VMFS

You are currently browsing articles tagged VMFS.

The Return of Virtualization Short Takes

Friday, June 5, 2009 in Networking, Virtualization by slowe | 4 comments

My irregular “Virtualization Short Takes” series was put on hold some time ago after I started work on Mastering VMware vSphere 4. Now that work on the book is starting to wind down just a bit, I thought it would be a good time to try to resurrect the series. So, without further delay, welcome to the return of Virtualization Short Takes!

  • Trigged by a series of blog posts by Arnim van Lieshout on VMware ESX memory management (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3), Scott Herold decided to join the fray with this blog post. Both Scott’s post and Arnim’s posts are good reading for anyone interested in getting a better idea of what’s happening “under the covers,” so to speak, when it comes to memory management.
  • Perhaps prompted by my post on upgrading virtual machines in vSphere, a lot of information has come to light regarding the PVSCSI driver. Some are advocating changes to best practices to incorporate the PVSCSI driver, but others seem to be questioning the need to move away from a single drive model (a necessary move since PVSCSI isn’t supported for boot drives). Personally, I just want VMware to support the PVSCSI driver on boot drives.
  • Eric Sloof confirms for us that name resolution is still the Achilles’ Heel of VMware High Availability in VMware vSphere.
  • I don’t remember where I picked up this VMware KB article, but it sure would be handy if VMware could provide more information about the issue, such as what CPUs might be affected. Otherwise, you’re kind of shooting in the dark, aren’t you?
  • Upgraded to VMware vSphere, and now having issues with VMotion? Thanks to VMwarewolf, this pair of VMware KB articles (here and here) might help resolve the issue.
  • Chad Sakac of EMC and co-conspirator for the storage portion of Mastering VMware vSphere 4 (pre-order here), has been putting out some very good posts:
  • Leo Raikhman pointed me to this article about IRQ sharing between the Service Console and the VMkernel. I think I’ve mentioned this issue here before…but after over a 1,000 posts, it’s hard to keep track of everything. In any case, there’s also a VMware KB article on the matter.
  • And speaking of Leo, he’s been putting up some great information too: notes on migrating Ubuntu servers (in turn derived from these notes by Cody at ProfessionalVMware), a rant on CDP support in ESX, and a note about the EMC Storage Viewer plugin. Good work, Leo!
  • If you are interested in a run-down of the storage-related changes in VMware vSphere, check out this post from Stephen Foskett.
  • Rick Vanover notes a few changes to the VMFS version numbers here. The key takeaway here is that no action is required, but you may want to plan some additional tasks after your vSphere upgrade to optimize the environment.
  • In this article, Chris Mellor muses on how far VMware may go in assimilating features provided by their technology partners. This is a common question; many people see the addition of thin provisioning within vSphere as a direct affront to array vendors like NetApp, 3PAR, and others who also provide thin provisioning features in the array themselves. I’m not so convinced that this feature is as competitive as it is complementary. Perhaps I’ll write a post about that in the near future…oh wait, never mind, Chad already did!
  • File this one away in the “VMware-becoming-more-like-Microsoft” folder.
  • My occasional mentions of Crossbow prompted a full-on explanation of the Open Networking functionality of OpenSolaris by a Sun engineer. It kind of looks like SR-IOV and VMDirectPath to me…sort of. Don’t you think?
  • If you are thinking about how to incorporate HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 into your VMware environment, Frank Denneman has some thoughts to share. I’ve been told by HP that I have some equipment en route with which I can do some additional testing (the results of which will be published here, of course!), but I haven’t seen it yet.

    • OK, I guess that should just about do it. Thanks for reading, and please share your thoughts, interesting links, or (pertinent) rants in the comments.

    Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

    Storage Alignment Document

    Tuesday, March 31, 2009 in Storage, Virtualization by slowe | 17 comments

    NetApp has recently released TR-3747, Best Practices for File System Alignment in Virtual Environments. This document addresses the situations in which file system alignment is necessary in environments running VMware ESX/ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Citrix XenServer. The authors are Abhinav Joshi (he delivered the Hyper-V deep dive at Insight last year), Eric Forgette (wrote the Rapid Cloning Utility, I believe), and Peter Learmonth (a well-recognized name from the Toasters mailing list), so you know there’s quite a bit of knowledge and experience baked into this document.

    There are a couple of nice tidbits of information in here. For example, I liked the information on using fdisk to set the alignment of a guest VMDK from the ESX Service Console; that’s a pretty handy trick! I also thought the tables which described the different levels at which misalignment could occur were quite useful. (To be honest, though, it took me a couple of times reading through that section to understand what information the authors were trying to deliver.)

    Anyway, if you’re looking for more information on storage alignment, the different levels at which it may occur, and the methods used to fix it at each of these levels, this is an excellent resource that I strongly recommend reading. Does anyone have any pointers to similar documents from other storage vendors?

    Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

    Open Source VMFS Driver

    Thursday, February 26, 2009 in Storage, Virtualization by slowe | 2 comments

    It looks like my post discussing a universal cluster file system may have been prescient. Shared with me first via Twitter, it appears that a company has already started building an open source VMFS driver. It was also covered here and here.

    As we discussed in the post about cross-hypervisor cluster file systems, the implications of hypervisors potentially being able to share clustered storage are quite significant. Of course, there are many hurdles to yet overcome, but what if this project develops and matures and becomes a valid tool? What will happen if open source Xen adopts VMFS as their cluster file system of choice? And although it’s quite unlikely—potentially even impossible—that GPL licensing would allow it, what would happen if Microsoft were to use this open source VMFS driver with Hyper-V? Everything has to start somewhere…and that includes universal cluster file systems. This could be the beginning.

    Of course, there are numerous other implications as well. As was mentioned on Twitter, this opens the possibility of an open source VCB equivalent and it sets a precedent for a potential de facto standard in cluster file systems for virtualization. The creation of standards through broad adoption by the vendors is something that I mentioned in my coverage of Citrix’s open sourcing their VHD implementation, and I mentioned at that time that I believed the move to open source the VHD implementation put Citrix in a good spot to be the leader in the creation of a de facto virtual hard disk standard. If this open source VMFS driver takes off, that puts VMware in a good position to have their cluster file system established as a de facto standard.

    Does this mean we’ll be running our virtual machines in VHD files stored on a VMFS partition? It’s possible…let me know what you think.

    Tags: , , , ,

    Virtualization Short Take #25

    Wednesday, January 7, 2009 in Microsoft, Virtualization by slowe | 19 comments

    Welcome to Virtualization Short Take #25, the first edition of this series for 2009! Here I’ve collected a variety of articles and posts that I found interesting or useful. Enjoy!

    • We’ll start off today’s list with some Hyper-V links. First up is this article on how to manually add a VM configuration to Hyper-V. It would be interesting to me to know some of the technical details—i.e., the design decisions that led Microsoft to architect things in this way—that might explain why this process is, in my opinion, so complicated. Was it scalability? Manageability? If anyone knows, please share your information in the comments.
    • It looks like this post by John Howard on how to resolve event ID 4096 with Hyper-V is also closely related.
    • This blog post brings to light a clause in Microsoft’s licensing policy that forces organizations to use Windows Server 2008 CALs when accessing a Windows Server 2003-based VM hosted on Hyper-V. In the spirit of disclosure, it’s important to note that this was written by VMware, but an independent organization apparently verified the licensing requirements. So, while you may get Hyper-V at no additional cost (not free) with Windows Server 2008, you’ll have to pay to upgrade your CALs to Windows Server 2008 in order to access any Windows Server 2003-based VMs on those Hyper-V hosts. Ouch.
    • Wrapping up this edition’s Microsoft virtualization coverage is this post by Ben Armstrong warning Hyper-V users about the use of physical disks with VMs. Apparently, it’s possible to connect a physical disk to both the Hyper-V parent partition as well as a guest VM, and…well, bad things can happen when you do that. The unfortunate part is that Hyper-V doesn’t block users from doing this very thing.
    • Daniel Feller asks the question, “Am I the only one who has trouble understanding Cloud Computing?” No, Daniel, you’re not the only one—I’ve written before about how amorphous and undefined cloud computing is. In this post over at the Citrix Community site, Daniel goes on to indicate that cloud computing’s undefined nature is actually its greatest strength:
       

      As I see it, Cloud Computing is a big white board waiting for organizations to make their requirements known. Do you want a Test/QA environment to do whatever? This is cloud computing. Do you want someone to deliver office productivity applications for you? That is cloud computing. Do you want to have all of your MP3s stored on an Internet storage repository so you can get to it from any device? That is also cloud computing.

      Daniel may be right there, but I still insist that there need to be well-defined and well-understood standards around cloud computing in order for cloud computing to really see broad adoption. Perhaps cloud computing is storing my MP3s on the Internet, but what happens when I want to move to a different MP3 storage provider? Without standards, that becomes quite difficult, perhaps even impossible. I’m not the only one who thinks this way, either; check this post by Geva Perry. Until some substance appears in all these clouds, people are going to hold off.

    • Rodney Haywood shared a useful command to use with VMware HA in this post about blades and VMware HA. He points out that it’s a good idea to spread VMware HA primary nodes across multiple blade chassis so that the failure of a single chassis does not take down all the primary nodes. One note about the using the “ftcli” command is that you’ll need to set the FT_DIR environment variable first using “export FT_DIR=/opt/vmware/aam” (assuming you’re using bash as the shell on VMware ESX). Otherwise, the advice to spread clusters across chassis as well as to ensure that primary agents are spread across chassis is advice that should be followed.
    • Joshua Townsend has a good post at VMtoday.com about using PowerShell and SQL queries to determine the amount of free space within guest VMs. As he states in his post, this can often impact the storage design significantly. It seems to me that there used to be a plug-in for vCenter that added this information, but I must be mistaken as I can no longer find it. Oh, and one of Eric Siebert’s top 10 lists also points out a free utility that will provide this information as well.
    • I don’t have a record of where this information turned up, but this article from NetApp (NOW login required) on troubleshooting NFS performance was quite helpful. In particular, it linked to this VMware KB article that provides in-depth information on how to identify IRQ sharing that’s occurring between the Service Console and the VMkernel. Good stuff.
    • Want more information on scaling a VMware View installation? Greg Lato posts a notice about the VMware View Reference Architecture Kit, available from VMware, that provides more information on some basic “building blocks” in creating a large-scale View implementation. I’ve only had the opportunity to skim through the documents thus far, but I like what I’ve seen thus far. Chad also mentions the Reference Architecture Kit on his site as well.
    • Duncan at Yellow Bricks posts yet another useful “in the trenches” post about VMFS-3 heap size. If your VMware ESX server is handling more than 4TB of open VMDK files, then it’s worth having a look at this VMware KB article.
    • The idea of “virtual routing” is an interesting idea, but I share the thoughts of one of the commenters in that technologies like VMotion/XenMotion/live migration may not be able to respond quickly enough to changing network patterns to be effective. Perhaps it’s just my server-centric view showing itself, but it seems more “costly” (in terms of effort) to move servers around to match traffic flow than to just route the traffic accordingly.
    • CrossBow looks quite cool, but I’m having a hard time understanding the real business value. I am quite confident that my lack of understanding about CrossBow is simply a reflection of the fact that I don’t know enough about Solaris Containers or how Xen handles networking, but can someone help me better understand? What is the huge deal with Crossbow?
    • Jason Boche shares some information with us about how to increase the number of simultaneous VMotion operations per host. That information could be quite handy in some cases.
    • I had high hopes for this document on VMFS best practices, but it fell short of my hopes. I was looking for hard guidelines on when to use isolation vs. consolidation, strong recommendations on VMFS volume sizes and the number of VMs to host in a VMFS volume, etc. Instead, I got an overview of what VMFS is and how it works—not what I needed.
    • Users interested in getting started with PowerShell with VMware Infrastructure should have a look at this article by Scott Herold. It’s an excellent place to start.
    • Here’s a list of some of the basic things you should do on a “golden master” template for Windows Server VMs. I actually disagree with #15, preferring instead to let Windows manage the time at the guest OS level. The only other thing I’d add: be sure your VMDK is aligned to the underlying storage. Otherwise, this is a great checklist to follow.

    I think that should just about do it for this post. Comments are welcome!

    Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

    You’ve Got to be Kidding Me

    Monday, December 15, 2008 in Microsoft, Virtualization by slowe | 24 comments

    Via jtroyer on Twitter, I learned of this post comparing Hyper-V and VMware ESX.

    Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a VMware fan, but as others in the virtualization industry know I also recognize that VMware is not a “one size fits all” solution. There are many places where other virtualization solutions, Hyper-V included, may be a better solution for the customer. It really all depends upon the customer’s needs.

    That being said, I do have a few questions for the owner of this particular post:

    • It’s a subtle point, but there is a distinction between “free” and “available at no additional charge”. I take vendors to task for this all the time. Hyper-V isn’t free; it’s available at no additional charge.
    • What in the world is “para metal” virtualization? I’ve heard of bare-metal virtualization (the kind that VMware ESX, Xen, and Hyper-V all perform) and paravirtualization (the kind that VMware ESX and Xen can perform; I don’t think Hyper-V does yet). Is “para metal” virtualization a blend of the two?
    • Identical servers are not required in order to support VMware HA. They are required for VMotion. I would strongly suspect that Hyper-V will have similar requirements or will require hardware support like AMD-V/Intel FlexMigration when it’s live migration feature arrives in 2010.
    • Just because VMware ESX can do memory overcommit doesn’t mean you have to use it. It just gives you the flexibility to use it when you need it.
    • I’m sorry, aren’t Microsoft Windows Server 2008, NTFS, and Windows Failover Clustering every bit as “proprietary” as VMware ESX, VMFS, and VMware HA? Am I missing something here?
    • VMware ESX installs just fine on x64 processors from both AMD and Intel. I have four x64 AMD servers sitting in my lab that are happily running both 32-bit and 64-bit guest operating systems.
    • Since when the hypervisor layer not containing any drivers—i.e., having your I/O drivers reside in the parent partition—have anything to do with direct hardware access by the guest OS? Unless I’m mistaken, these two items have nothing to do with each other. And the jury is still out as to whether having your I/O drivers in the parent partition, an approach used by both Hyper-V and Xen, is really a better approach.

    Did I miss anything?

    UPDATE: VMware blogger Jason Boche has also responded. Good points, Jason!

    Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

    Virtualization Short Take #22

    Tuesday, November 11, 2008 in Virtualization by slowe | 5 comments

    Despite the fact that I’m out of town this week at NetApp Insight, I wanted to go ahead and get out the latest installation of Virtualization Short Takes—my sometimes-weekly collection of interesting or useful links and tidbits.

    • Much ado has been made about VMware’s acquisition of Trango and the announcement of VMware MVP (Mobile Virtualization Platform). Rich Brambley has a great write-up, and I completely agree with Rich and Alex Barrett about what this really means: don’t expect to see Windows XP on your smartphone any time soon. Alex said it best: this is virtualization, not emulation, and Windows XP doesn’t run on ARM.
    • I’m curious—how many people agree with my comments in Alex’s article about the Citrix ICA client for the iPhone. Is there any real, actual value in being able to access a Windows session from your iPhone? I tend to think not, but it would be an interesting discussion. Speak up in the comments.
    • Duncan points out that the issue with adding NICs to a team and keeping them all active—the workaround for which required editing esx.conf—has now been fixed in ESX 3.5 Update 3. It’s now possible to add NICs using esxcfg-vswitch and there’s no need to edit esx.conf. Excellent!
    • If you haven’t yet checked out Leo’s Ramblings, go give it a look. He’s got some good content. It’s worth subscribing to the RSS feed (I did).
    • Rick provides a helpful tool to resolving common system management issues with VMware Infrastructure. Thanks, Rick!
    • Regular readers may recall that Chad Sakac of EMC and I had a round of VMware HA-related posts a few months ago (check out the VMwareHA tag for a full list of VMware HA-related posts). As part of that discussion there was lots of information provided about Service Console redundancy, failover NICs, secondary Service Console connections, additional isolation addresses…all sorts of good stuff. Duncan joined in the conversation as well with a number of great posts, and has been keeping it up since then. His latest contribution to the conversation is a comparison of using failover NICs vs. using a secondary Service Console to prevent VMware HA isolation response. According to the documentation, using a secondary Service Console can help reduce the wait time for VMware HA to step in should isolation actually occur. Good stuff, and definitely worth some additional exploration in the lab.
    • As a sort of follow-up to the discussion about using NFS for VMware, this VMware Communities thread has some great information on why the NFS timeouts should be increased in NetApp NFS environments. If you’re like me, you like to know the reasons behind the recommendations, and this thread was very helpful to me. Let me also add that we’ve recently started recommended to customers to increase their Service Console memory to 800MB when using NFS, so that might be something to consider as well.
    • Need to change the path of where Update Manager stores its patches? Gabe shows you how here.
    • Eric Gray of VCritial explores the question: what would things be like without VMFS? Well, as he states, you can just ask a Hyper-V user, since Hyper-V doesn’t (yet) have a shared cluster filesystem. Yes, that will change in 2010 with Shared Cluster Volumes in Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V 2.0. I know. Or you can just add Melio FS from Sanbolic today and get the same thing. This is not anything new to me; I discussed this quite extensively here and here. Now, what would really be interesting is for VMware to work with Sanbolic to co-develop a more advanced version of VMFS that eliminates the SCSI reservation problems…
    • Need a nice summary of the various network communications that occur between different components of a VI3 implementation? Look no further than right here. Jason’s site is another one that’s worth adding to your RSS reader.
    • If you really like living on the edge, here’s a collection of some RPMs for VMware ESX 3.5. Keep in mind that installing third-party RPMs like this is not recommended or supported…
    • Andy Leonard picked up the DPM video by VMware and is looking forward to DPM no longer being experimental. What he’d really like, though, is some feature to move his VMs via Storage VMotion and spin down idle disks. Andy, I wouldn’t hold my breath.
    • If you are a Fusion user (if you own a Mac and need to run Windows, you should be a Fusion user!), this hint might come in handy.
    • Eric Siebert has a good post on traffic flow between VMs in various configuration scenarios—different vSwitches, same vSwitches, different port groups, same port groups, etc. Have a look if you are at all unclear how VMware ESX handles traffic flow.

    That does it for this round. Speak up in the comments if you have any interesting or useful links to share with other readers. I’d also be interested in readers’ thoughts on the whole Citrix on the iPhone discussion—will it really bring any usefulness?

    Tags: , , , , , , , ,

    Virtualization Short Take #19

    Tuesday, October 14, 2008 in Virtualization by slowe | 4 comments

    Virtualization Short Take #19 is here, with news, headlines, and commentary on a few things that have passed my way over the last few weeks. Feel free to share your own interesting tidbits in the comments!

    • Rick Blythe, aka VMwarewolf, regales us with a tale of a new “feature” in VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 2. This new feature prevents VM migrations when putting a VMware ESX server into maintenance mode if it will violate the VMware HA failover level. Users will need to disable VMware HA in order to restore the pre-Update 2 functionality. (Anyone know if this has been addressed in VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 3?)
    • This VMware KB article is quite interesting; note the excerpt under the “Purpose” section of the article:
       

      VMware recommends storing your swap on a VMFS3 volume, when running virtual machines on NFS storage.

      So, even when running your VMs on NFS, VMware still recommends running the VM swap files on a VMFS3 volume. Very interesting, indeed. This is particularly interesting to NetApp, who—some would say rightly so—heavily pushes NFS for VMware storage.

    • Also from VMwarewolf, a note about guest customization failing with VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 2. Again, anyone know if this has been addressed with Update 3?
    • Microsoft has released a hotfix for Hyper-V failover clustering that improves functionality and adds VM control. An article at Hypervoria initially alerted me to this hotfix; a full Microsoft KB article is also available.
    • Ben Armstrong aka Virtual PC Guy provides a couple of scripts—in VBScript and PowerShell—for creating a dynamic VHD file.
    • Again via Ben, it looks as if Symantec has added support for Hyper-V to Backup Exec 12.5. That’s interesting, because I asked about Hyper-V support back in June at Tech-Ed and was told “as market demands dictate”. Is market demand now dictating?
    • Duncan alerts us to a potential failure of Storage VMotion after changing the Service Console IP address. I personally haven’t seen this behavior, but the fix is handy to know just in case.
    • Looking for a way to make mass changes to some VMX files? Luckily for you, the VI Toolkit blog has some information that you might find useful.
    • Brian Madden has a good overview of “View Composer” as it was described a few weeks ago at VMworld. Toward the end of the article, Brian mentions that VMware hasn’t announced anything with regard to user profiles:
       

      While that sounds noble, it also is a bit at odds with the longer-term vision that VMware CEO Paul Maritz outlined in the VMworld keynote, namely, that VMware wants to focus on deploying a personality to a user, not to a device. Certainly View Composer goes a long way in centrally managing desktops, but I wouldn’t be surprised if VMware does more in the user personalization space in the future as well.

      As Warren Ponder points out in the comments, there are several ways to handle user profiles, and it does sound like VMware already has some irons in the fire to help address that particular concern.

    • This has been pointed out in numerous places around the web, but who can fault one more link? Mike DiPetrillo of VMware has re-created Hyper-V’s Quick Migration functionality using PowerShell. I could go somewhere with this, but I think I’ll just leave it alone.

    I guess that will do it for this time around. Again, feel free to share links or tidbits you found interesting in the comments below.

    Tags: , , , , , ,

    TA2668: VMware ESX Architectural Directions

    Tuesday, September 16, 2008 in Virtualization by slowe | 5 comments

    Once again, there’s no wireless signal in the breakout session, so I’ll have to publish this in a delayed fashion. Ugh! Someone needs to work on this wireless network.

    This is session TA2668, VMware ESX Architectural Directions. This is another session that provides forward-looking information at future versions of VMware ESX.

    The presenter started out the presentation by giving an overview of VMware ESX, what it’s designed to do, what features it has currently, what it’s capable of doing, what it knows, how it manages CPU scheduling and other resources like memory. This would include stuff like being aware of the difference between sockets, cores, and hyperthreads; and stuff like VMware ESX’s advanced memory management functionality (like transparent, content-based page sharing). He also reviewed the management of I/O such as network and storage I/O.

    Moving into “future features,” these features will focus on security, scalability, interoperability, and performance.

    In the security area, VMware is focusing on improving security in a number of areas. One of these is reducing the size of the platform, such as in ESXi; it is anticipated that this will reduce the surface area and lower the number of potential vulnerabilities. VMware is also looking at the use of ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) and NX support (No eXecute). Together these features will protect both applications and the kernel and make exploits much more difficult and more difficult to automate and repeat.

    In addition, VMware is working on the VMsafe APIs, previously announced at VMworld Europe 2008 in February. These APIs will allow VM introspection and intervention. Security modules will run outside the guest and are strongly isolated from the guest(s) they are monitoring. However, these modules will still have full access, full visibility, and full introspection and control functionality.

    On the scalability front, VMkernel will move to 64-bit. Although in practice this will be unnoticeable, it will simplify VMkernel on large memory machines and on systems with larger numbers of CPUs. This will not impact support for 32-bit and 64-bit guests running on VMware ESX. This change will enable support for up to 64 logical processors, up to 512GB of RAM, up to 512 vCPUs per host, and higher VM limits (8 vCPUs and 256GB of RAM per VM). These higher limits will also help improve support for guests with 2 and 4 vCPUs.

    VMware ESX will also leverage dynamic frequency and voltage scaling, which will enable the VMkernel to manage power states for CPUs when load decreases. This will be accomplished via Intel Enhanced SpeedStep and AMD PowerNow.

    Power will also be treated as a first-class resource in the VI Client, with tracking and reporting of power utilization.

    Another scalability improvement is the Distributed vSwitch (DVS). The DVS is a vSwitch that spans an entire VMware ESX cluster. This brings greatly simplified network configuration across the entire cluster, stateful vSwitches (vSwitches can maintain per-port policies), and plugins. Examples of plugins would include appliance APIs (to create inline filters for per-VM traffic) or switch APIs (to modify the forwarding algorithm).

    vStorage Thin Provisioning is another scalability improvement. However, as mentioned in my earlier post on BC2621, this may conflict with VMware FT. This is intended to reduce disk space utilization, improve disk-related operations like backup, cloning, etc. Obviously, new alerts need to be created to manage disk allocation and overprovisioning.

    Moving ahead to interoperability, the presenter first discussed Enhanced VMotion Compatibility (EVC). The idea behind EVC is masking certain CPU features so that guests can migrate live via VMotion between hosts with dissimilar CPUs. EVC leverages functionality built into modern processors from AMD and Intel CPUs to hide CPU features so that CPUs appear to be identical to guests. EVC is available today in VMware ESX 3.5 Update 2. EVC problems are detected when a host is added to a cluster, to prevent problems before a user attempts a VMotion between hosts with incompatible CPUs.

    The Service Console will be updated to a 64-bit distribution running on version 2.6 of the Linux kernel. All hardware device drivers will be in VMkernel; none of them will be in the COS. In fact, the COS filesystem will reside in a VMDK on a VMFS and uses the same storage path(s) as VMkernel. Of course, there is no Service Console for ESXi. Both ESX and ESXi support CIM-based host management.

    Another area of interoperability is with storage plugins, using the VMware Pluggable Storage Architecture (PSA). This will enable partners to write plugins to enhance storage functionality. VMware ESX will ship with a plugin known as NMP (Native Multipathing Plugin), which in turn is comprised of SATP (Storage Array Type Plugin) and PSP (Path Selection Plugin). ALUA support will be added as well.

    VMDirectPath I/O is another interoperability advancement. This allows the guest to directly control physical hardware. This seems to fly directly in the face of virtualization, which is intended to virtualize and abstract physical hardware away from the virtual machines. However, this could be useful in some instances. Hardware I/O memory management is required in order to isolation guest memory access and translate guest addresses to host addresses. In addition, PCI device reset capability is required.

    VMDirectPath I/O does introduce its own set of challenges, such as the impact on VM suspend, checkpoint, and migration. VM memory management is also impacted. It is anticipated that the “Gen1″ release of this functionality will accept these limitations and “Gen2″ will begin to address them.

    VMware will also support newer device drivers from partners and will also allow asynchronous device driver updates. A device driver development kit will be available to allow 3rd party developers to add device drivers to VMware ESX. Of course, with the switch to a 64-bit architecture, the drivers will also switch to 64-bit drivers.

    Finally, in the area of performance, VMware will improve CPU efficiency for I/O virtualization. This covers an enormous amount of work for reducing overhead, enabling large packet send/receive, scheduling processor interrupts, and the paravirtualized SCSI device to improve SCSI performance. Future versions of ESX are also expected to include large page support. Other areas of improvement include expanded support for hardware virtualization, and VMware will focus on specific application areas to help drive performance and optimization of those applications on VMware ESX. This is in addition to helping customers optimize VMware ESX itself.

    At this point, the presenter concluded the session.

    Tags: , , , , ,

    Virtualization Short Take #14

    Wednesday, July 23, 2008 in Macintosh, Security, Storage, Virtualization by slowe | 6 comments

    Welcome to another installation of Virtualization Short Takes!

    • For you Quicksilver lovers out there that also run VMware Fusion, here’s a handy trick to allow you to launch Windows apps to run under Fusion via Quicksilver.
    • Duncan of Yellow Bricks points out this VMware Communities Forums thread discussing how to determine which host has a lock on a LUN. This thread also makes brief mention of the new VMFS version, version 3.31, that was released with ESX 3.5, which does a better job of handling SCSI reservations than previous versions. Good find, Duncan!
    • Speaking of the new VMFS version, a summary of the information shared in the VMware Communities Forums threads can be found here.
    • While we are on a bit of a storage kick, VMware has launched a new VMware Storage blog, and one of the early posts deals with VMFS. The post primarily attacks the notion of VMFS as a “proprietary” file system (which it is) by describing the advantages that VMFS provides. I’m hoping that the new storage blog will get more technical than marketing in the future, but the information is useful nevertheless.
    • This link falls more into the “ironic” category than anything else. Do you suppose he got into trouble with Citrix for blogging about how to use a competitor’s product to test ICA performance?
    • John Howard gives us an in-depth look at Hyper-V’s handling of virtual NICs in this article. This is particularly important for users who are interested in cloning VMs hosted on Hyper-V; I would assume that SCVMM 2008 will handle this correctly.
    • This news emerged several weeks ago via VMblog.com. It’s good to see Leostream getting some recognition; their broker is actually quite good in many respects.
    • Sven over at Virtualfuture.info recently blogged about XenServer’s HA functionality and how Marathon’s EverRun products play into that functionality. I actually had a conference call with the folks from Marathon several months ago about EverRun, but never got around to blogging about it. I do like the fact that you can control HA functionality on a per-VM basis, whereas VMware HA is applied to all VMs. (Well, I suppose you could disable HA for the VMs that you don’t want restarted, but it’s not quite the same.) I do agree with both Sven and PeterB’s comments regarding “Continuous Availability”; the sooner that VMware gets this functionality out the door, the more of a leg up they’ll have on the competition.
    • As has been reported elsewhere as well, Reflex Security has released the Reflex Virtual Security Center (VSC). The full press release is here. Based on what I’ve read thus far, it appears that the idea behind the VSC is to combine the information from multiple instances of their Virtual Security Appliance (VSA) so that users get the “full view” of what’s occurring across the virtual infrastructure. In this regard, it is remarkably similar to Altor Networks’ Virtual Network Security Analyzer (VNSA), which is also designed to provide visibility across the entire virtual infrastructure.

    As always, feel free to share other interesting links and news in the comments below. Thank you!

    Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

    Virtualization Short Take #2

    Monday, February 18, 2008 in Storage, Virtualization by slowe | 7 comments

    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!

    Tags: , , , ,