February 2008

Andrew Kutz has published a guide to developing plugins for VMware Infrastructure 3.5.  More information on the developers guide is available in this blog posting from Andrew on the Virtualization Pro site.

The developers guide is the result of Andrew’s work in creating plugins for VI3 version 3.5. The first plugin was a plugin for Storage VMotion, which was released about a week or so ago. Since that time, Andrew has also released a plugin for creating port groups across multiple ESX Servers.

Good work, Andrew!

In part 2 of my informal discussion about getting things done with my Mac, I mentioned that I needed a way to invoke an AppleScript from within NetNewsWire. I was already using Mail Act-On and an AppleScript to easily move information from Mail.app into OmniFocus, and had a similar AppleScript for NNW but no easy way to invoke it.

It wasn’t until late last night that I realized I already had a solution for the problem I’d been describing. I’d been searching for some way to quickly and easily invoke an AppleScript from within NetNewsWire—why not just use a Quicksilver Trigger?

I already use Quicksilver for tons of other things: accessing my Camino bookmarks (would love to be able to get to my Camino history…hint, hint); launching applications; getting information on a contact in the Address Book; even launching other scripts for various tasks. Why not leverage Quicksilver for this as well?

Just a few minutes later—the process only took a few minutes in the Quicksilver Preferences pane to configure the trigger—and I was quickly and easily moving information from NetNewsWire to OmniFocus.

Thank goodness for Quicksilver!

Before I begin the second installation of Virtualization Short Takes, I thought it was interesting to note that Thomas Bishop over at ScaleTheMind.com has adopted a similar strategy. There’s just so much happening that it’s truly impossible to discuss everything in depth. Even so, it’s often helpful to at least provide the readers with the links and some additional thoughts. It seems like this approach may be the best one to use. I’m certainly open to everyone’s thoughts.

So, on to today’s list of virtualization-related links:

• Frane Borozan has launched p2vbackup.com, a site that describes the process for incorporating virtualization into your backup and recovery process. I haven’t had the time to review the site fully yet, but what I’ve seen looks pretty good.
• Either Duncan Epping at Yellow Bricks just has really bad luck, or he has some sort of link into the VMware Knowledge Base so that he knows when new articles are published. If it’s the former, then his misfortune is our good fortune, as he’s pointed out a potential problem with Storage VMotion that can cause the storage migration to fail and the VM will then not power on. The associated VMware KB article is also available.
• Lou Springer has written a paper on estimating workload consolidation and placement without the use of VMware Capacity Planner. Truth be told, there are organizations that cannot, for whatever reason, leverage Capacity Planner. Lou’s document describes some alternative approaches and some ways of mitigating the risks of those alternative approaches.
• Again via Duncan, here’s some good information on recovering VMFS partitions when you’ve forgotten to set “automount disable” on the Windows-based VCB proxy server. It seems like I recall seeing somewhere that automount was disabled by default on the Standard edition of Windows Server 2003, but enabled on Enterprise. Can anyone confirm that? By the way, it looks like Windows Server 2008 will default to automount enabled.
• And while we’re talking about storage, check out this information from Duncan on Dell’s DRAC Virtual Media functionality and its interaction with VMware ESX Server. Anyone seen similar behavior from HP iLO?
• Via VMblog.com, I saw that Catbird had announced their HypervisorShield, which “is the first virtualized security technology that can monitor and control access to the hypervisor network”. OK, sounds nifty, but I have to side with Christofer Hoff on this one. What exactly is Catbird saying here? Are they protecting the Service Console network interface(s), the VMkernel interface(s), the vSwitches, or something else entirely? Personally, I’m going to wait until I can see more information to make a judgment call on this one.

That’s it for this edition. Feel free to submit any thoughts, suggestions, or rants in the comments below. Thanks for reading!

UPDATE: My recollection on the status of automount in Windows Server 2003 was incorrect. It is enabled by default in Standard, and disabled by default in Enterprise. Thanks to the readers to helped set me straight!

A short while ago I wrote about how I was trying a new way of getting things done on my Mac. Since I published that blog entry, I’ve made some progress on wrapping myself around some of the tools and addressing some of the shortcomings I’d found. Since there may be others out there facing the same situation, I thought it would be useful to share my experience here.

First, I moved back to OmniFocus. While I really liked the idea of “Areas” within Things, it just didn’t seem as robust as OF. Since my work life is no longer driven solely by finite projects that start and end at defined times (usually!), I’m using the projects within OF as areas of responsibility. For example, I’m responsible for creating reference architectures for the deployment of virtualization solutions, so “Reference Architectures” is one of my projects. Within that project, I’ll have any actions related to developing or designing reference architectures. This seemed to make the most sense to me and so far has worked well.

Oh, and kudos to the great folks at Omnigroup, who were nice enough to provide an extended trial license for OmniFocus. With something like this, where you are adjusting your own personal workflow and creating new habits, a 15 day trial just isn’t going to cut it. It was nice to see them recognize that.

The second major issue that I had was getting information into OmniFocus. Using these AppleScripts and these AppleScripts, I was able to cobble together a handy solution:

• I modified an AppleScript to use with Mail Act-On, so that I can quickly create OF actions from Mail.app. Since a lot of my actions are generated by e-mail, this allows me to quickly and easily add items to OF. This has helped me, for the first time in a very long time, to get my inbox to zero.
• I modified another AppleScript for use with NetNewsWire so that I can quickly create OF actions from NNW. If anyone has any insight on how to bind that script to a keystroke within NNW, that would be awesome. (I need something like Mail Act-On for the whole system.)
• I occasionally use the “Send to OmniFocus” script within Quicksilver as well. At some point I plan to update this script to include Growl support. Both of the scripts mentioned above—for both Mail and NetNewsWire—were hacked to include Growl support.

I don’t use the Clippings Service that much, although I may start using that more. It’s possible to assign a keystroke to that, right? I haven’t tried that yet; perhaps a combination of a keystroke for the Clippings Service along with my Mail Act-On rule and script will work even better.

The only area that I feel like I’m still not doing quite so well with is the idea of contexts. I feel like I’m still having problems defining useful contexts. So much of my time is spent at the computer, so I can’t really use a context like “Computer”. Some contexts make perfect sense; for example, I can’t work on the virtualization lab unless I’m in the virtualization lab. The other contexts, though, don’t seem quite so clear-cut. Any feedback from any “GTD’ers” out there is certainly welcome.

Moving forward, I’ll continue to tweak the AppleScripts that I’m using for getting information into OmniFocus, and I’ll be searching for an application like EagleFiler, Together, Yojimbo, or the like to help with storing and organizing information. I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that to really be effective, I need an application like OmniFocus to help me track and work through my tasks, and an application to help me store, organize, and retrieve information. Again, I’m certainly open to any recommendations from readers.

Andrew Kutz has launched viplugins.com, a home for developing and distributing plugins for VirtualCenter 2.5. This launch comes on the heels of the recently released Storage VMotion plugin, which provides a graphical interface to Storage VMotion.

Quoting from the site:

Welcome to your first and last stop on this wide world of webs for all of your VMware Infrastructure (VI) plugin needs…therefore invite all soon-to-be, current, future (whenever you are reading this) VI plugin developers to make this site the “goto” location for VI plugin development.

In addition, Andrew’s released the Add Port Groups plugin, which helps automate the creation of port groups across multiple ESX Servers.

Good work, Andrew!

Here I thought I was getting a scoop, but it appears that the e-mail I received regarding the Storage VMotion plugin for VirtualCenter 2.5 was distributed to a few others as well.

This new plugin goes above and beyond the previous GUI for Storage VMotion by integrating directly into VirtualCenter. While not fully tested, it is expected to be fully functional, and this VMware Communities thread seems to indicate that it’s working reasonably well for users thus far.

Kudos to Schley Andrew Kutz for his work on creating this plugin.

Rich Brambley over at vmetc.com has recently published some information taken from the VMware Authorized Consultant guides regarding the recommended partitioning scheme for ESX Server 3.x (not ESX Server 3i). It was good to see that this information closely mirrored the recommended partitioning configuration I’d developed myself.

In fact, I think that the only substantive change in the VAC guidelines from my own guidelines was the size of the swap partition. Anyone care to share their thoughts on the size of the swap partition? How many of you increase the size of the swap partition? How many leave it at the default?

Otherwise, the recommendations to create separate partitions—and the recommended sizes—for /var, /tmp, and /home fell right in line with what I’d already been using. My sizes were typically a bit larger for /tmp and /home, but otherwise were very comparable.

Thanks to Rich for getting that information disseminated.

Via Nick, it looks like the next version of Citrix XenServer (version 4.1, currently in beta) will have a new feature called Storage Delivery Services that is designed to take full advantage of some of the features of NetApp storage systems. Quoting from the Citrix datasheet:

The adapter uses native NetApp APIs to implement XenAPI storage operations that provide access to hardware provisioning and snapshotting directly, without the proprietary layer that complicates management in other products.

To put that in normal English that people can understand, Citrix has written an “adapter” that talks directly to Data ONTAP to enable XenServer to take full advantage of functionality such as Snapshots, FlexVols, and FlexClones directly from Xen management tools. This allows Xen management tools that use the XenAPI to provision VMs using cloning functionality in the storage hardware, for example. And it can do that without some of the drawbacks that come from the use of storage system functionality to provision VMs (I describe some advantages and disadvantages here and here).

This is pretty significant, in my mind, and definitely gives Citrix XenServer a hand up on VMware who, so far, has continued to remain storage agnostic. Of course, by remaining storage agnostic, they’ve also chosen to forgo the benefits of tying directly into the storage hardware.

Virtualization is about using your hardware more effectively. That should include your storage as well.

It would appear that Bob Plankers of LoneSysAdmin and I are thinking along the same lines.  Shortly after I posted a brief notice of the Storage VMotion GUI, Bob posted a rant on the overall quality of VirtualCenter 2.5.  In Bob’s words, I don’t even have to post, because he said exactly what I was going to say.

I didn’t hesitate to proclaim my disappointment in the Remote CLI, but I had hesitated to post my disappointments regarding other aspects of version 2.5 of VirtualCenter.  It’s slower than earlier versions on the same hardware, and overall it feels…unfinished.  Almost like VMware rushed to get this out the door too quickly, perhaps as if they were feeling the pressure from Citrix/XenSource, Microsoft, and Virtual Iron and felt like they absolutely must get this software out before it’s completely done.  After reading Bob’s post, I’m glad to see I’m not the only one feeling this way.

It’s all through the product.  VMware introduces support for jumbo frames, but only for virtual machines—not for the VMkernel to use with iSCSI or NFS datastores, where it could really help.  VMware gives us Storage VMotion, but hobbles it with the Remote CLI.

C’mon, VMware, there’s no need to rush things.  Organizations use your products because they are rock-solid and they provide the essential functionality required.  Focus on the solidity.  Capitalize on existing strengths.  Shore up weakness, but don’t introduce new weaknesses during the process.  Only then will you be able to fend off Microsoft’s “good enough” hypervisor bundled with every copy of Windows Server 2008 Enterprise.

So it’s clear that Bob and I aren’t too terribly happy with the overall fit and finish of VMware Infrastructure 3 version 3.5.  It’s a good product, yes, but it could have been a great product.  Now it looks like we’ll need to wait until version 3.5.1 until we can expect that.

What about you?  What do you think?

My dislike for the Remote CLI is fairly well-known.  Unfortunately, using the Remote CLI is the only way to perform a Storage VMotion.  Storage VMotion is, of course, the new feature in ESX Server 3.5 that allows for a running VM’s virtual disk files to be relocated from one datastore to a second datastore without any service interruption.  A very handy feature, indeed, but hobbled—in my opinion—by its dependence upon the Remote CLI.

However, an enterprising developer has written a graphical front-end for the operation.  Numerous sites have discussed it; for example, see Eric Sloof’s post or Anders’ post (and the referenced VMware Communities thread).  I’m sure there have been numerous other sites as well.

Now, if a single developer could write a GUI for Storage VMotion, why didn’t VMware take care of this themselves?