So, it was time to make the virtualization a bit more serious and the same time solve my hosting problem. After a quick survey of the hardware available, I bought a Dell PowerEdge R710: Read more »

Posted: June 10th, 2009 under Hardware, VMware by Frode.
Comments: 2

So, vSphere is out. I can’t say that I have noticed a huge difference from ESXi 3.5 to 4.0, but a few new features are always nice. Read more »

Posted: June 10th, 2009 under VMware by Frode.
Comments: none

Yes, the Dell PowerEdge R200 runs vSphere/VMware ESXi 4.0. More details to come as I revive this blog :-)

Posted: May 23rd, 2009 under Hardware, VMware by Frode.
Comments: 1

Well, it’s been a quiet month. I’m still writing on my project, and I’m searching for a job. In addition, the planning for The Gathering 2009, where I’m the chief information officier, has begun. Read more »

Posted: November 18th, 2008 under Hyper-V, Random thoughts, Readings, VMware by Frode.
Comments: 2

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

As I’m currently in the process of writing an academic report on virtualization solutions currently on the market, I have been surfing the web for documentation of quite a few of the products on the market. I have noticed that a number of these solutions are poorly documented. As a general notice, a lot of the solutions lack basic information about limits. For example, I really want to know how many guests I can have on a single server before the hypervisor says “enough” and refuses to power on another guest.

Simply said, there are a number of solutions I wouldn’t have bought today on the basis of their online documentation. This applies to Sun xVM and Parallels. As both Xen and KVM are freely available software, the demand for documentation decreeses, but I think they too should get someone to document their code.

On the other side, VMware have documented their solutions extremely good – and, they have done one thing that I think is critical: all the documentation are available from a single page linked to from the product page. No more browsing of support pages, pages you have to create an user to access and so on. It’s there, available for everyone. And, it is maintained on a regular basis. Kudos!

Just as a side note; Microsoft: Please try to do something similar, your web pages with both microsoft.com, TechNet, MSDN and so are a big mess. Collect all the necessary documentation on one page, please.

Posted: October 14th, 2008 under Random thoughts, Readings 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

Okey, so it’s official, Microsoft Hyper-V is out..

To celebrate, Microsoft held a seminar about both Hyper-V and its management applications. As usual, the number of  “we want you to buy this product” words by far exceeded the number of “our technocal solution is cool, but there are a number of improvements we want to include in the next release” sentences. As I am trying to become a good student, I took notes during the whole session (which btw lasted a whole day..).

To recapture some of my previous comments about Hyper-V, please read my previous posts on the subject: 1 & 2.

Comment #1: Just as some news papers already have said; Microsoft are trying to give the impression that they were the one’s who invented virtualization. As I recall, the virtualization techniques and methods first appeared in connection with mainframes in the 70′s and 80′s. The x86 virtualization is mainly a product of VMware after they released their first product and got their first patent in 1998.

Comment #2: “Virtualization should be a service in the operating, it should not try to be the operating system” (quickly translated and somewhat obscurinated by memory loss.). Well, let’s see: We have a virtualization system which is included in the Windows 2008 operating system. When installing Hyper-V, you actually replace the Windows 2008 kernel with a microkernel called HvBoot.sys (the same strategy as Xen is using by the way). Now, how is that different from an operating system as you still have to have the Windows 2008 (which definitively is an operating system) to be able to run virtual systems?
To make matters worse, Microsoft are releasing a Hyper-V server release which is more or less a stripped down version of Windows 2008 with the Hyper-V role and, as I understood it, nothing more. Well, that’s still an operating system in my eyes.

Comment #3: 24/7 is nice, we love systems with more and more 9′s. But how can you make that happen with Hyper-V? VMware have VMotion (live migration without down time) and High-Availability integrated in its virtualization software. Microsoft have something they call quick migration. It transfers your virtual machines to another physical hosts. So far so good. But, the move doesn’t happen live. You have to take your host offline for some 20-30 seconds terminating all the network connections to the hosts. So, how do you enable 24/7 operations with Hyper-V? You take the good old clustering techniques and make some clusters with your virtual machines as members. Yay! Complexity, complexity, complexity!

Comment #4: Now, x86-64 (or x64 as Microsoft says) have been on the marked for quite some time. I might understand why you don’t want to support older 32 bit hosts with your virtualization solution; but please, come up with a good list of reasons for why… There actually might be someone out there who doesn’t require 2Gig RAM for every virtual host.

Comment #5: Microsoft claim that VT (AMD-V and Intel VT) dramatically improves the performance. On the other hand, VMware says that they are better off doing everything in software since the programming APIs are far from good. I’m puzzled.

Comment #6: It feels like a big, nasty crocodile with it’s teeth stuck in my ass: Licensing. Or, L I C E N S I N G. Microsoft have never understood that we want simple terms. We want to spend money on software, hardware and beer, not attorneys. With VMware, you pay for the services you want. Only virtualization? –> ESXi is available for free. Enterprise management? –> Buy Virtual Infrastructure. HA? -> License. DRS? –> License. Backup? –> License. You can’t mess that up.

Now, it’s Microsoft’s turn: You can buy Windows 2008 in three different versions (and probably a lot more, but I don’t bother checking their web page while writing this..): Standard, Enterprise and Datacenter. Standard gives you an opportunity to run 1 virtual machine. Enterprise gives you 4. Datacenter? Unlimited. So far, so good. Now, here’s the fun part: You can’t transfer your license out of the country. Say what? If you have data centers in two or more countries, you have to have licenses for every possible piece of software in every country. So much for disaster recovery or load balancing between countries or continents…

To make things even worse: If you virtualize your standard edition, you can only run software on the virtual machine; not the host OS. Headaches, anyone?

Comment #7: The joy of taking a pretty known word and replace it with something that sounds stupid: Enlightenment. As far as I know, enlightenment is a window manager – or a commonly used english word. But hey, standard are bad things: Enlightenment, in the Microsoft world, is just a fancy way of saying paravirtualization. Paravirtualization is the technique of replacing privileged kernel calls with hypercalls which the hypervisor understands. Paravirtualization is used instead of binary translation and gives you some extra bang for your buck. But enlightenment? Yeye…

Comment #8: Speaking of paravirtualization: As far as I know, you can’t use paravirtualization on virtual Windows machines since Microsoft doesn’t want to open up their kernel. Using it on Linux works nice. So, Microsoft have enabled their own paravirtualization spec for use on Windows 2008 Hyper-V hosts with Microsoft guests. Well, that’s a bit annoying, but OK. Well, the best thing is that they have made a translator between the Linux paravirtualization support in Suse SLES 10.2 (Xen) to the Windows Hypervisor hypercalls. Why can’t they use the paravirtualization already implemented in VMware or Xen?! Convert hypercalls or use binary translation? Nice call…

Comment #8: Disk space. Just to make a note of it: The actual hypervisor is 100KiB (HvBoot.sys). The service is 260MiB. And, in addition, you have to download the integrated services install for Linux from Microsoft’s web page. Bloated?

Comment #9: This is probably the biggest killer of them all: Every virtual machine has to have it’s own LUN on your SAN. So, every time you need another virtual machine you have to call your storage manager to get another LUN. Or, at least that’s what they said. On the other hand, they also said that you could store virtual machine disk files on SMB shares and all other kinds of disk drives that WIndows recognizes. I’m confused… And I don’t think I’ll spend time testing it…

Comment #10: Disaster recovery: If you have to use Export/Import to move machines from one server to another (or quick migration..), what do you do if your Active Directory, your disk drive, the server or another feature fails and the server/system becomes offline? Will the virtual machines change ID’s, MAC addresses, config files and UUID? At least VMware asks you to confirm that you want to use the same system ID  or generate a new one. Hyper-V asks you to confirm when you try to use the same one,  but hey, they warned us pretty good about just copying the machines from one host to another because of the thight (…) integration with Active Directory.

Comment #11: The integration with every other Microsoft product makes me a bit sick. I just want to virtualize servers, not change my whole system to Windows. Just to mention some of the products they bragged about today: Microsoft Virtual Machine Manager, Microsoft System Operation Manager, Microsoft System Center and Microsoft Configuration Manager. I guess that a lot of these programs are pretty useful if you have a Microsoft friendly environment, but it’s pretty hostile here in my apartment :-)

Comment #12: Hyper-V has one cool feature: Differencing disk type. This is a type of disk which can expand from another disk image. For example, you can install the operating system first, add a new disk and make the installation read only. Then, the cool part: you can write all the changes to the new disk. Nedlesss to say, you can now use your read only installation as a master image for a lot of installations, removing the need for installing the operating system every time you want a new machine.

Generally speaking, the killers for Hyper-V will be the licensing model being used on Microsoft’s products and the SAN storage problem. The licensing issue is pretty much one problem I can’t swallow; it is too darn complicated and put too much restrictions on my use. Even though they promised that there won’t be any technical restrictions, you have to have control over which licenses you have and how many you are using currently to sleep well at night. Why can’t they just say “it’s nice that you bought our product, you can now use it as you like wherever you like” instead of this server farm/country crap? And it doesn’t stop there… For the love of god, make it easier!

When it comes to the SAN problem, I just hope that I’m wrong.

Please make a comment if you have some addition information about what I have just said..

September 12th; Update: Oh, I forgot; another fancy feature which wasn’t ready for the first release: Hot-Add of everything; disks, memory, CPU, usb.. you name it. It is supposed to be delivered at “a later time”. I want it now!

Posted: September 11th, 2008 under Hyper-V, Random thoughts by Frode.
Comments: none