Well, looks like VMware is updating their products again. VMware ESX(i) U3 is available from their site. I have installed it, but did not notice any differences. But hey, I have test lab, let’s be bleeding edge.

VMware: ESX4 beta? :-)))

On the other side, a few experiences the last couple of days: VM’s might get stuck – and there’s no way of killing them on ESXi that I know about, besides rebooting that is. There should be a kill option in the remote CLI!

Another one: suspending one guest, rebooting the host and powering on the guest again does not mean that all the network connections are dropped. My IRC connection stayed up during the reboot and I continued it when the guest was back on-line. Nice!

Posted: November 18th, 2008 under Random thoughts, VMware by Frode.
Comments: none

I would like to point your attention towards http://www.govirtual.org where VMware is trying to create a community for virtualization research and development. They’ve made a number of papers and some software available for download at this site, and invite the site users to make their own contributions to the site.

Posted: October 14th, 2008 under Readings, VMware by Frode.
Comments: none

Well well, it’s been a long time since VMware Server 2.0 beta 1 was released; but finally, the new version is complete and released to the general public!

As said before, VMware Server is great for those of you who are running a Linux or Windows server and are eager to try virtualization. If you’re more serious about it, you might want to consider VMware ESX(i); especially since VMware are giving away ESXi for free now.

As a bonus, the 2.0 release also includes a new build of their VirtualCenter Client. I doubt that there will be any new functions in this release; but there’s nothing wrong in hoping for it? :-) Check out https://servername:8333/client/VMware-viclient.exe or /usr/lib/hostd/docroot/client/Vmware-viclient.exe :-)

Unfortunately, it isn’t possible to add the VMware Sever 2.0 hosts to the VirtualCenter yet… :(

And I guess we’re still stuck with the web interface since the ViC can’t handle version 7 hardware… :(

Well well, on the other hand, I just love free software; don’t you? :-) As long as it’s free, I’m quite capable of swallowing some camels :-)

Posted: September 24th, 2008 under VMware by Frode.
Comments: none

Yet another exciting release: Cisco is supposed to deliver their NX-OS to the virtualized world.

Source: http://www.colinmcnamara.com/2008/09/16/cisco-releases-nexus-1000v-virtual-switch-for-vmware

Posted: September 17th, 2008 under VMware by Frode.
Comments: none

VMware held a VI Toolkit scripting contest to create some buzz around Windows Scripting and the connection to Virtual Infrastructure. As always, when there’s money involved, people usally do a good job.

The winner is a script capable of cloning a large number of guests and setting some variables which are quite annoing to set manually. Thanks to LucD for a nice idea and implementation :-)

You can find the rest of the winners here and all the entries at VMware’s community page.

Posted: September 7th, 2008 under VMware by Frode.
Comments: none

I’m getting some comments about the “Can’t write to device” errors. At first I thought it might be a problem with 3.5U2 since I had no problems installing the 3.5U1 on the R200, but my reinstall with 3.5U2 went without a hitch. So, here are some other ideas:

• Bad disk drive / disk drive firmware / disk related problems (I have changed from the disk delivered by Dell to a WDC 640Gig)?
• Old bios?
• Corrupted CD?
• Bad luck?

If anyone know the source of this problem, please make a comment :-)

Posted: August 29th, 2008 under Hardware, VMware by Frode.
Comments: 1

VMware isn’t very keen on sharing some of the details of ESXi, so it’s very nice that some of us virtualizing geeks are hacking their software to find new features.

One of the major problems with ESX(i) is the support for storage controllers – quite a few have discovered that their controller isn’t supported. Well, that’s a problem of the past from now on: You can just boot ESXi with PXE and still retain the configuration after reboot. You can even exploit this for making completely automatic deployment of ESXi. Kudos to Jim McCann for the guide!

Diskless ESXi: http://docs.google.com/View?docid=ddcwgcd6_4fs6s7jcf – check the buttom part to find out how you save your configuration so that it isn’t lost upon reboot :-)

Posted: August 26th, 2008 under Storage, VMware by Frode.
Comments: none

Okey, I have to admit it: I have a lot of CPU power just laying around unused. To be exact, I have around 24GHz available after my two critical hosts have gotten their share.

So, I’m testing the resource pools available for distributing resource shares to different virtual machines. The setup is pretty easy: I have a few critical hosts, namely this web server and the Windows 2003 which is running both my Windows applications and the VMware Infrastructure Server. They are both located on pentagon, a dual 3GHz machine with 7Gigs of RAM.

One of the applications that are using a lot of CPU time is SETI – Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence – which scans the radio waves picked up with the Arecibo radio telescope. It is notorious for spending close to 100% CPU time.

To test the resource pools and VMware’s ability to distribute resources, I made two pools; the critical and the non-critical pool. The critical is getting a high amount (80%) of the CPU resources while the non-critical is getting a low amount (20%). I then created a virtual machine (linux) to host the SETI setup. This setup was then duplicated to the three hosts that I have running.

I am happy to say that the latency on the critical hosts are close to zero even though my SETI virtual machine is spending almost all the available CPU resources. The host stays at close to maximum CPU utilization at all times, wasting almost no resources.

Well, no happy story without a word of caution: Don’t add your hosts to a DRS cluster, create some resource pools, power on a number of hosts with 100% CPU utilization and then remove the DRS cluster or move one of the hosts out of it. I tried that once with my critical hosts and it quickly came to a point where everything came to a stop. And, since I’m running my virtualcenter server inside a virtual machine, it took some time before I could fix the problem again…. One lesson learned, at least :-)

The picture attached shows my current setup. The current CPU usage is 96,7%. The explanation for the low numbers on the individual CPU’s is HyperThreading which makes the resource monitor a little bit confused. No biggie, the CPU usage monitor for the host displays the right number.

Posted: August 25th, 2008 under VMware by Frode.
Comments: none

Just a quick update on the VMWare Server: The 2.0 RC2 is released and ready to be downloaded from http://www.vmware.com/beta/server/ :-)

The list of updates to this release includes support for Firefox 3 (finally…), support for SCSI pass-through devices so that you can use your tape drive in a virtual machine, disk expansion on the fly and a few other things. Nothing revolutionary, but a nice update. Maybe we will hit 2.0 RTM soon :-)

On the dark side: there’s still no support for adding VMware Server hosts to the Infrastructure server and the VIC is saying that the hardware isn’t supported… So I’ll guess that we’re still stuck with the web interface…

Posted: August 25th, 2008 under VMware by Frode.
Comments: none

So, ok, the new semester started today. As always, I’m a bit lazy on the first day so I took the opportunity to work from home instead of going to school.

It turned out be a rather ok day when I finally got out of bed. I’ve made a quick front page and a suggestion for the content in my project report. As you can read on my “Why”-page, the goal is to virtualize computer labs for students to reduce both cost and administration and at the same time deliver a better service.

After a quick look around, I chose to focus on the following virtualization solutions in the next months:

• VMware ESX/ESX(i)/Server/VDI
• Microsoft Hyper-V
• Xen
• Sun Virtualbox/xVM/Solaris Containers
• VirtualIron
• Virtuozzo
• QEMU

Are there any other solutions I should look at? I know about the different IBM/HP solutions, but they requires special hardware which are pretty expensive.

Posted: August 18th, 2008 under Hardware, Hyper-V, VMware, Xen by Frode.
Comments: 1