Archive for the ‘Scott Sauer’ Category

 

Introduction

Virtualizing and running Java workloads on vSphere is absolutely a reality, but when I talk to customers I emphasize the same best practices as virtualizing Tier 1 workloads.  The rules are not the same as basic consolidation and containment and you need to understand, plan, and architect your virtualization platform if you want to be successful. 

I spend much of my time working with customer infrastructure engineers and architects, and when topics of Java come up, the conversation takes a turn.  The infrastructure teams typically don’t want to get into the application stack and I can’t say that I blame them.  Java and programming are a completely different skillset and the infrastructure engineers already have enough full time jobs keeping the datacenter running.  The purpose of the blog post is to help shed some light on a new technology in vSphere 5 called “Elastic Memory for Java” or EM4J and hopefully some other simple Java best practices and information as well.  The end state of this blog is to help you bring up an EM4J configuration of your own so you can begin to see the value and test your own JVM configurations.  I am also writing this to help educate some of the infrastructure engineers and help explain why this feature matters (Disclaimer = I am not a Java programming guy).

 

What is EM4J?

Hopefully you are somewhat familiar with the intelligent memory management features that come with the vSphere platform such as memory ballooning.  Ballooning is a great technique that allows you to reclaim memory from virtual machines if it’s not in use by the VM.  When dealing with Java workloads a VMware best practice has always been to set reservations for the virtual machine.  This means we are always guaranteeing (or backing) that the memory will be available to the VM when it needs it.  When a memory reservation is set for a VM the hypervisor won’t reclaim memory from this VM (which means VM’s memory won’t be ballooned, compressed or swapped to persistent storage) if memory is tight on the host.

If you consider the definition of JVM (Java Virtual Machine) the last two words are important to consider when talking VMware virtualization.  Running a VM on a VM creates somewhat of a problem for the hypervisor.  The JVM is essentially a black box to the hypervisor and it has no visibility into what’s going on inside it’s environment.  EM4J on the other hand allows one to reclaim memory through a much cheaper mechanism, and induces GCs at the moments when VM is handling relatively low load. It does not eliminate long pauses as VMs without full reservations can end up swapping, but it significantly reduces pause time and provides a more graceful performance degradation when running overcommitted, making workload’s performance more predictable.  Now that I have described some of the characteristics, here is the actual definition according to the VMware documentation:

 

“Elastic Memory for Java (EM4J) manages a memory balloon that sits directly in the Java heap and works with new memory reclamation capabilities introduced in ESXi 5.0. EM4J works with the hypervisor to communicate system-wide memory pressure directly into the Java heap, forcing Java to clean up proactively and return memory at the most appropriate times—when it is least active. You no longer have to be so conservative with your heap sizing because unused heap memory is no longer wasted on uncollected garbage objects. And you no longer have to give Java 100% of the memory that it needs; EM4J ensures that memory is used more efficiently, without risking sudden and unpredictable performance problems.”

 

As you can see VMware is taking the same underlying technology that has been used for years across our customer base and applying it to Java workloads to gain more/better efficiencies at scale.  The same performance characteristics apply to EM4J as they do to the ballooning in the VMware ESX hypervisor.  Ballooning will only be invoked if the system is over committing memory, and has to begin utilizing its advanced memory management techniques.  The benefit of EM4J is when the host is under memory pressure, the end user experience will be the same as if the VM was hard backed with physical RAM as we discussed earlier.

 

Getting started

EM4J is a product that works in conjunction with vSphere 5 and vFabric tc Server that is bundled with vFabric Standard and Advanced.  EM4J can also work directly with Apache Tomcat.  You might be asking yourself what is vFabric tc Server at this point and why the hell do I care about that?    vFabric tc Server is a Java application server based on Apache Tomcat that VMware maintains and supports.  This is a competitive product to a IBM WebSphere or an Oracle WebLogic, but is a much lighter weight Java container that allows faster deployments in development as well as production environments.   As a systems infrastructure engineer it is imperative that you understand these types of Java workloads from a high level.  Your success in moving these workloads into a virtual infrastructure depends on it and is irrelevant to EM4J.  Before I jump in and show you how to set this up there are a few things we need to get out of the way first.  Here is what your going to need to begin utilizing EM4J for your own testing, grab it now:

• VMware vSphere 5
• VMware vFabric tc Server 2.6
• VMware vSphere 5 Web Console (for reporting visibility)
• VMware vFabric EM4J Documentation
• VMware vFabric EM4J web console UI plug-in
• Redhat RHEL 5 operating system (Officially supported OS today)
• JVM Hotspot 1.6

Making it work in vSphere

As noted in my disclaimer above, I am not a Java guy so this took me some time to get my lab environment up and running with the right components since I am new to vFabric.  RHEL is the officially supported operating system today, but Linux is Linux so I chose to grab the latest Ubuntu 11 distribution for my testing.  Work with your internal Java guru to get vFabric tc Server setup and running on your Linux VM for testing.  Once you get through setting up and installing your operating system and vFabric tc Server, there are some technical pre-requisites you need to accomplish in order to enable EM4J balloon driver and gain visibility into the JVM itself.

The first step you need to perform in your testing is to enable an advanced parameter within the Linux VM your are testing with.  The virtual machine will need to be powered down to perform this action.  Right click on the virtual machine, select edit settings, and the select the options tab.  Go down to the advanced section and select “General” and then select the “Configuration Parameters” button that is now visible:

 

Once you select the “Configuration Parameters” button you are going to select the “Add Row” button and add the following configuration parameter to the VM:

sched.mem.pshare.guestHintsSyncEnable and set the value to “true” as shown below:

 

Making it work in tc Server

Once you have enabled the virtual machine for EM4J, you also need to ensure your instance of tc server utilizes the EM4Jbaloon driver.  Execute the command listed below to create a new instance, in this example my instance name is “scott” and the “elastic memory” option is what enabled the EM4J balloon driver.  Once you have created the instance, go ahead and start it up!

 

Next we will configure a few parameters within out instance so we can  monitor them via the VMware vSphere web console interface which I will show you next.  Add the following parameters to the setenv.sh file of your new instance name as follows:

 

JVM_OPTS="-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote=true
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.port=6969
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=false
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false"

 

Next step we need to setup what is called the Console Guest Collector (CGC).  The CGC is a process that allows the vSphere web console to pull data from the EM4J balloon driver and place it with each VM so the web client can then display performance data about the current workloads.  This needs to be setup via a cron so we can continuously pull real-time data into vSphere.  The cgc.sh script can be found in the /opt/vmware/vfabric-tc-server-standard-2.6.0.RELEASE/templates/elastic-memory/bin/ directory.  Here is a command to add an entry to the crontab for every 5 minutes:

*/5 * * * * /opt/vmware/vfabric-tc-server-standard-2.6.1.RELEASE/templates/elastic-memory/bin/cgc.sh >
/dev/null 2>&1

 

Making it work in the vSphere Web Client

You downloaded the EM4J UI plug-in earlier and now we need to extract it and set it up on your vSphere 5 Virtual Center server.  Extract the contents of the following directory then re-start the vSphere Web Client Service:

C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\vSphere Web Client\plugin-packages\em4j-client

 

 

The data!

Now that we are through the tedious stuff we can actually see some of the more interesting performance data, and frankly the reason you are probably reading this blog post!  Log-in to your Virtual Center’s web interface and navigate to your virtual machine you are using to test with.  Select the fourth tab at the top of the options section which is titles “Workloads”.  You should now see something similar to this and the EM4J Agent Enabled should be selected if you setup everything correctly:

 

 

Selecting the “Alerts” tab will give you any relevant data and tell you if any issues are occurring.  This will also display some Java Best Practices and instruct you on how to fine tune your JVM.  Selecting the “Resource Management” tab will display much more performance centric detailed information which gives you full visibility into the JVM itself.  Excellent performance visibility into that problematic Java workload:

 

Conclusion

From the documentation, “EM4J helps the system behave gracefully and predictably when memory becomes scarce. It helps you to more easily determine the over-commit ratio that provides acceptable performance at peak loads.”  Hopefully you learned a little bit about what Elastic Memory for Java is and how it works within vFabric and VMware vSphere 5.  As with most technology features and functionality I suggest understanding the best use cases for EM4J and how it fits into your own environment.  The documentation that I linked to, gives plenty of examples of when EM4J should be utilized effectively.  Look for more performance benchmarks around optimal overcommit ratios as our vFabric team completes some great performance testing on this exciting new technology.  The EM4J architecture will not only allow you to run your JVM’s more efficiently, but will also provide you some great performance visibility and give insight into your Java workloads.

 

Introduction

VMware is in a perpetual state of change if you haven’t noticed.  Virtualization and the hypervisor will never not be a core competency of ours but we are continually expanding into other areas of IT software solutions for our customers.  I think Paul Maritz states it best with his quote “When we see a management problem, we will be replacing it with an automation solution”.  Take a look at what VMware vCloud Director is accomplishing by delivering the automation of IT services at the Infrastructure layer for our customers and service providers.  Take a look at what Horizon App Manager is doing to create and deliver a self-service enterprise application store to consume SaaS based applications.  One of the best parts about moving towards a self-service model, the system engineers can now have part of their lives back to focus on more important projects for the business since the end users can now consume services on demand. 

When I talk with my customers, half of my challenge is educating them on what we are doing to enable them to operate more efficiently from a solution perspective.  We are no longer just a hypervisor company.  Don’t get me wrong, I love talking speeds and feeds and can geek out and get distracted with the best of them on the “tech cool factor”.  Alas, at the end of the day isn’t it about finding a solution that is going to make you (systems engineer) be able to do more with less while also delivering value back to the business?  This is why our customers love us so much into the “infrastructure corner”. We have helped them to maintain happy lines of business by providing IT faster to their customers with virtualization.  As our former friend Patrick Swayze (RIP) once said,  “Nobody puts baby in the corner!”

 

 

Enter vFabric Data Director

Let’s think out of the traditional infrastructure box, there are challenges with virtualizing databases from a management perspective.  No it can be done, and many customers are out there deploying Oracle and Microsoft SQL databases on VMware vSphere.   It’s not the traditional I/O workload conversation that one must consider when going after these tier 1 workloads.  It’s more about the long term management of these resources that are constantly being requested, deployed, copied, backed-up,  and the backend management that goes into this entire process.  Database sprawl is a real world problem that many organizations struggle with.

Why not create a portal where a non-DBA type IT user can login and tear off a database by answering a few simple questions?  Why not pre-configure the DBA repetitive tasks from a list of options or a “catalog” and allow them to choose the correct combo meal they would like to consume?  Why not give the DBA’s back time in their day to do more productive forward thinking activities and take the easy operational stuff off their plates?  Enter vFabric Data Director (The artist formerly known as Project Aurora).  Notice the following features and functionality as your watching the clip.

• Self-Service Provisioning
• Linked Database Clones
• SQL Statement Execution from the Web Portal
• Backup and Recovery simplification

 

 

vFabric PostgreSQL

The vFabric Data director portal probably makes sense to you now that you have seen it in action.  The first database we have enabled on top of this platform is a vSphere-optimized PostgreSQL database, the most enterprise-ready open source database.  We have specifically custom tuned this fork of Postgres to make it virtualization aware and to run more efficiently.

 

 

The vFabric Postgres database  is delivered to the IT environment in the form of a virtual appliance that is intelligent and can self-tune itself as workloads change.  Database buffer sizes can scale up and down as I/O characteristics change, a special ballooning database driver can be invoked for more memory efficiencies within the virtual appliance.  The database us a standard SQL database that supports ODBC connections and supports JDBC tools to query the database just like the open source version.

What’s next?

Expect much more!  I can’t say a ton here in this forum, but know this is just the beginning for this product/solution.  EMC’s Chad Sakac put together a great video for VMworld 2011 (and apparently is allowed to say much more than I am) on his blog site.  Watch towards the end of the video for futures and where you can expect to start to see the flood gates open up as we take it to the next level! 

- Scott

 

 

 

Introduction

With vSphere 5 comes a plethora of new features and functionality across the entire VMware virtualization platform.  One of the core components that got a nice upgrade was the vSphere Distributed Switch (vDS).  For those of you that have not had the chance to use the vDS, it is a centralized administrative interface that allows access to manage and update a network configuration in one location as opposed to each separate ESX host.  This saves vSphere administrators or network engineers a lot of operational configuration time and/or scripting activities.   The vDS is a feature that is packaged with Enterprise Plus licensing.  Here are some of the new features that are included with the vDS 5.0:

• New stateless firewall that is built into the ESXi kernel (iptables is no longer used)
• Network I/O Control improvements (network resource pools and 802.1q support)
• LLDP standard is now supported for network discovery (no longer just CDP support)
• The ability to mirror ports for advanced network troubleshooting or analysis
• The ability to configure NetFlow for visibility of inner-VM communication (NetFlow version 5)

 

NetFlow Basics

I could do a write-up on each one of these components as they are all worth discussing in more detail, but I wanted to focus on the NetFlow feature for this post as I think it’s an awesome addition.  NetFlow has had experimental support in vSphere for some time, but now VMware has integrated the functionality right into the vDS and is officially supported.

NetFlow gives the administrator the ability to monitor virtual machine network communications to assist with intrusion detection, network profiling, compliance monitoring, and in general, network forensics.  Enabling this functionality can give you some real insight into what is going on within your environment from a network perspective.  Having “cool features” is a nice to have, but having features that you can utilize and show value back to the business is a completely different value add.

Let’s look at how to setup NetFlow on the new vDS, then take a look at the data you can extract from NetFlow with a third party NetFlow viewer.  Once you see the value of the data, you can then make some important IT business decisions on how you need to mitigate risk and protect your investment by getting ahead of the curve (aka VMware vShield or some other third party software).

 

Setup your vDS 5 Switch

Ensure you are running VMware vSphere 5.0 and have activated Enterprise Plus licensing to setup the vDS switch in your environment.  You can see below the new option to deploy a vDS 5.0 switch, and of course we offer backwards compatibility for those that need to deploy to their 4.x environments.  Select the 5.0 version and hit next.

 

In the “General” section give the vDS a name, in this example I am giving him “dvSwitch5”.  Select next the number of network interface cards you want to participate in the switch and then select next.

 

For each host in your cluster that you wish to participate in the vDS, you will need to configure the network interfaces that will support this vDS implementation.  In this example I have selected vmnic 4 and vmnic 5 to be members of the vDS 5 switch.  Select next.

 

That’s it, review the summary and select finish for your vDS configuration to come online and begin configuring NetFlow.

 

 

Setup Netflow on the vDS 5

Now you have a fully functioning vDS 5.0 switch, you can actually start to use it!  First let’s go ahead and configure NetFlow on the dvPortGroup, then we will move some virtual machines over to the new vDS so we can get some real data flowing.  Right click on your newly created dvSwitch and select “edit settings”.  Go to the “NetFlow” tab across the top of the page.  You will need to give your vDS an IP address so your NetFlow tool will know where to collect the data from.  Populate an IP address for the vDS, then you will need to enter the IP address of the collector you plan on using to pull the data from.  Make sure you enter the correct port number (default is 1) for how you setup your NetFlow application to communicate.

 

Right click on the dvPortGroup within the vDS and select the “monitoring” option and enable NetFlow so you can begin to collect data.

 

Move a few VM’s over to the new vDS so you can begin to capture some real data within your newly established NetFlow configuration.  I have highlighted below how you can change the network connection on a VM to now utilize the dvSwitch5 we created earlier.

 

Pull Some Data

You will need to utilize a third party NetFlow analysis tool to parse the data we have started to generate.  In the example below I am using a pretty nice application called Manage Engine Netflow Analyzer.  I won’t be covering how to install or setup this application here, as your organization might already have some network tool that they have standardized on.  Once you have moved some virtual machines over to the new vDS, ensure you start to create some traffic so there is some relevant data to examine.  Below I ran a few speedtest.net downloads, and hit some websites to make traffic appear below.

 

Below you can see the different virtual interfaces on my vDS that are being monitored.  You can see our application is showing us what type of traffic we are examining, and the consumption of the different tcp/udp ports that are communicating both inbound and outbound on the switch.

 

The “under the covers” reporting is great stuff, but let’s start to look at how this can help the business.  Consider a VMware View environment where you are supporting hundreds if not thousands of desktop images.  You can use the NetFlow data to start to examine if certain VM’s are communicating to production systems that they shouldn’t be communicating to at all.  How about reducing the overall workload on your VMware View ESX server?  Many of the NetFlow products like the one I am showing here will produce reports on where users are going externally on the internet.  See the report below.  YouTube is probably a website you want to keep an eye on, as streaming video can greatly impact a virtual desktop environment.

 

From an intrusion detection and compliance perspective, you can now gain visibility into the vSphere environment to begin to understand some of the network communications that are taking place.  See below:

 

 

From a risk mitigation perspective, VMware can help you eliminate these security vulnerabilities that you are beginning to gather data on.  VMware vShield has three different solutions that can help protect your environment from the edge to the core.  I would suggest to examine segmenting and protecting your internal workloads to eliminate these security risks.  From a virtual desktop perspective, the desktop workloads are better served being contained in their own protected segment (VLAN’s are broadcast domains not protected segments).  Below is an example of how a logical vShield configuration can begin to help you segment your virtual infrastructure.

 

Conclusion

VMware vSphere 5 offers some great new features that are integrated into the new vSphere 5 Distributed Switch.  Start to leverage your existing investment by examining your network infrastructure with the NetFlow data you can now begin to extract.  Once you have gathered this data, begin considering how you can mitigate some of the security and compliance risks within your organization.  VMware vShield is a product that can help you in this regard and will integrate into your current environment.

 

-Scott

 

 

Introduction

 

This is a follow-up blog post to a write up I did last year on upgrading your virtual hardware.  The post I did was really trying to show people how easy the virtual hardware to version 7 was, and that despite it being a manual effort, it wasn’t all that painful.  There have been several other write-ups in the community that cover how to automate this task to save you time and effort.  In the end, there was no easy automated way to accomplish this task that was officially supported.

There are so many great new features that are being released with vSphere 5 that some of the small stuff might get missed.  As a former VI admin, this is one of the small ones that can’t be overlooked for those of you in the trenches.  There is another new feature that is introduced with vSphere 5 called “VMware Auto Deploy” that somewhat competes with VUM from a ESX deployment methodology.  If you would like to learn more about Auto Deploy, check out Gabe’s write-up here.

 

In a Nutshell

• VUM can be used to upgrade your ESX 3.x hosts and vSphere 4 hosts to 5.0 (3.x makes a pit stop at 4)
• VUM can be used to upgrade your vSphere “Classic” hosts to ESXi
• VUM can now remediate multiple ESX hosts at the same time rather than queuing up (think multi-threaded)
• VUM can automatically upgrade VMtools at a scheduled maintenance window
• VUM can automatically upgrade Virtual Hardware at a scheduled maintenance window
• VUM can no longer be used to patch guest operating systems
• VUM requires a Windows Operating system and can not be installed on the VMware vCenter Server Appliance
• VUM can automatically upgrade your Virtual Hardware from version 4 or 7 to version 8 (vSphere 5)

 

Update Manager to the rescue

You can now use vSphere Update Manager to perform orchestrated upgrades to upgrade the virtual hardware and VMware Tools of virtual machines in the inventory at the same time.  Not only can you use VMware update Manager (VUM) to upgrade your ESX hosts to version 5 you can also leverage it assist with the hundreds of VM’s you need to address as part of the upgrade process!  This is a huge time saver and will help eliminate configuration drift across your environment, as I am sure your virtual infrastructure has only grown bigger since the last time we went through this. 

Let’s walk through what this process looks like, and how you can now configure update manager to accomplish this.  I am going to assume you have already setup or upgraded your Virtual Center to version 5, and you have also updated or installed VUM 5.

Automate the VMware Tools upgrade

The first step in upgrading your virtual infrastructure is to crate a plan of attack.  Most of my customers group their virtual machines by applications or by lines of business.  This typical grouping won’t lend itself well to our virtual machine updating that we need to do.  I suggest creating a few folders in the “VM’s and Templates” view that you can use to help facilitate this upgrade.  As you can see below I created three different folders that you can use to temporarily move the vm’s into for their scheduled maintenance.   I suggest creating different upgrade windows that you will attach to these three folders (after getting change management approval of course!).  Yes there is downtime required for this process!

 

For each of these folders you are going to want to configure it to apply the VMware Tools upgrade first.  You can see below that this option is selected for my first patch management window.

 

After I have selected my VMware Tools upgrade, I can now scan the VM’s that I have moved into this folder to discover which ones need be upgraded.

 

Now you want to select “Remediate” on the new baseline that we have configured.  You will be prompted to create a schedule for the VMware Tools installation as shown in the capture below.  I have configured my first VMtools patching to occur at 2:20 a.m.

 

VMware Update Manager gives you the option of taking a snapshot prior to the tools upgrade in case something goes sideways during the upgrade procedure.  Here you can also select if you want to retain your snapshots or have VUM remove the snapshots after a configured period of time (hours):

 

Automate the Virtual Hardware upgrade

Now let’s run through the same process again, this time we are going to select the “VM Hardware Upgrade” which will then bring your VMware virtual machine hardware version up to version 8.  As I mentioned above, you can be running at either version 7 or even version 4 for VUM to update your virtual hardware.

Same as before, but this time make sure you stagger your virtual hardware upgrade for 30-40 minutes later:

 

Same options as before, feel free to take snapshots of the vm’s in case you need to revert for some reason.  Be aware, if you are doing snapshots across hundreds of virtual machines, you should consider the disk space that they will be consuming in both the short and long term.

Below you can see in the recent tasks that our upgrades are taking place automatically which should give you some of your personal time back to do other more important things in your environment.

 

 

Conclusion

Leverage VMware Update Manager as part of your upgrade path to vSphere 5.  Automation is critical as your virtual environment continues to grow exponentially.  I haven’t spoken with one customer that is hiring more VMware engineers to their team, so we need to leverage tools/technology to automate whenever possible.

Hope this helps!

-Scott

Welcome back, I hope you found our first newsletter helpful in some way shape or form.  The newsletter seems to be getting larger and larger which is a great thing.  It might soon start to qualify as a magazine rather than a newsletter.

We got some good feedback so we are going to keep going with this for a while.  Please let us know via the comments section if you are enjoying it, would like to see different content,  or just want to say hello.

-Scott

When talking about VMware virtualization bottlenecks, 9 out of 10 customers answer their number one bottleneck is memory. Notice how I said bottleneck, not problem. This relates to capacity planning or trying to understand and right size the environment so you can gauge when you need to order more physical infrastructure. Their number one problem is storage, which is quite a different story altogether and I won’t be covering storage in this article (this time). Since memory is such a common point of discussion with my customers, I thought I would dig a little deeper on this topic and share some information around utilization and what it all means.

 

My customers typically track their utilization in the most common area of vSphere that one might expect to find this information, the DRS Resource Distribution graph at the cluster level.

 

From the image displayed above, one might think that I am close to memory capacity and I should look at ordering more hardware for my cluster. While in a general sense that might not be a bad idea to begin planning for growth, but let’s take a closer look at what we are seeing.  Notice the blue informational icon and how it’s telling us that the displayed information is based on memory consumption. Let’s do a mouse over on the chart that’s being displayed to get some more granular information and what this means.

 

 

You can see in the above image that my Virtual Center VM is “Consuming” ~4GB of memory, but in all reality the active memory being used is sitting at ~700MB. DRS entitlement is a measurement that calculates what the load or demand is on the vSphere host/cluster over time, and then projects an average entitlement number for planning purposes. You can use the DRS entitlement numbers as a general planning/forecasting number, but to be honest you still have some capacity within the cluster.

Now I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t make you aware of an easier way to track this information by using software rather than brain power. For those of you that haven’t seen Capacity IQ yet, I would highly encourage you to evaluate the product. Capacity IQ was built for this specific reason, to help you understand when you will need to start thinking about more hardware. It can also help you run your environment more efficiently. There are some great reports that help you identify which virtual machines are not using the resources that were allocated to them.  Take them back!

Coming from a VMware system engineer end user position, I can tell you that as your environment begins to grow, capacity management and planning becomes critical. I evaluated Capacity IQ when I was still on the customer side, and did a write up if you are interested in my thoughts on the product.

There are a lot of the customers I cover in my region that are really starting to see the value in VMware’s management tools.  As virtual machines now outnumber physical machines, customers need some tools to help report against their existing infrastructure as well as predict and prepare for future virtual machine workloads.  One of my favorite VMware tools that I liked when I was on the customer side was a product called Capacity IQ.  I wrote up a blog post that I think people found useful that was basically an overview of the benefits of the product.  You can check that post out here.  I tell most of my customers about it, because it’s simple to setup (virtual appliance) and it gives you loads of great information about your existing infrastructure.

One of my customers that is moving forward with a CapIQ implementation e-mailed me about what types of storage metrics are available from the product.  I was happy to inform him that Capacity IQ 1.5 was just released and provides some great storage statistics that can now be reported against.  Much to my dismay, he told me that he wasn’t seeing the storage report data, the metrics were all blank.

Here are the requirements to get the reports to produce storage related information:

You  need the vCenter management webservices running for CapIQ to collect some of the storage metrics. The storage IO metrics require you to have ESX 4.1.  When you use ESX 4.0 or earlier hosts, the following metrics appear with dashes (–) and affect the Dashboard, the Datastores – List view, the Virtual Machine Capacity – Summary view, and the Virtual Machine Capacity Usage – Trend view:

* Disk I/O read/write
* Disk I/O reads/writes per second
* Disk I/O read/write latency
* VM Disk I/O read/write latency

-Scott

Introduction

VMware recently announced the general availability of a Zimbra virtual appliance that VMware customers can simply import into their existing infrastructure and get “e-mail in box”.  This is a great concept for administrators because the operating system is pre-configured and purposefully built for the application that is packaged with it.  The virtual appliance will import into the virtual center management console and will have the standard "OVF” (Open Virtualization Format) file extension for those that are new to virtual appliances.

I am no e-mail administrator, so I wanted to see how easy setting up the Zimbra virtual appliance would be and provide some instructions for those out there that are looking to test out Zimbra.

 

Get the Bits!

First things first, go out and grab the download of the Zimbra virtual appliance by clicking on the icon below.  Yes you will need to register to download the bits…

Import the Virtual Appliance

There are two methods of importing a virtual appliance, you can enter the url, which is supplied by the Zimbra website once you register, or you can download the appliance locally and import it locally.  I grabbed the full download in case I hosed something up I would have a copy of the ovf locally so I could start over from scratch.  I guess a snapshot would work as well, so it’s up to you how you would like to proceed here.  Below is a screenshot of the import:

Configure the Zimbra Virtual Appliance

The Zimbra virtual appliance is pre-configured to ask you the basic configuration parameters you will need to get the appliance up and running.  You can see below are the questions that you will to answer, pretty common stuff if you a IT administrator.  Make sure you use the FQDN for the hostname.

 

Power it up

Now that you have configured your basic system information you can now power up your new virtual appliance.  You can see below that it will automatically configure the appliance based off your information you have previously populated.  Very nice for a hands off approach and a streamlined installation process.

 

Finish it off

Now that you are powered up and on the network, you can login to the administration console to finish your configuration.  Point your web browser to https://<hostname>:5480  The administration console will be the place where you can create user accounts, configure licensing information, pull diagnostic data for troubleshooting and update the virtual appliance itself.

DNS is a big component of e-mail.  If you are doing split DNS or Dynamic DNS, I suggest  to reference this link to assist your efforts.  I am using a dynamic DNS service at home along with split DNS, so I had to go and update my host entry with a MX record so the world new where to route my e-mail traffic.  Once that was done correctly I was up and running and able to send/receive e-mails with no problem.

 

Licensing

The last thing you will want to to is license your installation, the nice folks over at Zimbra will give you a 10 user license free of charge.  Click the link below to go license your configuration or view some sample pricing on what a fully licensed configuration would look like.  Enjoy!

 

-Scott

It’s hard to believe that another year has flown by and Eric Siebert’s voting for the top Virtualization blogging contest is upon us once again!  If you enjoy the content that you read from Virtual Insanity, I encourage you to give back to the community and vote for us!

http://vote.vsphere-land.com/

What other site discusses great technical VMware content ranging from core ESX, Spring Source, Linchpin’s and even open’s its doors to great guest bloggers??  Thanks for reading.

-Scott

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

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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!).

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Introduction

“Going Green” has been a buzz word in the IT community for years but the more I deal with this topic the more I consider it a black and white issue.  I never thought I would be covering an energy blog topic, but there are some real world examples I wanted to write about.  Datacenters are enormous consumers of energy from the IT infrastructure itself, all the way down to the HVAC that is needed to cool these power thirsty systems.  While I think green initiatives are much needed in our industry, typically large corporations don’t consider these initiatives unless there is some intrinsic value associated with them i.e. money.  Business drivers outweigh the political pressures of saving the environment, and in all fairness isn’t that what a company should be about, their own salvation?

Maybe that sounds harsh to all of the eco-friendly readers out there, but don’t get me wrong I am all about saving natural resources and respecting our environment.  Understanding the underlying issue of the current state of our industry is critical if one is going to offer solutions to a problem.  If corporations can save operational costs on power and cooling and say they are a “green company” then we have just killed those two birds with one stone.

Read the rest of this entry »

Introduction

Networking is the fourth I/O component that I will be covering in this series of performance write ups.  Networking is another important component in the stack, if not well thought out, can lead to performance problems later down the road.  Security is an important design consideration when planning your network configuration.  One might argue that with a virtual environment your are more prone to risks since at times there is no longer a physical cabling restriction in place.  If someone has the appropriate rights in virtual center, they could bridge two logical networks together, or place a virtual machine into a DMZ.  VMware introduced vShields to mitigate your virtualized environment from some of these risks.  By creating zones you can enforce policies that can bridge, firewall, or isolate virtual machines between network segments.  When designing or upgrading your VMware environment, work closely with your network team to understand their design considerations.  If possible, leverage VLAN tagging (802.1q) to eliminate excessive physical cabling to different segments.

Read the rest of this entry »