ 6 tiles and 8.07 @ 6 tiles, roughly a 2% difference. The higher result was run using large pages for the javaserver workload while the lower result did not have large pages enabled. (Look here for instructions on how to allow large page usage on Windows 2003.) Using large pages allows the six VMmark javaserver workloads in the benchmark test to consume significantly fewer CPU resources while achieving their desired performance. This CPU savings frees additional resources to be shared by the other thirty workloads, resulting in a higher overall score. Thanks to our partners at Sun for sharing the data.

VMTN Blog: SRM test results: 8 mins. "that's all?" (worked too well)

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 08:04:15 +0000

via the new blog, VMGuy, from VMware SE Dave.

Link: VMware Communities: Manual Automation: Site Recovery Manager is a Hit!.

I have more testing to do but can report that I'm starting 4 VMs from a single replicated LUN in 8 minutes. And I'm not talking about from the time of just powering on, I'm talking about pressing the "big red (test) button" - powering-up the VMs - starting the Windows services - and the recovery plan completion. Try that using physical servers! Sorry, but even restoring servers from a B2D solution that's replicated to your DR site won't be as fast.

I demonstrated SRM for the DR team and initially got a "that's all?" kind of reaction. I quickly realized that SRM, with the combination of array-based replication, +worked too well+! Meaning, it did such a good job of hiding the complexity and number of steps required to get from A to Z that my non-technical DR teammates didn't understand what SRM was really bringing to the table. If there's only one thing you take away from this article, make sure it's that you're better off explaining in simple terms the steps SRM is executing in the background before running a demonstration.

Talking about the virtues of SRM is one thing (the recovery run book, the steps it automates, the testing capabilities (which are awesome by-the-way), etc.), demonstrating these product features for your DR team is another. If your experience is like mine, you'll find it dramatically influences the discussions on

VMTN Blog: Talking storage with Chad Sakac - Communities Roundtable Podcast #24

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 06:58:00 +0000

We had a great time with EMC's Chad Sakac last week. As usual, listen via the widget on the right or download the mp3. (1:08) More info on the podcast series.

I've delayed putting this up because I was trying to get the links together first, but I've been swamped. If you have any other links to contribute, feel free to add them in the comments, although Eric is usually the last word in resource links.

Chad's blog at virtualgeek.typepad.com
Track Datastore Free Space from peetersonline.nl
Rescan all hosts for new storage from Virtu-Al
load balancing active/active SAN’s from Yellow Bricks
Search the EMC Reference Library for 'reference architecture' (they use POST, not GET, so you need to do the typing yourself)
Storage links, including LUN sizing from Eric Siebert's VMware-Land

This Wednesday our scheduled topic is vCenter AppSpeed, but I'm still waiting on a final confirmation. For more information on AppSpeed (nee B-hive), see the old B-hive site and this AppSpeed demo video from VMworld 2008.

VROOM!: Unisys Publishes VMmark Result

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 22:34:35 +0000

Our partners at Unisys recently published their debut VMmark result of 21.96 @ 15 tiles using an ES7000 Model 7405R G1. This is a 32-core, 8-socket system. You can find the details at the ever-growing VMmark results page.

Team Fusion: VMware Fusion 201: Snapshots

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 22:19:40 +0000

I previously gave a tip about how to make effective use of snapshots, but what about how they actually work? As I mentioned, one of the key things to understand about snapshots is that they only store the differences between the current state and the original state. Technically-minded people will recognize this as copy-on-write.

Let's suppose you have a sparse virtual disk as shown. You then take a snapshot and do a little bit of work - modify the file at the far right and shorten the one before it. Once you take a snapshot, the original base disk is no longer written to, but is still read from. Most of the virtual disk is still pointing at the base file, but what you did change now refers to the snapshot. By itself, snapshot 1 is not enough to represent the virtual disk, nor is the base disk. Snapshot 1 might not even contain complete files, but only parts of files that have changed.

If you take another snapshot and make more changes, a similar process happens - now neither snapshot 1 nor the base file are written two, but are still referenced. New changes go to snapshot 2.

Hopefully you can see why each snapshot can take up as much space as is allocated to the virtual disk - you might overwrite every single block, and Fusion needs to keep both the original (in case you want to revert to the snapshot) and the new data.

With a preallocated virtual disk, it's nearly the same story. Only the base disk changes to a 1-to-1 mapping, but each snapshot is still sparse.

VMTN Blog: More on VMware Update Manager

Sat, 08 Nov 2008 02:43:02 +0000

A few days ago, we linked to a new white paper on VMware Update Manager performance and best practices. Rich Brambley at VM /ETC had a few comments (see VMware Update Manager planning makes a difference), and he also ran an informal poll about how people are using VUM. Check it out (and feel free to still go vote yourself).

Rich is a little uneasy with keeping VUM on the same machine as VC, since it has to store potentially years of patches going forward, but it looks like that's the easiest way and the way most people are doing it, probably because they aren't using for all those Windows patches. Our recommendations to separate it only kick in at larger deployment sizes.

Also from Rich:

Finally, Carlo over at VMware Info has written a great how to post for patching ESX with VUM. The VUM Administration Guide seems to be a little difficult to follow to me, and Carlo’s post is straight forward about how to configure VUM for updating ESX hosts.

VMTN Blog: Installing and Configuring Linux Guest Operating Systems

Sat, 08 Nov 2008 01:32:25 +0000

Link: Installing and Configuring Linux Guest Operating Systems.

This technical note describes installing, configuring, updating, and administering Linux guest operating systems in virtual machines running on VMware Infrastructure 3 version 3.5. In addition, this note includes a collection of useful tips and tricks in fine-tuning your Linux virtual machines. Although the recommendations in this paper apply to most Linux distributions, they are tailored specifically to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. Linux administrators can use this paper as a source for guidelines when building and maintaining Linux virtual machines in their VMware Infrastructure environments. Some working knowledge of VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 2, ESX 3.5 Update 2, and Linux operating systems is required.

Missed this last week when it came out. I need to get a weekly or monthly round-up of white papers -- if you haven't dropped by in a while, plenty of good stuff here at Technical Resources.

VMTN Blog: A day in the life of DPM - 55% power savings

Sat, 08 Nov 2008 01:22:48 +0000

Nice video of a day in the life of some VI servers using DRS with DPM (distributed power management) enabled. As the workforce comes into the office, utilization increases, ESX servers come out of standby mode, VMs get VMotioned, and everybody's happy. The process reverses itself after 5pm. (Who leaves work at 5pm?) And the servers happily sleep overnight or until you need them again. And the sys admins? Feet up, watching YouTube, never touching a power switch or a mouse. It's all automatic.

From instigator Scott Drummonds: VMware Communities: Virtual Performance: DPM Power/Performance Video.

We started the test with 13 tiles worth of VMs (108 VMs in all) on the DRS cluster. With all of these VMs idle, DPM consolidated them to a single host and turned off three servers. As the load was applied to the VMs at 9:00 AM and driven through an eight-hour workday, DRS and DPM powered on servers and balanced load, as needed. When the day ended at 5:00 PM, the load was again consolidated and servers were powered down. The video we shot includes power meters of the systems under test and screenshots of activity induced by DRS and DPM.

Team Fusion: VMware Fusion 2 University: Create a Virtual Machine from a PC with VMware Converter

Sat, 08 Nov 2008 00:26:44 +0000

Apple likes to talk about how 50% of all Mac purchasers are switching over to the Mac from the PC.

Just recently, Apple’s COO, Tim Cook, Apple specifically called out VMware Fusion as one of the driving factors helping people to switch to the Mac, by making it easy to run the Windows apps you’ve come to love, or which don’t have Mac versions, on your Mac, virtually.

Bring your PC with you as you switch

One of the things that helps people do this, is the ability to move an existing PC, a physical Windows box, like a Dell or HP or what have you, to a virtual machine, to run on VMware Fusion.

Yes, it does sound like black magic, but really, it’s quite easy. In fact, we provide a free tool, VMware Converter, which runs on pretty much any Windows OS, that will make a bit-by-bit virtual machine copy of your existing PC to run on any VMware virtual machine runtime (Fusion, of course, being this team’s favorite).

To help you get a better idea, here are two videos that show exactly how to switch to the Mac with VMware Fusion by bringing along your existing Windows PC.

These are both taken from the more than dozen VMware Fusion 2 video tutorials made freely available to help you get the most out of VMware Fusion 2.

VMware eLearning step-by-step video:

VMware Fusion team’s slightly sexier, though less exhaustive video:

Migrate Your Windows PC to your Mac with VMware Fusion from VMware Fusion on Vimeo.

Virtualization for SAP Solutions: SAP UK & Ireland User Conference

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 08:57:43 +0000

Taking place at the Novotel London West, Monday 10th and Tuesday 11th November, the SAP UKI User Group’s annual conference and exhibition is the UK & Ireland’s premier SAP related event bringing together SAP professionals and business managers from across the UK, Ireland and Europe and is an event not to be missed! For its first time, VMware will also be present at this event. Do not miss to meet with us at the booth and please join us for our presentation on Tue, Nov. 11. Illustrated with customer references including Astra Zeneca and T-Systems, this presentation will show how running SAP on a virtualized platform can enhance availability, reduce operational costs and complexity, accelerate deployment and upgrade processes whilst mitigating risk and compliance issues.

Presentation: Deploying SAP applications in a virtualized environment

Date: Tuesday, 11. November 2008
Start Time: 14:05
End Time: 14:50

Virtualization for SAP Solutions: Webcast: "Virtualize Your SAP Environment with NetApp and VMware" - Recorded Version Available on 11/14

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 06:00:30 +0000

Today, NetApp hosted a webinar titled "Virtualize Your SAP Environment with NetApp and VMware.” It was a great discussion featuring Roland Wartenberg of SAP elaborating on SAP's virtualization strategy, Rick Scherer with the City of San Diego talking about their virtualized SAP environment, and Manfred Buchmann (NetApp) discussing the connection between NetApp storage solutions, VMware virtual machines, and SAP. I contributed a number of customer use cases and customer results. Of course, we als talked about our joint DR Solution (Efficient Disaster Recovery for SAP Landscapes).

You will be able to see the recording starting end of next week.

-Joachim

VMTN Blog: VI admins sleep easier: HA in action

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 19:58:19 +0000

From Jason Boche yesterday morning on Twitter. Check out his new blog, now on Planet V12n.

"Lost power this morning to an ESX blade @ 9:44:15. VMware HA powers on downed VMs @ 9:45:17 after migrating them to a different host." -from Twitter

VMTN Blog: Green IT: how much are you saving?

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 19:44:11 +0000

Shannon Snowden went back and did a check on their power/hardware savings numbers from the virtualization work they are doing at New Age Technologies. "Green IT" as an overhyped topic of the day may come and go (I actually don't think it won't go too far away this decade), and you may even have plenty of room left in your data center (if so, congrats on your forward thinking and large capital budget), but the fact remains that the power savings are real, and that's dollars left in your bank account.

Link: Green IT and Virtualization Real Numbers | Virtualization Information.

So, I decided to run some numbers on one of our largest server virtualization projects this year and the results really are a great reminder that what we are doing is important.

We have one client that we have virtualized about 1,000 servers this year alone. Using VMware’s Green Calculator, check out the results.

Energy Savings: We saved over 6.6 million kWh of energy and cooling costs for the servers

Server Hardware: We saved over $5.2 million in hardware costs

Energy Costs: We saved over $660,000 in power costs

Update: if you're interested in a greener data center, also check out this webcast: Lean and Green: A Simpler More Cost-Effective Datacenter on November 13.

The Console: More Than Blue Sky Thinking

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 18:20:37 +0000

Posted by Réza Malekzadeh
Sr. Director, Product Marketing & Alliances

Looming on the horizon are the nimbus, cirrus, stratus and cumulus that threaten to deliver us cloud computing imminently. Promising an end to most of the challenges and frustrations of IT systems as we know them, the concept of cloud computing is thundering through the business community to become one of the most talked about and revered subjects of the day.

Behind the hype seems to be a reality that, for once, the IT industry maybe onto something truly game changing that will not only radically cut costs, but also deliver a far better experience to the business or consumer user.

The expectations are huge. banking analysts say that cloud computing will be a $160 billion market within the next five years, and every major IT company from Microsoft to Google, from IBM to Dell, is desperate to be the rainmaker.

The question that comes to mind though is not “what” cloud computing is, but rather “why”. If it is such a great idea then why has it taken until now for the gurus of technology to deliver it.

The “what” question is just too easy; imagine a world where you could walk up to any computer, anywhere in the world and instantly access all your data and applications just as you left them last time you logged on – and somewhere, up in the clouds, a huge IT infrastructure was whirring and churning to deliver the IT services to you. Basically, think of the ease of getting electricity from a socket in your home that somehow connects to a generating station and you start to get the idea.

Why has it taken so long? Go back far enough in time and IT professionals always thought that computing would be delivered from the cloud and that the personal computer was nothing more than an aberration. Early mainframes where constructed to deliver IT services down wires to dumb terminals that could do no more than display text on a screen and take back digits typed into a keyboard.

These mainframes could handle hundreds or even thousands of users and if they had carried on evolving then, we would probably have had cloud computing in 1988 - rather than 30 years later.

In fact, Thomas J. Watson, founder of IBM, is supposed to have remarked that “there is a world market for about five computers”. He didn’t mean that these new fangled devices would never catch on (as Lloyd George unfortunately said about TV) but that his vision was of a few massive number crunching mainframes in the sky that could deliver their computational power to the users remotely.

What was not understood though, was the challenges that cloud computing would have to overcome. And this is where the answer to the “why now” question lies.

To deliver cloud computing requires five critical components: the scalability of the infrastructure to meet users’ needs; the resilience to accommodate the unexpected; the network to distribute the applications; and the ability to deliver an acceptable experience to the user at a reasonable cost.

When it came to scalability the reality was that you built or rebuilt your datacenters once every five years to fit an estimated workload or users and traffic. The concept of “dynamic” or “on demand” capacity existed only as a concept. But something fundamental changed at the start of the 21st Century, when server virtualisation suddenly arrived on the scene, as a result of innovations led by VMware.

Where previously you had attached a given application to a server only to see users slow to a deathly halt during periods of peak usage, now you could now decide to vary the server capacity or resources available to a virtualised application and so scale it up or down according to demand. This was freedom for the CIO and MIS staff as they suddenly could adapt their business to the needs of the user community. It wasn’t cloud computing yet, but maybe the forerunner.

Resilience was probably the biggest killer of the original IT model and gave rise to the PC almost by itself. Despite cloud computing being the ideal solution for IT architecture, the repeated and sustained or catastrophic breakdowns of mainframes led users to revolt against the tyranny of the IT director. The phrase that sends shudders though the souls of many middle-aged ex-programmers is “unscheduled outage” as hours of work would be lost to some minor bug on a given server. Evolution eventually kicked in with the concept of transferable workloads made possible by innovations such as VMware’s VMotion – a technology which can take a running application from a problematic server to another server with no interruption.

Bizarrely the network was probably the least of the problems. Arpanet, the forerunner of the Internet, was up and running in the 80s and although designated for military use quickly proved itself within the academic community. But at an original 50 Kbps, compared to today’s multi-Megabit throughputs, there is no doubt that broadband has transformed the landscape for cloud computing.

Probably the most emotive issue in IT is the end-user experience. Grown men have cried at the prospect of rebooting Windows Vista and previous experiences of cloud computing were little different. We expect and have a right to an IT experience that delivers the goods. An ATM machine, a great example of existing cloud computing, should not take three minutes working out whether it will or won’t pour out cash. But so many factors affect that experience that IT directors have previously been powerless to control the experience. The era of virtualisation has radically transformed that equation as the IT professional can now isolate, prioritise and manage applications to deliver a fantastic experience to users.

Finally is the age-old issue of cost. Every new era of IT has promised much, but at extra cost. PC networks, client-server computing, server-based computing – all of them demanded an extravagant outflow for the promises of a return tomorrow. Cloud computing is the very, very first that actually costs less. By harnessing the scalability and resilience provided through virtualisation, and by using the global networks that now exist, it delivers the massively improved user experience at a lower cost.

And if you need proof, look at any of the combatants in providing Cloud Computing – Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle – and ask them if they use virtualisation at the core of their infrastructure. They all do. If the drip, drip, drip of effect of cloud computing works for some of the most popular IT services of today, you can be sure it will seep into mainstream IT soon.

Virtualization for SAP Solutions: SAP DSAG & TechEd EMEA 2008 Review

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 15:48:47 +0000

During the past weeks I attended two major conferences for SAP users - German SAP User Conference (DSAG), Leipzig and SAP TechEd EMEA 2008, Berlin. I'd like to share my impressions of these events with you.

At DSAG, I gave a presentation about VMware virtualization of SAP. The room was packed and some of you who visited my presentation had to stand at the back of the room. Despite the 115+ attendees, it was a great, interactive presentation, with discussions around Live Migration of SAP using Vmotion and DRS, Disaster Recovery Management using our latest member of our product family VMware Site Recovery Manager, and last but not least our reference customers. Some of the visitors hardly believed that it is possible to move a live SAP Systems while 100s of users are putting the system under stress from one server to another without any downtime, without loosing a single user, nor a user context. About 25% of my audience were already running SAP on VMware, 15% run SAP production on VMware.

At SAP TechEd EMEA 2008 in Berlin, VMware Virtualization was once again a topic presented by many companies and discussed in many presentations (see my previous blog). The sessions that I attended were again packed and the VMware presentation as part of Roland Wartenberg's session LCM300: Enterprise Virtualization Map was visited by 250+ people. IBM claimed that x86 virtualization was the key topic on their booth where they showcased a 96-core server - perfectly suited for VMware. The VMware live-demo on HP's booth was another highlight and received a lot of positive feedback from visitors. I spoke to SAP customers who told me that the integration of Virtual Center into SAP Adaptive Commuting is a step into the right direction.We are very happy to hear this.

Overall, both event were great, and I am sure VMware will be back next year.

Matthias

VMTN Blog: NFS.Lock.Disable = 0

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 18:13:24 +0000

There's been a slow discussion in the VMware blogosphere about this, and if you haven't been following along: if you use NetApp NFS storage (or NFS in general), please review your settings, makes sure NFS.Lock.Disable = 0 (the default), you've applied the appropriate VI patches, and check out the best practices documents and kb articles linked in these blog posts.

VMTN Blog: VMware's Dan Chu on Windows Azure and vCloud

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 10:50:00 +0000

It's an interesting conversation people are having in cloud-land at the moment. Microsoft Azure competes more directly with Google AppEngine, and somehow Amazon always comes into the discussion, but VMware, since we aren't a service provider, isn't on many people's radar in this conversation yet. (Peter Laird and Tim O'Reily give pretty lucid cloud taxonomies.) Here VMware's Dan Chu compares Microsoft's approach to VMware's - very worth a read. VMware: Windows Azure More Smoke than Cloud

"With vCloud, we don't become a service provider," says Chu. "Microsoft is stepping over the line, and now intends to compete directly against some of their [hosting and service provider] partners." By comparison, Chu argues that vCloud is a platform that is supported by a broad range of third-party service providers, including British Telecom, Saavis, Rackspace, Terremark, and others.

The second failing of Windows Azure Chu sees is the lack of support for applications and platforms that aren't based on the .NET framework. "[With vCloud] we're looking to support a broad range of existing applications...without forcing customers to rewrite applications, or to only have certain kinds of apps, "says Chu. "VMware's products are already providing a platform that people are using to deploy internal clouds, and that our partners are already using to create external clouds."

Virtualization for SAP Solutions: Workforce VMware founded by German SAP User Group (DSAG)

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 09:04:32 +0000

Due to the great demand of VMware Virtualization in the SAP community, The German SAP User Group (DSAG) founded the "Workforce VMware" to further develop solutions for customers regarding virtualization and gather customer feedback. For the first meeting we expected 20 customers, but more than 280 signed up. We are currently working on the logistics of this meeting in Walldorf on December 11. You can find more information here.

Matthias

VMTN Blog: Join us Wednesday - EMC's Chad Sakac at the VMware Communities Roundtable

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 07:58:53 +0000

Join us on the podcast. Wednesdays noon PST / 3pm EST / 8pm GMT. Connect info. This week with EMC's Chad Sakac. It should be free-ranging and fun. Some possible topics:

What VMware, EMC and Cisco are doing together around the Next Generation Datacenter
What's coming in vStorage
Reference Architectures for Tier 1 applications like Exchange, SQL Server, Sharepoint
What we're seeing around Disaster Recovery for VMware

VMTN Blog: So how important is LiveMigration/VMotion now?

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 07:36:56 +0000

We say this all the time, but don't listen to us, listen to other people using VMware. We will eventually look back on planned downtime (or emergency downtime for patching) like something quaint and obsolete. (What's a good example of something an admin would have to do 30 years ago that we laugh at now? Wait for your overnight batch job to come back? Load the line printer with green bar fan-fold paper? Swap giant disk platters? I'm sure you can come up with better ones. Anyway, we'll think of it like that.)

Link: It’s Just Another Layer » So how important is LiveMigration/VMotion now?.

One of Microsoft’s big marketing statements I’ve heard several times is that LiveMigration wasn’t that important since clients don’t change when they do work on hardware even with LiveMigration. I’ll cover why this in depth on why this is a flawed thought for an enterprise company in a future blog entry.

Along comes a critical use case this past week. MS08-67 came out and threw most companies I know of into some serious chaos while they rolled this patch out ASAP. Now this one does impact any Windows OS including Server Core. Anyone that would be using Hyper-V would obviously be affected right now. Let’s walk through trying to deploy this for 120 Hyper-V hosts with Quick Migration (which causes a service interruption) as fast as humanly possible with business buy-off to do this ASAP outside of Maintenance Zones.

VMTN Blog: Bonus Tip: Snapshots

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 07:17:20 +0000

Snapshots are not particular tricky, but they are often misunderstood, on both the hosted and the VI side. (I just had to clean up a huge Fusion snapshot that was really difficult -- I tried to commit my snapshot (merge it back into the base image) by deleting it, but I didn't have enough space left to make the new clean file. Oh well, I didn't need those iMovie files anymore.)

Link: VMware: Team Fusion: Bonus Tip: Snapshots.

People sometimes get confused about how snapshots work and how to use them. While snapshots are incredibly useful for many things, one major misconception is thinking that they are a form of backup - they're not! If a lightning strike totally fries your computer, a snapshot won't help if it's on the same disk (because your snapshot just got fried too). Sure, you'll probably get lucky - if your computer merely shut down uncleanly, your snapshot may still work. You might not even need to go use the snapshot. But this is not a backup, it's gambling.

Developer Center Blog: Update / Correction - Technical Note: Performance Counters

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 01:34:13 +0000

Folks - we had an update/correction on our Peformance Counters - you can download the latest doc here, it will take us a few days to upload to our doc server.
On page 6: Table 3: Performance Counters - Under column Name - consumed

Latest Version:
Document Revision 2008-Nov-03 (as indicated on the very last page)
File Name: technote_PerformanceCounters-11-03-08.pdf

____________________________________________________________

Folks,

SDK Developer Support Team has put together a pretty good Technical Note describing details on our Performance Counters. The document will live on our Tech Notes Site

CORRECT URL:

http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/1067 and be incorporated into our next SDK release.

Hope this is helpful - send us your feedback

Regards,

Pablo

Team Fusion: Make Windows Unity windows look like Mac OS X Windows: WindowsBlinds with VMware Fusion

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 21:24:25 +0000

Chris White pinged us on Twitter the other day saying that he was using WindowsBlinds to skin his VMware Fusion Unity windows (Unity demo video here) in Windows look like Mac OS X windows.

We were intrigued, and asked him to take some screenshots to share with everyone.

Chris was nice enough to do so.

Here’s a shot of Internet Explorer with a Mac OS X WindowsBlinds skin on it. The visual style is “Leo.” Hmmmm…wonder what that stands for….?

Note how the “close” “minimize” and “maximize” buttons in the upper right of the window look like Mac OS X buttons:

And in a too-meta-moment, here’s a screenshot of the WindowsBlinds UI, which has itself been skinned!

VMTN Blog: Paul Maritz: The Future of Cloud Computing | Newsweek

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 21:15:16 +0000

Link: Paul Maritz: The Future of Cloud Computing | Newsweek Technology | Newsweek.com.

NEWSWEEEK: What is VMware ' s vision of cloud computing?
Paul Maritz: You can divide the cloud today into two categories. One is the enterprise cloud, and there is one, for want of a better phrase, that I call the new-age cloud. The enterprise cloud is really about providing the opportunity for existing IT customers to take their existing workloads and have somebody else supply the underlying infrastructure … The other type of cloud is what I call the new-age cloud. This is about supporting fundamentally new applications. It's not about the current applications that are being used in the IT space. Ultimately the two will come together.

What are the biggest reasons for cloud computing to happen?
Businesses are going to want the flexibility to outsource the provisioning of infrastructure to people who can be presumably more efficient at it than they can be. The motivation is going to come really from having other people provide the "plumbing"—power, the day-to-day management, the reliability, uptime and so forth. Businesses will want to have the option of moving their application loads into, and equally importantly back out of, this outsourced infrastructure as they see fit.

Team Fusion: VMware Fusion 201: Preallocated Virtual Disks

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 20:20:32 +0000

Last time I covered sparse virtual disks. This time, let's look at the other option: preallocated virtual disks.

If you recall, the main advantage of sparse disks is that space is not grabbed upfront, but rather as needed. A preallocated disk, on the other hand, is (as you might expect) preallocated. You tell Fusion that the virtual disk should be 10 GB, and Fusion goes off and grabs 10 GB of disk space. Performance may be slightly better with a preallocated disk.

There are fewer problems with fragmentation on a preallocated virtual disk. As you might recall, there are three layers where a sparse virtual disk can get fragmented: the guest filesystem, the .vmdk file, and the host filesystem. A preallocated disk avoids fragmentation at the .vmdk file level, and fragmentation at the host OS filesystem level will not grow worse over time (since Fusion already grabbed all the disk space, there's no need to get more). For best results, you can defragment the host filesystem before creating a preallocated virtual disk to make sure it's as contiguous as possible.

Having a preallocated disk doesn't mean that your virtual machine will always be the same size, however. The most obvious example is that taking a snapshot or using AutoProtect will increase the needed space, and snapshots tend to grow over time.

Personally, I stick with sparse virtual disks. I like the flexibility of having extra space, which lets me keep more virtual machines at the same time than if I had to commit all that space right away. The only downside is that I have to be a little more careful about not running out of space, but I keep enough free that it's never a problem.

VI Powershell Blog: Ever wonder how big your snapshots are?

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 21:28:33 +0000

I often call snapshots "the silent datastore killer". When you create a snapshot, the system records the difference between the current state and the state when the snapshot was made in something called a delta file. The delta file can grow to be as big as the base disk itself if you write a lot of data to it. If you create a snapshot of that snapshot, the process begins again, and that snapshot can also grow to be as big as the base disk.

I've personally filled up many a drive with snapshots that I've forgotten about. When your datastores fill up, any VM trying to expand files on that datastore (for example if it has snapshots it is trying to grow) will freeze until some space becomes available. It's a real disaster and I've even heard of people going so far as to disable snapshots entirely.

The trouble is that VI Client doesn't give you an easy way to figure out how big snapshots are. Even if it did, do you really want to sift through dozens or hundreds of VMs on a regular basis looking for big snapshots manually? We need automation to solve this problem.

A new cmdlet in the VI Toolkit Extensions can help. Get-TkeSnapshotExtended adds a property called SizeMB to snapshot objects. To use it, load the VI Toolkit Extensions (in PowerShell v2 CTP2 or higher) and run

Get-VM | Get-TkeSnapshotExtended | Select Name, VM, SizeMB

Here's some sample output:

Hope that helps!