DMZ virtualization with VMware Infrastructure

Many network engineers is worried about virtualizing DMZ servers on the same physical ESX servers as their production servers. VMware has released a whitepaper on best practices on DMZ virtualization with VMware Infrastructure:

Read it here

VMware Infrastructure 3 in a Cisco Network Environment

Cisco has written up a document regarding how to setup VMware VI3 environments connected with a physical Cisco switched network.

This document is intended for network architects, network engineers, and server administrators interested in understanding and deploying VMware ESX Server 3.x hosts in a Cisco data center environment.

Read it here

It’s pretty good. Enjoy it!

VMware Workstation 6.5 beta 2 og debug mode

En af mine gode kollegaer gav mig et tip til hvordan man fjerner debug mode fra VMware Workstation 6.5 beta 2 - så den performer en lille smule bedre:

1. Omdøb filen vmware-vmx-debug.exe til vmware-vmx-debug_old.exe
2. Omdøb filen vmware-vmx.exe til vmware-vmx-debug.exe

Genstart derefter din maskine og voila

Hvis du vil “lege” med VMware Workstation beta2 klik her:

http://www.vmware.com/communities/content/beta/ws65/registration.html

Microsoft releases Hyper-V

Microsoft has released Hyper-V for download:

Read more here.

 

Thoughts on Microsoft’s Hyper-V feature called Quick Migration vs. VMware VMotion

Quick Migration in Hyper-V is Microsoft’s way to provide high availability in their virtual infrastructure. Quick Migration requires setup of a Microsoft Cluster to be able to failover VMs from one Hyper-V host to another. This requires Enterprise or Datacenter licenses for Windows. But what does this mean?

Microsoft does not support two Hyper-V hosts accessing the same LUN at the same time. You have to setup Cluster Disks that only one host can access. This means that when you want to do a failover with Quick Migration – you failover the whole LUN. All guests (VMs) that use that specific LUN will be suspended in a short period and then moved to another host. It happens within seconds – but the VM is not accessible in that period and users may lose connectivity.

To be able to move a single guest from one Hyper-V host to another host requires that this guest use its own dedicated LUN. This could potentially limit the number of VMs running on a Hyper-V host. For database servers, like SQL, Exchange, where you split the load on more than one LUN to separate random IO from sequential IO, this will dramatically limit the number of guests on one specific host or cluster. One host or cluster can only address up to 255 LUNs. 16 nodes are supported in a MS Cluster.

If you decide to put more guests on the same LUN – this group of guests will all be failed over to the same destination host. In the end this means that you would need more hosts to support the same amount of guests compared to VMware, because you need available resources within the other hosts to be able to take over the load from all guests within a same LUN. One thing to consider is how long a failover takes. This should be tested thoroughly. In prior versions of MS clustering the more resources in the resource group that you want to failover the longer it took.

Also you would not be able to separate the load from one Hyper-V host (that has failed) to multiple hosts. It all depends on design – but it makes it more complicated in my opinion.

I think the way VMware does this is far more flexible and scales a lot better and potentially it is possible to use more resources on each hosts and still have capacity to lose a single or two hosts within a cluster. VMware can failover multiple guests to multiple hosts – sharing the same LUN and by that spreading the load from the failed host on multiple hosts.

Many customers are not very confident with running a Microsoft Cluster solution based on the reputation the cluster features has on stability, management and complexity. I have prior build and setup multiple MS cluster solutions and they have became a lot more stabile in Windows Server 2003 and hopefully even more with Server Windows Server 2008.

Final note is that Quick Migration can’t be compared with VMware’s VMotion. Quick Migration suspends the guest or guests before they are failed over with a minimal downtime. VMware VMotion moves the VM guest within hosts without downtime. Several other features from VMware is built on top of VMotion – which is VMware Update Manager, VMware Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS – automatic load balancing on CPU and memory), VMware Storage VMotion, VMware Distributed Power Management (DPM – currently in experimental support only)

For more info on Microsoft Quick Migration read this whitepaper: http://download.microsoft.com/download/3/B/5/3B51A025-7522-4686-AA16-8AE2E536034D/Quick%20Migration%20with%20Hyper-V.doc

For more information on VMware VMotion read this datasheet: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vmotion_datasheet.pdf

Danish VMUG meeting….

Today the Danish VMUG (VMware User Group) held a meeting at VMware Denmark in Nærum and about 60 participated in the event. Some of the topics discussed were:

• Dell Virtualization (what Dell does around virtualization)
• Perl og Powershell (about scripting and how it could be used and demo)
• RCLI og ESXi (also scripting with the remote command line interface and demo)
• LCM (Lifecycle Manager - overview and demo)
• SRM (Site Recovery Manager - overview and demo)
• Geek surprise (A geek award (who has the coolest home test lab) and two VMUG beers)

Who else does that? Thanks to Steen Spur for the home brewed beers - cool initiative

More info from the meeting will be posted on http://www.vmug.dk/

 

Be carefull installing drivers on Microsoft Hyper-V

I had my concerns on the parent partition of the Microsoft way of doing hypervisor virtualization and on how secure it was. This article below describes a weakness within the parent partition when installing 3rd party drivers.

Read this article from Randall C. Kennedy: Hyper-V’s Achilles’ heel

The article talks about Microsoft key advantages to VMware that it supports generic Windows drivers but it “could” also be the weakest point on Hyper-V.

If you need to update drivers in the parent partition you should consider shutting down your running VMs first. Hopefully Microsoft will work on solving this before release.

VMware CEO’s talks about Microsoft, Security, EMC and Cloud Computing

Read about Diane Greene comments on Microsoft, EMC, Security (VMSafe), Cloud Computing, Thinstall and more…

Read the article here.

Storage Virtualization by Compellent

On last VMworld I spotted an interesting product from Compellent - called Compellent Storage Center. Compellent offers Automated Tiered Storage (Information Lifecycle Management ILM) on disk block level which automatically moves blocks of inactive data to cheaper disks. Sweet

Compellent offers several other features like Thin Provisioning, Thin Replication (remote, dedup), Continious Snapshots, Advanced Virtualization, FastTrack and Boot from SAN (one image). Read more on www.compellent.com

Take a look on this 5 minute demo on
Compellent FastTrack and other features

Read more on Automated Tiered Storage (ILM) see this article:
Compellent Review on Automated Tiered Storage

Also Storage Magazine Quality Awards - Compellent came out on top. Read more here:
Storage Magazine Quality Awards

Some quotes on Compellent:

“The Compellent Storage Center is the best SAN we’ve tested, with the broadest feature set and the greatest ease of use.”
“Compellent’s level of maturity, both in feature set and ease of use, places it alone at the pinnacle of midrange systems and even compares favorably with top-tier systems.”
“Superb scalability and excellent support, all at a very competitive price.”
InfoWorld, January 2008

HP announces HP StorageWorks EVA Virtualization Adapter for SRM

HP developed an adapter that enables VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) to operate with HP storage. The HP Adapter provides discovery of StorageWorks arrays, DR group failover and BC snapshot functions for SRM solution.

http://h18006.www1.hp.com/storage/highlights/06162008.html#va