Microsoft Mythbusters Top 10 VMware Myths

I had just read through some articles and watch the video from Microsoft about the top 10 VMware Myths today, I would like to share my thoughts about the video details published by Microsoft with unbiased opinions.

The guys talked about Live Migration on HyperV on the next release. As a customer, I am always believed that the software provider should only commit and tell the customers when their products are ready, and not always tell the customer WE ARE READY IN THE NEXT RELEASE. This only explain as your product is not ready, what about your next release is in 2 years time? That meant the products is not as promise as you publish to the customers. Please take note that VMware had supported Storage VMotion for current version, which is another step beyond of Live Migration.

Cluster File system from Microsoft today will be far behind if we compare with the fault tolerance in vSphere. This is only able to match with what VMware had been done in the pass and not creating new technology into their product. They should take more innovative to come out something that VMware doesn't.

HyperV is not scalable as VMware does? This could be right depend how you want this to be compared. In virtual infrastructure, HA and DRS are both important pieces in the production environment which promise the load balancing and High availability. ESX 3.5 support up to 32 ESX host per clusters, which I think HyperV is not comparable at all. I think HyperV is far behind in term of the technology which customers are demanding. They may able to target the crowd which plan for development, test and training environment to be virtualized on HypverV, but not mission critical production systems. You can easily run 1000 of web server in the front end without HA or clustering to serve your web site today, with additional load balancer in the market which auto redirect the traffic to the servers, therefore when 100 / 1000 servers are down, and your web should still reachable. There is nothing should be proud to tell the customer how many Virtual Machine from Hyper V is currently running the Microsoft website. To run a web server in virtual machine today, is very common and not big deal at all.

About reliability, if we compare the system uptime for Linux and windows, which machine will we rebooted most and patch it most? I think you and myself should have the right answer in the mind. Even if VMware is utilizing the similar amount of resource to power up the ESX, but do remember, VMware perform smartly in term of resources management. It will smartly manage the resources to give the maximum utilization of the hardware you invested, plus higher ratio of consolidation. Of course, it does provide flexibilities to reserve the right amount of resources if require.

HyperV has the advantage to run on any hardware you like. This is something that VMware does not provide, as we are required to follow the HCL from VMware for each version of ESX we deploy. In most case, will we actually run our production virtual infrastructure to serve business need on a custom made server? or a mixture parts from multiple vendor which didn't fully tested of compatible purpose? Most customers today will buy the servers from DELL, HP, IBM and etc, which provide the best compatible from technology from motherboards, memory, CPU, storage and etc, which had been certified and tested before they sell to the customers. This had significant improved the server life spend and productivity. Therefore, I will conclude this advantages from HyperV does not really concern myself to select them as the hypervisor in our data center.

Management wise, I think they are trying to over sell their system center, which is a big step to lock customers down to their so call SCCM for everything in your environment. Why will you need to have pure microsoft to run in your organization while there are plenty of products available to be more reliable, cheaper and efficient. In our environment, we are trying to avoid to run Microsoft as much as possible due to the costly licensing term they apply to the customers. We run 85% of our system in Linux environment today, and I should said SCCM is not the right tools to manage my physical or virtual environment. If you want me to choose between Altiris and SCCM, Altiris might be a better choice to myself. SCCM may meant more to the pure Microsoft platform environment usage.

There are certainly more comments I can put here regarding the video I watched, but I think is just too tired to write up everything here. I think you guys who read this should have your personal opinion. My thought here is meant for share and more towards my environment. You may think differently from myself as the environment that you run may be different. Enjoy the video.

Offline VM Migration auto convert RDM to VMDK format

Due to some reconfiguration work we performed on our Virtual Infrastructure, we had required to relocate some of the VM to a different datastore. These VMs which required to be moved had been attached with Raw Device Mapping (RDM). Previously I thought the offline storage migration will not move the RDM over to the datastore as RDM is referring to the raw device from the SAN storage.Actually I was planned to convert the RDM to VMDK which I planned to manual transfer the files I need from RDM to the new virtual disk I created.

In a test yesterday, we found that a offline VM migration will auto convert the RDM which attach to the virtual machine to the VMDK format when I selected the data store to be moved in offline mode. This was really surprise myself and simplify my work actually, as I do not require some manual file transfer from the RDM to the new virtual disk.

Oracle to buy Sun Microsystem

Break news today which shocked most of the IT folks as Oracle had announced to buy over Sun Microsystems for 9.50 a share. I am really shocked to see this as last week, we were still talked about the deal called off with the possible merging from Sun Microsystems with IBM, which may end up IBM monopolize some high end computing market. Oracle could make a good move by taking over Sun. This may direct or indirect many environment which related to Virtualization, Java and MYSQL which is the strength of Sun Microsystems. There are chances to reduce the dependency of Oracle to Redhat and Enterprise Linux and move over to Sun Solaris or open solaris. This is more positive VS the buy over that suggested by IBM previously.

Oracle is no longer a software company today. With buy over for Sun Microsystems, they will able to deliver the hardware, platform, software, database, virtualization and etc. I think they will be more aggressive strategy to move themselves into the virtualization and integration market which may end up competing themselves with their partner such as VMware. This will definitely heat up the market or virtualization and hypervisor competition.

6 cores limitation per socket for vSphere enterprise

As the new licensing model from VMware vsphere 4, it clearly show that you may require additional 620USD per sockets to entitle yourself for the enterprise plus if which come with 12 cores per sockets, host profiles, distribution switch and etc.

For existing enterprise users, they will no longer entitle everything as they did in the past due to the new scheme that will apply by vmware. There is a clause which stated by the official documentation released from vmware.

" vSphere Enterprise is available for USD$2,875 per one processor with up to six cores for use on a server with up to 256GB of memory. "

This clearly stated as six cores per sockets is the max you can go if you are previous or new enterprise customer. Here is the concern now, as six cores is in the market now, and soon we will see 8 cores and 12 cores in the market too. When the hardware technology improve and provide more cores per CPU, we will end up require to pay for additional charges to entitle the features due to this licensing model.

Personal point of view, to provide alternative licensing model with new features should be acceptable, but it shouldn't fix the limit for number of cores to be allowed in each CPU sockets licenses. A customer may end to pay more not because the new features they really need, it may just purely due to the maximum number of cores per socket is allowed. I hope VMware should reconsider the clause they had included in the release.

Calculation of Max LUN Supported in ESX Server

I found my ESX servers could not recover the 65th LUNs that I tried to present to it and myself did log a support call and still pending the reply from VMWare. Beside that, I found another interesting article with the details below.

Article Copy from VMWare

In Multipathing Configurations the Number of Paths Per LUNIs Inconsistent
The hpsa driver in ESX Server might reduce the number of supportable LUNs below the expected maximum limit of 256 when the controller is used in multipath configurations. In multiplath configurations, if all four paths are configured, the total supportable LUNs is reduced to 64. In certain multipath configurations, because each target path consumes an available LUN slot, the total number of supportable LUNs might be reduced to 60.

Workaround
Reduce the number of LUNs on a server until the product of LUNs and paths is less than 256 (LUNs * Number of paths < 256), and if necessary, reduce the LUN count depending on use of multipath until each LUN has the expected number of paths.
The following example shows a configuration with the maximum supportable LUNs presented to an ESX Server installation on four paths, providing all LUNs with the expected number of usable paths:
Path 1: 63 LUNs seen through this path; Total LUN count (63 + 1 path) is less than 256
Path 2: 63 LUNs seen through this path; Total LUN count (63 + 63 + 2 paths) is less than 256
Path 3: 63 LUNs seen through this path; Total LUN count (63 + 63 + 63 + 3 paths) is less than 256
Path 4: 63 LUNs seen through this path; Total LUN count (63 + 63 + 63 + 63 + 4 paths) = 256

If I do use the formula above to calculate my environment, yes, I am at the full limit of 256 LUNs. I have 2 ESX servers which only have 2 HBA connection, and had no problem to present more than 67 physical LUNs to it until now. What I had done now is, I removed 2 HBA connection from each of my ESX servers, and run the rescan, and I found that the LUN is presented as I expected. Again, I am not confirmed with the solution yet and will do another round confirmation with the VMware engineer on this.

Manual commit snapshots delta file to vmdk flat file

I had a tough time this week to deal with the snapshot issue with one of the VM. The VM is containing an important snapshot that previously taken for system restoration. When I browsed through the snapshot manager from vCenter, the system show my VM was running without any snapshots. Here was the kicked start of my problem and excited journey until I managed to recover it this morning.

I tried to SSH to the ESX host and browse to the specified datastore, and I found the snapshot file which end with file extension .vmsn were available in the correct location. No matter how many times I tried and rebooted my Virtual center, the snapshot were not visible to the snapshot manager still.

I read through some articles and forums which suggested to clone the snapshot by using vmkfstools -i option, but it didn't success in my case here, and I continue my research and here I found a useful blog post from 1 of the blogger Oliver O'Boyle who experienced similar issue previously.

After I read through his article, which explained the chain within the CID and parent CID, it does help me to resolve my issues. I found that the root cause of my VM was due to the snapshot problem & vmdk config file corruption. For snapshot issues, we can recreate a new snapshots and we select to delete all snapshot afterward, it should force the vmdk flat files and delta files to be committed. In 1 of the virtual hard disk, we experience difficulty as the ESX servers will force the virtual HDD to be detached from the VM. The root cause of that was caused by the file missing on the parent file which should be VMxxxx.vmdk.

During this troubleshooting, you should ensure that the delta files and flat files are always retained and not overwritten. There are 2 delta files which end with VMxxxxx-000001.vmdk and VMxxxxx-000001-delta.vmdk. Your flat file should end with VMxxxxx-flat.vmdk. The 1st thing I did, was to ensure the virtual disk was able to re-attached the vm. I had manually created a new vmdk config file follow the guide from the Oliver O'Boyle, and I copy the parent CID and virtual disk value number require. I had manually configured the link within .vmdk and the flat file. After that, I was able to attach the virtual disk back to the VM from virtual center. Please take note that the virtual center will not see the flat files as the attachable virtual disk, as vCenter recognize the virtual disk base on the location of .vmdk. Recommended to keep the .vmdk and flat file within same datastore. You can also relocate the vmdk files to different datastore if you wish to do so.

Once the virtual disk had been attached to the VM, boot up the VM immediately. Please log in to the system and ensure everything is in normal and functioning correctly. The data I contained now, wasn't the latest data I needed as the result of the missing snapshot which was not committed by the system. Now, I take a new snapshot for my entire VM. Once I had done that, datastore in SSH showed up with plenty of delta files and newly created VMDK files which end with VMxxxxxxx-000003.vmdk and so on.

Here are the steps been taken to commit the snapshots manually

1. Power off the VM
   
2. Right click the VM and select edit settings from vCenter and select the virtual disk that you are trying to recover. The system will show which vmdk files this virtual disk is pointing to
3. Copy down the file names and go back to your SSH screen
4. Replace the VMDK and delta files that you previous retain from your original snapshots which you are recovering with the FILE NAMES that you copy on step 2
5. Open up the snapshot manager for the VM, and select delete all snapshots option. This process will take time as it depend the size of your delta files require to be committed.
6. It should stuck at 95 % or time out, but the system will still continue to commit the delta files back to the flat files. In my case, it took more than 2 hours to delete the snapshot
7. I noticed the ESX server load and disks activity increased from the performance chart
8. Once it completed, all the delta files will be deleted and everything should be back to normal
9. Power on the VM and double check all the data and mount point and I found the system was back to normal

Fault tolerance on Windows 2008

Fault tolerance had been recently added as an optional features on windows 2008 which provide a similar features to the Tandem Non Stop concept to minimize the system down time from minutes to seconds. As we notice, this technology will be down the road by VMWare on the next release ESX 4. I not sure whether Microsoft will consider to offer this in the virtual environment rather than the physical, as more users is more interesting in Virtual Vs Physical Servers today. Let's see what will be the next from Microsoft, innovative portion, I m glad to see this from Microsoft.

Windows 7 available for public beta

Windows 7 had been available for public beta. You can obtain a copy of this through the MSDN access or https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/subscriptions/securedownloads/default.aspx

I just installed a VM in my ESX servers and found the performance is good if compare to Vista. I will spend more time to reimage my current workstation from Vista to windows 7 for further test out. Hope Microsoft will learn from the disaster Vista and really deliver the useable version of Windows 7 for the next release.

Balance in between In source and Out source for IT services

Recent big news and the hottest topic of the financial and IT market globally is really focusing on the Satyam Computers financial scandal which similar to Enron previously. It had significant impact to the client who use the services from Satyam for their day to day operation. Personally, I will see that the impact to the company who use Satyam as their IT our source vendor, which may result the significant cost increase as they original plan. Now is time for the company to reconsider the balance in between outsource and in source. This topic is nothing new to the world as always some claim outsource is better and some claim in source is better.

My point here is, both of them is the same, at the end of the day, CIO or CEO will only interesting to manage the figure of operation expenses as well as the result to be able to achieve. Problem of choosing which is the better deal in term of outsource or in source is purely base on people issues. IT is a business, is generating revenue and stop thinking IT as a COST will help the company and the business to grow faster than the competitor. Non of the success company today is not rely on their IT infrastructure to simplify and automate the business process with 24x7x365 availabilities. The Satyam case had provided the alert to the management to rethink the best option to run the IT services to the business. I am always believe the balance in between in source and outsource will help the operation rather that rely fully on 3rd party vendor.

Microsoft will lay off 15000 employees

Latest news I watch today, Microsoft will lay off 15000 employees worldwide. It will be consider a Big "Present" to the employee with the new start of Year 2009. 17% of the lay off will be impacted to the MSN team as the source told. Personal point of view, it had been cash, stock price as well as revenue issue with Microsoft and force to make such a decision at this time could drive the situation in US to be worst.

Laptop Shipments Exceed Desktops For The First Time

I just read the article from the web and found this interesting news. Had been a while we discuss all the time about laptop, desktop, workstation and thin client. We see the significant grow for the number of laptop in the market VS desktop and the 1st time we see the number of laptop had been overtake the desktop. Personally, here is my opinion. Laptop today is good enough to handle most of the activities require to be performed for personal and work related today thanks to the competion from Intel and AMD, as well as the graphic chip from Intel, ATI & nvidia which is too powerful for most of the users. Desktop, is not mobile type and is not green in my point of view. Therefore, I am not a big fans of desktop, unless for gaming purpose. Of course the desktop will not been dissapear in the market for now, but it will significant reduce as it may not be the favour for major users today.

Wipro Take over the IT services Company from Citigroup

Latest new from informationweek.com that the Citigroup had been agreed with a deal of $ 127 Million. Many of the discussion now had been started to talk about the job availabilities after this deal. As many of us aware, to further reduce operation expenses in IT, offshore the IT support to Asia will be the choices as it is really tough for the current economy. At the same time, the impact of this news will also reduce the job vacancy for US who work for Citigroup. Is really interesting to monitor the followup status of this deal and hopefully will not create another massive lay off in US because of the deal.

VMware ESX 4 New features

According to VMware, the future of the VMware Enterprise Edition Virtualization which name as ESX 4 will be launched earlier next year, will contain some of the features which been show case during the seminar to the public. Below is some of the information which had been shared by VMware for reference

1. 64 bits kernel VS the current 32 bits kernel on ESX server
2. Thin Provisioning
3. Fault Tolerance
4. 8 way virtual SMP
5. 256 GB memory per single VM

There are also more to come in the roadmap of year 2009 which will specify on the vcloud, virtual data center and etc. At lease for today, this had been public demostrate to the end user about some of the technology roadmap and features in the next version. ESX 4 is still under private beta test at this moment, which aim to be launched at 1st quater next year.

VMware Workstation 6.5.1 Release

VMware had just official released the Workstation 6.5.1. There are some new features will be impress with the latest build number of 126130

For more information, please view it over at the link below

VMware Workstation 6.5.1

VMware Server 2.0

VMware Server 2.0 is free and open source version, which is different with enterprise ESX 3i which also a free version from VMware. In term to utilize VMware server 2.0, you will require to have a Windows or Linux install on your machine or server, and install VMware Server 2.0 on top of the operating system to enable the hypervisor to be executed. This is different with ESX 3i which is not require any Operating System to be installed.

We may see this is comparison which compete with VMware workstation 6.5 which recently launched. If you ask my opinion, I will say that both are on different product range. VMware Server 2 can be consider as alternative to the business users, who may not need the advance technology & features to simplify their IT environment with minimal administration require. This product is more suitable for the Small Medium Enterprise users which may not have a Data Center for their working location. I will say that a Junior IT professional will easily able to manage the VMware Server and take the opportunity as a entry level for Enterprise Virtualization with VMware Server 2. Besides that, it does provide opportunity for every users to have virtualization in place for their business to provide better ROI in term of hardware investment and utilization.

If we look VMware workstation, it provide more features and ability to the IT pro users to perform their test and development environment on their laptop, workstation or desktop which reduce the amount of servers require for a corporate to perform their application development. Somehow, ESX is targeting Enterprise level, 3i is provide for free which some cases we may not require VMotion and HA capability.Management wise, Workstation is simple and easy. You may not require to browse through the web console and easily can be launched as a program from your machine, but you will lost the administration features on the network. VMware Workstation has ACE integrated, drag and drop features and etc, which may not require for most of the VMware Server users for hosting purpose. VMware Server 2 will require a web browser for your management, and you able to manage it through LAN network. There is a tomcat installed while you configure you VMware server at the 1st time.

As well, you may compare the VMware Server 2 with XEN hypervisor free version. I believe in term of features, VMware always have better comparison. User freindly & Reliability are always important for a consumer when they consider the investment to a certain software.

Equallogic VS FC SAN

Economy Crisis this year has encouraged users to consider the ISCSI SAN Vs FC SAN today. Data Storage growth will never stop unless the business is stop. In order to keep the environment growth, the IT architect will have to provide a cost effective solution in the finance critical timing like now.

Performance wise, we may know that the Equallogic ISCSI might not beat the huge SAN box which easily cost you double as your TCO on ISCSI. I would like to share my finding relevant on the features it bundle with equallogic. In FC SAN, we are able to achive performance and functionality, which require always additional license cost and expensive infrastrucutre to support it. Today, ISCSI provide more flexibility in term of FC due to the common understanding we all have on the IP technology which we deal with it everyday.

In Equallogic ISCSI, you will entitle every features which bundle together with the storages you purchase.

• Snapshot Volume Manager
• Thin Provisioning
• Raid 5, Raid 50, Raid 10
  
• Auto Load Balancing
• Web Base Console
• DR Replication
• Storage Replication
• Volume Clone

The details of the available features is more than what I am stated here of course. Imagine if you own a FC SAN today, you may end up paying additional charges for every piece of licenses you require of the functionality. Beside this, Virtualization and VMware is become a main player for every Data Center today. Same with Equallogic, it had also become a powerful competitor to compete with the major vendor like Netapps, EMC, HP, HDS, IBM and etc.

Whithout comparing the cost and performance, I am really impress with the simplify management provided by Equallogic. You will not require to be long waiting of the web console, and it is user friendly and easy to be managed. Compare to FC SAN, you will require certain level of skillsets and patient for administration which you may suffer from the slow loading from the console always. Additional to that, FC SAN will become slower when the number of spindle and workload is increase, but equallogic has it advantage with every array will increase the processing power and throughput. Personal experience, I am only require less than 10 minutes to setup and configure my Equallogic Storage array, and able to start provisioning right after the configuration done. Is Really Fast!!

I run the performance test on my ESX server to compare the I/O performance Vs FC SAN, I realize that the performance is acceptable with the amount of money we pay for it. Simply becoz you may not virtualize the servers which require the real I/O intensive performance. I am able to achieve approximately 140MB/s with FC SAN for read/write, with Equallogic, I manage to achieve 115MB/s as maximum throughput in my VM. Again, this may be impacted due to the software ISCSI initiator. ISCSI HBA will able to improve the performance with minimize the overhead on ESX host. For my test, I only manage to run with single array. If we have more array in the future, it will able to increase the disk performance and storage throughput. 10Gb Ethernet are also on the way to the market next year. Equallogic are also design for SRM solution which provide by VMware to simplify the DR solution. With this storage solution, we will no longer require a big pipe for SAN storage replication as we did for the FC SAN previously.

Latest array PS 5500E are providing 48TB in RAW with SATA, which will be a good option for DR solution to provide cheaper hardware cost & better functionality. If I has been asked to reduce my CAPEX for SAN purchase, the only option I can think now is ISCSI as my option. Cisco 3750 is the recommended switches for DELL Equallogic, it is much more cheaper if we compare to the brocade FC SAN swithces.

Never the less, FC SAN are still the best option in term of reliable and performance, but as it is a tough time now for budget spending, I believe Equallogic has provide us an additional option with limited budget.

Storage Thin Provisioning

Most of the software and storage are supporting think provisioning today. As most of us know that this features provide the users to fully utilize the available storage for the business. Previously, we may consume extra storage space which is idle or unused due to the risk of storage grow rapidly always. In order to re size the partition of the production system, it always require a down time of production to minimize the risk of data corruption.

Today, with thin provisioning, we will able to forecast the storage allocation as usual which include the buffer require for storage grow, which even allow the administrator to increase the percentage of buffer for every volume it created. Without putting extra money on the storage system, we will able to achieve by using thin provisioning. Example I may have a LUN with 1TB usable storage, but I will able to assign total of 5TB to five different servers which contain 1TB each. As long as the initial data consume is within 1TB, it will be fine. Beside that, the thin provisioning will have the intelligent to increase the actual allocation automatically on the fly, which is no down time. From OS perspective, it will always recognize as 1TB no matter on Windows or Linux, this has provide a down time saving for our business today. Of course, the storage will provide monitoring features to ensure the capacity warning is alert before it full, therefore, the storage administrator will able to add the storage to the environment on actual consume basis.

Netware 6.5 on VMware

Netware 6.5 on VMware is not new thing. But you will find that is not allowed to have more than 1 Vcpu per VM by default. Actually there is ways to overcome this as you normally can't fo it through virtual center. VMware workstation allow you to change the number of Vcpu as usual. But, on ESX server is different. You may need to log in to the web access to specify host or virtual center, and power off the virtual machine. On the web console, you can edit the number or Virtual CPU from 1 to 2 or 4. Then you power up the VM again, and now you will able to see the extra Vcpu you added just now. Go back to the virtual center, you should able to see the extra cpu too. VMware not recommend to have more than 1 Vcpu per VM for netware as it has some performance impact on host level and is proven during my personal test on it. The CPU utilization on host will be very high consistantly but it only consume 5% from the VM level.

DELL Equallogic PS5500E provide Auto Snapshot Manager for VMware

The latest version of ISCSI SAN Equallogic PS 5500E which launched recently had provide better capacity, performance, extra functionality and more spindles in arrays. It could be support both 500GB and 1TB SATA II spindles up to 48 drives in a single array of 4U. A very impress usable storage space in single array which up to 48TB in Raw. If we compare to the capacity, it is hardly found that a single array would provide a huge capacity at 48TB in Raw today. In additional to that, DELL had provide all the necessary features as for storage management as free which integrated as part of the storage purchase for equallogic ISCSI SAN. The latest features is regarding the Snapshot Manager for VMware. Previous version is only supported on Microsoft environment, but now, it had also supported on VMWare environment.

This features provide more option which will allow the users to snapshot, backup, and restore the files, volume, VM or even a single file that you need. Many of us may think about using the VCB for our VM backup today, the equallogic had provide some interesting package which allow us to avoid of VCB in our environment, and provide better backup and restoration process.

If we talk about disk base backup, which is VTL, it always cost involve in term of disk space and software licenses. With the latest features from Equallogic, we will able to avoid the extra investment require on VTL, but provide the similar functionality on disk base backup, and from disk to tape backup. If I bought the equallogic previously and sign up with the maintenance, I entitle the upgrade of the new features today. It will be a excellent surprise for my investment. As economy crisis, IT budget is been tight and require to work smarter, this should be a great news for the consumers. Personally, I will still say that the 10Gbe will be my option as to get rid of the fiber channel storage that we current use for VMware. As 48 spindles in a single array, we may need the bigger through put from the array to reach the client always.

According to DELL, we should able to see the official launch on 10Gbe but 1st quater of 2009.

VMware Increase Research Development Staff in China

According to the latest news from China, VMware is increasing the number of staff in China for R & D due to the high demand market which is double digits growing every year in China.

For more information, please read the related news here.

VMware China