Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Will Steve drink the kool-aid?

A co-worker passed on this well written letter to Apple from UW-Madison to support virtualization, especially in a post Xserve world. Drink Me

Which made me remember a bit of research I did for a potential client in Jul 2009. Below is the email in full:

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I got a question about VMWare's enterprise product line on Apple Hardware (as this is a requirement to run OSX). Looks like there was a recent thread started in a few places online talking about this. Here is the thread, excerpts below. http://communities.vmware.com/thread/213146

From a VMWare employee:
vSphere support for xServe requires supporting UEFI. This capability is on VMware's roadmap for a future release. Sorry, I can't give you an ETA but hope that helps.
Thoughts from me:
2011? 2012? I wouldn't think sooner.

From a VMWare customer:
So, though the Parallels Server Virtualization Product IS more Serverish than running Fusion, it is still not Bare Metal, and definately NOT VSphere.

Info from me on this:
http://www.parallels.com/products/server/mac/features/ "Parallels Server for Mac" requires OSX to be installed on the hardware. At one point in the marketing on their site they call it a "bare-metal" solution but it DOES require a base install of OSX to run the APPLICATION "Parallels Server for Mac".
The single biggest thing that precludes us from looking at other hypervisor solutions is memory optimization. ANY other hypervisor solution (HyperV, Xen, xVM, Parallels, etc..) do not have the ability to oversubscribe memory. When the same piece of physical hardware can comfortably host 5 Hyper-V VMs or 20 ESX VMs I'll choose ESX.

For "illegal" use of vSphere on xServe hardware we've got this jem from that thread:
The Xserves DO NOT have BIOS emulation in the EFI firmware like the desktops do (http://community.brighton.ac.uk/ajd9/weblog/15666.html).
Thoughts from me:
So you could get ESX on a laptop or MacPro but not an XServe.

More thoughts from the peanut gallery:
For an enterprise-grade solution I would want to wait for ESX to run on apple hardware or for Apple to allow OSX to run on ESX legally. Anything else would not have the same level of redundancy and support that comes along with an enterprise-grade price tag.

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In a post Xserve world, what are Apple enterprise clients left with? Currently nothing.

ThinProvisioning a Solaris VM with ZFS

We have some clients who like to purchase storage well over what their expected use will be. We've started thin provisioning the data disks on any VMs from these particular clients, or for any new request over 100G. So we've built in some over-provisioning of our storage into the service while watching the capacity at both the current thin and theoretical thick levels.

And then I started watching the disk usage creep on a few VMs: Our Solaris 10 machines that I've been particularly keen to keep the performance and customers happy. Our Sol admins switched from UFS to ZFS root. ZFS and it's partner-in-crime, RAID-Z use Copy-on-write transactional model so that a new block is used upon every write.
So I've asked our Admins to bring the VMs back to UFS or I'd need to thick the disks out.

So there you have it. Every time the Solaris VMs that I'm trying to keep in top shape write something to disk, they're potentially extending the thin provisioned vHDD. VMware would like to think that there's no performance hit with thin disks, but I don't think they've planned for a copy-on-write file system.
The fact that Solaris is officially supported but there's little discussion or documentation has stymied our group's willingness to bring on more Sol in VI. It just looks like VMware and Solaris/Oracle are headed in different directions.

Monday, November 8, 2010

VMWorld 2010 sessions

VMware requires auth for the root of the vmworld session directories, but not the actual content files.
Using the bash script linked below will download all available flv presentations or the session pdf if no flv was available. Some sessions did not have any content (about a dozen or so). Resulting folder size is 12.7G. Requires lwp-download that should work on sol/nix/OSX ..as long as perl is installed.
Or just browse the script for sessions you want. Session name will be the file name.

...if anyone asks, i got it from a friend of a friend.

Drink Me

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Drinking the virtual kool-aid

Although kool-aid seems to be well established with vmware, virtualization and "the cloud", vKoolAid had not yet been coined. It was about time for me to split off my vSpecific posts from my generic blog, so I thought some nice orange Kool-Aid would do the trick. Tasty orange drink.

Monday, November 1, 2010

Where to get fast EMC information?

My storage dude passed this gem on to me a little while ago:
"Unfortunately I just received word that all R30(to) upgrades have been temporarily placed on hold until mid-December."
So, hm. I head to powerlink and I don't see any huge OMG warnings. I look at Chad's blog and have assumed correctly that there would be nothing there. Sound like a bug. A big bug. A month-and-a-half-to-figure-out-what's-going-on bug.

And I don't know where to look for fast info from EMC. Finally a use for twitter?