On the time issue, all our VM’s are on our domain, so initally I always went along with the fact the VM’s would sync with the domain controller.
Then I was told at the VCP training that you should always have it sync with the host (and of course make sure the host is syncing properly), the reason being that if the machine goes idle for say 5 mins, the next time it goes to execute it’ll be 5 mins out, and only sync again when sceduled in Windows, which could be serveral minutes, so the machine would be out of sync. On the other hand if it’s set in VMTools to sync with the host it’ll make sure it’s synced before executing.

Can anyone shed some light, especially for machines on a Windows domain?

Thanks

Ray

You can read my answer at http://rodos.haywood.org/2009/01/what-is-cloud-conversation.html

Rodos

I’m guessing it’s all a matter of perspective. ZFS was/is also considered “revolutionary” by those same folks.

I personally say “so it’s WAFL for free minus some features”.

I can agree with the revolutionary part from their perspective of “but it’s free and open”. That’s entirely true. Having ZFS and Crossbow in the public domain is a huge step forward for open source, and especially so given we don’t know if Sun will be able to turn that corner or not.

At this point I can’t imagine an open source solaris wouldn’t live on even if Sun did go the way of the dodo (which I also don’t think is going to happen).

I would imagine though, much like with the storage server 7000, you will see some sort of “vm appliance” out of Sun in 2009 that will give VMware a serious run for it’s money (assuming they can get mind share with it).

Every vendor–Microsoft included–throws their own fair share of FUD out there. It would be great if every vendor just let their product stand on its own merits, but…alas, that is not the world in which we live.

Thanks for reading and commenting!

I am curious as to what the real story is with licensing. It has no impact for me since I use software assurance, but I am curious now. I dislike the marketing tactic from VMware though. They put it out there with an extreme lack of clarity, but got exactly what they wanted out of it. Blog sites like yours picked it up. Trying to do a quick search for real information on the licensing issue what did I hit? Blogs repeating the VMware claim with their sole source of information being the same VMware page you linked to. I had the same experience trying to get valid information on NIC teaming. Thats really frustrating. At least with NIC teaming it was a technical thing so I could just do it for myself to see what reality was (once I had time). Licensing you can’t just ‘figure out’.

I brought up the SC suite because I had brought up DPM for use as DR of your hyper-v infrastructure. In other conversations I’ve had with VMware folk I tend to get the “oh see there’s M$ trying to make you spend more money on M$ products” whenever I bring up complimentary products that make life easier for you. I think Microsoft has done some great things in licensing for virtualized environments. The unlimited VMs with datacenter (even if you are using VMware) is great, the unlimited managed VMs with SC enterprise mangement license is great too. VMware wants to be nasty to Microsoft about licensing, but Microsft’s licensing changes have helped VMware quite a bit. Heck they probably could have been nasty and made it so that the datacenter unlimited VMs only counted for hyper-v, but they didn’t.

Actually, if you go back and read my comment, you’ll see that I said I would be very interested in knowing WHY the process seemed so complicated. If it doesn’t seem complicated to you, then fine. Someone with extensive Hyper-V experience–which I’ll be the first to admit I’m not–probably views this as quite straightforward, and VMware’s method seems complicated. I did not go “anti-MS,” but rather merely stated my observation.

VMware’s process would be a) shutdown the VM; b) move/copy all the VM’s files to the appropriate destination; c) register the VM. AFAIK, that process is the same whether the VM has snapshots or not.

(Just for the record, by the way, VMware has supported VSS-quiesced VM snapshots since VMware ESX 3.5 Update 2.)

I don’t take the licensing issue to be codified truth, either, which is why I stated that an independent organization “apparently” verified the requirements. I have not personally verified the requirements, and I haven’t seen any information to the contrary. Having only the information available to me, then, I can only come to one conclusion, and that conclusion is that the licensing requirements are accurate. If you have information to the contrary, please share. I brought it up because I felt like it was a piece of information that users needed, regardless of which virtualization platform they are using and it could affect quite a few users. No organization wants to get surprised with expenses they didn’t expect or forecast, and this seemed like something that could end up that way if users didn’t know.

I’m not really sure where the comment about DPM, Ops Mgr, Config Mgr, SCVMM came from, as I didn’t touch on them in my post. In my opinion, those products are complementary to either virtualization platform.

Thanks for your comment!

Kinda went anti-MS on this one didn’t you. I thought you purported to be a balanced perspective?

On the manual VM addition, the author says right in his blog “mainly due to live snapshots.” Doing it manual isn’t the supported way from MS, and I don’t know why you would want to. You can export and import the VMs if you so choose. If you are looking for DR type purposes you should look into DPM, not just taking copies of a VHD and trying to manually stuff things back together. DPM can snapshot any of your virtual machines live (using VSS) then you can restore them from there and don’t need to mess with any of this manual stuff. DPM is hyper-v aware so you can just restore the VM to whatever host you choose form whatever poitn in time. You can use DPM2DPM4DR if you want offsite replication. I can see the VMware response coming already with “why should I have to have extra MS stuff to get t job done?” Well you have to have extra stuff to get the same type of functionality out of vmware. I’m not even sure if there is a VSS aware option for vmware to truly get the same functionality of a live perfectly clean snapshot. Besides you are going to want virtual machine manager anyways, and if you are a Microsoft shop you’d also like ops manager and config manager. Well just buy a single system center enterprise management license for the physical boxand it covers unlimited VMs on it for all four products ops manager, VMM, config manager, and DPM.

On the licensing issue, the report is coming from Vmware, so I don’t immediately take it as codified truth. For the sake of argument however, let’s assume it is correct. I can’t think of any enterprise Microsoft customer that would not have software assurance. You’d have to be absolutely foolish not to. And if you do have software assurance all of your 2k3 CALs became 2k8 CALS the instant 2k8 was available. If you are not keeping software assurance on your Microsoft products I’d have to assume you are a very small shop in which case you can either A) Run hyper-v server for free and not worry about it (you are small so you probably don’t need the higher end features of full hyper-v, aka you’d probably run ESXi if you weren’t running hyper-v). B) Pay to upgrade the few CALS you have. Again this is only assuming that the VMware article about Microsoft licensing is accurate. It could be FUD, especially considering they aren’t even willing to completely own their accusation.

Part of the problem is that there is no clear definition of cloud computing. If you accept that cloud computing is a pooling of resources upon which you run applications, then your reference architecture for a private cloud is right on the money, and it’s something that everyone can pretty easily get their hands around.

If, on the other hand, you define cloud computing as the delivery of computing power across the Internet (specifically), then your reference architecture doesn’t define that.

In my mind, the very fact that we don’t have a clear and consistent definition of cloud computing is the largest part of the problem understanding cloud computing.

I guess that’s what has me confused–Crossbow is being touted as “revolutionary,” but it doesn’t seem all that fundamentally different than VMware ESX’s networking functionality (save some advanced QoS and that sort of thing). Had I spent more time in the Xen world, I guess it would make much more sense just how revolutionary Crossbow actually is. This isn’t a knock against Crossbow, understand–just coming from where I come from, I was having a hard time getting the picture of why people were so excited about it. Between David Magda and you, I think I have a better picture now. Thanks!

Oh, and it was Ben’s blog that alerted me to Crossbow in the first place, but thanks for the pointer!