I’m delivering a VMware View training this week. When I reached the “Replicate Server” chapter we had to do a lab with the “Hercules virtual appliance”. The goal of the lab is building a multiple “Connection Server” environment and let the appliance do the load-balancing. Although the “Hercules virtual appliance” is well documented and even has a VA page at the VMware website, I had a hard time to get it working. The virtual appliances available on http://istanbul.sourceforge.net/ either have a IDE disk or an old SCSI disk which isn’t compatible with ESX 3.5. I converted the “Hercules virtual appliance” to the Open Virtualization Format (OVF), and it’s available for download at the following address :
http://www.ntpro.nl/software/Hercules-SCSI-ESX3.zip
Here’s the way to set it up:
• Import the OVF virtual aplience.
• Power-on the Hercules VM.
• Open a console. Login as a user-ID of "root" with a password of "root".
• Enter the following command at the command line:
• pen 443 10.168.100.3:443 10.168.100.4:443
The format of the command is: pen <port-number> <first-server:port> <second-server:port>. There is a space between the first port number and the first server IP. There is a second space between the first server's 443 port and the second server's IP.
It runs on a Linux OS built from scratch to have a minimal footprint. It can run with just 32MB memory for normal usage and you can increase memory requirements for the appliance as you need. It also has a built in web server, SSH server, DHCP client. You can administer the machine remotely via SSH. It is setup for DHCP so the networking is setup automatically. A webserver is installed to both serve up this page and to help you test different configurations. The load balancing functionality is provided by the excellent open source project pen.
The amount of disk space used by it is 4.0 MB. The virtual disk will expand as needed and has a maximum size of 100 MB. This is the minimum size of a virtual disk that can be created in VMware Workstation. The compressed/zipped image of this appliance is 2.5 MB !
Wednesday, February 18. 2009
Hercules virtual appliance available in OVF
Mike Laverick is giving away his SRM book
Mike has rented out his advertisement space and is living in wealth now. He doesn’t have to earn his money with writing book anymore, so he’s giving them away. :-) You can download the first chapter of Mike's SRM book at RTFM-Education.
"This book will teach how install and configure VMware's Site Recovery Manager product. It also covers in detail the failover and failback processes - and I will guide you through step-by-step through the setup of the product. This book is not filled with project management padding that typifies a lot of IT books. It's practical and technical, and assumes you are already pretty familiar with VMware's Virtual Infrastructure products including ESX 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5. In this book you will learn the strengths and weakness of the Site Recovery Manager product, and show you the common pitfalls and errors that can happen, and also more importantly why they happen, and how to fix them."
Update : Mike did it again, another Four Free Chapters from the Vi3Book are online.
Tuesday, February 17. 2009
Support for ESXi and ESXi free in Veeam Backup 3.0
VMware ESX Server version time-line
Did you ever wonder when a particular version of VMware ESX was launched? Well Harold Schoofs, my former colleague at the Kadaster in Apeldoorn has searched through history and created a time-line containing al launched ESX versions. The timeline ends at December 2008, maybe we can add a new version to this timeline next week.
OpsCheck- a free tool to ensure vMotion operation
Server Virtualization Design Module for Lanamark Suite
The new module supports the following platforms: Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V, Parallels Virtuozzo Containers, Virtual Iron and VMware ESX. Here is what’s unique about the module:
It provides advanced modeling and side-by-side comparison for a broad set virtualization platforms. Unlike other solutions that focus only on servers and platforms, the module takes into account both technical and commercial dimensions of each solution:
- Hardware, Servers – new, redeployed and upgraded.
- Storage arrays and HBAs since these components dramatically affect the TCO.
- Software licensing costs for virtualization platforms and management software.
- Services (e.g. training, consulting).
The module leverages a rich repository with servers, blade enclosures, storage arrays, HBAs and virtualization software maintained and constantly updated by Lanamark. Based on conversations with Lanamark's customers and partners, it became clear that calculating the number of servers required and balancing workloads across these servers is not enough. What is needed is the ability to design and compare end-to-end server virtualization solutions across virtualization platforms with hardware, software and service components.