Ever since VMworld 2008 I've been waiting on the official words on what the new VI4 version name will be. I figured it'd be changed from VMware VI4 which was the latest name. Just wasn't sure what it would change to.
Du Du DAAHAHAAAAA
Makes sense. Just curious when the official announcement will come.
Continue reading »I've been starting to look at using the VI Toolkit which uses Powershell. In doing this many of the command formats tend to be "Get-VM | Get-View" or "Get-VMHost | Get-View". So I'm off and figuring this out and I run a small script and say "Geez that took a long time to run". I'm talking to my co-worker (a pretty smart cookie) and he says "Why don't you just use "Get-View -ViewType VirtualMachine" and skip the middle man?" Good point. Didn't know about that command. Well this is just a tad bit faster.
Get-VM | Get-View timing in my script takes 1 minute and 37 seconds.
Get-View -ViewType VirtualMachine takes an amazing 5.12 seconds.
The VI Toolkit developers have identified this as a serious issue are working on ways to speed this up and retain backwards compatibility.
So the lesson today is if you need to do a Get-View immediately after doing some set collection look at using the Get-View -ViewType instead. It isn't as readable though it gets the job done well.
Continue reading »Recently my company has gone through this huge architectural discussion/debate around using Citrix versus using VDI. It has been rather entertaining to say the least. I've met with the architect that's attempting to put together a comparision document on a direction to go.
Some background... We've worked to get Citrix to run our critical home grown apps 3 times now. All since Citrix is going to save us some untold amount of money in the long run. Each time trying to get our homegrown apps to Citrix-ize has been completely and horribly unsuccessful. So great.. We have Citrix running some 2 dozen applications (not the important ones still) and still have to maintain a separate application deployment system for applications outside of Citrix currently (lets talk about management, labor and support effort of maintaining two separate systems). The current Citrix environment gets at least a dozen new tickets
When we attempted to get Citrix up and running the first time 4+ years ago we spent some 200 hours trying to get One homegrown business critical application up and running on Citrix. That failed horribly. We then looked at running this "Virtual Machine" concept with XP workstations which was completely new at the time. It was this or putting some 200 desktops into our datacenter. Ewwww. We went and tried the Virtual Workstations out and had the application, entire environment and all systems up and running in about 100 hours of effort. It worked. The environment then grew organically as more and more teams heard about it and found that it just kept working. We are up around 1200 VDI instances (we call it Virtual Workstations) now.
Sooo.. Back to architectural discussion..
Citrix has some 12 pages in this document around the things we'd have to fix and all the unknowns and estimated effort to Citrix-ize all these apps and possible, maybe cost savings if we are lucky and can get some of these business critical applications up and working and so forth. Virtual Workstations has 1/2 a page that says basically.. "It works and will work for the forseeable future."
What is upper management thinking about doing? Citrix. Why? Beats the tar out of me as the possible cost savings just don't appear to be there. *sigh*
Continue reading »In a previous blog I had stated some concerns about HP BL495c G5's "Virtualization Blade". VMware ESX 3.5 Update 3 came out and now both HP and VMware are supporting it. Woot.
Continue reading »As I stated in an earlier post that the
concept of VMotion/LiveMigration wasn’t that important since clients don’t change when they do work on hardware even with VMotion
The assumptions that Microsoft makes is that the only time you ever work on anything is during these distinct change windows. So you don't make any changes at all outside of these windows. You don't optimize performance. You don't replace failed hard drives in RAID array. You don't launch new web servers to enhance performance as load grows. You don't turn off servers that are no longer in use. You don't turn on new servers.
Now that's obviously significantly silly for any serious enterprise. Any company with more than say 20 servers is going to be doing things all the time. You are introducing an increasing risk to your company the longer you wait to do any of those activities. You'll follow ITIL with the change control rules. You'll try to optimize your teams efforts so you can do things spread out to maximize efforts with minimal or ideally no impact to the business (accidents happen). In doing this you'll likely follow the ITIL categorization of different activities. This is a key thought here.
ITIL has the concept of Routine Maintenance in Service Operations. Any type of IT Operational process which has been performed enough times with near zero impacts caused due to the activity can be considered viable to perform at most any time. Every change no matter how small has risk. The objective is to weigh what the risk is to what the impact is if you don't do this specific change. Your mileage will vary depending on your company and procedures and experiences obviously.
An example of a Process is the replacement of a failed hard drive in a RAID 5/6 Array. This has been done some 500 times by my team over the past year. We know the impact when we do this and if we don't do this. We have had one issue two years ago when we replaced the hard drive and the RAID rebuild started another drive failed at the same time. My company has ruled that this activity has a significantly low enough risk level that it can stay at Routine Maintenance and done at anytime we can do it (preferrably as soon after notification of issue as possible as not doing this replacement introduces a new increasing risk over time of complete system failure).
Often the only way to get a Process to Routine Maintenance is a promotion path:
In my environment VMotion has been performed over 50,000 times in the past year. It is considered Routine Maintenance and is used on a daily basis to provide better service to my clients. It took me close to a year to get VMotion to Routine Maintenance and was worth every single effort. Now VMware DRS that is now enabled since VMotion has such a fantastic history at my company I don't have to manage a cluster since DRS handles quite a bit of the performance issues for my team now.
So Yes, I do use VMotion daily at all hours. Yes, I would update my hypervisor layer with a critical patch like an equivalent MS08-67 starting immediately upon emergency Change Authorization. Finally, Yes it would be done faster than a product like QuickMigration since I can do it and not impact my companies services (No interruption to my network connections). This is my goal at the end of the day - maintain my companies uptime running Windows Server while provding the most risk free environment at the best cost possible.
Continue reading »