Welcome to vSphere-land!

The regional VMUG season has kicked off again and if there is one in your area you should make a point of attending it. The regional VMUGs or “User Conferences” are much larger than traditional local VMUGs and are all-day events that are more like mini-VMworld’s. There are 4 tracks throughout the day where you can choose from various vendor sessions which are encouraged to be educational in nature. I developed the session for HP which is entitled “Understanding and optimizing storage performance in vSphere”. There are also sessions provided by VMware on various technical topics, this year VMware has expanded their sessions from 4 to 8. I’ve attended the South Florida and Silicon Valley VMUG’s already and will be attending the upcoming Charlotte VMUG on 5/15. While at the SV VMUG I was able to arrange an interview with Stephen Herrod to chat about VMUG’s and various topics.

I live in Denver and our regional VMUG is coming up at the end of the month on 5/30 so if you live there be sure and register for it. I’ll be there, I’m sure Scott Lowe will be there as he lives in Denver as well and John Troyer from VMware will be giving the afternoon keynote.

You can view the full list of upcoming regional VMUG’s here. I’ll also be attending the Minnesota, Indianapolis, Chicago and Kansas City VMUGs later this year.

Finding good technical information from VMware can be tough, VMware scatters it all across their websites & blogs and their is no one big technical library where you can view everything. I’m a junkie for great technical information on vSphere and have run across a number of great resources that I thought I would share with everyone:

1. You may be familiar with VMware Labs as they pump out a lot of those great Flings that are unofficial free tools that perform specific functions in a vSphere environment. They also have a publications section that has 50+ hardcore technical papers on topics like VisorFS, which explains the ESXI architecture in detail and vIC which explains Interrupt Control for VM storage device I/O. VMware has rolled a lot of these great publications up into a Technical Journal that they recently published.

2. You can find all of VMware’s patent listings at this website which helps explain exactly how a lot of their technology and features work. Here you can find out the technical details behind their DataMover component of the hypervisor which is responsible for moving and copying VM data for operations like Storage vMotion. You can also find out all the details on how their Fault Tolerance feature works as well.

3. In addition to problem solving articles, the VMware KB has a lot of great articles in it as well but finding them can be pretty challenging.  To find them you can search on types of documents and select technical articles that are not specific to problems and issues such as Best Practices, How-To’s and Information documents. Their is also a KBTV video blog as well that gives you video instruction on many of the popular KB topics.

4. The VMworld website has all of the recordings and materials from previous years VMworld’s. You can only access the previous year if you attended or purchase a subscription to them. But the years before the previous year are always made free after each VMworld and still contain a lot of good content. For example you can see all of the 2010 sessions here.

5. VMware has a video library for their Technical Publications on YouTube so if you don’t like reading about something you can see it in a visual manner instead. Most of the videos are fairly short (under 5 min), it would be nice if they could make these longer and put more information in them but they are still good to watch.

6. VMware has first rate documentation, it’s now available in PDF, EPUB and MOBI formats, download it all and put it on your Kindle, E-Reader or iPad so you always have it with you. It’s broken into specific guides now for areas such as storage, availability, networking, security, resource management, etc. This documentation is not just how to install and use the products, their is a lot of great information as well that is very educational.

7. Of course don’t forget the great technical papers that VMware frequently publishes, some great recent ones include Storage Protocol Comparison and another comparing Stretched Clusters to SRM.

8. Then there is the VMTN forums which is where a lot of topics get discussed, but there is also a Documents section in each of the forums that contains some great information that is more focused then the discussion threads. For example here is the Documents for the vSphere forum and for the vCenter forum.

9. Finally if there is one blog you must read besides Duncan’s, VMware’s vSphere Blog is it. The vSphere blog has become an aggregate for may other VMware technical blogs that focus on specific areas like storage, ESXi, DR/BC, Networking and Automation. Some of VMware’s great technical minds like Cormac Hogan, Frank Denneman, Duncan Epping, William Lam and Kyle Gleed.

If you have any other good VMware technical information sources let me know and I’ll add them to the list.

Mixing ESX/ESXi Versions in an HA/DRS Cluster (VMware ESXi Chronicles)

Dell

EMC

HP

HP 3PAR VMware ESX Implementation Guide (3PAR)
Configuration best practices for HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) family and VMware vSphere 4 (EVA)
Using vCenter Update Manager for HP ESXi installations (General)
HP P4000 LeftHand SAN Solutions with VMware vSphere Best Practices (LeftHand P4000)
Running VMware vSphere 4 on HP LeftHand P4000 SAN Solutions (LeftHand P4000)
Configuration best practices for deploying VMware vSphere 4.1 on the HP P2000 G3 MSA Array combo controller (MSA P2000)

NetApp

Virtualization in the trenches with VMware, Part 1: Basics and benefits (Ars Technica)
Virtualization in the trenches with VMware, Part 2: Storage, networking, and blades (Ars Technica)
Virtualization in the trenches with VMware, Part 3: Networking in the enterprise (Ars Technica)
Virtualization in the trenches with VMware, Part 4: Performance tuning your virtualized enterprise setup (Ars Technica)
Virtualization in the trenches with VMware, Part 5: Physical-to-virtual conversion in the enterprise (Ars Technica)
Back to basics (Part 1): Virtualization 101 (Virtualization Admin)
Back to basics (Part 2): Virtualization 101: A Storage Primer (Virtualization Admin)
Back to basics (Part 3): Virtualization 101: A Storage Primer (Cont.) (Virtualization Admin)

So the voting has ended, the results have been tabulated and here they are. There were around 80 new blogs on the ballot this year and 4 new blogs to make the top 25. This year there was almost 1200 votes compared to around 800 last year. Voters were asked to pick their top 10 favorite blogs and them rank them from 1 to 10. The votes are weighted so a #1 vote is worth 10 points, a #2 vote is worth 9 points all the way down to a #10 vote being worth 1 point. The total points for each blog were added up to determine the results. It’s a pretty time consuming process for me, some of it is automated but I still have to add up votes and drop them into a spreadsheet to determine the winners.

Be sure and watch the special vChat top blogger awards episode that we recorded with special guest John Troyer as we count up the top 25 winners with lots of color commentary. The vLaunchpad and Planet vSphere-land will be updated soon to reflect the new voting results. Thank you everyone who voted and congratulations to the winners. With so many bloggers out there its a tough scene but I seriously encourage you all to keep at it, the longer you stick with it, the more people notice and will reward you with their vote. You guys are all great, I know how hard it can be to find the time to blog but do know that your efforts are appreciated and your unselfish dedication makes a difference to a great many of people.

Special thanks to TrainSignal for sponsoring it again this year, be sure and check out their website for their great new vSphere 5 and View 5 training offerings.

Here are the overall voting results…

And here are the top blog category winners…

Join me and Jonathan Reeve from SolarWinds in a webcast on Wednesday, Feb. 22nd at 10:00am MST on managing performance in a virtual environment. This webcast is based on a white paper that I wrote for SolarWinds and covers why monitoring performance is critical, where to get started, key metrics to monitor, why vCenter Server isn’t that effective and how SolarWinds fills the gaps in monitoring performance. You can register for this webinar here. Hope to see you there!

HP is sponsoring the Unofficial, Official Community Tweet-up at VMware Partner Exchange. If you don’t know what a tweet-up is it’s basically a fancy name for a party that is geared towards people on Twitter who follow each other so they can meet in person and socialize. But don’t worry, if you’re not on Twitter you can still attend, Twitter is a great communication tool and you might find yourself signing up once you find out more about it.

The party is Monday, Feb 13th from 8:00 pm - 10:00 pm right after the Welcome Reception ends and is being held at Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville which is a short walk south of the Venetian on the same side of the street. There will be free food and free drinks courtesy of Calvin Zito from HP and it should be a fun time. We will also be giving away a HP MicroServer to one lucky attendee which will make a great part of any VMware home lab (I have 2 of them in mine).

Attendance is limited to 150 people so you must RSVP to attend, so head on over to Twtvite and RSVP, you can do this even if you don’t have a Twitter account. See you at PEX!

There are over 180 blogs dedicated to VMware virtualization, here’s your chance to pick your favorites and determine the top blogs. The last voting was over a year ago and new bloggers are springing up every month. When casting your votes please keep the following in mind about the blogs.

• Longevity - Anyone can start a blog but it requires dedication, time & effort to keep it going. Some bloggers start a blog only to have it fall to the wayside several months later. Things always come up in life but the good bloggers keep going regardless of what is happening in their life.
• Length - It’s easy to make a quick blog post without much content, nothing wrong with this as long as you have good content in the post that people will enjoy. But some bloggers post pretty long detailed posts which takes a lot of time and effort to produce. The tip of the hat goes to these guys that burn the midnight oil trying to get you some great detailed information.
• Frequency - Some bloggers post several times a week which provides readers with lots of content. This requires a lot of effort as bloggers have to come up with more content ideas to write about. Frequency ties into length, some do high frequency/low length, some do low frequency/high length, some do both. They’re all good and require a lot of time and effort on the bloggers part.
• Quality - It all comes down to whats in the blog post regardless of how often or how long the blog posts are. After reading a blog post if you come away with learning something that you did not previously know and it benefits you in some way then you know you are reading a quality post. Good quality is usually the result of original content, its easy to re-hash something previously published elsewhere, the good bloggers come up with unique content or put their own unique spin on popular topics.

So please take all this into account when casting your votes, here are some more details on the voting:

• You can pick 10 of your favorite blogs and also rank them in your order of preference after you pick your 10. The results will be weighted with #1 ranking getting 10 points and #10 rankings getting 1 point. Point totals will be tabulated and from them the top 50 will be determined.
• Blogs are listed on the ballot  in alphabetical order with the current top 25 blogs highlighted in bold & underlined text, so please go through the whole list when making your choices (Duncan ended up on the bottom).
• New this year we also having voting in special categories to help distinguish certain types of blogs. The choices of which blogs to include in the categories was the result of this survey and my best guessing. The categories are independent of the general voting so first pick and rank your top 10 overall favorite blogs and then choose your favorite blog in each category.
• Voting will run until 2/7, afterwards the results will be determined and announced on a special podcast with myself, Simon Seagrave, David Davis and John Troyer live at VMware Partner Exchange.
• Several random voters will be picked to win a copy of the Train Signal’s  new vSphere 5 and View 5 video training courses.
• Duplicate vote protect is enabled, we’ll be using geolocation, IP addresses & cookies to protect against duplicate votes. This isn’t Chicago, please be honest and fair when voting, any suspicious votes will be tossed.
• If you are not familiar with a blog you can use my vLaunchpad to see links to them all. Try not to pick blogs based just on names but also take content into account. There are a lot of good blogs currently not in the top 25 that deserve to be there.

So what are you waiting for, head on over to http://vote.vsphere-land.com to cast your ballot and reward the best bloggers for their hard work and dedication by letting them know that you appreciate them. In case you need it here’s the direct link to the survey as well.

Special thanks to Train Signal for sponsoring the voting!

It’s time to do the annual top blog voting, last year we had almost 1,000 votes that shaped the top 25 list that is published on my vLaunchPad. This year in addition to the traditional top 25 voting I’m opening it up to allow voting in specific categories as well to help distinguish certain types of blogs. To do this I have created a survey to allow you to nominate your blog or website for one of the categories that I have defined.

This survey is not the general voting poll for the top VMware/virtualization blogs, this survey is only to nominate your blog for certain categories if it fits. Once the nominations are collected I will open the polls for voting for the top blogs where voters will be able to rate their top 10 blogs and also vote in each of the categories.

You should only nominate your own blog/website, these nominations will be used to populate the category choices when voting opens. If your blog doesn’t fit one of these categories then do not nominate it, all blogs on the vLaunchpad will automatically be included in the general top blog voting. If your blog is not currently listed on the vLaunchPad use this form to let me know. The categories that can be voted on are:

• Best Storage Blog (Must have more than 50% of posts storage related)
• Best Cloud Blog (Must have more than 50% posts cloud related)
• Best VDI/End-user Computing Blog (Must have more than 50% posts VDI/EUC related)
• Best News & Information Website (No blogs)
• Best Scripting Blogger (Must have more than 50% posts Scripting related)
• Best podcast (Audio or video podcasts)
  
• Best official VMware Blog (Blogs part of VMware’s website)
  
• Best Videos used in a Blog (Must have produced a good percentage of videos)
  
• Best New Blog (Blog must be less than a year old)
  
• Best Independent Blogger (Can’t work for VMware or a hardware/software vendor)
  

So head on over to the survey and nominate your blog or website, the survey will be open until 1/17. Once it closes I will use the nominations to build the survey for the top blog voting which will begin shortly afterwards.

I was updating my VMware build/release tables a few weeks ago and noticed that I could not find a version 5.0 of vShield Zones which is included with the Enterprise and Enterprise Plus editions of VMware. When you go to the download links for vSphere 5 under the Enterprise Plus category it says VMware vShield Zones for vSphere 5 - 1.0 Update 1.

So I thought that can’t be right in vSphere 4.1 the version of vShield that was included was vShield Zones 4.1, how can it be version 1.0 now. In vSphere 4.1 there was the Zones version and the App version of vShield, you could upgrade from Zones to App by buying the licences for it and once you applied them Zones became App which provided more features that were not part of Zones.

So I was having lunch with Rob Randall, VMware’s security guru last week and asked him about it. Turns out they are no longer providing the updated vShield Zones as part of the bundle with Enterprise/Plus licenses. They did a switch-a-roo and are now providing the old version 1.0 Update 1 instead. I’m guessing they thought they were giving too much away for free with the updated vShield Zones which was not all the much different from vShield App and as a result people were not upgrading to App. This is disappointing as there is a huge difference between the 4.1 version of vShield and the  1.0 version. The biggest difference is version 1.0 does not use the VMsafe APIs and only worked inline between vSwitches in bridged mode. So if you are upgrading from vSphere 4.1 to vSphere 5 and you are using vShield Zones be aware that you are going to lose it after you upgrade. Your only options are to switch to version 1.0 (not very appealing) or cough up the dough to buy vShield App licenses. This VMware KB article breaks the bad news to you.

If you want to read more about vShield and the differences between the 1.0 and 4.1 versions as well as the differences between Zones & App I did a detailed multi-part series on each that you can read.

• Series on vShield 1.0
• Series on vShield 4.1

Storage is the slowest and most complex host resource, and when bottlenecks occur, they can bring your virtual machines (VMs) to a crawl. In a VMware environment, Storage I/O Control provides much needed control of storage I/O and should be used to ensure that the performance of your critical VMs are not affected by VMs from other hosts when there is contention for I/O resources.

Storage I/O Control was introduced in vSphere 4.1, taking storage resource controls built into vSphere to a much broader level. In vSphere 5, Storage I/O Control has been enhanced with support for NFS data stores and clusterwide I/O shares.

Prior to vSphere 4.1, storage resource controls could be set on each host at the VM level using shares that provided priority access to storage resources. While this worked OK for individual hosts, it is common for many hosts to share data stores, and since each host worked individually to control VM access to disk resources, VMs on one host could limit the amount of disk resources on other hosts.

The following example illustrates the problem:

• Host A has a number of noncritical VMs on Data Store 1, with disk shares set to Normal
• Host B runs a critical SQL Server VM that is also located on Data Store 1, with disk shares set to High
• A noncritical VM on Host A starts generating intense disk I/O due to a job that was kicked off; since Host A has no resource contention, the VM is given all the storage I/O resources it needs
• Data Store 1 starts experiencing a lot of demand for I/O resources from the VM on Host A
• Storage performance for the critical SQL VM on Host B starts to suffer as a result

How Storage I/O Control works

Storage I/O Control solves this problem by enforcing storage resource controls at the data store level so all hosts and VMs in a cluster accessing a data store are taken into account when prioritizing VM access to storage resources. Therefore, a VM with Low or Normal shares will be throttled if higher-priority VMs on other hosts need more storage resources. Storage I/O Control can be enabled on each data store and, once enabled, uses a congestion threshold that measures latency in the storage subsystem. Once the threshold is reached, Storage I/O Control begins enforcing storage priorities on each host accessing the data store to ensure VMs with higher priority have the resources they need.

Read the full article at searchvirtualstorage.com…

I find myself frequently needing to copy files such as application installation files from my workstation to the guest OS running inside a VM. Sure you could do this using UNC paths and shares by connecting to the VM at the guest OS layer and authenticating with the VM and then copying files with Windows Explorer but this can be a pain sometimes. It also means that those files are taking up space on the VM and if its only temporary and you’re using thin provisioning you can’t easily reclaim that space. I also find myself installing the same applications on many VMs and to have to copy the files to each VM can be time consuming.

So instead of messing with copying files through the guest OS layer using a copy utility, I prefer to copy them through the virtualization layer using an ISO file. By using an ISO file I can easily mount it on the VMs CD/DVD drive and then access the files without having to copy them to the VM’s file system. This is the same method by which VMware Tools is installed on a VM, the VMware Tools install binaries are mounted from a special mount point on the host disk partition to the CD/DVD drive of a VM so they can be installed. You’ll notice if you create a VM without a CD/DVD drive that you won’t be able to install VMware Tools and will receive an error if you try.

So you might think, creating an ISO file, isn’t that a pain in the butt as well. It’s actually very quick and easy and once you create it you can use it over and over on any VM to install applications with and copy files to VMs if needed. You can keep a collection of them on your workstation and mount them from your local disk or you can copy them to a host datastore and mount them from there. I sometimes create toolkit ISO images that contain many of the typical applications (i.e. Sysinternals, disk tools, etc.) that I use when troubleshooting problems within a VM. Windows still does not have the native ability to read or write ISO files but there are a number of free tools that you can create ISO files with such as ImgBurn, CDBurnerXP (works on Win7) and ISO Recorder. I usually use ImgBurn but ISO Recorder is even easier as you can select the files/folders that you want to include in the ISO file and launch it via the Windows Explorer menus like below.

Next you simply select a directory and a name to save your ISO file in, click Next and your ISO file will be created.

You can now mount it inside the VM using the virtual CD/DVD drive of the VM by browsing to the ISO file you just created so you can access all the files inside the ISO file from within the VM.

That’s it, quick and easy, takes less than a minute to complete and much easier then having to copy files through the guest OS of the VM.

VMware has recently released a new build of ESXi to fix a bug that causes ESXi to hang for a long period of time while it tries to connect to all iSCSI targets. I’ve personally seen this happen in my lab and it can take quite a long time for ESXi to boot as it will try 9 times to connect to each iSCSI target. VMware sees this as a serious enough issue that not only have they released a patch to fix the problem but they’ve also released a special patch express release of ESXi. So when you go to download ESXi 5.0 now you will see two options for the ESXi ISO: one for systems without software iSCSI configured and one for systems with software iSCSI configured. If you are already using software iSCSI or plan on it at some point  you should choose the ISO image for systems with software iSCSI. You can read more about this issue in this VMware KB article. Here is the details on the two ESXi builds:

• Original release: Version 5.0.0 - Release Date 8/24/11 - Build 469512
• iSCSI patch release: Version 5.0.0 - Release Date 11/10/11 - Build 504890

This is my final post highlighting the white papers that I did for SolarWinds. This one focuses on a white paper titled “Capacity Planning in Virtual Environments” which is a topic that is often not very well understood or executed in virtual environments. Capacity planning can be a real challenge in virtual environments and there is a lot more to it than meets the eye, below is an excerpt from this white paper, you can register and read the full paper over at SolarWinds website.

Virtualization is all about the sharing of resources. You have to plan with the big picture in mind and take into account your virtual environment as a whole. A balance of resources is critical in a virtual environment since the server hardware used for virtualization is bigger and more expensive than traditional server hardware as it has to support many virtual machines (VMs) running on it. If resources are unbalanced on a host, it can lead to wasted resources, and since the whole point of virtualization is to make the most efficient use of all resources, this goes against the reasons that we virtualize in the first place. For example, if a host runs out of physical memory, it limits the number of VMs that can run on that host despite having plenty of other resources available to it. Sure, you can use memory over commitment, but performance severely degrades once your VMs start swapping to disk to make up for the lack of physical host memory. As a result, the lack of having enough physical memory available for VMs means that you are wasting resources and money.

Trying to keep your resources balanced isn’t all that simple; you need to look at historical resource trends and usage to determine what that balance point is. Trying to calculate this manually is almost impossible. You need tools that can analyze your historical data and report how your environment has grown over time, how it stands today and how it will look in the future. Another area that further complicates resource calculations is spare capacity. If you are using High Availability in your environment, which most companies do, you have to maintain sufficient spare capacity to handle the load when host failures occur. So, you need a pool of resources that is unused at all times so you have enough resource capacity to handle VMs from failed hosts. Trying to factor spare capacity into your resource calculations can quickly get complicated, having a tool that can do this for you can make it a much easier exercise.

Full paper available here…