Aug 13 2010
I participate in a weekly video podcast called vChat along with Simon Seagrave (techhead.co.uk) and David Davis (vmwarevideos.com). Each week we discuss certain topics related to virtualization for about 30 minutes. This weeks episode (vChat #3) we discuss home labs and give advice and our experiences with building our own home labs. So head on over there and check out the latest episode as well as past episodes, you can also subscribe via iTunes.
Aug 12 2010
While the vSphere client provides performance data, the esxtop and resxtop performance utilities offer more advanced information to ease virtualization troubleshooting efforts. In this tip, we focus on using esxtop and resxtop; but the same performance statistics can be viewed from the vSphere client. Esxtop and resxtop run in a shell session, and manual coding can be intimidating. But don’t let the format discourage you. Once you get used to the controls and how to interpret the data, these tools become invaluable for reading how CPUs handle the workloads of hosts and virtual machines (VMs).
Esxtop vs. resxtop
While esxtop runs only inside an ESX service console — either directly at the console or remotely using a secure shell console –resxtop is a remote version of esxtop. Resxtop is included in the Linux version of the vSphere command line interface (CLI) and is part of the vSphere Management Assistant (vMA). Esxtop and resxtop function the same way and provide the same information, but resxtop supports only the interactive and batch modes and cannot be run in replay mode.
Read the full article at SearchVMware.com…
Aug 09 2010
VMware’s vSphere 4 brings a number of new vSphere networking features to the table, including tighter VM traffic management and control with the vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS) , as well as support for third-party virtual switches (vSwitches). Along with that come a new high-performance virtual NIC, VMXNET3, the ability to create private VLANs and support for IPv6.
Implementation and benefits of private VLANs with a vSphere network
Private VLANs allow communication between VMs on a vSwitch to be controlled and restricted. This feature, which is normally available on physical switches, was added only to the vDS and not the standard vSwitch. Normally, traffic on the same vSwitch port group has no restrictions and any VM in that port group can see the traffic from other VMs. Private VLANs restrict this visibility and in essence act as firewalls within the VLAN. Private VLANs must first be configured on the physical switch ports of the uplink NICs on the vDS. Private VLANs are then configured by editing the settings of a vDS and selecting the Private VLANs tab.
Read the full article at searchnetworking.com…
Aug 09 2010
If designing a physical server is similar to designing a house, designing a virtualized infrastructure is almost like designing a small city. There are lots of interrelated components, and you have to make many critical design decisions to ensure that all of the residents’ needs are met properly.
If you don’t properly account for water, gas and electric needs, for example, your houses won’t have the resources they need for basic services and peak loads. Similarly, when designing a virtualized infrastructure for customers, solutions providers need to size the storage, network, CPU and memory resources correctly, or the virtual machines (VMs) will not have the resources they need to run applications.
Besides hardware resources, you have to make other decisions when designing a vSphere virtualized infrastructure, many of which will dictate your hardware requirements. The vSphere features you’ll need are often tied to the type of server hardware you use. If you do not make the correct hardware decisions when designing your customer’s virtual environment, you may find that you cannot use some of vSphere’s features. Therefore, it’s important to understand vSphere’s requirements and limitations early on in your design phase.
Read the full article at searchsystemschannel.com…
Aug 09 2010
Security is critical in a vSphere environment. Virtual machine (VM) architecture, access methods and management is much different from that for physical servers. Because VMs are encapsulated into a single file that resides on a shared data store, additional attack vectors need to be secured. Further, any change or operation in a virtual environment can have a ripple effect on other residing VMs because all share common infrastructure components. Consequently, having proper security access controls in place is paramount to protect hosts and their VMs.
Because they have multiple components, virtual environments are secured in layers. You can do much of the work to secure an environment through vCenter Server, which provides centralized authentication and authorization services at many different levels inside vSphere. VCenter Server features four main components:
Read the full article at searchsystemschannel.com…
Aug 09 2010
VMware has long claimed that ESXi will one day be the Palo Alto-based company’s main hypervisor, and the time has come for ESX to begin to gracefully make its exit. The recent release of VMware vSphere 4.1 will be the last release to include the ESX version of VMware’s hypervisor, which may not make ESX fanboys happy. The improvements in ESX 4.1, however, demonstrate that the time to start switching is now.
In a recent Virtualization Viewpoints column, I wrote about drawbacks of VMware ESXi and why widespread adoption of ESXi is not a reality. Some of the problems with ESXi included:
The article also outlined several suggestions for making ESXi more attractive to administrators used to working with ESX. While I have always preferred ESX over ESXi, I am now recommending that you start using ESXi and plan on migrating all of your current ESX installations to the ESXi platform.
Read the full article at searchvmware.com…
Aug 09 2010
If you’re involved in virtualization, you probably can’t go a day without hearing the word cloud – and I don’t mean as part of your weather forecast. If you pay attention to companies like VMware and EMC, it seems as though everything is migrating toward the cloud — and it’s not a matter of if your environment will enter the cloud but when.
Today, virtualization seems to have taken a back seat to cloud computing. If you look at the VMworld 2010 tracks and sessions this year, they focus on cloud computing. But you can’t have internal cloud computing without virtualization, so virtualization remains on the hot topics list, even if it’s no longer in the No. 1 spot.
In this tip, we consider how clouds and virtualization go hand in hand and how to leverage the capabilities of VMware vSphere to create your own private cloud.
Read the full article at searchvmware.com…
Aug 09 2010
You can use VMware vSphere without a shared storage device, but it limits the amount of advanced features that you can use with it. Certain features in vSphere require that a virtual machine (VM) reside on a shared storage device that is accessible by multiple hosts concurrently. These features include high availability (HA), Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), Fault Tolerance (FT) and VMotion, which provide high/continuous availability as well as workload load balancing and live migration of virtual machines. For some storage administrators, these features may only be nice to have, but they are also essential for many IT environments that cannot afford to have VMs down for an extended amount of time.
A few years ago, VMware shared storage typically meant using a Fibre Channel (FC) SAN, which was expensive, required specialized equipment and was complicated to manage. In recent years, other shared storage options that utilize standard network components to connect to storage devices have become popular and make for affordable, easy-to-use shared storage solutions. The protocols used for this are iSCSI and NFS, both of which are natively supported in vSphere. The performance of NFS and iSCSI are similar, but both can vary depending on a variety of factors including the data storage device characteristics, network speed/latency and host server resources. Since both protocols use software built into vSphere to manage the storage connections over the network there is some minimal CPU resource usage on the host server as a result.
Read the full article at searchsmbstorage.com…
