OK..I’ll admit it: I am spoiled by the capabilities of vSphere. What other platform lets you schedule system updates that will occur unattended and without outages of the applications being used? I don’t mean the winders patches, they require a monthly reboot. I am talking about the hypervisor updates. VMware Update Manager coordinates all of this for you. Then along comes vShield Zones to break it all.
First, let me explain what I am trying to do. To simplify things, vShield Zones is a firewall for vSphere Virtual Machines. Rather than regurgitate how it works, take a look at Rodney’s excellent post. A customer has decided to use vShield Zones to help with PCI Compliance. The desire is that only certain VMs will be allowed to communicate with certain other VMs using specific network ports, and to audit that traffic. ’nuff said.
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Back in the summer, I saw Stu’s Post about automating the installation of ESXi. I was reminded again by Duncan’s Post. Then, I found myself in a situation when a customer bought 160 blades for VMware ESXi. With this many systems, it would be almost impossible to do this without mistakes. I took the ideas from Stu and Duncan and created an ESXi automated installer that works from a PXE deployment server, like the Ultimate Deployment Appliance. I took it a step further and added the ability to use a USB stick or a CD for those times when PXE is not allowed. The document below is a result of it.
This is a little different than the idea of a stateless ESXi server, where the hypervisor actually boots from PXE. This is the installer booting from PXE so that the hypervisor can be installed on local disk, an internal USB stick or SD card. You could also use it for a “boot from SAN” situation, but extreme care should be taken so you don’t accidentally format a VMFS disk.
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Categories: Cloud Computing, ESX 4, ESXi, Scriptng, VMware, automation Tags: Automated Deployment, ESXi, Installation, VI4, VMware, vsphere
VI:OPS is was a VMware Forum that dedicates dedicated itself to providing information related to operations surrounding a VMware Infrastructure. The “Proven Practice” documents are were submitted and reviewed by moderators before they are published. The published documents allow for peers to comment on the documents.
I made it point to meet Stevie Chambers because he used to be the driving force behind VI:OPS. When he took his helmet with the big red plume and his sword and armored kilt over to Cisco, everything seemed to just freeze at VI:OPS. It took a week to have my last post approved. PMs were not returned quickly. It just died. No gladiator to defend it.
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Since VI:OPS seems to have died and the content was gobbled up and reindexed my the main VMware communities site (They miss you Stevie!), I am posting my VCB proven practice here. It is dated, since its last version covered ESX 3.5, but most of it still applies in ESX4. If you have comments or changes that you wish to see, please comment here.
You can get it here -> http://www.dailyhypervisor.com/?file_id=8
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OK, so my last post brought on a blizzard of remarks questioning some of the validity of the data presented. I used what I was told during a presentation was a “Gartner recommended” configuration for a VM. My error was that I could not find this recommendation anywhere, but the sizing seems fairly valid, so I went with it. I went back to some of the assessments I have done and took data from about 2,000 servers to come up with some more real-world averages. I wanted to post these averages tonight. Remember what I said previously: This is just a set of numbers. You must ASSESS and DESIGN your virtual infrastructure properly. This is only a small piece of it.
I apologize for the images instead of tables, but I spent way too long trying to get tables to lay out properly in Wordpress. Click on the images for larger views. I can post the raw data if someone wants to look at it, but I have to work on stripping away proprietary data first. So, here we go:
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I attended the second day of the HP Converged Infrastructure Roadshow in NYC last week. Most of the day was spent watching PowerPoints and demos for the HP Matrix stuff and Virtual Connect. Then came lunch. I finished my appetizer and realized that the buffet being set up was for someone else. My appetizer was actually lunch! Thanks God there was cheesecake on the way…
There was a session on unified storage, which mostly covered the LeftHand line. At one point, I asked if the data de-dupe was source based or destination based. The “engineer” looked like a deer in the headlights and promptly answered “It’s hash based.” ‘Nuff said… The session covering the G6 servers was OK, but “been there done that.”
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The vSphere 4.0 Quick Start Guide: Shortcuts down the path of Virtualization
has finally arrived!
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I received a pre-release edition of the book at VMworld 2009. This guide has a great selection of shortcuts, tips and best practices for setting up and maintaining vSphere 4. I would be an excellent addition to any VMware administrator’s bookshelf. The book’s size also makes it a great reference for consultants as well. It will easily fit into your backpack.
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I will be presenting a session at the GreenIT event hosted by the Philadephia Area VMware User Group this Thursday, November 19th. I am going to be speaking about how VMware affects GreenIT. I will also be describing some of the steps to follow ot make the savings a reality. So, if you are in the Southeastern Penciltucky area, you should be there.
REGISTER NOW: http://campaign.vmware.com/usergroup/ug-signup.php?session=Philadelphia2
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A little over a week ago, I was pleasantly surprised by an email from VMware announcing the release of VMware Workstation 7. Since I actively participated in the beta, they gave me a free license key for the new version. That’s reason enough to love it in itself! But, to be honest, I have been using VMware Workstation for quite some time now. I vaguely remember Y2K testing with it back when is was an IT pup. Since I got the fresh copy, I decided to completely redo my laptop with a fresh install of Winders 7 and all of my handy convenience programs (Office, TortoiseSVN, TweetDeck, FeedDemon, Firefox, Pandora, etc.). Since Winders 7 and IE8 have some compatability issues with some things, I decided to create a hybrid of what I did when I ran Ubuntu as the host OS. Since I was making things fresh, I created a Winders 2003 template then spawned a VM to host all of my favorite tools for VMware. I will most likely create spawns of the template for other things, like SAN tools. This gives me modules to do the job of the day and portability in case the host crashes.
So, let’s say I didn’t get a free copy of Workstation. What are the options? Would I be able to justify the $189 for it? Let’s look at some of the differences, starting with the free stuff: Read more…
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Last Month, I attended a Brocade Net.Ed Session that covered Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and the idea of Server I/O Consolidation. If you missed the Net.Ed sessions, you can learn about it at Brocade’s Training Portal. Once you register / login, click on Self-Pased Training and search or browse for FCoE 101 Introduction to Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). It’s free. Here is an unabridged report about the Net.Ed session with some of my opinions wrapped in:
Trends
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