Tag Archives: vSphere

EA7849 – Exchange Server 2010 on vSphere

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Hanging out checking out some information on Exchange and decided to hit this session.   My company is looking at upgrading and since we are going to Exchange 2010, I’d like to get us virtual on vSphere if we can make it happen.   Alex Fontana, our presenter, is a Microsoft Technical Specialist for VMware.

The trend has been clients have been pushing to virtualize Tier-1 apps such Exchange.   At VMworld 2007, Dell had a Exchange 2003 performance study.   VMworld 2008 introduced the SVVP program along with Exchange 2007 performance white papers.  Along with the early adopters pushing the envelope, Exchange has improved its approach to disk access every release.   It requires less and less IOPS in each release and still provide acceptable performance.

Over the years ESX has been improving and offering less overhead versus native performance in every release.   Starting with ESX 2 which had anywhere from a possible 30-60% overhead costs to now ESX 4 which is <7% . This along with better hardware generations every 18 months has given even more performance.

This is backed by some performance tests done.   In general the virtual has been within 5% of the the physical in a scale up test.   In a private vSphere Cloud spread across the US, when using DRS, have seen about an overall 18% improvement in system performance versus not enabling DRS on the cluster with Exchange in it.

Some of the best practices mentioned:

  • Go with a basic 1-1 ratio of vCPUs to pCPUs to start with.  Scale out after monitoring to make sure performance is acceptable.  Basically don’t go with over subscription if possible.
  • Don’t over  commit memory until steady state is stable and available RAM
  • Spread the heavy I/O systems across several LUNs
  • Use eagerthickzero VMDK files (Option at time of creation, select enable for FT in vSphere 4.x GUI)
  • RDMs are not any better than VMFS.   VMFS can’t do quorums though.  Performance of VMFS is typically a little bit faster.
  • Use VMXnet3 driver – highly optimized performance in both lower CPU and TOE
  • Note:  VMware does support VMotion/DRS for Microsoft Cluster Nodes.   Cold migration does work fine though.

Exchange has a variety of requirements matrixes for which Exchange 2010 server role is needed.  As long as the requriements matrix is followed for each role, the VMs should be scaled properly.   In that requirements is a discussion around Megacycles.   Need to generate that to scale properly.  Some key notes is that Mailbox roles shouldnt’ go above 70% utilization.   The recommendation is to use the Exchange 2010 Mailbox Server Role Requirements Calculator.   Especially around the database availability groups (DAG) going on.

As you design your Exchange 2010 need to keep in account the limitations of vSphere Configuration Maximums.   One additional one is keep the DAG under 1TB a piece to say under the 2TB limits of each VMFS volume.  Along with that be sure to take into account passive databases in DAG setups.

There is a large set of good slides to cover various VMware products and how they work with Microsoft clustering and DAGs.   Things like SRM functionality and vMotion and HA.   Definitely more details in the slides than I will cover here.

Exchange 2010 is nicely VSS friendly and as such can take array based backups quickly and painlessly offline.   It can easily have a 10 second backup window where we have impact on the Exchange systems.

At the end of the day we need to define what level of availability do we need?   What are the SLAs?   What level of corruption do we need to be concerned about?   Can recovery be manual or does this need to be automated and why?   Can we use VMware features or do we need to use the Exchange features?

Cool Apps to play with by VMware Engineers

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Came across VMware Labs website today.   A nice website for VMware to show case the quality work that its employees are developing to improve the general vSphere environment.  I have used or looked at 1/2 of these and was pleasantly surprised to discover some new tools.

Per the site manifest:

This is our place to share cool tools created by VMware engineers.  There is a wide range of tools here for you, including one for automating tasks, getting ESX performance graphs, a rich Internet application framework and much more. These tools are offered under Technical Preview or relevant Open Source License.

They are calling each app/tool/API a fling.   This is a pretty smart naming.   I have seen several start up companies employees start making some cool code that never gets to see the light of day.   They are just flings of interest to help a specific problem.   They don’t always become full fledged products.

Here’s the current list:

Apache Pivot

Like most modern development platforms, Pivot provides a comprehensive set of foundation classes that together comprise a “framework”. These classes form the building blocks upon which more complex and sophisticated applications can be built.

Dynamo RIO

DynamoRIO exports an interface for building dynamic tools for a wide variety of uses: program analysis and understanding, profiling, instrumentation, optimization, translation, etc. Unlike many dynamic tool systems, DynamoRIO is not limited to insertion of callouts/trampolines and allows arbitrary modifications to application instructions via a powerful IA-32/AMD64 instruction manipulation library. DynamoRIO provides efficient, transparent, and comprehensive manipulation of unmoOndified applications running on stock operating systems (Windows or Linux) and commodity IA-32 and AMD64.

esxplot

Esxplot is a GUI based tool that lets you explore the data collected by esxtop in batch mode. The program loads files of this data and presents it as a hierarchical tree where the values are selectable in the left panel of the tool, graphs of the selected metrics are plotted in the right panel.

Onyx

Onyx is a standalone application that serves as a proxy between the vSphere Client and the vCenter Server. It monitors the network communication between them and translates it into an executable PowerShell code. Later this code could be modified and saved into a reusable function or script.

SVGA Sonar

VGA Sonar is a demo application for SVGADevTap. SVGADevTap is a user-level library that communicates with the VMware SVGA guest driver to provide low-latency notifications of changes to the screen.

vApprun

The vApprun tool implements the same vApp/OVF feature set as the vSphere 4 release. Thus, Workstation/Fusion can be used as a development environment for advanced OVF packages, and it can be used to evaluate and test OVF packages on your desktops and laptops.

vCMA

VMware vCenter Mobile Access (vCMA) – vCMA allows you to monitor and manage VMware Infrastructure from your mobile phone with an interface that is optimized for such devices.

VGC

VMware Guest Console allows you to manage the Guest OSes from the VMware layer.

VI Java

vSphere Java API is a set of Java libraries that sits on top of existing vSphere SDK Web Services interfaces. It provides full managed object model and run-time type checking, resulting dramatic productivity boost. With the new Web Services engine in 2.0, it also performs much faster than engines like Apache AXIS up to 15 times.

Virtual USB Analyzer

The Virtual USB Analyzer is a free and open source tool for visualizing logs of USB packets, from hardware or software USB sniffer tools. As far as we know, it’s the world’s first tool to provide a graphical visualization along with raw hex dumps and high-level protocol analysis.

If you want to see what is possible with a companies products, these are some of the tools to go look at.  http://labs.vmware.com

VMworld 2009 – Keynote P5

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To expand and handle the next layers of Virtualization is:

vSphere Control:

Appspeed: is the “finger of blame” now.   Instead of Network always getting the finger, now AppSpeed can point the finger at someone else.  

vApps are the containers of the future for applications be it standalone or multi-tier.   The idea is with a vApp is that it has a variety of attributes/metadata such as Availability, RTOs for dR, Max Latency etc.   This info travels with the vApp.  

VMsafe APIs:   This gives control of security and compliance.   The nice thing is this is more appropriate data tied to a vApp via the attributes/metadata and the various vendors such as Trend/McAfee/Symantec/RSA etc.   Example would be Needs these firewall rules and capabilities.  

vCenter ConfigControl:   The demo showed that ConfigControl really has

vSphere Choice:

LabManager is the token self service portal today.

VMworld today:

37,248 machines -

if physical –> 25 MegaWatts – 3 football fields of space

with VMware Virtualization – Down to 776 physical servers running 540 Kilowatts

vCloud

Priority is around the internal cloud.   Next is working on bringing internal datacenter trust and capabilities to the external clouds.   The 3rd innovation is how and what can you do once you have these two pieces and how they interact and connectivity. 

Today Site Recovery Manager is the first step into the Connectivity space.   When and how and what needs to take place to failover from one datacenter to another one. 

Long Distance VMotion:   The challenges – Move VMs Memory, Disk consistency/syncing and VM network id/connections.  

  • Follow the Sun/Moon approaches (moving computing to stay during the night and cheaper issues) 
  • Disaster Datacenter Avoidance – Hurricane coming.   Move the Datacenter somewhere out of the path.

Cisco does this by spanning Layer 2 across both campuses up to 300KM apart. 
F5 uses its iSession technology to move things around through a globally based load balancer system.

Interoperability:  vCloud API

vSphere Plugins with your hosting provider to maintain the Single Pane of Glass. 

Open Standards.   The end goal is it will work regardless of where you go or what hypervizor is used.   The end goal is to have a good eco system and selection for end clients.  

vApps   Automation for the app stacks.   Spring Source helps go down this path.  Much discussion around splitting up Infrastructure, Applications, Platform and separating these to create well defined interaction points.  

Spring Source Demo shows some of the process capabilities to control deployment and put some controls around it.   Things like CloudFoundry.  For those of us the contest is on.. http://www.code2cloud.com for backstage pass to see Foreigner.  (Oh wait.. maybe I shouldn’t post that)  

Till the next time.   I’m off to IO DRS Tech Preview.

VMworld 2009 – Keynote P4

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vSphere is the basis of all the improvements and technology over the years.  Based on Software Mainframe (for those of you over 40), the Cloud (for the under 40 crowd) and decides the best idea is to call it The Giant Computer.   The reason this all works is because of VMotion.   It is the basis of all that has happened.

The reason for the success of VMotion is Maturity, Breadth, Automated Use.

Maturity of VMotion – Estimates (fun or not) put around 360 million VMotions around the world since VMotion started.  About 2 VMotions a second around the world.   VMotion is 6 years old.   (Wow I feel old)

Breadth of VMotion – Storage  & Network VMotioning.   Across protocols and soon across Datacenters.   High performance computing systems are starting to look at using VMware.  

Automation of VMotion – DRS is the initial version that made this work.   DRS has been shown to average 96% of a perfect performance environment compared to a manually setup cluster in a perfect world.     Future will include IO DRS shares and configuration based on IOPS.    DPM allows for power optimization across the datacenter.   Or as has been said a Server Defrag capability.  

vSphere is still driving ahead.. more next post.

vSphere 4 is GA and I can’t download it

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vSphere 4 is now GA and available for download if you are evaluating it.   However if you have Support & Service contract for in-line free upgrade of your licenses, your out of luck (or at least this morning when I tried 3 different ways).

If I went in and said I wanted to evaluate it, then I could download everything just fine.

If I get an email saying vSphere 4 is ready for download I should be able to download it.  Am I asking too much?

vSphere 4 – The Next Great Thing

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It’s official. There’s about a zillion blog postings and news articles coming out about the next generation of ESX.

In watching the press conference yesterday the one thing that really hit me is that this is the next game changer. Cloud computing has been stuck for years in lock-in approaches. Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure are development environments that you really need to develop to for your apps to work. The designs and setup have to be extremely customized to function. This is the main reason cloud computing hasn’t taken off full scale. No cross vendor solutions. No ability to take my application out of the box deploy to the cloud system and it just works. No way for me to honestly develop in house and then move it easily to the cloud.

vSphere 4 (or Cloud Infrastructure) is the first Cloud Computing solution that I have seen that doesn’t lock you into a specific vendor. I can run Microsoft Azure on top of vSphere 4 (woah!). It can run on my infrastructure of commodity parts (yeah.. that white box I have can be a cloud computing solution). I can set it up, test it, run it in my basement, then deploy it up to a cloud provider with more bang and power than I have.  I can develop on linux, suse, freebsd, windows, or solaris and have the whole thing packaged up as a deliverable tool. No middleman. This is a powerful concept. This is the game changer.

The reason Microsoft OSes took off in the early ’90s is they were simply the easiest and most accessible development environment out there.  Today Linux/Java/Web is taking most of that development energy by storm.  It costs me nothing to develop solutions on those products.   If I can setup a development environment of my own without having to pay some thousands of dollars just to get started with the tools, I can make the next facebook/twitter/ebay.  I don’t have to be a corporation to develop a solution.

VMware gets that and Paul Maritz was a key component of that understanding at Microsoft. Welcome to the next great thing.

vSphere here we come

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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

VMware vSphere

This according to vmblog.com

Makes sense.   Just curious when the official announcement will come.