Virtualization Feeds

VMware Technical Items

Creating a local VMFS volume generates the error: Error during the configuration of the host: Failed to update the disk partition information (1001489) -

Creating a local VMFS volume generates the error: Error during the configuration of the host: Failed to update the disk partition information (1001489) You are experiencing these issues: · Creating a VMFS volume on your local hard disk fails

Download VMware Products \| Privacy \| Update Feed Preferences Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.

Unable to add P2V VM to a SRM protection group (1020796) -

Unable to add P2V VM to a SRM protection group (1020796) · Adding a VM to a protection group that has been converted from a physical host fails with this error: Unable to createplaceholder virtual machine at the recovery site: recovery virtual

Download VMware Products \| Privacy \| Update Feed Preferences Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.

The vCenter Server vpxd log reports this message: Resource module 'xxxx' not found. Using from default locale (1022708) -

The vCenter Server vpxd log reports this message: Resource module 'xxxx' not found. Using from default locale (1022708) In the vpxd.log file of vCenter Server, you see messages similar to these: [2009-11-04 13:22:46.253 02620 warning 'Locale']

Download VMware Products \| Privacy \| Update Feed Preferences Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.

Collections for Oracle Management Views are initiated, they do not return data. (1023972) -

Collections for Oracle Management Views are initiated, they do not return data. (1023972) · Data is not returned on initiating collections against Oracle Management Views · You see these messages in the log file Sys Cmnd Err in AppOracleDBMgmtViews

Download VMware Products \| Privacy \| Update Feed Preferences Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.

Applications running in a Windows guest experience screen drawing issues (1261) -

Applications running in a Windows guest experience screen drawing issues (1261) · The guest operating system is running Windows · The application does not exhibit this behavior when running on the host · Black or white sections or boxes are drawn

Download VMware Products \| Privacy \| Update Feed Preferences Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.

Running custom quiescing scripts inside Windows virtual machine with ESX 3.5 Update 2 and later (1006671) -

Running custom quiescing scripts inside Windows virtual machine with ESX 3.5 Update 2 and later (1006671) This article provides FAQs about running custom quiescing scripts inside Windows virtual machine with ESX 3.5 Update 2 and later. In ESX 3.5

Download VMware Products \| Privacy \| Update Feed Preferences Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.

VMware Converter Cannot Take a Snapshot of a FAT Volume on 64-bit Vista and Windows 2008 Sources (1006807) -

VMware Converter Cannot Take a Snapshot of a FAT Volume on 64-bit Vista and Windows 2008 Sources (1006807) VMware Converter cannot take a snapshot on Microsoft 64-Bit Vista or Windows 2008 physical sources if the source has a volume formatted in FAT

Download VMware Products \| Privacy \| Update Feed Preferences Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.

Using HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 Technology with VMware ESX and ESXi 3.5 Update 3 (1007982) -

Using HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 Technology with VMware ESX and ESXi 3.5 Update 3 (1007982) The following issues occur when HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 is used with VMware ESX and ESXi 3.5 Update 3: · Currently, VMware High Availability (HA) does not

Download VMware Products \| Privacy \| Update Feed Preferences Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.

Unable to remove source and replica virtual machines associated with View Composer desktop pools (1008704) -

Unable to remove source and replica virtual machines associated with View Composer desktop pools (1008704) You cannot remove source and replica virtual machines associated with desktop pools in View Composer. The View Connection Server creates,

Download VMware Products \| Privacy \| Update Feed Preferences Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.

"Requested registry access is not allowed" is displayed when a non-administrator user tries to launch VI Client (1009284) -

"Requested registry access is not allowed" is displayed when a non-administrator user tries to launch VI Client (1009284) · You get this error: Requested registry access is not allowed · These messages are available in the log file:

Download VMware Products \| Privacy \| Update Feed Preferences Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.

Incompatibility between McAfee for Mac and VMware Fusion can damage virtual hard disks (1014531) -

Incompatibility between McAfee for Mac and VMware Fusion can damage virtual hard disks (1014531) There is an incompatibility between certain McAfee Mac antivirus products and VMware Fusion that can cause truncated virtual hard disk files (.vmdk) when

Download VMware Products \| Privacy \| Update Feed Preferences Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.

Restoring the contents of a blank VMware Fusion Applications Menu (1016249) -

Restoring the contents of a blank VMware Fusion Applications Menu (1016249) · The Applications Menu (Start menu, Fusion menu bar item) is blank or empty · No virtual machines are listed in the dropdown, and most other text is gone · The *All

Download VMware Products \| Privacy \| Update Feed Preferences Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.

I/O error occurs when downloading a large file from the datastore browser or when exporting a virtual appliance to OVF (1017614) -

I/O error occurs when downloading a large file from the datastore browser or when exporting a virtual appliance to OVF (1017614) · When you download or upload a large file (for example, > 2 GB) using the datastore browser, an I/O error might be

Download VMware Products \| Privacy \| Update Feed Preferences Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.

Understanding and using Lab Manager (1020915) -

Understanding and using Lab Manager (1020915) This article provides a compiled list of tutorial style videos that discuss and demonstrate the various actions that can be performed while using VMware vCenter Lab Manager. This is an ongoing video

Download VMware Products \| Privacy \| Update Feed Preferences Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.

Cannot connect to the client CD/DVD drive by using Passthrough IDE mode (1022010) -

Cannot connect to the client CD/DVD drive by using Passthrough IDE mode (1022010) · Connecting to the client CD/DVD drive using Passthrough IDE mode does not work in vSphere Client, . · This issue may occur with the vSphere Client on 32 bit or 64 bit

Download VMware Products \| Privacy \| Update Feed Preferences Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.

Mouse pointer does not track the movement of a redirected USB human interface device (1022076) -

Mouse pointer does not track the movement of a redirected USB human interface device (1022076) If you redirect a standalone or composite USB device that includes an HID component such as a mouse or trackball, the position of the mouse pointer is

Download VMware Products \| Privacy \| Update Feed Preferences Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.

After Upgrading From VMware vCenter Lab Manager 4.0.0.1140, Unable to Upgrade Agent if VMs are Using Host Spanning. (1023159) -

After Upgrading From VMware vCenter Lab Manager 4.0.0.1140, Unable to Upgrade Agent if VMs are Using Host Spanning. (1023159) If you have virtual machines deployed in cross-host fenced mode, after you upgrade from vCenter Lab Manager 4.0.0.1140, you

Download VMware Products \| Privacy \| Update Feed Preferences Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.

Creating a new screen using VMware Service Manager Screen Designer (1023575) -

Creating a new screen using VMware Service Manager Screen Designer (1023575) This article provides the procedure to create a new screen using VMware Service Manager Screen Designer. To create a completely new screen using Screen Designer: 1) Log in

Download VMware Products \| Privacy \| Update Feed Preferences Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.

VMware Service Manager 8.0 Tasks Outstanding screen shows duplicate tasks in Oracle database environment (1023576) -

VMware Service Manager 8.0 Tasks Outstanding screen shows duplicate tasks in Oracle database environment (1023576) VMware Service Manager Tasks Outstanding screen shows duplicate tasks in Oracle database environment. This issue occurs only in VMware

Download VMware Products \| Privacy \| Update Feed Preferences Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.

VMware Service Manager tab order does not work correctly after editing the tab order in Screen Designer (1023577) -

VMware Service Manager tab order does not work correctly after editing the tab order in Screen Designer (1023577) VMware Service Manager tab order does not work correctly after editing the tab order in Screen Designer. This is a known issue in VMware

Download VMware Products \| Privacy \| Update Feed Preferences Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.

Unable to submit a VMware Service Manager Customer Portal Submission form (1023699) -

Unable to submit a VMware Service Manager Customer Portal Submission form (1023699) · Cannot submit the VMware Service Manager Portal Submission form · When logging a submission form through the Customer Portal and clicking the Submit button, nothing

Download VMware Products \| Privacy \| Update Feed Preferences Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.

Images added to an HTML editor widget in the VMware Service Manager Designer module do not appear in the application (1023837) -

Images added to an HTML editor widget in the VMware Service Manager Designer module do not appear in the application (1023837) Images within an HTML editor item on a VMWare Service Manager screen do not appear when you log into the Customer Portal.

Download VMware Products \| Privacy \| Update Feed Preferences Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.

Repairing a virtual disk in Fusion 3.1 (1023856) -

Repairing a virtual disk in Fusion 3.1 (1023856) · The virtual machine fails to start after a forced Mac shutdown · The virtual machine does not boot up after a crash · When starting the virtual machine, you see the error: Cannot open the disk '

Download VMware Products \| Privacy \| Update Feed Preferences Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.

Top 5 Planet V12n blog posts week 20 -

Top 5 Planet V12n blog posts week 20 It's been a while since the last Top 5 has been released. My apologies, but I attended the VMware Technical Summit, was on a holiday for a week in Italy and two close relatives passed away. Anyway it is Sunday again and tomorrow a fresh new weeks start... no apologies any more. We will continue with the Top 5 as of this week again. It took me a while to go through the immense list of articles, but I guess the following 5 stood out. Bob Plankers - What are P-states and how do I use them in vSphere? VMware vSphere 4 added the ability to take advantage of Intel SpeedStep and AMD PowerNow! CPU power management features. These features are commonly known as “Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling” or DVFS, and let an OS cooperate with the CPU to reduce power consumption by reducing the frequency of the CPU and the voltage at which it is operating. It reduces these things in preset tiers, and these tiers are known as P-states. On Intel CPUs they are trademarked as “SpeedStep” and on AMD they are either “Cool’n'Quiet” or “PowerNow!” Bouke Groenescheij - Shares: Low-Normal-High Well, try to stay away from multi core VMs. If you are running multicore VMs, don't overcommit (at least not too much) and put them on a dedicated cluster. Why not overcommitting? Well, duh, you gave it multiple CPUs, so apparently those VMs need to do some processing which is very important. And since it's that important, don't overcommit. Should make sense. Else give it one vCPU. Also, try not to use the somewhat extreme 'low-normal-high' share setting. I would say: "If a VM is more important, use a custom setting of 1200 shares/vCPU. If a VM is less important, use a custom setting of 800 shares/vCPU". That way the ratio between them isn't that extreme and nature is more balanced. Frank Denneman - Resource Pools Memory Reservations If a cluster is under-committed the VM resource entitlement will be the same as its demand, in other words, the VM will be allocated whatever it wants to consume within its configured limit. When a cluster is overcommitted, the cluster experiences more resource demand than its current capacity, at this point DRS and the VMkernel will allocate resources based on the resource entitlement of the virtual machine. Resource entitlement is covered later in the article. Scott Sauer - VMware Acquisitions – What’s it all mean? 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!). Steve Kaplan - Calculating the optimal Microsoft SQL licenses for virtualization The ability to consolidate multiple SQL instances onto a single host combined with application server license mobility rules generally make either SQL Server Enterprise or SQL Server Datacenter the best choice for a vDC. A 2-CPU VMware vSphere host, for example, running two licenses of SQL Server Enterprise could run up to eight instances of either SQL Server Standard or Enterprise. Additionally, these instances can either be VMotioned to another host in the cluster or even utilize the continuous availability of vSphere Fault Tolerance without requiring additional SQL licensing for the target host.

Download VMware Products \| Privacy \| Update Feed Preferences Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.

Exchange 2010 Disk I/O on vSphere -

Exchange 2010 Disk I/O on vSphere In the first part of this series on Exchange 2010 on vSphere the focus was scale-up performance of a single Mailbox Server VM. The results showed performance was great across all points tested, ranging up to 8000 users. This article will take a look at disk I/O which is an important aspect of Exchange performance. Enhancements made to Exchange 2010 have resulted in a reduction in disk I/Os per second (IOPS) in comparison to previous versions. This reduction is reported by Microsoft to be as big as 70% in some cases. Exchange 2010 makes more efficient use of memory as a cache which results in fewer reads and writes to disk than before. However sufficient memory is still very important for optimal performance. Exchange 2010 also uses larger I/O and more sequential I/O to improve performance. Tests were conducted in the VMware labs to measure how beneficial additional RAM could be to an Exchange 2010 Mailbox Server VM running on vSphere 4. Configuration The same test configuration was used as in the previous blog. To summarize, a Dell PowerEdge R710 with dual Xeon X5570 quad-core processors and 96 GB of RAM was installed with a development version of vSphere 4 (build 235768). Three Exchange 2010 VMs were created and used for testing: Mailbox Server, Client Access Server (CAS), and Hub Transport Server. An EMC CLARiiON CX4-960 provided Fibre Channel based storage with two nine-disk RAID-5 LUNs for data and an eight-disk RAID 1/0 LUN for logs. Normally, RAID 1/0 would have been used for both data and logs because it provides the highest performance with fault tolerance. Due to the improvement in Exchange 2010 IOPS performance, it was decided to try RAID-5 for these tests to see if this lower performing RAID type would provide acceptable performance. Testing Exchange 2010 can use RAM as a cache for disk I/O. This reduces the amount of IOPS on the physical disks because more requests for information are satisfied in memory. If the workload is kept constant, then a VM that is assigned more RAM will have lower IOPS. As more requests are satisfied by information in memory, the average response time will also decrease. The mailbox VM was configured with 4 vCPUs and a range of memory sizes from 16 to 64 GBs. LoadGen 2010 Beta was used with the Very Heavy Outlook 2007 Online profile with 100 MB mailboxes to simulate 8000 users. Increasing RAM reduced both IOPS and Average SendMail response time. The charts below show the results of these tests. The total IOPS is low for 8000 users even at the highest recorded level of 1921 IOPS with 16 GB of RAM. Increasing RAM to 24 and 32 GB showed a significant decrease in IOPS, but additional gains are much less as more RAM is added. The performance improvements as shown by the SendMail response time follow the same curve as IOPS with big improvements at 24 and 32 GB. The reduction in disk I/O is directly related to the improvement in performance. The next chart shows CPU utilization broken out for the Mailbox Server, Hub Transport Server, and CAS VMs during these same tests. The only change between tests is the amount of RAM assigned to the Mailbox server VM. CPU utilization of all the roles remained essentially the same across all tests. The amount of IOPS reduces as RAM is increased, but the amount of users remains the same. The VMs are doing the same amount of work but with a better response time. In this case, CPU is not affected by the change and does not reflect any change in performance. Conclusion Assigning more RAM to an Exchange 2010 Mailbox Server VM can result in decreased IOPS and faster response time. This makes disk requirements for Exchange something that can be changed based on each environment. The strategy could be to support more users with the same number of disks or use fewer disks to support the same number of users. Improvements in performance with Exchange 2010 and the lower cost per GB of RAM in current servers can make it a worthwhile exercise. The flexibility of assigning granular sizes of RAM to VMs makes it easy for an Exchange 2010 VM to be tuned to the correct amount of RAM. The next Exchange 2010 on vSphere blog will be on some scale-out performance with multiple Mailbox Server VMs.

Download VMware Products \| Privacy \| Update Feed Preferences Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.

Google and VMware's "Open PaaS" Strategy -

Google and VMware's "Open PaaS" Strategy - Posted by Steve Herrod Chief Technology Officer Wow… it has been an incredibly exciting, err, Spring for VMware's SpringSource division. In early April, we announced the acquisition of Rabbit Technologies, leaders of the open source RabbitMQ products used by thousands of customers for highly scalable, and reliable application messaging. In late April, we announced VMforce, a partnership between VMware and Salesforce.com to build an enterprise Java cloud with access to the vast data and great application services offered by the Force.com platform. And just last week, we announced the acquisition of GemStone Systems, a leader in data grid technology. We see this as yet another critical offering within our growing application framework. You can read some exciting speculation about where it could head in the blog post from Gemstone's chief architect. And now I'm excited to discuss another incredibly exciting step forward towards our goal of making Spring the best framework for developing enterprise-class cloud applications. Today we announced a partnership with Google to make Spring even better and to integrate it into the new Google AppEngine public cloud offering. First a little history… VMware and Google both sprung out of Gates Computer Science Building at Stanford University around the same time. We've also both grown incredibly rapidly by focusing on new ways of computing, and we've even used each other's products in various ways. However, we've never done any deep collaboration. We both found this surprising and decided to get several leading engineers from the companies together. When we first met last year, both sides seemed a little unsure… at the time we had fairly different product focuses, customer sets, and cultures. However, in a very short amount of time we realized that we have similar visions of the cloud and similar passions for building great software to achieve this vision. Our shared vision is to make it easy to build, run, and manage applications for the cloud, and to do so in a way that makes the applications portable across clouds. The rich applications should be able to run in an enterprise's private cloud, on Google's AppEngine, or on other public clouds committed to similar openness. Thus started an ambitious effort resulting in today's demonstrations at Google I/O and the downloads available here. For VMware, this Google partnership is a key step in our "Open PaaS" strategy that I blogged about last month. Specifically, it moves the give-developers-choice strategy forward on 3 important axes: 1. Choice of Clouds: Private or Public, VMware and non-VMware We are committed to making Spring the best language for cloud applications, *even if that cloud is not based on VMware vSphere*. Google's AppEngine cloud is not currently based on VMware's server virtualization products, and that's fine. Developers must be able to write applications without needing to know what underlying technology powers the cloud that they'll be deployed on. Furthermore, there are many use cases where portability between clouds makes great business sense. For example, they might want to develop and test their application on AppEngine and then seamlessly move it to their own VMware-based private cloud for production execution. Or they might do it the other way around as well! 2. Choice of Add-on Services The cloud is full of outstanding web services that developers want to take advantage of: ID-handling, messaging, data access, maps and location-based services, data sources, translation, tweeting, and many more. We are working to make the Spring framework let developers easily choose from and leverage these services in as portable a way as possible. One of the most exciting aspects of pairing up with Google is enabling Spring developers to leverage the rich set of services that they offer today and that they'll aggressively add to in the future. 3. Choice of Which Devices Access your Application It's clear that cloud applications will be accessed by a diverse set of devices… desktops, laptops, mobile phones, iPads, and more to come. It's a big challenge for developers to customize their code for the specific browsers, technologies, and screen sizes on these different devices. The announced integration of Spring with the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), takes us a major step forward in helping developers write their applications once, but enabling a rich user experience on the multitude of devices that may access it. Just wait until you see the keynote demo of how well they've advanced this toolkit! I hope this has been a useful backdrop for today's exciting announcement. We're still in the early stages of our partnership with Google and of our Open PaaS strategy. You can expect to hear a lot more about additional advances in this strategy in the coming months. And I hope you can all attend VMworld 2010 where we'll be making several more announcements. And congratulations to the engineering teams at both Google and VMware. In a short amount of time, you've shown how two industry leaders can work together and demonstrated how we can aspire to make cloud portability a reality for tomorrow's applications.

Download VMware Products \| Privacy \| Update Feed Preferences Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.

Surveying Virtualization Performance Trends with VMmark -

Surveying Virtualization Performance Trends with VMmark The trends in published VMmark scores are an ideal illustration of the historical long-term performance gains for virtualized platforms. We began work on what would become VMmark 1.0 almost five years ago. At the time, ESX 2.5 was the state-of-the-art hypervisor. Today’s standard features such as DRS, DPM, and Storage VMotion were in various prototype and development stages. Processors like the Intel Pentium4 5xx series (Prescott) or the single-core AMD 2yy-series Opterons were the high-end CPUs of choice. Second-generation hardware-assisted virtualization features such as AMD’s Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI) and Intel’s Extended Page Tables (EPT) were not yet available. Nevertheless, virtualization’s first wave was allowing customers to squeeze much more value from their existing resources via server consolidation. Exactly how much value was difficult to quantify. Our VMmark odyssey began with the overall goal of creating a representative and reliable benchmark capable of providing meaningful comparisons between virtualization platforms. VMmark 1.0 released nearly three years ago after two years of painstaking work and multiple beta releases of the benchmark. The reference architecture for VMmark 1.x is a two-processor Pentium4 (Prescott) server running ESX 3.0. That platform was capable of supporting one VMmark tile (six VMs) and by definition achieved a score of 1.0. (All VMmark results are normalized to this reference score.) The graph below shows a sampling of published two-socket VMmark scores for each successive processor generation. ESX 3.0, a vastly more capable hypervisor than ESX 2.5, had arrived by the time of the VMmark 1.0 GA in mid-2007. Greatly improved CPU designs were also available. Two processors commonly in use by that time were the dual-core Xeon 51xx series and the quad-core Xeon 53xx series. ESX 3.5 was released with a number of performance improvements such as TCP Segmentation Offloading (TSO) support for networking in the same timeframe as the Xeon 54xx. Both ESX 4.0 and Intel 55xx (Nehalem) CPUs became available in early 2009. ESX 4.0 was a major new release with a broad array of performance enhancements and supported new hardware feature such as EPT and simultaneous multi-threading (SMT), providing a significant boost in overall performance. The recently released hexa-core Intel 56xx CPUs (Westmere) show excellent scaling compared to their quad-core 55xx brethren. (Overall, ESX delivers excellent scaling and takes advantage increased core-counts on all types of servers.) What is most striking to me in this data is the big picture: the performance of virtualized consolidation workloads as measured by VMmark 1.x has roughly doubled every year for the past five years. In fact, the performance of virtualized platforms has increased to the point that the focus has shifted away from consolidating lightly-loaded virtual machines on a single server to virtualizing the entire range of workloads (heavy and light) across a dynamic multi-host datacenter. Not only application performance but also infrastructure responsiveness and robustness must be modeled to characterize modern virtualized environments. With this in mind, we are currently developing VMmark 2.0, a much more complex, multi-host successor to VMmark 1.x. We are rapidly approaching a limited beta release of this new benchmark, so stay tuned for more. But in this post, I’d like to look back and remember how far we’ve come with VMmark 1.x. Let’s hope the next five years are as productive.

Download VMware Products \| Privacy \| Update Feed Preferences Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.

Exchange 2010 Scale-Up Performance on vSphere -

Exchange 2010 Scale-Up Performance on vSphere

In order to provide some performance guidance for the new Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 on VMware vSphere 4, a series of tests were run in the VMware labs. The first set of these tests involved a single Mailbox server VM that was scaled up from 1 vCPU to 8 vCPU with a range of memory sizes. This blog article will take a look at the results from these tests to understand how Exchange 2010 performs in a VM. Additional blog posts will look more closely at these 1 VM tests as well as another set of tests that used up to four mailbox VMs to test Exchange 2010 performance in a scale out model.

Configuration

The server used for the testing was a Dell PowerEdge R710 with two Intel Xeon X5570 quad-core processors and 96GB of RAM. An EMC Clariion CX4-960 storage array was used to provide Fibre Channel based storage. A development version of VMware vSphere 4 (build 235786) was installed and the VMs were created for the Exchange 2010 testing environment.

A new Windows Server 2008 R2 test domain was created for this testing. A separate VM was created for the Mailbox, CAS, and Hub Transport Exchange 2010 server roles. All three VMs were installed with Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 Enterprise Edition, added to the new Exchange 2010 test domain, and had the necessary prerequisites for Exchange 2010 installed. Once the Exchange server roles were installed, additional storage was added to the Mailbox Server VM. A couple of nine-disk RAID 5 LUNs were used for the mailbox databases and an eight-disk RAID 1/0 LUN was used for logs.

Microsoft ExchangeLoad Generator 2010 Beta (aka LoadGen) was used for this testing. This tool simulates Exchange 2010 users and can be highly customized if so desired. For these tests, the Very Heavy Outlook 2007 online profile with 100MB mailboxes was used. The defaults were taken for all other options. A separate server with Windows Server 2008 was also added to the Exchange 2010 test domain and used to run the LoadGen tests.

Testing

There is a nice sizing spreadsheet that Microsoft has provided for Exchange 2010 that gives a detailed recommendation once you plug in all the needed information. More simply, Microsoft has provided a basic memory sizing formula for Exchange 2010: 4GB + 3-30 MB per user. The results of this memory sizing formula reflect that email user types can vary quite a bit, and the amount of RAM needed to support them can also vary quite a bit:

	Memory for Exchange 2010 in GB Based on Formula
Users	Low	Middle	High
1000	6.9	18.7	33.3
2000	9.9	33.3	62.6
4000	15.7	62.6	121.2
8000	27.4	121.2	238.4

Testing at various points in this range of memory sizes showed that the Very Heavy LoadGen profile with 100MB mailboxes, used in these tests, falls at the low end of the memory sizing guidelines. The following chart shows the results from scaling up the Mailbox VM with vCPUs and RAM as the number of LoadGen users was increased. The response times reported are the average from a 10 hour test run.

Performance remains very good as the number of users is increased from 1000 to 8000. The 95th percentile latency increases less than 150ms to a max of just under 300ms. There is a slight improvement in performance from 1 vCPU to 2 vCPUs, which is attributed to Exchange not being able to benefit from its multithreaded capabilities with 1 vCPU.

CPU utilization for these tests was low, with plenty of room for spikes in load. In the 8 vCPU and 4 vCPU cases, with 8000 and 4000 users respectively, there is ample CPU resource available. In these cases the same amount of load could be run with fewer vCPUs. The chart below shows the CPU utilization for the Mailbox Server VM as well as the CAS and Hub Transport.

In order to be able to plot the CPU utilization of VMs with different numbers of vCPUs assigned, each vCPU worth of compute power is represented by 100 on the chart. The chart goes up to 800 because the largest VM used was an 8vCPU VM. The ratio of CPU usage between the three roles remains the same across all tests with the Mailbox Server VM using about 2x the CAS VM and the CAS Server VM using about 2x the Hub Server VM. With 8000 users only 2vCPUs worth of processing was needed in the 8vCPU VM.

Conclusion

Exchange 2010 performed very well in tests running on VMware vSphere. In all tests run, the amount of RAM needed was at the low end of Microsoft’s guidance, CPU usage was low, and performance remained good.

Watch for the next blog post based on these tests which will look at the performance of Exchange 2010 disk I/O.

EMC World day 1 - VPLEX, Joe Tucci & Michael Capellas drop by, and an interesting private cloud TAB -

EMC World day 1 - VPLEX, Joe Tucci & Michael Capellas drop by, and an interesting private cloud TAB Day one at EMC World kicked off today. The day had what was to me a bit of an odd structure, with a product announcement to the press, a keynote that really didn't go into the announcement, and then two more keynotes and an executive panel in the afternoon. Here are some pix from the conference: The big EMC news today was VPLEX, a new federated storage product that, in its current incarnation, should let you VMotion a single virtual machine or an entire data center across 100km or so. It's new enough - even a new category? -- that even the EMCers seem to be struggling to define it succinctly. Chuck Hollis (EMC): VPLEX: The Birth of a New Storage Platform "Like anything relatively new, it will take a while for people to fully understand the rationale and the strategy behind the product. It took me a good while before I got a full grasp on the implications of this new technology." Chad Sakac (EMC): Your Virtual Machine Teleporter is ready ... Are you? "Why is this important? Well, one of the key tenants of the “journey to the private cloud” is not only being able to consume things differently (via all sorts of self-provisioning models amongst many things), but also being able to break the barriers of the physical datacenter – being able to do things across geographic boundaries." Stu Miniman (EMC): VPLEX: Redefining the Boundaries of the Data Center. "When new technologies are introduced into the marketplace, people are most comfortable in making comparisons to things that they already know. In this post, I’ll compare traditional replication solutions with VPLEX Distributed Federation." Storagezilla (EMC): This is VPLEX. "A category creating product which brings Distributed Cache Coherency to workloads in the Private Cloud by providing the ability to make block storage volumes available Always-Active across long distances." Stephen Foskett (Gestalt IT): EMC Shouts VPLEX In A Crowded EMCWorld Scott Lowe (EMC) has some additional links: EMC VPLEX Launches Today The bloggers lounge at EMC World was a great place to network and still do work besides. Along with the discussions on storage, virtualization, and private cloud, we were able to watch a succession of luminaries step into SiliconAngle's TheCube for a live video streaming session. All the sessions will eventually get up on YouTube, but for now you can check them out here. For me, the standout session was a surprise visit by EMC CEO Joe Tucci and new Acadia CEO Michael Capellas. This may be the first on-camera intervew from Michael Capellas since he was was announced at heading up Acadia, the EMC-Cisco joint venture. Check out his reasons for signing up to lead this new company focused on private cloud. Watch live video from The Cube LIVE from EMC World 2010 on Justin.tv I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that I was also on a live panel discussion on social media. It was a good session, but it really wasn't about virtualization, so if you're interested in hearing us punditize, check out this post at Len Devanna's blog. Another interesting bit of news via Chuck Hollis was the formation of a Technical Advisory Board at EMC. Nothing very controversial with this group of very very smart people, all of whom I'd love to invite to dinner; but check out who is on the board from VMware: Steve Herrod – Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of R&D, VMware Rod Johnson – General Manager, SpringSource; Senior Vice President of Middleware, VMware Now Steve has been our CTO for quite a while and is instrumental in building the private cloud and steering VMware technology to be in alignment with the evolution of IT. But that second member is Rod Johnson, now the general manager of the SpringSource unit of VMware. Rod founded the Spring Framework, the most usable (and most used) Java framework today, and he is now charting out the course of building the most usable and powerful toolset for creating the next generation of cloud-enabled applications. What does that say about building the private cloud, the platform-as-a-service stack that VMware is building, and the no-longer-even-interesting view of EMC as just a vendor of spinning rust? (Relevant link: Joe Tucci on the number of EMC software vs hardware engineers.) I leave that discussion up to you -- it's just interesting is all I'm sayin' ... Reporting live from EMC World, this is Dr John Troyer for VMware

Download VMware Products \| Privacy \| Update Feed Preferences Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.

EMC World 2010 - let's talk private cloud - live streaming -

EMC World 2010 - let's talk private cloud - live streaming [Executive summary: We'll be blogging about private cloud for the next three days here at EMC World 2010. Stuck at your desk? Follow along with EMC World 2010 live video from SiliconANGLE's #TheCube.] I'm here in Boston to attend EMC World 2010. The theme, plastered everywhere at the venue and across the city (that's a sign at the taxi stand at Logan Airport over to the right) is "The Journey to the Private Cloud Starts Now." Thousands of infrastructure geeks are here to get their EMC on, and I'll be covering the more-virtualization-related activities at the conference. I'm very interested in what people are thinking now about private cloud and if it's starting to make sense to them. Sometimes I see people have made it easy on themselves by just categorizing "cloud" as a marketing term for now, full of hype. That way they don't have to think about it too much. Others, coming from experiences with the public cloud, can't see how a private cloud makes sense. The reality is far more complex, and far more interesting. Already after talking to some of the attendees and EMC employees at the conference I'm seeing a recognition that private cloud concepts are resonating with the IT professionals. What makes private cloud challenging to talk about is that "private cloud" isn't a term the marketing gang cooked up that we can all ignore, like the normal Three Letter Acronyms that every company "is a leader in." Cloud is not a technology -- you can't rack up a Cloud Box and call it a day. Cloud is an operational model, a consumption model, and way of running IT as a value-added part of your business. It's been fascinating so far this trip as everybody is closest to their part of the coalescing cloud -- topics like provisioning, automation, chargeback, policy-based management and compliance were common topics at the opening reception -- and it will be interesting to see how these threads come together over the next three days as we continue to talk public cloud. EMC's Ed Saipetch has been briefing customers on the virtual datacenter and private cloud this week. He wrote yesterday about the conversations he's having. It seems to be a lightbulb type moment -- to some IT shops, building a private cloud seems obvious, and to others, it still seems impossible. As Ed says in his post talking about some We’re separating but will stay friends: Some customers saw exactly where I was going and others probably thought I was insane. I started at a high level and then went into the details but here’s the problem. When we talk about infrastructure becoming a pool of resources that you’re able to push and pull workloads into and out of, some people think it’s fairytale land. ... Infrastructure AND platforms are both part of the “Stack” and “Cloud” conversation. It’s about businesses being able to let their most valuable asset (their people) work on deploying applications faster instead of provisioning servers. We seem to be mirroring the same conversation we had when we had to give up being server huggers and virtualize in the first wave of server consolidation. As we're moving to a higher level of abstraction and automation, at first it seems like you're giving up what you've spent all your hard time to build in the first place. Sound like an interesting conversation? Let's get started. There's a few ways to follow along over the next few days. Follow along here on VMTN Blog and Twitter (@jtroyer) I'll also be checking in on foursquare to support the Spots4Bots charity http://bit.ly/Spots4Bots Search for blog posts on EMC World Search for Twitter updates on EMC World And my favorite... streaming video LIVE from #TheCube at EMC World 2010. SiliconANGLE's John Furrier (@furrier) and Mark Rizzn Hopkins (@rizzn) will be broadcasting live Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday from 2:30-5:30pm EDT (and a little more besides). They're set up right outside the bloggers lounge here, and they've already penciled in a great series of guests. You should not miss this show. Check it out at http://siliconangle.com/emcworld2010/. EMC's Stu Miniman (@stu) lays out more information on the broadcast and agenda: What content are you getting? THREE keynote speakers (2 of which will be coming directly from the stage straight to the live video), top industry bloggers & analysts, partners (VMware, Cisco, Brocade and others) and more special guests to be announced later. Topics will span everything from Federation, Cloud and Virtualization to Social Media, Security and Sustainability. Here's the current schedule: On with the show! Reporting live from EMC World, this is Dr John Troyer for VMware! John and EMC's @pollypearson after the Counting Crows on Sunday

Download VMware Products \| Privacy \| Update Feed Preferences Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.

Share and Enjoy:

Virtualization Feeds

VMware Technical Items

1. Choice of Clouds: Private or Public, VMware and non-VMware

2. Choice of Add-on Services

3. Choice of Which Devices Access your Application

About the Author

No Comments

Leave a Reply

vCalendar

Tags

Advertisements

Archives

Pages

Top 5 Planet V12n blog posts week 26 Been really busy today with the kids but did manage to get the top 5 ready for you guys.... Read it! Thomas Mackay - Understanding ESX/ESXi Equivalency…Are we there yet? It is public knowledge that ESX is evolving to a pure ESXi model in the future release cycles of the product, though exact timelines are still under NDA. Convergence to a “console-less” ESX provides a number of benefits to our customers, with which many of you are, by now, well acquainted . It reduces the overall footprint that requires patching (see below) as well as removes the dependency on the vestigial RHEL-based Console Operating System, and sets the stage for future enhancements and technologies yet to be introduced. (Those who are under NDA might know to what I am referring! Thakala(vReality) - VMware Data Recovery 1.2 Linux file level restore client I have successfully tested it on 64-bit CentOS 5.5, and because so many versions of Ubuntu are listed I’d guess that FLR client works on any recent Debian releases also, just make sure it has support for FUSE 2.5 or later. If you have custom kernel make sure you have all FUSE dependencies compiled in. Note that even though your Linux distribution may be 64-bit version, 32-bit version of FUSE is required. Note the absence of any SuSE or Novell SLES distrubtions from tested and supported list, not that FLR client won’t work on them though, I am sure it will. Jon Owings - All out of HA Slots As you can see here the slot size is rather giant. We have the largest CPU and Memory reservation plus some overhead (for simplicity) and that blows the size of the slot way up. I didn’t set the reservation, but surely they were there. 8GB of reserved memory. 4000MHz of CPU. Ouch. Where did that come from? It followed the VM from the old host to the new one. One of the reasons I was there was to setup a new cluster since the older ones were performing so slow on the local storage. It seems like someone tried to help some critical VM’s along the way by adding the reservations. I removed the reservations and had plenty of slots as you see below. Massimo Re Ferrre - Cloud and the New IT Pillars In my previous IT life I was in the business of trying to homogenize heterogeneous virtualization platforms under a single management umbrella so I have to (strongly) agree with my colleague’s statement. In fact, these pillars are very different in the way you manage them. This is true not only from a technology perspective but also, and even more so, from a process perspective. For example, the process to request a partition on a legacy Unix system may be totally different than the process required to instantiate a new physical server, which in turn is totally different than the process to request a new vSphere virtual machine. To complicate things more, the Cloud pillar, by very definition, doesn’t require any process whatsoever to instantiate a new workload from the self-service portal. Duncan Epping - vSphere 4 U2 and recovering from HA Split Brain I had never noticed this until I was having a discussion around this feature with one of my colleagues. I asked our HA Product Manager and one of our developers and it appears that this mysteriously has slipped. As I personally believe that this is a very important feature of HA I wanted to rehash some of the info stated in that article. I did rewrite it slightly though...

Download VMware Products \| Privacy \| Update Feed Preferences Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.

Top 5 Planet V12n blog posts week 25 The World Cup tournament just entered the knockout stage. Today England plays against Germany and I guess it is needless to say that I will be supporting England, or should I say "Engerland"? (Hey, no one loves their neighbours.) All of this has of course nothing to do with the reason I am writing this article. This article is about the top 5 Planet V12n articles of week 25. This week we've got a "newcomer", I guess this is my way of saying welcome William. Here we go: Kendrick Coleman - Why vSphere Needs NFSv4 If you are familiar with my blog, you'll know that I'm a huge advocate of the NFS protocol with VMware. I firmly believe that over the next few years, ethernet storage will be the front-runner of VMware deployments. Most of the people that I talk to that have a Fiber-Channel (FC) based environment are in large enterprises that made the switch to VMware but used their existing FC environment. Which is great, but now is the time everyone is starting to virtualize their whole environment and money talks when it comes to scalability. I won't go into Ethernet vs FC because there is boat loads of information already out there, but let's talk about NFS. NFS is that guy sitting in the corner that doesn't get much attention, but NFS is making headway into the marketplace. Vaughn Stewart - Data Compression, Deduplication, & Single Instance Storage Storage savings technologies are all the rage of the storage and backup industries. While every vendor has their own set of capabilities, it is in the best interest for any architect, administrator, or manager of data center operations to have a clear understanding of which technology will provide benefits to which data sets before enabling these technologies. Saving storage while impeding the performance of a production environment is a sure-fire means to updating one's resume. Daniel Eason - VMware DPM usage – My view DPM technology is excellent and to be honest plain common sense, it has moved from being experimental into full blown production supportable within the later versions of ESX and now as a de facto proven product within vSphere. Core Main benefit of DPM is simple, it will dynamically turn off virtual hosts that are not needed at non peak times which is great, it avoids the cost that would have been occurred by running even vSphere hosts in an under utilised state. So I’ll get to the point do I think DPM is capability that can be used it to obtain the saving to anyone? well not really to be honest, I am in the non enthusiastic camp when it comes to DPM and the reasons I think this are as follows... William Lam - ESXi syslog caveat Append the above entries between the ... tags. Once you have updated the vpxa.cfg file, you will want to run the follow command on the Busybox console to ensure the changes are saved and backed up to the local bootbank for ESXi. There is an automated cron job that runs every hour which calls /sbin/auto-backup.sh Scott Drummonds - Private Clouds, People Consolidation, and Chargeback The beauty of virtualization is that not only can the physical resources be shared, as any VMware demonstration will prove, but the people that support the infrastructure can be shared, too. This concept is already understood by VMware’s more mature customers, who have been telling VMware for years that virtualization can save more money in operational expenses than capital expenses. These savings are coming after thinning the ranks of dedicated infrastructure specialists and refocusing them on higher value opportunities.

Download VMware Products \| Privacy \| Update Feed Preferences Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.

Top 5 Planet V12n blog posts week 24 As it was fathers day yesterday and I also had to fly out to London I totally forgot to hit the "publish" button. I did however create a Top 5: David Davis - VIDEO: Mike DePetrillo speaking on VMware vCloud One of the most controversial parts of Mike’s presentation is when he says that vCloud is really sold to the CIO and the message to the IT group is that you will have to change in order to keep your job. In other words, “the cloud” will assimilate the infrastructure as we know it and IT people will have to adapt to that, improving their skill set, in order to move to different roles in the IT organization where they can accomplish the more important IT projects with real ROI (not just maintaining the SAN LUNs, or whatever they do). Watch the video to hear the vCloud message for yourself… Note: Mike doesn’t show a “Project Redwood” demo – sorry. Eric Sloof - StarWind iSCSI multi pathing with Round Robin and esxcli After you have created a StarWind iSCSI target, it’s ready to service connections. You can established a connection to an iSCSI target and it appears as a new datastore on your ESX server. I’ll show the operations you need to complete to create and format the datastore in the way your ESX server can create virtual machines on it. I’m also going to show how the esxcli command can be used for PSA (pluggable storage architecture) management and explain how to use the vSphere Client to manage the PSA, the associated native multipathing plug‐in (NMP). Tod Muirhead - Scale-Out Performance of Exchange 2010 Mailbox Server VMs on vSphere 4 The performance in the 4000 user tests shows a rise of only 30ms in the 95th percentile SendMail response time between a single 4-vCPU VM and four 1-vCPU VMs. The 8000 user tests show an increase of approximately 140ms in the same metric when comparing the single 8-vCPU VM with four 2-vCPU VMs. Even though this is a significant percent increase, the absolute increase is still relatively small in comparison to the 1 second threshold which is where users will begin to perceive a difference in performance. Martin Klaus - Operations Management in the Virtualized Environment – What’s different? As the foundation for the Private Cloud, virtualization enables server, storage and networking resources to be shared very efficiently across applications. Virtualization also allows you to standardize your service offerings. Templates for your corporate Windows or Linux images can be provisioned as virtual machines in minutes. Even higher-level server configurations with complete web, application and database server stacks can become building blocks for your Enterprise Java environments or Sharepoint instances, further simplifying the provisioning process and lessening the need for one-off admin tasks. Automated backup, patch and update processes are additional benefits that are easy to realize with virtualized infrastructure. Scott Lowe - The vMotion Reality In his article, Benik states that the ability to dynamically move workloads around inside a single data center or between two data centers is, in his words, “far from an operational reality today”. While I’ll grant you that inter-data center vMotion isn’t the norm, vMotion within a data center is very much an operational reality of today. I believe that Benik’s article is based on some incorrect information and incomplete viewpoints, and I’d like to clear things up a bit.

Download VMware Products \| Privacy \| Update Feed Preferences Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.

Scale-Out Performance of Exchange 2010 Mailbox Server VMs on vSphere 4 This is the third part in a series of blog posts on Exchange 2010 performance on vSphere 4. In the first post, tests were done to show the scale-up performance of a single Mailbox Server VM hosting up to 8000 users. The second post was about how increasing the amount of RAM would reduce the number of IOPS, resulting in better performance. This article is about scale-out performance with multiple Exchange 2010 Mailbox Server VMs. For a variety of reasons, it often makes sense to have more than one Mailbox Server in an Exchange environment. Testing was conducted in VMware labs to determine the performance impact of spreading the same number of users across multiple VMs as opposed to running them in a single VM. The results showed that great performance was maintained with only a slight increase in latency when scaling out with either of the 4000 or 8000 user scenarios. Configuration The same configuration was used as in the previous two blogs. A Dell PowerEdge R710 with dual quad-core Xeon X5570 processors and 96GB of RAM was installed with a development version of vSphere 4 (build 235768). In the previous tests, there were three Exchange VMs running on the vSphere server: Mailbox, CAS, and Hub. For these scale-out tests, the number of Mailbox Server VMs was increased to 4 and the CAS and Hub Server VMs were moved to another vSphere server. This resulted in only four Mailbox Server VMs running on the vSphere server being tested. Storage for the VMs was increased to provide additional space for the new Mailbox Server VMs. The number of data LUNs was doubled, resulting in four 9-disk RAID 5 LUNs with each VM having virtual disks on all of the LUNs. Microsoft Exchange Load Generator 2010 Beta was used to simulate the users for the scale-out tests. The Online Outlook 2007 Very Heavy profile with 100 MB mailboxes was used. The option to have all LoadGen Users pre-logon was set, and the rest of the settings for LoadGen 2010 beta were left at default values. Testing In order to test the scale-out performance of Exchange 2010 on vSphere, the same number of users were run on a single Mailbox Server VM, two Mailbox Server VMs, and four Mailbox Server VMs. The total amount of memory and vCPUs was kept constant and the users were evenly divided across the VMs. The charts below show the results for 4000 and 8000 user tests across one, two, and four VMs. The performance in the 4000 user tests shows a rise of only 30ms in the 95th percentile SendMail response time between a single 4-vCPU VM and four 1-vCPU VMs. The 8000 user tests show an increase of approximately 140ms in the same metric when comparing the single 8-vCPU VM with four 2-vCPU VMs. Even though this is a significant percent increase, the absolute increase is still relatively small in comparison to the 1 second threshold which is where users will begin to perceive a difference in performance. The reason for the increase in response time is due to an increase in IOPS, which puts additional load on the storage array and disk latency increases slightly. IOPS increases as VMs are added, even though the number of users stays the same, because using four smaller caches is less efficient than one large cache. This shows that Exchange 2010 does a good job of managing large caches when the RAM is available. Another way to look at the data is to compare the same size VMs being used to support an increasing number of users. A single 4-vCPU VM supporting 4000 users had a 95th percentile SendMail latency of 234ms and two 4-vCPU VMs supporting 8000 users had 314ms. Doubling the workload on the server with an additional Mailbox Server VM resulted in an increase of only 80ms. Conclusion Performance of Exchange 2010 in the scale-out tests on vSphere was great with response times well below 1 second. vSphere allows Exchange 2010 architects to have the flexibility to use multiple mailbox server VMs to create and manage their Exchange 2010 environment as their needs dictate and get great performance. At the same time testing indicated there is the opportunity to reduce IOPS by using fewer mailbox server VMs with larger RAM sizes instead of using a greater number of mailbox server VMs with less RAM. This aspect of Exchange 2010 performance is due to Exchange 2010’s ability to efficiently manage the larger memory size.

Download VMware Products \| Privacy \| Update Feed Preferences Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.

Top 5 Planet V12n blog posts week 23 As I was watching one of the World Cup games yesterday evening I totally forgot to click "publish". Thanks Jason for pointing this out. Here's this weeks top 5: Aaron Delp - Comparing Vblocks I believe one of the most interesting concepts to come along in our industry recently has been Cisco/EMC/VMware's Vblock. My best definition for Vblock is a reference architecture that you can purchase. Think about that for a second. Many vendors publish reference architectures that are guidelines for you to build to their specifications. Vblock is different because it is a reference architecture you can purchase. This concept is a fundamental shift in our market to simplify the complexity of solutions as we consolidate Data Center technologies. We are no longer purchasing pieces and parts, we are purchasing solutions. Scott Drummonds - VMDirectPath The only reason why anyone is considering VMDirectPath for production deployments is the possibility of increased performance. But the only workload for which VMware has ever claimed substantial gains from this feature is the SPECweb work I quoted above. That workload sustained 30 Gb/s of network traffic. I doubt any of VMware’s customers are using even a fraction of this network throughput on a single server in their production environments. Jason Boche - NFS and Name Resolution A few weeks ago I had decided to recarve the EMC Celerra fibre channel SAN storage. The VMs which were running on the EMC fibre channel block storage were all moved to NFS on the NetApp filer. Then last week, the Gb switch which supports all the infrastructure died. Yes it was a single point of failure – it’s a lab. The timing for that to happen couldn’t have been worse since all lab workloads were running on NFS storage. All VMs had lost their virtual storage and the NFS connections on the ESX(i) hosts eventually timed out. Frank Denneman - Memory Reclaimation, When and How? Back to the VMkernel, in the High and Soft state, ballooning if favored over swapping. If it ESX server cannot reclaim memory by ballooning in time before it reaches the Hard state, the ESX turns to swapping. Swapping has proven to be a sure thing within a limited amount of time. Opposite of the balloon driver, which tries to understand the needs of the virtual machine let the guest decides whether and what to swap, the swap mechanism just brutally picks pages at random from the virtual machine, this impacts the performance of the virtual machine but will help the VMkernel to survive. Duncan Epping - Is this VM actively swapping? At one point the host has most likely been overcommitted. However currently there is no memory pressure (state = high (>6% free memory)) as there is 1393MB of memory available. The metric “swcur” seems to indicate that swapping has occurred” however currently the host is not actively reading from swap or actively writing to swap (0.00 r/s and 0.00 w/s).

Download VMware Products \| Privacy \| Update Feed Preferences Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.

Latest Updates These are the changes or updates made to VMware Compatibility Guide since it was last published: Added support for Asianux 3 Service Pack 3 on ESX 4.0 Update 2 Added support for Debian GNU/Linux 5.0.4 on ESX 4.0 Update 2 Added support for FreeBSD 7.3 on ESX 4.0 Update 2 Added support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 on ESX 4.0 Update 2 Added support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Desktop 11 Service Pack 1 on ESX 4.0 Update 2 Added support for Ubuntu 10.04 Desktop and Server on ESX 4.0 Update 2 Check the VMware Compatibility Guide here: http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php?deviceCategory=software

Download VMware Products \| Privacy \| Update Feed Preferences Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.

VMware vExpert 2010 [Updated Monday 7 June] The invitations to the VMware vExpert 2010 program have been sent out. Emails were sent out Friday and Monday; the timing had no bearing on the merit of your application! (If you were expecting an invitation, please check your junk mail filters. Although I tried not to use any words like Congratulations! or You Win a Million Dollars! or Free Herbal Prescriptions! I've gotten reports that spam filters did catch a few of the outbound emails.) We had a great selection of candidates this year, and I'm looking forward to working with all of you. All of the judges were very impressed with the applicants, and we made some very hard decisions about who to accept in the program. If you applied but did not get selected, I would be happy to work with you on planning for 2011 and how you might work toward a vExpert designation. The vExpert award looks backward on what you did the year before, and in the seven short months until Jan 2011 you could make quite an impact. Things move very quickly in the social media world, and people who rock it hard can get noticed quickly. There were a number of common cases in applications that weren't accepted: You didn't demonstrate enough activity. If your claim to vExpert fame is a blog, then you should blog like you mean it. If you are active on the community, then you should be very active. Although we tried to evaluate quality over quantity, blogging or answering questions on the community is an endurance sport, and the way to grow in knowledge and grow an audience is to be consistent over time. Take the time to blog (or speak, or whatever you do) every day. This is hard work. Work hard, but you just have to do one step at a time. After a year, you'll be shocked at how much you accomplished. (Now life may have intervened -- babies, work, health, and happiness are all part of living and should take precedence over virtualization evangelism. We'll catch you next year when you come up for air. No worries.) You participated but did not create. You came to events, podcasts, and more. You supported and commented and tweeted. You probably learned a lot, and you now know more people, but you didn't do a lot of sharing of your expertise. Creating is hard work, and we looked for people who sat their butts in their chairs and typed or powerpointed or otherwise instantiated their knowledge so that others could benefit. You have something to say to the world. Say it. What problem did you solve at work today? What are you passionate about? Give back to the world. Your didn't differentiate yourself. There are two related parts to this problem: one you can't do much about, but one that's the key to success. If you are in the English-speaking virtualization world, the bar for evangelism is very high. We're a bunch of smart people, and you're competing for people's attention against both geniuses and overachievers. (Oh, yes, I'm talking about the Dutch.) You can't do much about where you live, but you can figure out how to make yourself stand out. Don't just blog product and press releases. Go beyond. Blog your passion and tell people about what's important to you. Make a picture or a comic or a presentation or a video. *Become "that guy that does that amazing thing." Dare to be memorable.* You didn't demonstrate enough "above and beyond" activity outside your normal job. If your day job is to sell virtualization products, you had to pass a high bar to receive a vExpert award. The judges have a soft spot in our hearts for people who could be lounging on the couch at home or even at a hotel, but instead push it harder. Invest a slice of your time in yourself. Having fun doing something cool is the best way to stand out in your career. It's much better than not having fun and not standing out. You need to go deeper. Virtualization is a deep topic. vSphere is a deep product that cuts across all IT disciplines. We all start somewhere in our journey and from the perspective of where we've been. Be humble enough to realize that you might not understand the whole landscape yet. Do your homework. *Listen, learn, break out of your silo.* You didn't demonstrate enough reach outside your company. The vExpert award is at some level about evangelism. Sharing your expertise internal to your own company is wonderful, but the judges were also looking for people who had created a platform where they could influence beyond the boundaries of a single company -- thus the emphasis on a blog or speaking engagements. Go out and conquer! If you're introverted, write. If you're extroverted, speak. If you're brilliant, teach. If you're not brilliant, hook up with people that are and help organize! Make waves. Your application note wasn't detailed enough. Often, the judges couldn't determine exactly what impact you had in your activities, or exactly what you did. If someone else nominated you, they may not have adequately described exactly how awesome you were in 2009. I think we're moving to an application model (vs a nomination model) for next year. *Get ready to apply for 2011 - now is not the time to be modest.* Allow yourself to excel and then just let us know what you've been up to. Your activity was mostly in 2010. The award was given out for things you did in 2009. The next vExpert selection will be in seven short months, so if you just got going in 2010, you have a great runway to join the program next year. Keep it up! I hope something in that advice resonates with you. I'd love to work with you throughout this year and next - give me a buzz. For those that did get selected as vExperts, I've got more to say about why and what's coming up, but that came come later. I hope you're as excited as I am. Doors will be opening to our vExpert community site tomorrow! Cheers, John Troyer jtroyer@vmware.com

Download VMware Products \| Privacy \| Update Feed Preferences Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.

Top 5 Planet V12n blog posts week 22 Week 22 already. Almost half way down 2010. Next week the Fifa World Cup starts. For those of you, probably Americans, who don't have a clue what it is about: World Cup Soccer. And yes this is the most widely viewed sports event there is and the cool thing about it is that you get to watch sports for 45 minutes in a row before you have a commercial break! Anyway, there's one thing left to say before I will list this weeks Top 5: GO HOLLAND! Cody Bunch - The Math Behind the DRS Stars In our particular case, not much to look at, as well, she is seemingly a well balanced cluster. However let’s work through the formula with the assumption that we have a 2 node cluster and a standard deviation of 0.282 (the “target” from above): 6 – ceil(0.282 / 0.1 * sqrt(2)). Eric Sloof - Caveat when using - Percentage of cluster resources reserved as failover spare capacity I think everyone knows the three admissions control policies which can be enforced on a VMware HA Cluster. If you are using the default “Host Failures Allowed” policy, you must keep in mind that the largest virtual machine reservation will decide how big your cluster slot size is going to be. In most cases when you are using reservations that differ, I would prefer to use the “Percentage of cluster resources reserved as failover spare capacity”. But be careful, I’ve pulled two quotes which warn us for scattered resources and the need to set restart priority on large virtual machines. Simon Long - VMware ESXi 4 Log Files This is the ESXi Host Agent log. It contains information on the agent that manages the ESXi Host and it's VM's. I don't tend to use this log as much as I used to with ESX, purely because it has been amalgamated in the message log. If you are troubleshooting a Host issue and don't want vmkernel logs getting in the way, this is the log for you. The log entries are time stamped (using UTC timezone) which is pretty handy when looking back to see what happened when an error occurred or something failed. Arnim van Lieshout - PowerCLI: Reset CPU and Memory Limits Today I noticed a memory limit on a vm. After investigating my environment using the vEcoShell and the Community PowerPack, I found more vms with memory limits set. It turned out that there was a template which had the limit set. I could easily reset all limits using the GUI, but I thought I rather do it with PowerCLI. Alan Renouf did a post already on a oneliner to reset all cpu and memory limits back in july 2009. After trying that code I found it rather slow. If you want to speed up things in PowerCLI you need to use the Get-View cmdlet. After some digging in the vSphere API Reference, I came up with a different peace of code that is much faster. Duncan Epping - esxtop -l As most of you know esxtop takes snapshots from VSI nodes (similar to proc nodes) to capture the running entities and their states. The rate in which these snapshots are taken can be changed with the “s”. The default setting is 5 seconds and the minimum, which most people probably use, is 2 seconds. This means that every entity (worlds, for instance a virtual machine) and the associated info is queried again every two seconds. As many of the metrics shown in esxtop are calculated based on the difference of two successive snapshots, e.g. %USED (CPU), esxtop just rereads all the info(all entities and all values) and calculates the values of the metrics.

Download VMware Products \| Privacy \| Update Feed Preferences Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.

Top 5 Planet V12n blog posts week 21 You all know the drill by now: Simon Long - Using vMA As Your ESXi Syslog Server When vMA collects the logs from your ESXi Host, sometimes the logs have the ESXi Host timestamp and sometimes they will have the vMA Localtime timestamp. I'm not exactly sure why this happens, but it does. (You may or may not know that ESXi uses UTC as its timezone when it timestamps the logs. You can read more about that here. VMware have told me this cannot be changed.) Didier Pironet - The host does not have sufficient memory resources to satisfy the reservation I removed the host from the cluster, made a direct connection with vCenter client and booted up the VM, but still same error. I could say that something was wrong with the host only, and not with the VMware cluster’s resource allocation config. Hal Rottenberg - Getting around PowerCLI roadblocks: Tips from the field In order to move past this barrier, you have to use the Get-View cmdlet. Get-View is very useful -- it's like having a release valve that lets you bust out some really cool tricks. I'm not going to go into great detail about the cmdlet here, but what you need to know is that the PowerCLI cmdlets present an interface to the virtualization administrator which is customized to be consistent with how PowerShell works. This is great for administrators when it works, but when you hit against limits of the included cmdlets, you have to work with the underlying API objects. In other words, you need to understand a totally different interface -- the same one that programmers see when they develop software for vSphere. Duncan Epping - Swapping As always the common theme of the discussion was “swapping bad”. Although I don’t necessarily disagree. I do want to note that it is important to figure out if the system is actually actively swapping or not. In many cases “bad performance” is blamed on swapping. However this is not always the case. As described in my section on “ESXTOP“ there are multiple metrics on “swap” itself. Only a few of those relate to performance degradation due to swapping. I’ve listed the important metrics below. Frank Denneman - Re: Swapping When a virtual machine guest OS starts, there will be a period of time before the VMware tools is loaded and the vmmemctl (balloon driver) is operational. During this timeslot the operating system can access a large portion of its configured memory. Windows systems are notorious for this as they tend to touch every page until it reaches the end of their configured memory. Unfortunately page sharing due to Transparent Page Sharing (TPS) is also at a minimum. Redundant memory pages are not collapsed immediately when a virtual machine is started. TPS is a VMkernel background process and uses a cycle of 60 minutes (Mem.ShareScanTime) to scan a virtual machine for page sharing opportunities.

Download VMware Products \| Privacy \| Update Feed Preferences Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.