12 months ago I took on a new initiative here at Tripwire focused on virtualization management.  The vWire project was a separate line of business from Tripwire Enterprise, entirely focused on solutions to make the VI professional’s life easier.  What a ride it has been!

Over the past year I had the opportunity to work on something that has automation built in as a base function and as most of you know automation has truly been my passion when working with virtual environments.  It has been a great honor and privilege to be a part of something new and have the opportunity to have input to help design and build a new application to help the virtualization administrators find and resolve issues before those issues really become nightmares.  I really think the vWire team, here at Tripwire, built a fantastic product that has such a great deal of potential to make a difference to the administrators working in the trenches.

After careful consideration Tripwire has decided to permanently discontinue the vWire product, effective immediately.  Why is vWire being discontinued?  Tripwire has been highly successful in security and compliance and we want to focus all of our efforts on this in 2010.    As we looked at vWire, it is just not inline with that strategic goal and as a result this decision was necessary.

Thanks to your loyalty and input into the vWire community, we have learned a great deal and are excited to explore how to focus the vWire technology into future projects.   Look for great things in 2010.

The entire vWire team sincerely appreciates your support.

Steve Beaver

On my quest for PowerShell knowledge I was working on a script to rescan HBA’s and then to list the paths to the datastores but, I only wanted the script to run on certain specific hosts at a time. Usually the rule is when you add storage or paths to an ESX host you would do this to all hosts in the cluster at the same time and could use PowerShell to list the members of a cluster to work with but I was exploring the option of creating  a list of the ESX hosts that I wanted the script to run on and have that list saved in a file.  Using the “get-content” cmdlet, I was able to do just that. The only other things was the “foreach” loop, when reading the content of a file, you need to use “foreach-object” cmdlet.  Below is an example of the code to read the serverlist.txt file and then use that information to rescan and then refresh the HBA’s. 

get-content -path d:\scripts\serverlist.txt | foreach-object {Get-VmHostStorage (Get-VmHost -Name $_ ) -RescanAllHba}
Start-Sleep -s 30
get-content -path d:\scripts\serverlist.txt | foreach-object {Get-VmHostStorage (Get-VmHost -Name $_ ) -Refresh}

Nothing to exciting, just another method of getting information for your script to run against.

There is a very good blog post on the best practices for vSphere (ESX 4) Service Console Partitions by Rich Brambley on the VM /ETC blog.  The original article can be found here.  In this article he had a very nice chart for custom partitioning.

Custom Partitioning

• The following Custom Partitioning Design is recommended:

• The installer also automatically creates the following partitions without displaying them:

Besides being a good test question is there really any reason not to “just go big”?  Most servers now ship with well over 50GBs of local storage. So why not create bigger partitions for the ESX Service console?  I would use the local VMFS partition as a temp storage to put some ISO or clones of virtual machines.  This would be just a place of temporary storage for me. This conversation becomes mute with ESXi and there are rumors that soon there will be just ESX(i) and the service console becomes a memory.  I am not a big fan of losing the service console but not much else I can do except rant a little when I can. By the way, “/boot” has been increased as a “safety net” for future upgrades to ESX(i).

Rich recommended setup is as follow and for the most part I agree completely

Primary:
/     - 5120MB
Swap  - 1600MB
Extended Partition:
/var  - 4096MB
/home - 2048MB
/opt  - 2048MB
/tmp  - 2048MB
I might even say to add 1GB to each partition in his example, except for the Swap partition. So what about you? How big is yours?

I had the opportunity recently to try to help a friend on his quest to P2V a Microsoft ISA Server.  We tried all sorts of different setting to allow communication between the ISA and in this case both Virtual Center and a Platespin server trying to get either one to be able to discover and migrate the ISA Server.  We added the conversion servers to the management group on the ISA box and disable RPC checking and still no dice.  We actually got a little further with vConverter by getting it to connect and install the client but it was not getting any further in the conversion process.  I am sure if we had more time we could have figured out the ports that needed to be opened but, time was not on our side.  Did you know that you can still get a cold clone CD from VMware?  I was looking through all the VI install files for all the vConverter files and was coming up empty but I found a blog post with its location and thought it would be worthwhile to re-post the post by Vladan Seget on the www.vladan.fr blog site.  The original post “VMware Cold Clone to Convert your Physical Machines, Where to get it?” can be found here. 

You cannot do a hot conversion every time.  Sometimes you need to perform a cold clone to convert your physical servers. Then you’re asking, where to get the converter cold clone boot CD?

So, there exists the cold-clone disc. This is a bootable CD-ROM disc that you actually boot the physical server from. The disc contains a pre-installed Windows 2003 image that runs a built-in version of Converter. Since you boot from the CD, none of the server’s processes start-up so you can get a good clone of the hard drive.

In case you want to download you must go and:

• Use Converter 3.0.x Standalone Enterprise Edition from http://www.vmware.com/download/download.do?downloadGroup=CONVERTER3.

• Use the VMware vCenter Converter Boot CD for vCenter Server. The most recent version is at http://www.vmware.com/download/download.do?downloadGroup=VC250U4.

Make sure that you log-in before you download. This means that you have to have an Store account, that means that you have already bought some product with VMware before.

Source: VMware

Today’s topic is going to be about VMware’s Distributed Power Management or otherwise known as VMware DPM.  If you have not heard about VMware DPM before, I found an interesting video interview with Anne Holler who works at VMware as a Senior Staff Engineer.  I found this interview at Vladan Seget’s ESX Virtualization site here and it is worth checking out.  The video is pretty short, only about four minutes in length and gives a pretty good overview of how VMware positions DPM in conjunction with HA and DRS.

In a lot of the environments I have worked in over the years actually had most of the processing power happen at night during the backup process.  Actually at one point I had a cluster that was oversubscribed to put it mildly.  If you have ever driven a standard transmission then you know about the red line on the tachometer that you should not go over or the engine would blow up.  Let’s just say my oversubscribed cluster was riding that line during the day and when the backup schedule kicked off I actually saw CPU% on the individual VMware ESX hosts themselves reach levels of 102%.  Just like clockwork ever day when the backup’s kicked off the host would really max out.  Pretty cool to watch but I digress.  The point is I am not sure I would really think about using VMware DPM in my production environment.  Now if I just built a brand new ten node cluster what was designed to cover the growth for x amount of time and I had just gotten started with putting virtual machines on the cluster then sure why not set that up?  I would have plenty of resources available that I would feel pretty confident about that but in most places that I have worked or spent any time at there was not really that amount of spare resources and most customers were always trying to cram as much as they can on the clusters.

VMware DPM was actually introduced in Virtual Center 2.5 and VMware ESX 3.x as an “experimental” feature and only had one way of ‘waking’ a server and that was with a magic wake on lan packet.  That worked great until you rebooted Virtual Center or restarted the Virtual Center server service for any reason.  After the reboot Virtual Center would see the host as down and was not able to bring it back to life.  That was one reason why the technology was experimental at the time.  Now in vSPhere, VMware DPM actually has three different wake methods it can use to bring the host back up. Along with using wake on lan DPM will also use IPMI wake and ILO wake. One other really cool thing that was added to VMware DPM was the ability to schedule when an ESX host would wake back up.  So if you know you were going to have a heavy load at 9am you could schedule the host to wake up at 8am to be pretty for the start of the business day.

So to recap, I am not sure that VMware DPM would be something I would setup and use on a regular basis.  I have also worked in certain environments that the Change Control Board would literally lay an egg if they knew that hosts could and would shut down for any reason. 

That is my take on this. So what’s your take on VMware DPM and are you using it currently in your environments? I would really like to what you all have to say and think on this? Inquiring minds want to know.

It seems the big news for the day is the Announcement of the VCE Coalition.  Seems I have been reading blog posts about this all morning with the last post being Scott Lowe’s thoughts on the subject. I have been hearing that this has been in the works for a while now and yes it will be nice to be able to use one SKU to some sort of complete hardware package for running your virtual infrastructure. I do, however have to agree with Scott Lowe that VMware has the most risk from this adventure but I really have to ask the question.  Where you really expecting anything different?  Let’s take a look at the money angle.  EMC owns VMware and CISCO has invested a lot of money into VMware also, at least in my mind, it was just a matter of time for something like this to happen.  Well than again there was my favorite rumor that CISCO was going to buy VMware or even better yet EMC.

Another question to ask is who is really going to benefit the most from this? What will be the response from the other server OEM’s?   A little healthy competition for things is supposed to be better for the customer right?  Well I guess time will tell how this little adventure plays out and if this will mean more segregation between the server hardware providers.  More and more blog post are getting added it seems like each minute with more information so, once the dust settles things should really start to get interesting.

One of the enhancements or features in VMware’s latest release, vSphere, is the option to create virtual machines with thin provisioned disks. I found the skinny on Thin Provisioning with vSphere on the VMware Blog by Michael Adams.

vStorage Thin Provisioning optimizes storage costs through the most efficient use of storage in virtual environments. Storage requests more often than not are usually overestimated by users mostly to avoid having to go through the request/approval process. With vStorage Thin Provisioning, IT departments can now assure business users of storage space availability while deferring the actual costs of purchasing storage to when it is really needed. Full reporting and alerting on allocation and consumption ensure that virtual machines don’t really run out of storage, Storage VMotion and Volume Grow ensure that virtual machines can either migrate to datastores with additional storage or volumes can be increased in size when consumption approaches allocation.

Sounds pretty cool and can be a real cost saver.  This was the topic of conversation on this week’s VMTN Community Roundtable.  In case you missed it you, can hear the podcast from this link or you can also download from iTunes.  

Storage providers have been able to provide thin provisioning for awhile now and this has worked really well.  So now with vSphere we have a choice of where we want to handle thin provisioning. vSphere also makes it really easy to convert thick vmdk files to thin using Storage vMotion.   So which one should you use?  Well that is the real question.  Now, truth be told, I have only set up thin provisioning in my lab environment.  I am not sure if today I would try to make the selling point to switch from storage thin provisioning to VMware provisioning.  I guess I am under the belief that it might be better to leave this type of provisioning and control with the storage group.  I really have nothing to back that belief up one way or another it just seems to be the most logical choice. I do think that changing a process that is already in place might causes issues later. What happens if both VMware and the storage device both work to deliver thin provisioning at the same time?  I do not have the equipment in my lab to test but I really have to wonder.  Has anyone out there tried this? 

Now on the flip side of the coin, if the storage device is not providing thin provisioning then it would make good sense to take advantage of this technology by letting VMware handle this for you.  The next question would be, is thin provisioning for everything? Should it be used for some virtual machines and not others?  For me, personally, I am not ready to push new technology into production without taking some baby steps first. I think thin disks will work great for VDI and can greatly increase deployment times of the desktops.  I think that would be my first step and would not even consider the technology for mission critical application for at least a bit while my comfort and confidence level increases.

Aren’t these the steps that most companies follow when adapting new features or new technology?  I have no doubt that thin provisioning in one way or another will become the de facto standard as we move forward in time. Now what say you?  What are your thoughts on thin provision and how it should be handled?

This week’s VMTN podcast was Title: #69 - The Virtualization Journey with Vittorio Viarengo was a discussion about the steps for driving a successful virtualization adaption.  You can also download the podcast on iTunes. For years now I have had a tag line that I use. It’s my motto, if you will, and goes like this: “Virtualization is a journey, not a project.”   Profound isn’t it?  This is something I firmly believe in and have been preaching over the years.  The idea is that there are steps that happen during this virtualization journey that happened at the different stages of your deployment.  Without a doubt the first step is having the front line people, namely the administrators that will build, control and support the environment. Vittorio continued with the second step of getting the application owners on board as well as some trust in the infrastructure so that over time virtualization will become more accepted and would be the first thing the application owners would choose going forward. He went on to his third step of getting the C level manager or director on board and committed to virtualization moving forward to establish a virtual machine first policy in the infrastructure.

I fully believe in that concept and this falls right in line with my understanding of how things need to play out in a company to get the VM first policy in place but, I disagree with the order of the steps.  I believe you need the C- level signoff as step two and the application owners step three. Let me explain my reasoning for this difference of opinion.  Application owners that I have had the pleasure of working with over the years have had to take ownership of an application that they may be knowledgeable about or may not have any experience on that application at all and they were given the task to learn and deploy. These guys and gals will read and memorize the release notes and this is the guide that they will live by as well as the vendors System Engineer that is guiding the application owner on the install.  I am happy to report that things have gotten better over the years as far as third party and OEM’s accepting and supporting their products in a virtual environment. In the olden days, when virtualization was in its early infancy, venders and OEM’s were not so quick to jump on the virtualization band wagon and would be quick to say that they would not support their product running in a virtual machine. Can you believe the nerve of these guys? So easy to say “we won’t support virtual machines”. Oh those where the days and although support has gotten better it is not fully there yet, across the board. This is the main reason but you also need to squash the company politics right from the get go. So getting the C level manager and/or Director on board to support the company’s virtualization journey and to make sure everyone in the organization is on the same page about the vision and direction the company is about to follow.  There is actually another step for the C-level but I will come back to that in a second. Once you can get a policy in place then overall acceptance in the company will be much easier.  This leaves some Managers in a position to push back on venders, if needed.  Some phone calls might start sounding  something like this; “You will support your product on a virtual machine because that is what we use.  If you need help with some of the testing or anything we the company will be more than happy to help you with that but you will support us or we switch to a new product.”

Now the focus will shift to step three, the application owners and working with them to educate them on the power of virtualization as well as a little bit of training about what kind of resources they would really need to run this application.  No you do not need a four way virtual machine with four gigabits of RAM to be your DHCP server.  That is a different blog post altogether but understanding, communication and trust needs to be built with the application owners. It is their butt on the line when something happens to the application regardless if the failure was something they could not control. Once you build the trust the world is a better place for all.

I mentioned earlier that the C level manager and/or director really had two steps in this process and now we work towards the second step with management.  Sometime during your deployment you will come up to what I call the “Magic Moment.”  If one of my past assignments this “magic moment” was during an offsite disaster recovery test. I was able to prove to all a big reason why virtualization was the next best thing since the computer.  I got to help design a rock solid disaster recovery plan and with living in the middle of hurricane central, this was a very good place to shine.  Once I was given the green light that the LUNS were presented to the offsite virtual infrastructure I was able to recover the infrastructure in a matter of minutes and a lot of people really took notice.  Once we got back from the test absolute full virtualization acceptance across the board happened. What a magic moment to share.

These are the steps that I believe happen on a company’s journey into virtualization and steps to the cloud.  It is never a project but rather a life changing journey moving forward into tomorrow.

I was combing through the VMTN community forums and came across a couple of posts on the best way to extend or expand a vmdk file.  This topic seems to come up on a regular basis, so I thought it might be a good idea to put together a blog on this topic.

The main tool that I have used to complete this task is the Microsoft utility called Diskpart.  For most cases this utility will do the job just fine but it does have some limitations.  Inside of the vSphere client it is very easy to expand the vmdk file to the new size that you need.  Let’s take a quick look at the requirements to be able to extend a volume with Diskpart.

• The volume must be formatted with the NTFS file system.
• For Basic volumes, the unallocated space for the extension must be the next contiguous space on the same disk.
• For Dynamic Volumes, the unallocated space can be any empty area on any Dynamic disk on the system.
• Only the extension of data volumes is supported. System or boot volumes may be blocked from being extended, and you may receive the following error:

Diskpart failed to extend the volume. Please make sure the volume is valid for extending

• You cannot extend the partition if the system page file is located on the partition. Move the page file to a partition that you do not want to extend.

Even though you cannot extend the system or boot volume you can easy use a helper virtual machine to attach the disk you want to extend. You should then have no problems performing the extend with the helper virtual machine. Got to love virtualization!!!  I have found it just easier to use the helper virtual machine for any and all extends that I need to perform.

This is all pretty straight forward which brings me to my next question. What do you use when diskpart does not work or is there a 3^rd party tool that just really rocks?  Before moving on to 3^rd party it is worth mentioning another VMware product that can perform this talk for you also.  You can use vConverter to change the disk size during the conversion. This leaves vConverter as a very viable option to perform this task although it is one of the slowest options.

There is a tool call GParted from Sourceforge that is worth mentioning.  They have the ability to boot from a cd-rom or usb to extend volumes.  You can download this product straight from Sourceforge’s web site http://gparted.sourceforge.net/download.php

I found out from the forum that Dell has their own utility called ExtPart to be able to extend a volume.  More information on this tool can be found at http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/download.aspx?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs&releaseid=R64398&formatcnt=2&fileid=83929

So who has any others tools they use and would like to share with the class today? It would be great to have a reference of all the options and tools available to us.

I was recently asked what I thought was the best way to organize things in vCenter?  I personally have used several different methods to organize things in different ways. I started to wonder how other admins were organizing their own environments and if there was any common methods of madness to this. First let’s take a look at the different ways I have organized things and then I will propose the same question to you and see what kinds of responses I can get from you, in the audience.

The different methods that I have used to organize my environment have been mainly with the use of resource groups and folders.  Each of these options is located in different views; resource groups are located in the host and clusters view and folders are located in the virtual machine and template.

Starting with resource groups, I have built different groups in a few different ways in different clusters.  Creating resource groups based on importance, such as high, med and low has been the most basic configuration that has been taught by VMware in the classes and as examples when talking about resource groups.  Now resource groups setting only take effect when contention happens on the host.  If there is no contention then these groups give you the ability to group together virtual machines based on operating system.  I have had a “Windows” resource group as well as “Linux” resource group to separate the different groups and or teams and the virtual machines that each maintained as well as having “high” and “low” groups for the most important and least important or in other words, the things like the development virtual machines.  I have also seen people create resource groups based on the type of application but vSphere now gives us that ability to use vApps to accomplish that kind of configuration.

So nothing too exciting with the resource groups, just a pretty straight forward configuration.  Now, I also organized differently in the folders view.  I would actually create different folders based on the application running on the virtual machine.  One example would be to have all the exchange servers in one folder.  In one case I actually created folders based on the virtual machine owner so I would easily know who is responsible for any virtual machine when issues arise.  Moving forward in time I really started to use custom columns in vCenter for application owner and all information to be able to get hold of that person.  As time went on it I created more and more custom columns to turn the main virtual machine page into my main source of information about all the virtual machines.  In the end these columns would have all the information that the server database had listed and ended up replacing the server database for any information about the virtual machines.

Now we have gotten to the part of audience participation.  How do you organize your vCenter?  Inquiring minds what to know!