Jon Owings | CrashLoopBackoff

Vote for the top VMware Blogs

The vSphere Land top 25 is up for vote once again. I am low on the list of bloggers, I just want to get close enough to see the shoes of the guy at #25. Like the picture I took in San Francisco during VMworld, I can barely see the top of the hill. Hey though, very excited to be on the ballot once again. Get on over and vote. Vote for me if you like the blog.

Here are a couple of my top blog posts from the last few months.
1. The mini ESXi 4 Portable Server
2. Storage IO Control An Idea
3. You Might be a vDiva if…
4. Adaptive Queuing in ESX

VMworld 2010 Recap – Five Session Highlights

I thought I would get more into posting my thoughts on each session. To be completely honest I was in some really good and really bad sessions. My goal was to find sessions that would potential benefit my day to day work. Not just a session where they talk about features we may or may not see in the next year. More of that knowledge came from doing the labs. Next year I will make more time to check all the labs out. I do not really learn well listening to someone speak anyways. I am more of a hands on learner.

I was go over how I would address the sessions I didn’t like. I think the best way to comment is to just say there were some sessions that were not helpful, at all. Others were really good. Therefore I wanted to list out five good lessons I learned in the VMworld 2010 Breakout sessions.

1. A common theme to me was the distributed virtual Switch (dvSwitch) is required to do anything advanced. This convinced me to push more into using the dvSwitch on deployments when possible. I figure more and more network features will be depending on the dvSwitch. Included features now available are: Network IO Control, Private VLANS (needed for cross Host network fences, and will be important for Cloud networking in vSphere an vCloud Director)

2. Innovation is coming to the Network. Converged networks from Xsigo and Cisco are just the beginning to virtualizing the network and I/O.

3. Doing VDI and having happy users is going to be harder than Server Virtualization.

4. VMware is working hard to get View deployments right. The View Benchmarking tool is going to help validate the deployments in order to provide scale. Hoping for good things here.

5. There are so many moving parts in a virtual datacenter solution. Architecture when it comes to VMware is basically knowing to account for everything involved. Seeing how the lab datacenter was put together was encouraging. Knowing even the rock star Architects at VMware have the same challenges as the everyday folk. They did a great job, because in my opinion the labs rocked.

I learned a great deal during VMworld. It was once again a great experience. At the same time I hope the words “deep dive” are not misused like they were this year. VMware did a great job this year and hopefully will do better next year. See you all at PEX 2011 in Orlando?

The Fun Stuff at VMworld 2010

Much of my planned activities for the blog didn’t work out this year. Not too much in the sessions or keynotes that was worth a blog post yet. Expect some View 4.5 and vCloud Directory posts once I can get it in the lab. Probably the most useful parts of VMworld were the discussions at the Thristy Bear, Bloggers Lounge, Chieftain, over breakfast or dinner among many other places. There was a great turn out for the In-n-out trip noting that it took around 30 minutes on public transportation to get there. This post is sharing some of the few experiences* I had and the couple of pictures I thought to make while in San Francisco. I met a lot more people than last year. I couldn’t even begin to name them all off but it was a great time hanging out with all of you enjoying a few drinks and talking Virtualization and Storage and other topics.

This is the hall in our hotel. I kept seeing these twin girls at the end of the hall. It was scary.

Here is proof of my In-n-Out take down. Double Double and Fries welldone. Several people showed up. I hope everyone enjoyed it. I do not think any In-n-Out vs Five Guys battles were decided though.

I hung off the of the Cable Car all the way back to Powell and Market. Jase McCarty @jasemccarty and Josh Leibster @vmsupergenius

The view from the top of the hill and the front of the Cable Car. The picture does not do justice to how steep the hill is.

Random shot at the Veeam party.

A couple of VMware R&D Managers I met at the CTO gathering before the VMware party. Steve Herrod hosted a party that included a great mix of vExperts and some of the thought leaders at VMware. Great chance to meet some people, @kendrickcoleman beat me down in wii bowling though. I will be practicing until next year.

Proof that I at least made it to the door of the CTO party, by Wednesday I had a pretty good collection of flare on my badge. TGI Fridays made me an offer but I didn’t want to move my family back to the West Coast.

A less fuzzy picture with Rich Brambley @rbrambley and Rick Vanover @rickvanover. I am honored to just hold the sign for these guys.

The Veeam party got bit crazy when 17 Princess Leia’s showed up.

The EMC vSpecialists roll up on VMworld 2010, there was at least 4000 more people at VMworld than last year. 3500 of them were from EMC. Actually found out they were real guys (and girls) and were really cool. Really good conversations about virtualization were had with many of these guys. If you haven’t seen it yet Nick Weaver @lynxbat and other vSpecialist put together a pretty good rap video. Check it out here

*in the event I did not have actual pictures of the event artistic liberties were taken.

VMworld In-N-Out Meetup – Directions

If you were wondering, “where is the in-n-out?” Here is a handy google map that @trey_anderson created. For the directions follow the link here. Remember 5:30pm Tuesday (today).

View Larger Map

VMworld Day One Quick Thoughts

Just some quick thoughts on day one. For me things are going pretty smooth. I did skip lunch so I could get into the Building the VMworld Labs session but I would say it was worth it. Very good and practical information on how you build a datacenter in 2 months. Stuff that. Most of the time the sessions have some good information but this one was all good.

I think this would be all for now.

Your mom goes to VMworld 2010

Am I allowed to say that?

ooops the video I used was removed from youtube

Wow, it is almost here. Today I am getting ready for my flight to SFO tomorrow morning. This is a short post to preview what is planned for the blog during VMworld.

A daily recap blog. Getting all of the detail of the days is going to be a big task. So much will be going on there is no way I will get it all but I will give my perspective on that is going on.
A video feature. I am teaming up with @kevin_miller and we will be getting some “unique” perspectives from people in and around VMworld. If no one will cooperate I will make something up. Need to find a mic.
Pictures from the In-n-Out meetup.

I do have some non-goofing around goals for the trip. There is a massive value to VMworld. I hope I get to all the sessions I want early enough to get in. I am looking for ways to improve what I do everyday which is design, implement and support VMware solutions. I am excited for cool new features as much as the next guy but too much focus on futures and you can miss the stuff that will help you right now.

Finding the Fusion OVFTool

The OVFtool is something I wished VMware Fusion had a while back and finally got a chance to use it the other day. I checked google and I found that it was located at:

/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/ovftool

As I looked for that path I was surprised it was not there. I upgraded from Fusion 2 to 3 to 3.1 and never recalled a chance or a place to add the OVFtool to my install. I could not find an independent download for the Mac OVFtool. I ended up re-installing the newest version of Fusion and I had to click “Advanced” during the install and turn on the OVFtool to install. Not sure if that is the best way, but that is how I got it to work. 🙂

Now that the path exists I was able to convert the OVF Appliance to be used on my Mac.

ovftool --help reveals a ton of options. To do a basic conversion though try this:

`$mkdir /Users/username/Documents/Virtual Machines/ApplianceName $/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/ovftool/ovftool ./Appliance.ovf /Users/username/Documents/Virtual Machines/ApplianceName`

This will expand and convert the VM to be used with Fusion. Now just select open the VM in Fusion and play away.

Storage IO Control and An Idea

After being out of town for almost all of July, I am finally getting to make a run at vSphere 4.1. I am throwing different features at our lab environment and seeing what they do. I don’t think I would be writing anything new in saying vMotion and Storage vMotion is faster. Clones and deploying from a template is faster (VAAI). I decided to take a peak at the Resource Allocation for IOps per VM. Nothing you do not already know, you can now assign shares and limits to the Disk IO. Useful if you need certain machines to never take too much IO and cause storage latency. This only kicks in when the latency threshold is exceeded.

My wacky ideas usually come from the idea of resource pools, shares and limits are cool but I don’t want them used all the time. So why don’t I apply the limits or shares dynamically based on a certain time or expected workload. Lets say my third party backup software runs at 8pm, and that software is on a VM. At 7:59 I could lower all the shares of all the vm’s and raise the disk shares of my backup server. This prevents rogue dba from killing your backup window with a query or stored procedure that is heavy in the disk. Even deeper if I could return the shares to each VM as the backup software finishes backing up all the vm’s on that datastore. I wonder if this will actually shorten backup windows or just make the dba’s mad. Either way you win. 🙂

While clearing up my understanding on the issue of SIOC William Lam sent me to these two scripts (very useful):
http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2010/07/script-configure-vm-disk-shares.html
http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2010/07/script-automate-storage-io-control-in.html

VMworld 2010 – In-N-Out Burger Meetup

Last year we had a great time going to In-n-out. For someone like me that was born and raised in Southern California, In-n-out is one of those things I must have when coming back to California. Luckily there is a location within a short trolley ride of the Moscone Center / VMworld 2010. If there is a lesson from last year if you are not used to public transportation you may need some practice. 🙂

Leave a comment or hit me up on twitter @2vcps if you are think you will make it.

Meetup
Where: at the In-n-out in San Francsico
When: Tuesday 8/31 at 5:30 pm – Gives you enough to go eat and come back before any Vendor sponsored party/events. I won’t interfere with free food and beer. 🙂
What: Eat Double Double, Fries

UPDATE

@trey_anderson was cool enough to make this map with directions from Moscone to In-N-Out

All out of HA Slots

A few weeks a go I was moving a customer from an old set of ESX servers (not HA clustered) to a new infrastructure of Clustered ESX hosts. After building, testing and verifying the hosts we started moving the VM’s. It became apparent after a little while there were some resource issues. After just a few VM’s were moved an alert appeared that we could not start any new machines. I start looking at the cluster and there is plenty of extra Memory and CPU. Still nothing will start.
I say to myself, “Self, we have read about this before.” I thought back to this HA Deep Dive article by Duncan Epping.
Lets check the HA slots! (on a side note, if you use HA and have never read the Deep Dive, go do it now!)

As you can see here the slot size is rather giant. We have the largest CPU and Memory reservation plus some overhead (for simplicity) and that blows the size of the slot way up. I didn’t set the reservation, but surely they were there. 8GB of reserved memory. 4000MHz of CPU. Ouch. Where did that come from? It followed the VM from the old host to the new one. One of the reasons I was there was to setup a new cluster since the older ones were performing so slow on the local storage. It seems like someone tried to help some critical VM’s along the way by adding the reservations. I removed the reservations and had plenty of slots as you see below.

Yeah! I was able to power on another VM!

The new cluster blew away the old one. Went from older Xeon’s to 6 core Nehalem’s, from local disks to 48 disks of Equallogic Storage. The reservation was no longer needed.

Lessons:
1. Be careful with reservations, it can impact your failover capacity.
2. Reservations set on the machine will follow it to a new host.