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VMware vCenter Appliance 5.1 feature parity with Windows version?

January 3, 2013 By Leave a Comment

So, I was all into vSphere 5.1 news during and right after VMWorld SF 2012.  One of the tidbits I’ve been waiting for is documentation on the vCenter Appliance for vSphere 5.1.  According to a VMware Communities Roundtable Podcast on October 8th (at around the 23 minute mark) vCenter Appliance now has feature parity with vCenter Server for Windows and is now fully supported.  I recently had a buddy call me about an issue he was having with vCenter in an all Linux environment.  I asked him why he didn’t just upgrade the environment to the Linux appliance.  He was still under the assumption that the appliance had the traditional limitation due to lack of any announcement or documentation from VMware.  I thought that this couldn’t be the case because this is a big feature.  After scouring the VMware website for about 1/2 hour, I wasn’t able to find any documentation specific to the appliance.

Justin King (@vcenterguy), the show’s VMware employed guest seemed pretty excited and passionate about the the capabilities of the appliance.  I’m pretty surprised at the lack of mention on the VMware site about the new capabilities.  I reached out to Justin via twitter and if he responds I’ll update the post.

Has anyone deployed the Appliance in production or even lab to test the features vs. the Windows install?  I would imagine there’s a lot of interest for Linux only environment.

VMware Communities Roundtable Podcast – Show Notes #205 – What’s new in vSphere Client & vCenter Server 5.1 | VMTN Blog – VMware Blogs.

Filed Under: Virtualization Tagged With: ,

SANs free live migration – VMware vs. Hyper-V

October 23, 2012 By 2 Comments

With the introduction of Hyper-V 3.0 and vSphere 5.1 both major virtualization vendors have introduced SAN free live migration solutions.  To give a quick recap live migration is the ability to migrate a virtual machine from one physical host to another physical host without interruption of service for the target virtual machine.  In the past, the one consistent requirement in both Hyper-V and vSphere has been that you had to have a SAN in common between the two hosts. The primary challenge for the SAN requirement was the cost and complexity associated with operating a SAN.  This put one of the most beneficial features of hypervisors out of the reach for small organizations.  Another challenge is the inability to migrate virtual machines between hosts homed to different SANs.  It’s been a common challenge to perform maintenance on a SAN or change the class of storage associated with a VM but not have anywhere to move it without downtime.

Microsoft and VMware approach SAN free migration in two different ways.  Microsoft leverages the improvements in their SMB protocol in Windows Server 2012.  SMB has had a reputation for being an inefficient protocol for years.  NFS and iSCSI have been the default method for providing storage over a TCP/IP network.  Microsoft now claims that SMB is efficient enough to compete with NFS and iSCSI in offering the backend storage needed to host VM’s.  It’s this new performance boost that Microsoft leverages as the foundation of SANs free live migration.  Instead of storing the VM on a traditional NFS volume or iSCSI LUN, Hyper-V can now store VHD files on a standard Windows Files Share.  The file server doesn’t have to run Hyper-V itself.  It just needs to be a Windows Server 2012 OS and could be virtual itself.  In essence you still have the shared storage requirement but get a new shared storage option.  You still however get many of the performance advantages during live migration as you do in NFS, iSCSI and Fibre Channel based solutions.

VMware takes a different approach by combining standard vMotion with Storage vMotion.  Instead of migrating just the VM’s memory and CPU state from one host to another, the storage is migrated as well.  So, you can have two hosts with local storage perform migrations between the two hosts.  This offers a greater level of flexibility over the Hyper-V approach.  The obvious disadvantage would be performance as large VM’s would take a long time to replicate even over a fast network.  There also could be performance related issues for both Storage and Network I/O.  However, this is a great new feature for allowing the migration of VM’s from one SAN to another SAN.  It doesn’t offer much in the form of protection as shared storage is still the way to go if you are looking to protect workloads.

Both solutions are great new features of the platforms.  Microsoft uses a little marketing magic to technically achieve “SANs” free live migration but it is still a very useful feature while VMware makes a natural evolution to live storage migration between two hosts with no shared storage.   Do you see a use case for SANs free migration in your environment?

Filed Under: Virtualization Tagged With: , ,

Installing Citrix VDI-in-a-Box in VMWare Workstation 8

July 11, 2012 By 6 Comments

I posted an earlier lab on installing XenDesktop 5 within VMware Workstation 8. But the number 1 search term that comes up for this post is “How to install Citrix VDI-in-a-Box in VMware Workstation.” I kind of take it for granted that if XenDesktop will run in VMware Workstation then the lighter VDI-in-a-Box should be a shoe in. But, since the question gets raised and I’ve never deployed the lighter VDI solution this a good source for a lab and post.

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VDI in a Box is a much simpler solution than XenDesktop. In order to Run XenDesktop 5 Quick Deploy in a vSphere environment you need at least 4 Windows servers. In VDI in a Box you only need your ESXi server, the Citrix vdiManager appliance and your client image (Windows XP or 7) to have a complete solution. My laptop is pretty robust. I have 16GB of Ram and a quad core i7 processor. But my guess was that you could probably do this lab on a workstation with only 8GB. Also, the vdiManager is 32-bit so Intel-VT shouldn’t be needed. The instructions for installing VDI-in-a-Box can be found here on the Citrix website.

I went a very simple route for the design of this lab. I created an ESXi server with 4 CPU’s and 4GB of RAM. I bridged the network work adapter so I could access the VDI environment from any machine in my lab. The below snapshot are the VM settings for my ESXi server.

Figure 1 ESXi Virtual Machine Settings

After importing the vdiManager OVA my virtualized ESXi server should memory utilization at 1.2GB which is kind of high and is more than likely a result of VMware tools not being installed on the Linux appliance. I choose to use an XP image because I had one handy to import. This is where I enjoy the features of Workstation 8. I just added the virtualized ESXi to my list of managed hosts in Workstation and I was able to just upload the image directly from VMware Workstation.

The installation of VDI-in-a-Box is much simpler than the installation of XenDesktop. Using an OVA appliance and just a configuration screen makes it a no brainer installed in comparison. The setup for configuring the image and setup are guided and worked well. I configured a pool of 10 potential desktop with 1 desktop powered on. I went low for memory requirements at 512MB per VDI session.

Here’s a sample of the guest settings for the first VDI session Citrix configured after completion of the image deployment.

Figure 2 VDI Workstation in ESXi

This lab was fast, easy and not very intensive. If you have a system with 8GB of RAM it should work well. The one problem you may run into performance wise would be running more than one VDI session. My system capped out at 9GB of used RAM during this lab but keep in mind I had all of my regular productivity applications opened and created this post as well while preforming the lab. Here’s a snapshot of my virtual ESXi server summary while running the lab with two VDI images running along with the vdiManager.

I love to answer any questions on this lab or take comments.

Update 07/14/12: I recorded a video for the lab that can be found you YouTube

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vSphere inside of VMWare Workstation Performance

May 4, 2011 By 2 Comments

I’ve been debating over the past few months as to buy a new desktop.  My current desktop is still relatively a decent machine.  It’s a 3 year old Dell XPS 420 with a Quad Core 9300 and 6GB of RAM; a decent machine for today’s power user.  I have no complaints when it comes to my day to day computing.

I’ve even been able to do some pretty basic vSphere labs inside of VMWare Workstation.  The problem that I always run into is RAM.  My machine is maxed out with 6GB.  For virtualization labs this is on the lower end of what I’d like to see.  I recently purchased a Sony Vaio laptop with a first generation Intel i3 processor and upgraded to 8GB of RAM.  How does this compare to the equipment I normally use?  Most of my production VMware machines have at least 72GB of RAM.

The lab I manage at work has 3 HP DL 370’s with 16GB each.  I complain all the time about the limited memory.  So, I’ve been a little more than skeptical about running my home lab with less than 16GB of RAM.  I’m from the school of “buy as much RAM as you can afford and then beg for some more money to buy more school.”  That’s why I’ve been looking into Dell’s XPS 9100 with 24GB of RAM.  That should make for a pretty decent home lab.

I’m not a huge fan of running virtualization labs on a laptop but this machine does have some pretty decent specs.  I’ve seen other bloggers post positive opinions with lessor powered Mac Book Pros with 8GB RAM.  I still had a perception that this just isn’t that much RAM for nested virtual machines.

But, reading more and more about laptops with modern processors running a nested vSphere lab within Workstation kept me wondering if I’m over spec’ing my new desktop.  So, I decided to go ahead and build the lab on my Vaio and post the results.

I wanted to get as realistic as a lab as possible.  I decided on the follow layout.

Server Hypervisor Environment Specs
vCenters Workstation 1.5 GB RAM, 40GB Thin disk, 1 CPU Windows 2008
Openfiler 2.3 Workstation 1 GB RAM, 100GB Thin disk, 1 CPU
vSphere Workstation 2 GB RAM, 40GB Thin disk, 2 CPU, ESXi 4.1 update 1
vSphere Workstation 2 GB RAM, 40GB Thin disk, 2 CPU, ESXi 4.1 update 1
Windows 2008 ESXi 1 GB RAM, 40GB Thin disk, 1 CPU

My Vio is running Windows 7 Home premium and Workstation 7.1.2.  Without taking into account the host operating system my laptop’s memory is pretty close to being oversubscribed.

Results

I fudged around with getting everything installed in a few hours.  I’ve never used Open Filer before so that slowed me up.  I also didn’t have all of my ISO’s readily available at home so that really slowed me up.

Memory

Overall I was surprised by the results.  My laptop prior to powering up the VM’s sits idle with 1.8 GB of RAM used.  After firing up all the VM’s including the single nested 2008 server my used RAM went up to 6.75 GB used during the installation of the nested machine.  The most observed memory usage was 7.4GB when I performed a vmotion between the virtual ESXi servers.

CPU

I typed this post on the same laptop while all of this was running in the back ground and I have to say that I didn’t even notice a performance hit.  My 4 logical cores (the i3 is a dual core CPU with HT enabled) were relatively idle with the virtual machines addle.  I did begin to stress it a bit when I installed the nested instance of 2008 in the vSphere cluster. I saw overall CPU usage peg to %75 spread across all 4 logical cores when performing a vMotion.

Conclusion

You won’t mistake the experience with any production system with multiple physical hypervisors but it works for a lab.  I even had DRS enabled and successfully performed a vMotion or two.

The bottom line is that I could realistically get a Dell XPS 8300 with 16GB of RAM and be fairly happy for a home lab.  But I’ve been really looking forward to running some complex lab scenarios with VMWare and GNS3 and if you ever used GNS3 it’s both a memory and CPU hog.

This is a great example of that %5 engineering rule.  I’d be building an infrastructure based on 5% of my usage pattern – just not a smart way to do things.  Let’s see which logic wins over the next couple of months.

Update 5-6-2011

I stumbled along a great post on 8 nested ESXi nodes and 60 virtual machines on a single physical host with 8GB of RAM.

Filed Under: Virtualization Tagged With: ,

vSphere inside of VMWare Workstation 7.0

February 24, 2011 By 4 Comments

Follow on to my post on running ESX inside of VMWare Workstation 6.5.  I’ve finally taken the plunge and spent the $100.00 (yeah these are tough times) and upgraded to VMWare Workstation 7.0.  The best feature to me has been the ability to run vSphere natively within VMWare Workstation.  The install takes minutes and I haven’t run into any major issues.

My biggest issue is lack of memory on my workstation.  My desktop has 6GB of memory and has an older Intel Quad Core processor.  My laptop is an i3 with only 4GB of memory.  The new Dell 9100’s can be expanded to a whopping 24GB of RAM.  That’s pretty nice and would make for a great virtualization home lab.

The only problem is that the 24GB of memory is a $660 upgrade option and Dell forces you to upgrade to Windows 7 Professional at another $130.00.  That’s $790 to get the memory I’m looking for in my lab.  If I had a difficult time justifying the $100 upgrade to 7.0 just guess what I’m thinking on paying $2k for my new home rig.

Dell 9100

Well while I’m fantasying about a new desktop I’ve went ahead and ordered 2 DDR3 4GB modules for my laptop that will take me up to 8GB of RAM.  I’m not too excited about it because I do very little lab work on my laptop because it’s just inconvenient.

Filed Under: Virtualization Tagged With: ,

Virtual Host Security

May 13, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Security is a never ending battle for us folks in the business of IT Infrastructure.  There are always new threats that we need to consider from every layer of the network.  Now that virtualization is becoming a huge part of the infrastructure, it’s a good idea to extend our security policy to include virtualization challenges.

I wanted to take a look at some of the common challenges to consider within VMware.  Specifically the VI3 platform as I’m running into this platform %90 of the places I go versus vSphere which has a completely new model and API available for securing your virtual environment.  I will take a separate look at Hyper-V, XenServer and vSphere at a later date.  Since VI3 is so prevalent it’s the audience that I believe I could touch the most.  It’s important to note that these principles could apply to the other platforms as well.

So, what are the security challenges with hypervisors?  Out of the box the kernel and consol are pretty secure.  There aren’t a lot of services that could be exploited running by default.  There’s a firewall enabled by default.  And communication is over SSH and SSL.  These are all things we should expect but here are three areas of concern.

Guest OS

One of the first area’s to look at would be the guest OS and services.  The vulnerabilities of the guest OS could easily become the not so obvious vulnerabilities of the hypervisor.  I’m not going to pick on any one operating system as things issues are common amongst all OS’s that provide services.  One thing to really consider is DoS attacks against the VMware host through a subject able guest OS or service.

An attacker could direct a DoS at a service running on one guest OS which could affect the performance of the physical hardware.  This in turn could affect other guest operating systems.  This is why it’s important to have system monitoring in place for your hardware and applications.   This is where tools like vMotion could really pay for themselves as you can isolate servers that are experiencing high utilization or suspicious activity.

Network Isolation

It’s extremely important to fully plan out your virtual network and physical network layout and the access lists governing control between the two.  It’s been my experience that the team that manages the virtual switches and the team that manages the physical network are two separate teams.  I personally think that this is a mistake.

I have experience as both a Network Engineer and a Server Administrator and have a strong understanding of routing, switching and access control.  This is a critical skill when dealing with an extremely large virtual environment.  I find that when I wear both hats I have conflicting agendas.  The network engineer in me wants to think security first but the server administrator wants the course of least resistance.

This leads to shortcuts and poking holes in VLAN configurations by using static routes between Virtual Machines on different network segments.  These shortcuts are normally undocumented and come to bite us in the rear sometime in the future when we least expect it.  Worst case hopefully its internal audit doing a review of controls and not some bad guy taking advantage of our laziness.

Virtual Center Clients

This is an area that we may not give much thought to because the list of people allowed to access the console is limited.  But it’s this area that we need to pay a great deal of attention.  I’m very reluctant to give access to the Virtual Center Console to Jr. Level Administrators.  Even when configured correctly by restricting rights to virtual machines through Directory Services it’s important to realize how big of a security risk it is giving access to someone who doesn’t have the appropriate training in Virtualization or even security.

This is an area that can lead to a great deal of damage if an administrator is lacks about securing their desktop.  This is why it’s also importing to have the appropriate level of logging configured to re-enforce the security policy with accountability.

There are plenty of other area’s to look at like iSCSI security, Storage Network and device level challenges.  I’ve provided a few links at the end where you can get much more detail on securing you virtual environment.

Useful Links

I found these useful links that give more detail in securing your virtual environment.

VMware Harding VI3

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vi35_security_hardening_wp.pdf

VMware vSphere Hardening Guide

http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-12306

Keith Townsend

Filed Under: Network, Security Tagged With: , ,

ESX inside of VMware Workstation

April 22, 2010 By 1 Comment

I was talking with a VMware ISV Health Evangelist the other day and he mentioned with VMWare Workstation 7 you can now run vSphere 4 inside of VMware and have nested virtual machines. I thought that was curious as I have 6.5 and had heard you could already do it.

Why in the world would you want to be able to do this at all? The basic answer is your ability to Lab vSphere without having a dedicated box. This makes for all kinds of interesting scenarios. You could get an open source iSCSI server, virtualize it and then lab vMotion and vHA. This is without having the underlying physical requirements for ESX like SCSI or SAS hard drives.

Well I thought I remembered seeing you could already do this and low and behold it has been done. I purchased the Trainsignal vSphere training package awhile back and David Davis the instructor for the video series walks you through the process. You can find that portion of the video here .

In short you need an Intel processor that supports VT or an AMD processor that supports AMD-V. Of course with any virtualization you need as much RAM as you can get. I was successfully able to create a virtual instance of vSphere which had a nested instance of Fedora running inside. In addition, I had a Windows 2003 server running my Virtual center and everything ran smoothly with the exception of Fedora which ran a bit slow which is to be expected.

My system is a Dell XPS 410 with 6GB of RAM with a Quad Core Intel Q9300 running at 2.5 Ghz. I was able to keep all this running for a couple of days in the background without really noticing any performance issues running my day to day web browsing and word processing.
Next is to create an iSCSI SAN and implement vMotion.

Filed Under: Virtualization Tagged With: , ,
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