July 5th, 2010 | 
Author: 
I’m very happy to report that since I posted You got somethin’ to say?! (an invitation for virtualization and cloud computing professionals to be guest bloggers here at Virtual Insanity), we’ve received an awesome response. It turns out that there are many individuals who, like us, have something valuable to share but little time to share on a regular basis. And because talk is cheap, I’m even happier to report that we’ve already received a couple blog entries from a few of the individuals who have expressed interest in being a guest blogger.
Notice the addition of “Guest Bloggers” to the main menu? (in addition to the new look and feel of the Virtual Insanity theme) I’ve posted the first entry from Kelly Culwell, a Solution Architect with InterWorks, titled Six P’s and None the Richer. In the next day or two, I’ll also be posting a great contribution from Brandon Riley, a Sr. Distributed Systems Engineer with the Clearing House Payments Company.
A very special “Thank You!” goes out to our first two guest bloggers. We looking forward to seeing more great work from the both of you.
So be sure to check out the great content that’s already starting to flow through our new Guest Bloggers section.
Introduction
A fellow VMware Engineer recommended a book to me recently titled “Linchpin” by Seth Godin. The book has nothing to do with VMware or virtualization but it hits home for me because it highlights a lot of topics that I find applicable to our industry. I could not ignore this as a relevant force that has somehow affected me, so i felt I had to write something up and share some thoughts. This post is a little more off paced from what I normally write about so bare with me. I think a lot of what Godin covers is present in the VMware community today, and many of you are already “Linchpins”. I reached out to Seth to get his permission to share some of his insights, if your interested in purchasing the book just click the link above. Here is the book synopsis:
There used to be two teams in every workplace: management and labor. Now there’s a third team, the linchpins. These people invent, lead (regardless of title), connect others, make things happen, and create order out of chaos. They figure out what to do when there’s no rule book. They delight and challenge their customers and peers. They love their work, pour their best selves into it, and turn each day into a kind of art.
Linchpins are the essential building blocks of great organizations. Like the small piece of hardware that keeps a wheel from falling off its axle, they may not be famous but they’re indispensable. And in today’s world, they get the best jobs and the most freedom. Have you ever found a shortcut that others missed? Seen a new way to resolve a conflict? Made a connection with someone others couldn’t reach? Even once? Then you have what it takes to become indispensable, by overcoming the resistance that holds people back.
Godin believes that our society has changed and we (the U.S. in this example) are no longer living in the industrial era that our parents and grandparents grew up in. We are no longer the factory-driven-widget-producing society that we once were, in fact most of these types of positions have been outsourced to cheap labor across the globe. Going through the schooling process and obtaining a piece of paper no longer guarantees you will be promised a job for the next 30 years of your life. Competition and technology have extinguished the promise of a secure job that pays well, offers health insurance, and a great retirement package when you exit.
Sound melodramatic and doom and gloom? It’s not really. Godin goes on to explain that because our society is changing, we need to also identify this and change with it. We are not cogs in a giant industrial machine. You have a mind of your own, and have more to contribute that you might think. Working off the same rule book is no longer going to apply if you want to be considered indispensible by forward thinking companies.
The old school of thought: "”Keep your head down, follow instructions, show up on time, work hard, suck it up”.
The new school of thought: “Be remarkable, be generous, create art, make judgment calls, connect people and ideas”
Become a VMware Linchpin
Here is how Wikipedia defines Art:
Art is the process or product of deliberately arranging elements in a way to affect the senses or emotions. It encompasses a diverse range of human activities, creations, and modes of expression, including music, literature, film, photography, sculpture, and paintings. The meaning of art is explored in a branch of philosophy known as aesthetics.
The new school of thought talks about becoming an artist, but don’t think of art as the class you avoided in high school. Art is creating something from nothing, it’s also about creating something that invokes an emotional area in the brain for yourself and others. Many virtualization evangelists are creating something from nothing, the VMware blogosphere is one of the best examples of this today. The VMware community is alive with passionate people that are writing and creating new content daily. Have you ever stopped to examine the VMware Planet v12n blog aggregator? It’s really quite amazing the amount of new content created around this topic of virtualization. Customers stepping up, and brining their content to local VMUG’s to share their personal experiences is another great example of creating this type of art.
Twitter is now inundated with VMware virtualization metadata. Not only can you find where this virtualization data resides but you can now make connections with people that would have been impossible to make before. There are experts in every form and fashion that are now open to communicating about all things that touch virtualization. Storage experts, systems experts, networking experts, powershell experts, and perl experts are just a few that jump out. Are you looking for a specific need that might have a benefit to others around you? Pose the question and 9 times out of 10 someone will write the code and share it with the community at large.
Challenge Yourself
Maybe this is something you are already doing today, maybe it’s something your not doing and will never do. That’s fine too, I’m just some guy that read a book and sharing my two cents. I will tell you that as you start to consider some of these topics and look out at the industry in general (not just VMware) you will see this change come into play more and more.
Challenge yourself to get out of your comfort zone. Go out of your way to make new connections. Help someone out that might not be as skilled as you. Write a blog. Sign up for a Twitter account. Stand out, create art, be noticed. It will give you a sense of accomplishment, help define yourself as an expert in your field, and even open more opportunities down the road.
-Scott
– The vTrooper Report –
I was asked a question about a specific use case where a second vCPU should be added to a VM in a Virtualized environment. Generally its an easy answer;
If the server can execute multiple threads and really uses the second vCPU for that other tread
then it’s probably OK to add the second vCPU to the VM
Now adding a vCPU in a server to make it SMP oriented is an elementary task in VMware, but has a few impacts:
- It will change your metrics for reporting
- It changes the HA slot size for your failover needs
- It will modify your consolidation ratio per core and indirectly per socket affecting your Capacity Planning plans
- It will make you redeploy your Ubuntu or Linux server that you forgot to compile with an SMP kernel. (Not to be taken lightly or your server won’t boot)
I was exploring the use case and impacts when a bit of information popped up:
Garbage collection on .NET applications will require a second vCPU to perform in ‘Server Mode’ versus ‘Workstation Mode’
Explaination from MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb680014.aspx
Managed code applications that use the server API receive significant benefits from using the server-optimized garbage collector (GC) instead of the default workstation GC.
Workstation is the default GC mode and the only one available on single-processor computers. Workstation GC is hosted in console and Windows Forms applications. It performs full (generation 2) collections concurrently with the running program, thereby minimizing latency. This mode is useful for client applications, where perceived performance is usually more important than raw throughput.
The server GC is available only on multiprocessor computers. It creates a separate managed heap and thread for each processor and performs collections in parallel. During collection, all managed threads are paused (threads running native code are paused only when the native call returns). In this way, the server GC mode maximizes throughput (the number of requests per second) and improves performance as the number of processors increases. Performance especially shines on computers with four or more processors.
This caught me by surprise and makes me think; for every disk of VM’s around the world which are out of whack (mis-aligned) , there are an equal number of .NET app servers that have been virtualized with P2V tools across the globe that are starved for the correct garbage collection mechanism….
OH, THE HUMANITY !!
Hindenburg and .NET
Whoa! I gotta settle down!
Ok
Now you are going to ask where the special override switch or Regedit value would be used to fix it. The answer is even more easy. There isn’t one. .NET sees one vCPU or more and decides for the app. You cannot override it. You can add 4 vCPU’s to improve its performance but not turn it off.
This probably explains a few of the things that have already happened or will happen in your app development world:
- The .NET development on dual core workstations is working fine and when you move the application to a single core VM the development process hits a hiccup in performance while GC runs.
- VM admins who have been adverse to the second vCPU that was idle now have a reason to deploy a second vCPU but won’t like it.
- It drives a reason to migrate to vSphere sooner than later due to the relaxed CPU scheduler that was introduced in 4.0
- Additional vCPU’s will drive more ‘Eggs’ into your baskets – Do Not Panic
As all the worlds workloads increase its only inevitable that the number of vCPU’s would increase as well. The push for 64-bit systems with over 4GB of RAM are driving up the size of the VM in most farms as seen by the new maxims in the VMware vSphere release. Just remember that you can look for vCPU contention and NUMA pressure in the ESXTOP values.
If you have read Easy vSphere Web Apps with Grails and the VI Java API or Easy VMware Development with VI Java API and Groovy then you know I’m a big fan of Steve Jin’s vSphere Java API. And I recently received the following email …
Folks,
We are running a survey to better understand the needs of the greater community using the vSphere / VI Java API. I am referring to http://vijava.sourceforge.net.
The survey takes less than 5 minutes and it would help us understand what you need from VMware. Does your organization require formal support, indemnification, training or does the current model work for you ?
This survey will be confidential; we will not disclose your name or who you work for. We just want to understand how you are using the vSphere / VI Java API and what you need from VMware.
Link to survey: http://www.surveymethods.com/EndUser.aspx?C4E08C96C4859496C2
Thanks for your time and hope to see you at our Developer Days @ VMworld 2010
Pablo Roesch
vSphere SDK Product Marketing
So if you’re a developer using the vSphere Java API – or if you would like to use it but can’t for some reason (e.g. lack of official support) – then I would ask that you take the survey. I’ve already taken the survey, and I can assure you it’s quick and painless. Thanks for your help!
Greetings Virtual Insanity readers!
My name is Jeff and I am Sr. Systems Engineer / Solutions Specialist at VMware. I specialize in virtualizing messaging systems (Microsoft Exchange, Zimbra), databases (Microsoft SQL), ESX Performance, and Security. My posts are my thoughts at the time I write them and do not reflect those of my employer. I reserve the right to change my opinion as technology evolves and I learn about new ways of getting IT done. And please test any settings described in our posts in a test environment to see if how they will impact your production environment.
I recently had a conversation with a colleague of mine regarding hyper-threading which led to this post.
Here is the question: VMware’s Performance Best Practices for vSphere whitepaper recommends enabling hyper-threading in the BIOS (see page 15), but the application vendor recommends disabling hyper-threading, can I enable hyper-threading for the ESX host while disabling hyper-threading for a specific virtual machine? Yes.
The conversation centered around Microsoft’s recommendation to disable hyper-threading for production Exchange installations and configuring a virtual machine to accommodate this recommendation.
TechNet, “Hyper-threading causes capacity planning and monitoring challenges, and as a result, the expected gain in CPU overhead is likely not justified. Hyper-threading should be disabled by default for production Exchange servers and only enabled if absolutely necessary as a temporary measure to increase CPU capacity until additional hardware can be obtained.”
So, how do I go about disabling hyper threading for a specific virtual machine while leaving the option enabled in the BIOS of the ESX host?
So I am often asked the question “how does this work in ESXi?” from my customers, especially around HW or management agents equivalency. So I hope to make the answer a bit more clear for everyone…
It is public knowledge that ESX is evolving to a pure ESXi model in the future release cycles of the product, though exact timelines are still under NDA. Convergence to a “console-less” ESX provides a number of benefits to our customers, with which many of you are, by now, well acquainted . It reduces the overall footprint that requires patching (see below) as well as removes the dependency on the vestigial RHEL-based Console Operating System, and sets the stage for future enhancements and technologies yet to be introduced. (Those who are under NDA might know to what I am referring!) 
You may have noticed over the past few years there have been a number of authors here at Virtual Insanity. Some have contributed only once or twice. Others contribute (or plan to contribute) on a regular basis. In fact, there are now seven authors who call Virtual Insanity home (ordered by number of posts) …
- Aaron Sweemer (me) – Senior Systems Engineer at VMware
- Scott Sauer – Systems Engineer at VMware
- Rick Westrate – Director of Cloud Services at Eastern Computer
- John Blessing – Technical Consultant at EMC
- Chris Everett – Senior Systems Engineer at VMware
- Thomas Mackay (new author!) – Staff Systems Engineer at VMware
- Jeff Szastak (new author!) – Senior Systems Engineer and Tier 1 Applications Specialist at VMware
I was having a conversation yesterday with a few of my fellow co-authors about how we could improve the blog, make it more valuable for our readers, and make it a powerful and highly recognizable industry resource. We set some pretty aggressive goals, but to achieve them, we’ll need to produce quality content across a broad range of topics on much more frequent basis. Unfortunately, the main obstacle each of us face is simply the lack of time to sit down and write meaningful blog posts with any sort of regular frequency. Read the rest of this entry »
Introduction
I come from a family of artists and I thought some of that intrinsic genetic value kind of flowed in the blood, but by my white boarding skills (illustrated above) apparently that isn’t the case. I promise I will work on my happy little trees as time permits (Bob Ross reference) and try to move away from my chicken scratch art work. I only hope that I can make both my family and Bob proud.
Hello all,
My name is Tom MacKay. I am a Staff SE for VMware and colleague of Scott and Aaron and have worked closely with John B. (vTrooper!) for a few years now. In fact, John was my customer at one time (remember that John?), and Aaron was my “mentee” when he joined VMware. So I have been around at VMware for almost 5 years and seen a dramatic transformation from the days that there were only two of us SEs in the Ohio territory trying to explain to customers why virtualization was a good thing to do!
Aaron and I recently traveled to Santiago, Chile as part of an initial VMware “SE Exchange Program” to present at the VMware vForum there, and Aaron asked if I could add some of my impressions of the trip to the blog. So that no one is confused on this point, I am new to blogging and tweeting, and the other social media aspects of the current scene, so I generally don’t hit the blogs very often. I have a few friends and colleagues you all might know (Duncan, Mike D., etc.), in the blogosphere who do a fantastic job, so this is my attempt at adding my thoughts and input in such a way that might be helpful in some way to the readers.
Introduction
There has been a lot of activity here at VMware with acquisitions and partnerships over the past few months. A fellow engineer at VMware summarized a lot of these acquisitions and how they are meaningful to VMware as an organization. I wanted to share this information because I think it provides people with a better understanding of where we are going as a company and the overall strategic vision of VMware (Thanks again Andy!).
There are plenty of announcements to talk about from the second half of Day 1 and Day 2 of EMCWorld. Keynotes from Pat Gelsinger, Brian Gallagher,and Rich Napolitano all brought the “Why, What, and How” the datacenter will change over the next year. With the quick reference to VPLEX by Joe Tucci in the morning Keynote of DAY 1, the official announcement and demo of the technology by Pat Gelsinger in the afternoon keynote explained the VPLEX technology and its purpose in todays datacenters.
– vTrooper Report — from EMC World
My self-imposed gag order has been lifted since my arrival to EMC.
I’m ready to share some of the great news from EMC World 2010. Stay tuned for all the announcements in detail but for now:
It’s my first time at EMC World. I’m an infrastructure guy at heart and have been to Cisco World and VM World a few times, but not the big storage show. That’s good because EMC is not just a storage company. My “Firehose” treatment over the past few weeks made certain of that fact. So I’ll warm up to EMC World with a little mood and follow it with content. All good fun starts with a party:
Introduction
Being only three weeks into my career at VMware, I haven’t had much time to do any technical blog posts due to the fact that I have been drinking from the fire hose and trying to ramp up as quickly as possible. I am writing this post from VMware’s annual tech summit, and I joked with a few people here that I am so new that I haven’t even gotten a paycheck yet. My wife called to reassure me that I actually did get paid, so no more jokes about a “virtual paycheck” I guess.
Everything has been great so far. The people I am working with are awesome, the job is going to be fun but challenging, and to be honest I think I am working for the coolest software company in the world. VMware’s breadth of products is really quite amazing, they are literally covering the stack with many different applications, and driving a change in the industry that many people are excited about, revolutionizing IT.
A few weeks ago I wrote a post with a very similar title, “Easy VMware Development with VI Java API and Groovy.” Today I want to expand on that a little bit and show you a cool way to quickly stand up web apps for VMware vSphere using Grails. What is Grails? If you’re familiar with the popular Ruby on Rails web application framework, then you can think of Grails as the Java (well, Groovy actually) equivalent of Rails. From the Grails official website …
Grails is an advanced and innovative open source web application platform that delivers new levels of developer productivity by applying principles like Convention over Configuration. Grails helps development teams embrace agile methodologies, deliver quality applications in reduced amounts of time, and focus on what really matters: creating high quality, easy to use applications that delight users.
What does all this mean? The short and sweet answer is Grails will take care of all the pain-in-the-a$$ “stuff” required to get a web app up and running. A good analogy would be cake mix.
Have you ever wanted to write a script or an application that automates your VMware VI3.x / vSphere environment, but lack the development skills to do so? Or, maybe you have development skills, but you’re looking for ways to simplify your code and improve your productivity? In either case, I’ve stumbled across something you’ll definitely want to check out.
Before we start, I should probably clarify something. If you have zero development experience, then the title of this post could be a little misleading. An absolute beginner probably wouldn’t consider this “easy.” There are certainly easier ways to develop VMware scripts which are targeted at VMware Administrators, such as the vSphere PowerCLI. And if you want to do some VMware scripting without learning a programming language and/or acquiring some development skills, then you should stop reading now and go check out the vSphere PowerCLI. However, if you’re a little adventurous and want a “fast track” for creating VMware applications, then by all means, read on.