VMware - 34

Well they did it.  The Advanced Technical Design Guide written by Mike Laverick, Ron Olgesby and Scott Herold is finally available. Scott Herold got an email from the publisher with the following information:

I just talked to Brian, and we outlined the final steps of the process to get this book printed.  Our goal is to have this thing wrapped up and at the printer by next Friday (6/6). This means we are about 5-6 weeks out from this showing up at people's doors and it will be available for actual order soon.

Scott Herold:

I've been flooded with emails lately, as have friends of mine who are simply associated with the book for reasons of technical editing or they simply know me very well.  I know I've said it before and you are probably sick of hearing it, but we are close to done.  The content has been completed for some time.  Anyone who read the first book knows that we had a LOT of grammatical errors in it, and it took quite a bit of time to clean that up this time around.  Throw Mike Laverick into the mix, and heaven help the person that needs to edit this thing.  It's still not perfect, but will be significantly better than the first book.

A few weeks ago I conducted an interview with Mike Laverick. We were attending the VMware Virtual Desktop Manager Train The Trainer at the VMware headquarters in Frimley. At the end of the interview Mike said one or two things about the new Advanced Technical Design Guide. I recorded the interview and you can download it here.

Sven Huisman an Matthijs Haverink over at http://virtualfuture.info have written a  comparison chart with the following products:

Microsoft Softgrid
VMware ThinApp
Installfree Bridge
Citrix Application streaming
Symantec Appstream
Xenocode Virtual Application Studio

This comparison chart is an objective overview of features of the major Application Virtualization solutions. Some of the major advantages are:

• Migrate to new operating systems without upgrading or replacing legacy applications.

• Lock down corporate endpoints by running applications in user mode without locking out users.

• Minimize application conflicts and regression testing.

• Replicate your virtualized applications like any other enterprise data to maintain an instant-on fail-over plan for your applications.

Alistair Sutherland over at B2V updated their ESX command guide. This guide has been compiled by the consultants & trainers at Taupo Consulting and is based upon their personal experiences with the VMware ESX Server 3 product and is updated frequently. The information in this guide is not verified or sanctioned by VMware and they encourage their website visitors to use www.vmware.com/vmtn as the primary source of VMware product information. They are of course delighted if you find their shared experience documented in this guide of use in your environment and always appreciate being linked to.

VKernel has released its Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer virtual appliance, and they are offering a FREE 14-day trial in your own data center. Everyone implementing virtualization is — or will be — challenged by capacity bottlenecks. To maintain optimal performance in your VMware ESX environment, you really should give the Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer a try. You'll quickly be able to:

• Find current capacity bottlenecks (CPU, memory, and storage).
• Predict future capacity bottlenecks — e.g., you will experience a memory bottleneck in cluster X in 7 days.
• See exactly how many more virtual machines can fit into any of your hosts, clusters, or resource pools.

The trial is free, deployment is instant, and you'll have 2 full weeks to put it to work. Why not download the trial right now ?

Ulli Hankeln over at Sanbarrow created a new version of the VMware-liveCD this version contains:

-Workstation 6.0.2 ripped
-Converter 3.0.3 cold clone mode
-ViClient for ESX 3.5.0 u1
-RemoteCli
-Virtual Disk Developement Kit
-ViToolkit for Powershell

The complete build is about 450 MB - it requires a box with at least 512 MB RAM to load the dotnet2 apps. Latest MOA 2.3.-011 now allows to run ESX 35i in WS 6.5. beta 91182. In this case the ESX 35i is running from the LiveCD - you can of course mount any local VMFS-volumes and assign them to the ESX 35i. Obviously you need a fat machine to run this LiveCD Of course it still works as a simple Cold Clone CD .

Eric Siebert over at VMware-Land has put together a new Top 10 list featuring the Top 10 free tools that should be in every VMware administrator's toolkit. My little vmCDConnected app is on the 9th place. After a lot of late hours of coding I finally can release the vmCDConnected application. What’s so special about this application ? Well it scans all the Virtual Machines and shows if they have a CD connected to it. After scanning the VM’s you can disconnect all the CD’s with a click of  a button. Why do we need it ? Imagine you have a DRS cluster with 80 VM’s, when one of those VM’s is connected to a CD it will stay on the same ESX server because V-Motion doesn’t work in combination with a connected CD.

9) VMCdConnected - http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/172-Software.html
    • Scans all Virtual Machines and shows if they have a CD connected to it. After scanning the VM’s you can disconnect all the CD’s with a click of  a button.

Version 1.0 of the SVMotion has been released at http://sourceforge.net/projects/vip-svmotion/. New features include:

- No longer counts RDM files against datastore size, fixing the bug that plagued the last version.

- SVMotion operations against templates are not supported since VMware does not support them.

- Added tool tips that explain why a relocation cannot take place

- All SVMotion events write out a log, enabling better understanding of what went wrong in case of an error.

- Aside from the library that loads the plug-in, all of VMware's internal code has been replaced with the VI Toolkit for .NET.

- The project is now supported by almost 20 unit tests, helping to ensure fewer bugs and greater stability.

- The unit tests can be expanded to include testing for a system-resource supported number of servers since they use mock testing designed to work with the VI Toolkit for .NET.

- The project is now built using NAnt, which allows nightly builds of the source, creates distributions, and builds the MSI installer.

Arne Fokkema over at ICT-Freak has written a nice little “how to�?. His post shows all the steps to take so you can get all the historic VMotion info and present it in an Excel sheet. The data is  extracted directly from the Virtual Center database and can be updated any time.

VMware Stage Manager, a break-through product for delivering applications from staging to production is now generally available. VMware Stage Manager solves the problem of server sprawl, configuration drift, and repetitive system testing in pre-production by running IT services and business applications as virtual machine configurations that can be easily transitioned through the release process. VMware Stage Manager allows IT to roll out new and updated applications into production more quickly, avoid the risk of unplanned downtime, and accelerate change requests to production systems.

VMware Stage Manager is available for VMware Infrastructure 3 Standard or Enterprise and can be purchased as part of the VMware Management and Automation and IT Service Delivery bundles, or a-la-carte.

Christoph over at 21st century storage has written a good article about 10 GigE. Here are some quick performance results from VMware servers with 10 Gigabit Ethernet cards (from Sun with an Intel 82598 controller. The servers were Sun X4150 with Dual-Quadcore processors. I fired up two test VMs with Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 (64 bit) and used netperf to measure TCP bandwidth between them (the exact command used was netperf -H <target ip> -t TCP_STREAM -C -c -l 60 -f M).

Generally this is exactly what we expected: to be able to provide good performance to many virtual servers which do network and/or disk-I/O only periodically without overprovisioning the whole infrastructure.

At the moment there is exactly one dual-port 10 GigE card in every VMware server and there are two physical connections to two different switches - a much cleaner setup than the 12 (!) GigE interfaces per server we had before. Via Arne Fokkema over at ICT-Freak.