So how important is LiveMigration/VMotion now?

Server Virtualization | Oct 28, 2008

One of Microsoft's big marketing statements I've heard several times is that LiveMigration wasn't that important since clients don't change when they do work on hardware even with LiveMigration. I'll cover why this in depth on why this is a flawed thought for an enterprise company in a future blog entry.

Along comes a critical use case this past week. MS08-67 came out and threw most companies I know of into some serious chaos while they rolled this patch out ASAP. Now this one does impact any Windows OS including Server Core. Anyone that would be using Hyper-V would obviously be affected right now. Let's walk through trying to deploy this for 120 Hyper-V hosts with Quick Migration (which causes a service interruption) as fast as humanly possible with business buy-off to do this ASAP outside of Maintenance Zones. Lets assume we are talking about a patch that ONLY affect Virtualization Hosts (I know I know.. not realistic with Hyper-V, bear with me).

Hyper-V Scenario with Quick Migration:

• Standard business Day is 6am to 10pm. So with the business units agreement we can do this patch from 10pm to 6am every day which is 8 hours of work.
• Applying the patch takes 30 mins including reboot and checkout time. Need to apply to both the primary and secondary Host since any real enterprise has HA setup and configured since its "Defined as Free by Microsoft" right?
• Each Hyper-V Host has 20 Servers on it and there is 120 Host Pairs.
• There's a fail over host available for each of these 120 Hosts (Let's not talk about amazingly wasted resources. This is being generous to Microsoft here and we fail over only once each cluster.)
• Each Host takes about 30 mins to "Quick Migrate" all 20 Server Virtual Machines and one person can do 4 hosts at a time without incurring other unplanned outages.
• All Hands on Deck for part of our team and some folks are awake during normal work hours for support. Lets say reasonably 6 people are working on this.

This doesn't take into account the issues with the business units that are dependent on your services:

• Apps that don't work right with a Quick Migration and don't check out right
• Hit to your team's morale.
• Hit to your team's reputation for using this Virtualization Solution.
• People aren't perfect and make mistakes, patches don't always apply right.

VMware Scenario with DRS & VMotion:

• Put the Host that needs the patch into Maintenance Mode. If the cluster is large enough do two at the same time.
• Apply the patch to the Host and reboot it.
• Check the Host out and Release it for usage. Take it out of Maintenance Mode.
• Repeat until every Host is finished.

We would start this patch application immediately upon notification since VMotion does not cause a network outage or service interruption. The window of potential infection is incredibly small at this point as I don't wait for a maintenance zone and start the update immediately on the Hosts.

So the question for a real enterprise how much is this worth? For me its pretty obviously worth it. No downtime. No service impact. Just a continiously available service for my clients who don't have to care about the latest patch.

HP BL495c - Virtualization Blade?

Server Virtualization | Oct 15, 2008

HP finally came out with the official information on the heavy duty blade for use in VMware environments. This blade for the c-Chassis is the BL495c which has 16 slots for Memory DIMMs and two AMD Opteron processors. Its the official Virtualization Blade.

There's just a couple of gotchas here coming from someone that would like to use them:

• It comes with 2 10Gb builtin ethernet connections. There's no interconnect module right now that can use this other than the pass thru. Well if your going to use an interconnect pass thru the whole purpose of blades for being able to reduce cabling and simplify management. You might as well just use rack mounts as they give you more flexiblity and control and your just buying what you need.
• It has the option of coming with SSD drives. If your doing serious virtualization the last thing you need in a physical instance is anything that ties you to that physical instance. The SSD is a short term solution and I don't care if its faster (that's the big deal with SSD Drives - faster). The future for serious virtualization solutions is zero ties to the hardware all served out from a central system. Personally I think PXE is going to be the answer to this issue.
• There's no support listed for VMware ESX in the support pages. I thought HP was a huge VMware Partner? Easily the single largest Server Virtualization Vendor in the business and you don't support it though you have Marketing statements like "the world's first virtualization blade"?

Heeyyyyyy for da cool picture

VMware | Oct 9, 2008

Transitive software has a lower level of virtualization that VMware and Xen and Hyper-V don't do today. That is virtualizing the CPU layer with a full abstraction layer, not a pass thru approach using Ring 0/Ring 3 the way the x86 Ring Architecture the way it was originally intended to be used. By this I mean they create a virtualization layer that allows you to emulate the PowerPC CPU on x86 hardware or SPARC on x86.

Well they had this really nice raffle program they did during VMworld where they gave away a MacBook every day for 3 days of the convention with their virtualization suite installed on it. They had one more MacBook they were to give away for the best picture with their shirt and glasses on. So I told my family about it and my children wanted to go and take some pictures with a hometown hero's statue.

We sent the pictures in and ta-da.. A new toy coming soon.

VMworld 2008 Wrap up

VMware | Sep 25, 2008

Overall VMworld 2008 went fairly well. I had a good time and learned a bit about a variety of new areas in the Virtual Product markets. Some new companies products trying to fit into the VDI world like Teradici's PC over IP technology. Some very interesting new implementations of existing technology (probably a customer said something like.. You know I could use this, this way, and if you gave it to me as an appliance I could buy it) like Platespin's Forge product for Business Continuity. Finally, Egenera has an interesting product that separates out I/O hardware subsystem from the Processing system (CPU). I did appreciate the new leadership directions of Paul Maritz and do honor the original leadership of founder's Diane Greene and Mendel Rosenblum.

My basic comments boil down to a comparison between Las Vegas & San Francisco:

Las Vegas is a Party Place and not good for a serious conference.

Many of the sessions I went to were fairly empty even though there was more people at this conference (14k) versus last year (10k). Reading Twitters, blogs and overhearing people talking about why they didn't make sessions such as "too much partying last night", "too much drinking", "too much gambling". (And that's even giving leniency for the day after the VMworld Party.) It really left me wanting from the conference in the Birds of a Feather sessions and panels.

Las Vegas is the Anti-Green compared to San Francisco which is a Green Place.

In San Francisco everything was recycled or recyclable and reasonably healthy in the supplied breakfast and lunch menus. Las Vegas had at least one deep fried or hot McDonald's style microwaved item at every meal.

Las Vegas Sands Expo really knows how to move people.

I never felt like I was waiting and not moving to get either to my sessions or to the supplied breakfast and lunch. When I headed in for Breakfast with the other 4k people that wanted breakfast, I'd always be moving until I got my food and sat down. As soon as our "grouping" of people eating was done, the staff would clean it up and make it ready for the next batch. They had people directing you on where to go, where to get your food, where to sit and where to leave. I was mega impressed.

After saying all that, I did have a good time in Las Vegas and did meet up with a lot of developers, engineers, vendors and peers. So all and all this was not a waste or a loss in my book. It was a worth while expenditure of time, money and energy and can't wait to go next year.

DirecTV & Tivo in bed again.

Fun and Life | Sep 21, 2008

Sweet news for DVR done right. DirecTV and Tivo together again!

As a diehard fan of DirecTV and Tivo, especially the DirecTivo systems, this is the best news I've heard in months. My DirecTivo's are each dying slowly and surely. They are an easy 5 years old at this point which is quite old consumer electronics typically (with 2 kids, 2 dogs, a cat and moving 3 times).