I went to install the VMware SDK for vSphere 4.0 on to my desktop running Windows 7 64-bit, Visual Studio 2008, and .Net 3.5 SP1 and discovered the SDK setup is not friendly with these versions. According to VMware you need Visual Studio 2005 and .Net 2.0 if you want to run the SDK.
So like most of you reading this I turned to my trusted adviser…google to find the answer I was looking for. Much to my disappointment after 5 minutes of searching around I didn’t find any instant gratification for my problem so I decided to just go ahead and figure it out on my own.
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Categories: Other, Scriptng, VMware Tags: ESX 3.5, ESX4, ESXi, Installation, Script, scripting, SDK, vCenter, VI4, Virtual Center, VMware, VMware Workstation, vsphere
We all have come to love many free services that we have integrated into our daily lives. Things like free email, free voice mail, free open source applications, free video streaming, social networking sites, operating systems, and many other services that make our lives better. At dailyhypervisor.com we are working on a new type of free service that can help all of you in the technical community. A free community lab. A free community lab would provide access to an environment that would grant everyone the opportunity to learn IT hands on and provide the ability for those who don’t have the means to test and learn about new technologies.
Tackling something of this scale will not be easy, but with help from the community hopefully we can make this something extraordinary. I personally will be donating some of my own lab equipment to the first generation of this lab environment. I’m currently working on building the lab for early beta testing by the end of March 2010. The first generation of this lab will consist of 3 servers running ESX4i. The servers have limited resources but each one consists of a single Quad-Core AMD Phenom 9850 processor, 8GB of Memory and access to 1TB of NFS storage. Access to the lab in the beginning will be by invite only much like other beta offerings. If you are interested in participating and leveraging this opportunity please register with dailyhypervisor.com and post a comment to this blog post stating your interest in participating. In your post please provide a brief description of how you would leverage this and also anything you would like to see available in the lab. All early beta users will be also to provide feedback on the lab and may be asked to participate as environment moderators once the lab goes GA. Much like community forums the goal is to make this community driven and supported by user moderators and the such.
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Categories: Community Lab, Free Stuff, XenServer, automation, vSphere Tags: Desktop Virtualization, ESX, vCenter, VI4, virtualization, VMware, vsphere
“The desktop deployment productivity tools that NetApp and DynamicOps offer significantly increase the value of virtual infrastructures by improving performance, providing essential data management resources, and reducing costs,” said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Solutions and Alliances, NetApp. “Enterprises and service providers can now offer multiple, cost-effective service level options for virtual desktop deployments by leveraging the unique orchestration of virtual storage capabilities that are part of the new DynamicOps solution.”
The full release can be found at http://www.dynmaicops.com/news/
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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
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!
|
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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For over a year now, I have started off telling customers in Plan and Design engagements that they would be using ESXi unless we uncovered a compelling reason to NOT use it. The “which do I use” argument is still going strong. Our blog post “ESX vs. ESXi which is better?“ was posted in April and is still the most popular. It seems to be a struggle for many people to let go of the service console. VMware is trying to go in the direction of the thinner ESXi hypervisor. They are working to provide alternatives to using the service console.
VMware has provided a comparison of ESX vs. ESXi for version 3.5 for a while. Well, VMware posted a comparison for ESX vs. ESXi for version 4 last night. It’s a great reference.
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So , today I sat in a seminar hosted by VMware, EMC, Cisco and SunGard. It was called “Take the Risk Out of Cloud Computing“. It was the same old mantra…Create your Internal Cloud now in preparation for the coming of the External Cloud. SunGard puts an availability twist with its view on things: “Let us be your hosted cloud and/or your DR cloud.” The sessions seemed to be designed to inform someone who knows about virtualization, but may not understand cloud computing. I was there to see what SunGard’s take on it was. In the Cloud realm, they do two things and they do them well: hosting and DR. (I have to admit, I served a five year sentence with SunGard…)
When Clair Roberts got up to speak, the first thing he did was read the official VMware definition of Cloud Computing. Then he gave his own definition: “I don’t care!” Later, I spoke with him and he admitted that he borrowed it from someone else at VMware, so I am going to borrow it from them, too.
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Everyone at this point should be aware that the Service Console is now located in a vmdk on a VMFS partition. The Service Console vmdk must be stored on a vmfs datastore and the datastore must either be local stoage or SAN storage that is only presented to the one host. So I guess no shared vmfs datastores to house all the Service Consoles……. The next question I had about the new service console was the /boot partition. Where is it and how is the server bootstrapping? Well I can’t say I have totally gotten to the bottom of this yet but I have discovered a few things. When digging into scripting installations of vSphere I first looked at the disk partitioning which sheds a little light on the boot process. Here is what the disk partitioning portion of the script looks like:
part /boot –fstype=ext3 –size= –onfirstdisk
part storage1 –fstype=vmfs3 –size=30000 –grow –onfirstdisk
part None –fstype=vmkcore –size=100 –onfirstdisk
# Create the vmdk on the cos vmfs partition.
virtualdisk cos –size=8000 –onvmfs=storage1
# Partition the virtual disk.
part / –fstype=ext3 –size=0 –grow –onvirtualdisk=cos
part swap –fstype=swap –size=1600 –onvirtualdisk=cos
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Categories: ESX 4, Kickstart, Other, Scriptng, VMware, vSphere Tags: Automated Deployment, datastore, datastores, ESX4, kickstart, service console, VMware, vsphere
