baeke.info

Microsoft: SCVMM 2008 Hotfix for Hyper-V RC1

rastix — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 20:05:00 +0200

From Arlindo's Blog I picked up that there is a hotfix to get SCVMM (System Center Virtual Machine Manager) 2008 to work with Hyper-V RC1. Now I can finally update my Hyper-V test system.

You can get the hotfix from http://connect.microsoft.com.

VMware: VDM 2.1 Reviewers Guide

rastix — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:53:00 +0200

Douglas Brown has written a reviewers guide for Virtual Desktop Manager 2.1. I am not sure if this guide is really needed as the VMware documentation is clear and the product is simple to install and use. However, if you are looking for one document that contains an overview from start to finish it is a very good read.

Get it here.

As a side remark it seems that Provision Networks VAS (Virtual Access Suite) still has the upper hand when you look at the features and the price of the product. They just need to put some extra work in their documentation, support site and troubleshooting FAQs because those leave a lot to be desired.

VMware VDM: Using Windows Mobile Devices

rastix — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 22:55:00 +0200

This week somebody asked me if it was possible to sync a Windows Mobile device using a VMware VDM virtual desktop. The following screenshots show how this is done. I am running VDM 2.1 and the virtual desktop is Windows XP SP2 with ActiveSync 4.5. The client is Windows Vista SP1 with the VMware VDM Client and my Windows Mobile SmartPhone is connected with a USB cable.

From the VDM Client, the user logs on to the desktop by double clicking it:

The remote desktop session is started but it is wrapped in the VMware VDM Client's user interface. The window's title bar contains a menu:

If the Windows Mobile device is connected on the client, it will show up in the Devices menu:

The user just needs to click the device to "connect" it to the virtual desktop. As soon as the device is redirected it can be used. In my case, I need to provide a password to the device first:

The device is now connected and ActiveSync in the Windows XP virtual desktop can work with it:

The mobile device also shows up in My Computer as expected.

A couple of things you should know here. USB device redirection like this requires the VDM agent in the virtual desktop and VMware VDM Client on the client.

Microsoft releases Hyper-V RC1

rastix — Tue, 20 May 2008 20:01:00 +0200

Hyper-V RC1 is available for download. More info can be found here. A couple of things to note:

Saved-state files and online snapshots are different so discard these before upgrading.
The current SCVMM 2008 Beta does not support RC1.
There is support for Windows 2000 SP4 guests.
Integration Components disk (iso) contain the binaries needed for all Windows guest operating systems including Windows Server 2008.
Static IPv4 migration when you create a virtual network bound to an adapter with an existing fixed IPv4 address.

While we are on the subject of Hyper-V, check out the Microsoft Virtualization Team Blog. It contains a couple of interesting posts including some more WMI examples.

SCVMM 2008: Quick Configuration Tips

rastix — Tue, 06 May 2008 21:03:00 +0200

I stumbled across two configuration issues with the beta of SCVMM 2008 (available on http://connect.microsoft.com). Here they are:

1. SCVMM does not like : in a path

I use local storage on my ESX server and ESX automatically gives that storage a label in the form of hostname:storage#. When I tried to deploy a virtual machine to ESX with SCVMM, it failed saying that the volume name was not recognized. Removing the : in the label solved the issue.

2. Issue with USB flash devices in Hyper-V host

When I added my Hyper-V host to SCVMM everything seemed to work fine except the Refresh-Host job. It turns out that in the beta, that job fails when you have USB flash devices in the system. Because I use an HP Desktop machine with built-in card readers, I had to disable them all in device manager. After disabling those devices, Refresh-Host completed without errors, making the Hyper-V host available for deployments.

SCVMM 2008 and VMware integration

rastix — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 20:18:00 +0200

I downloaded and installed SCVMM 2008 today and installed it to check out the VMware integration. I created a new virtual machine with Windows Server 2008 x64 with 1,5GB of RAM and started the installation from an attached ISO. When I did that the installation failed during WAIK installation. I copied the WAIK files (from \Prerequisites\WAIK\1033) to the server and installed WAIK from there. I than reran the setup procedure and SCVMM installed fine.

The first thing you do after installation is to add some hosts. This beta of SCVMM 2008 supports the following virtualization hosts:

Virtual Server 2005
Hyper-V (on Windows Server 2008)
VMware VI3 (with VirtualCenter)

To manage ESX you need to add a VirtualCenter server. SCVMM cannot connect to ESX servers directly. The result (click to enlarge):

In the screenshot above at the right, you'll see an action called Add VMware VirtualCenter. That action launches a wizard that asks you for the name of your VirtualCenter box and your credentials. Upon completion, the wizard adds folders to SCVMM for each VMware datacenter object and then adds the ESX boxes.

If you look at the screenshot further, the Summary tab shows some information about the ESX host like CPU, memory, storage and the virtual machines on the host. The Storage and Networking tab shows the following info:

When you click on the Virtual Machines button and select the ESX host you get a list of virtual machines:

From that list you can do what's expected: stop, start, suspend, modify the virtual machine settings, VMotion, etc... You can also connect to the console of virtual machines. The first time you do this you need to install an ActiveX control. The console looks like this:

That's all I have time for today. Next I will check out how SCVMM works with ISOs and virtual machine templates and how that ties in with VirtualCenter. I will report those findings later.

ESX Server, IP Storage and Jumbo Frames

rastix — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 17:48:00 +0200

Scott Lowe has written an interesting post about enabling jumbo frames for VMware's software iSCSI initiator. VMware does not support this (yet) but it appears you can already enable it. For full details, check his blogpost.

A jumbo frame's size is typically set at 9000 versus the standard size of around 1500. Setting the frame size (or mtu) to 9000 actually lowers the amount of packet processing (assembly/disassembly) by a factor of six. The overhead for ethernet packets also decreased because you send less frames. In general, you should see a performance increase of around 20 to 30%. Note that you have to enable jumbo frames on all levels of your infrastructure: the ethernet switch, the server and the storage box (e.g. NetApp, EqualLogic, ...).

Hyper-V: Creating a differencing disk with WMI

rastix — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:24:00 +0200

In my test environment I use a couple of base disks to easily create new virtual machines. I have a base disk for Windows XP SP3, Windows Server 2008 (32-bit and 64-bit), Windows Server 2008 Core and Windows Server 2003. Each time I create a new virtual machine, I create a differencing disk based on one of the base disks and tell the virtual machine to use that base disk. This functionality is the same as in Virtual PC and Virtual Server.

I wanted to automate the creation of differencing disks using a PowerShell script and it turns out to be very easy. The following two lines are all you need:

$img_svc=Get-WmiObject -Namespace root\virtualization -class msvm_imagemanagementservice

$img_svc.CreateDifferencingVirtualHardDisk("path for new disk", "path to parent disk")

You can find this information here but at this time the information there is pretty basic. You'll probably learn more by listing the WMI classes in PowerShell and playing with them a bit. To list the classes just use the following command:

Get-WmiObject -Namespace root\virtualization -list

I tried to find out how to create a virtual machine using WMI but that seems to be rather difficult. At first glance there is no simple method you can use with some parameters like the name, amount of memory, disk and so forth. Oh well, when SCVMM will have support for Hyper-V there will be native PowerShell commands to do just that so it's no big deal.

Microsoft: Hyper-V RC

rastix — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 22:52:00 +0100

Hyper-V Release Candidate is now available and includes support for Windows Vista SP1 and Windows XP SP3 guests (among other improvements). Full details about installation can be found here.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) and VMware

rastix — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 22:57:00 +0100

The SCVMM product is available today to manage Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1. But somewhere this year, another version of SCVMM (vNext) will be available that also manages Hyper-V and VMware VI3.

What you should know about this is that SCVMM does not replace VirtualCenter. In fact, SCVMM requires VirtualCenter because it uses the VI3 APIs of VirtualCenter to do all of its work. If you have multiple VirtualCenter servers, SCVMM will be able to talk to all of them to enable management across all instances. It seems a bit too hard for Microsoft to talk to the ESX servers directly which surprises me because there are APIs to do that.

I am not sure if using SCVMM together with VirtualCenter is a compelling scenario. Sure, SCVMM's PowerShell functionality is cool but VMware itself is hard at work to get their VI PowerShell launched. VI PowerShell will beta this month and from what I have already seen it works very well.

Another SCVMM function, intelligent placement, is also something that has been available for a while on VI3. I continuously hear people say that this is a feature that SCVMM vNext will bring to VI3 and that is just incorrect. See also this article about this common misconception.

The library feature is not that interesting either because you can easily store ISOs, floppy disk images and virtual machine templates on VMFS or NFS datastores. SCVMM does provide a nicer GUI to work with those assets but that is not something that justifies an extra management tool.

I do see some benefit in the integration of SCOM 2007 with SCVMM vNext especially if Microsoft were to release a management pack for VMware VI3. Performance information from ESX hosts and virtual machines could then be fed into SCCM vNext to improve VMotion recommendations, intelligent placement calculations and so on. I don't except this will happen soon but today at the Microsoft TechDays in Ghent, a Microsoft employee told us that we should expect some big announcements around the timeframe of the Management Summit. Will there be more VMware-related integration? Time will tell...

So although I think SCVMM is great for Virtual Server and Hyper-V deployments, I don't think it is very useful in a VMware environment. But maybe you have a different opinion so let me know what you think.

Windows licensing and virtualization

rastix — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 22:00:00 +0100

You probably know that the different versions of Windows allow you to run additional virtual instances of Windows. The standard version allows you to run one additional virtual instance, the enterprise version allows four virtual instances and the datacenter version allows unlimited instances. The additional virtual instances are linked to a physical server. This means that when you buy the enterprise version of Windows for example, you can run four virtual instances on one physical server.

You should also know that these rules are not linked to Microsoft virtualization technologies such as Virtual Server or Hyper-V. They apply to VMware VI3, XenServer and any other hardware virtualization product.

But what happens in an environment with live migration features such as VMotion, XenMotion or even Quick Migration like in Virtual Server and Hyper-V? In that case you need enough licenses for the amount of virtual machines that can potentially run on one physical server.

An example should make this clearer. If you have two hosts running ESX with eight virtual machines in total and VMotion/HA enabled you might be tempted to buy two Windows Server Enterprise licenses. You can do this but then you have to run four virtual machines on one server and four virtual machines on the other and never move them! (Note: there are some exceptions to this in the official Microsoft documents)

So how many Enterprise licenses do you have to buy? The answer is you should buy four Windows Server Enterprise licenses: two for the first server and two for the second server. Depending on the amount of physical processors in the server, Windows Server Datacenter licenses will quickly become cheaper.

More information: Microsoft

Microsoft Hyper-V: Booting without the hypervisor

rastix — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 14:53:00 +0100

If, for some reason, you want to boot Windows Server 2008 without the hypervisor you can create an extra entry in the boot loader. Here's how:

At the command prompt, type the following:
bcdedit /copy {default} /d "No Hypervisor"
The above command should say: The entry was successfully copied to {guid}. Copy that guid to the clipboard including the curly braces.
Now, type the following command:
bcdedit /set {guid} hypervisorlaunchtype off

In the above command, replace {guid} with what you copied in step 2. The above command just sets a property in the boot entry that will not load the hypervisor on boot.

That's it. If you now boot your machine you will get a boot menu with an extra option.

Now why would you do it? Troubleshooting is one reason but for test/dev/training purposes you might want to run something like Virtual Server or VMware Server/Workstation on the same box. Running those with the hypervisor turned on will give you all sorts of problems: it will be slow, you won't be able to run x64 guests in VMware, etc...

Microsoft Hyper-V: Network Adapters

rastix — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 22:52:00 +0100

When you install Hyper-V on a system and you select a network adapter for virtual machines some changes will be made to your configuration. Before installation of Hyper-V, I had the following connection:

I had only one adapter because I used a standard HP desktop. The adapter was configured with a static IP. During installation, I chose the above adapter for virtual machine networking (click to enlarge):

After the reboot when the installation is complete, the network adapter configuration changes. In my case:

Local Area Connection is the same as before. It represents the physical network adapter in the system. But the configuration only has the Microsoft Virtual Network Switch Protocol configured. IPv4 and other configuration settings are not active anymore:

The Local Area Connection 3 adapter is actually a virtual adapter that is available to the parent partition (the actual installed operating system running on top of the hypervisor) for management. You set the IP address for your physical machine there. This virtual adapter is actually bridged over Local Area Connection just like a virtual machine.

When you disable the network adapter that represents the physical adapter (Local Area Connection in my case), virtual machines and the parent partition will lose connectivity. When you disable only the virtual network adapter of the parent partition (Local Area Connection 3 in my case), you will lose network access to the parent partition but your virtual machines will still have access to the network. This is because they still have their virtual interface bridged over the physical adapter.

Microsoft Hyper-V: Integration Components

rastix — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 22:16:00 +0100

After installing a virtual machine from the same media as Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V beta 1, I noticed that the integration components were already installed. Device manager showed the following devices:

The list of services on the server had the Hyper-V services already running:

There is no need to install the integration components from the Action menu:

Microsoft Hyper-V Beta 1: VMM service fails to start

rastix — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 19:51:00 +0100

I installed Windows Server 2008 x64 with Hyper-V Beta 1 on an HP Desktop and installed the Hyper-V role from Server Manager. Everything worked fine and the machine rebooted properly after installation. The role was available but the Virtual Machine Management service refused to start. It threw the following error: "Error 87: The parameter is incorrect".

The reason for the error seems to be that you need to install Windows Server 2008 using the US English locale. I chose Dutch - Belgium during the installation and that results in the error above. The solution came from here.

What's new and different in VI 3.5

rastix — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 23:01:00 +0100

Mike Laverick has done it again. He has written a great guide about the new features of VI 3.5. Take a look here for download links.

A couple of things I learned from the guide that I did not read anywhere else:

Virtual disks can now be enlarged from VI Client. No need for vmkfstools.
Power-on boot delay for guests and an option to boot directly in the BIOS after a guest reboot.
You can set a static MAC address for a guest from the VI Client.
The new datastore browser allows you to upload files to and from the datastore.
You can configure time synch with NTP from VI Client.

There is much more in the guide so I urge you to read it. Great stuff and thanks Mike!!!

Microsoft: Hyper-V Beta 1 available

rastix — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 21:43:00 +0100

Go and take a look at the download page for Windows Server 2008 RC1. It contains a link to a version with Hyper-V Beta. The Windows Server Division weblog has more details about the release.

Some critical new features in this release are:

Support for quick migration and cluster HA (16 nodes).
Installation from Server Manager.
Support for running on Server Core!
VSS support.
64 GB of memory for a VM (just like in ESX 3.5).

Integration components are available for Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 (x86 and x64). Integration components for Linux are available in beta form.

Quite a surprising release. Everybody was expecting this only at the release of Windows Server 2008 in February.

VMware: ESX Server 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5

rastix — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 17:05:00 +0100

The release of ESX Server 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5 brings a lot of interesting features. A good overview can be found in the release notes and more information in a what's new document.

Some of the changes I like in this release are:

Integration of tools like Guided Consolidation and VMware Converter in the VI Client.
Image customization of 64-bit guests. This is probably still based on the sysprep format for Windows Server 2003 and earlier. Remember that Vista and Windows Server 2008 use a different format (xml-based).
Provisioning across datacenters. In previous versions, you had to have templates in each datacenter.
Datastore browser that supports file sharing between hosts. You will be able to just cut and paste files between ESX hosts. Seems like a basic feature to have but in the past you had to do this from the console.
Support for 256GB of RAM in the ESX host and 64GB of RAM for a guest. Interesting but I doubt there will be many customers who need more than 16GB for a guest. Gotta run the race though. ;-)
Lockdown mode: the ability to prohibit management of a host when it is already managed by VirtualCenter.
Limit the amount of remote console connections.

For our customers, the features of most interest will probably be:

Update Manager: provides a patching solution for ESX hosts and (some) guests. This includes offline patching. Microsoft is also working on an offline patching solution with codename "Himalaya". See virtualization.info for more information. It will be interesting to see how the two stack up to eachother.
Storage VMotion: the ability to migrate virtual machines from one LUN to another without downtime. The migration needs to be done on the same host. You just present the source and target LUN and off you go.
VMware Converter integration into VI Client: makes it easier to do V2V and P2V right from VI Client and also allows customers that use VCB to restore backed up virtual machines right from VI Client.

VMware: VMFS volume on MSA50 enclosure

rastix — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 17:08:00 +0100

We have some DL380 G5 servers with a P800 controller and a MSA50 enclosure. The enclosure is full of disks to have 1,2TB of storage in RAID5. ESX 3 fully supports the P800 controller and the MSA50 enclosure if you have the correct patch level. For ESX 3.0.2 it is best to run update 1.

ESX sees the 1,2TB volume but when we want to create a VMFS volume on it we get the following:

Error during the configuration of the host: Failed to update disk partition information.

In the vmkernel log, we see:

WARNING: SCSI: 5739: Can't write through read-only handle 0x741
WARNING: SCSI: 5616: status Read only, rstatus 0xc0de00 for vmhba1:0:0.residual R 999, CR 80, ER 3
BC: 1521: Failed to flush buffer for object def5 16 6 3 1eee350000000000: Read only
WARNING: SCSI: 5739: Can't write through read-only handle 0x770

The only way to create the VMFS volume is with the service console and the following commands:

Run fdisk /dev/cciss/c1d0 and then type n to create a new partition, t to change the partition id to fb and w to write partition table to disk.
Run the following vmkfstools command to create the VMFS volume: vmkfstools -C vmfs3 -b 8M -S volumelabel vmhba1:0:0:1

We use c1d0 because it's the second controller and the first logical disk and vmhba1:0:0:1 because it is the first partitition we are creating.

We have opened a support call with VMware to find out why exactly this is happening because we would like to create volumes (and basically do all our management) with the GUI. I know, I know, not cool but it makes life a bit easier for those who have to implement our procedures.

IT Forum 2007: First Day

rastix — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 19:44:00 +0100

I am at IT Forum Barcelona this week where today's sessions have just finished. It started with the keynote by Bob Kelly where a couple of things were announced and talked about. Of course, virtualization is still a big thing and an announcement was made that Windows Server Virtualization will be called Hyper-V. The role will be named like that but it will also be a separate product "Hyper-V Server". Not many details right now though.

Microsoft is really trying to focus on different levels of virtualization and they are repeating it in all sessions about it. The focus is on 4 levels of virtualization:

Server Virtualization (Virtual Server and Hyper-V)
Application Virtualization (SoftGrid or now to be called Microsoft Application Virtualization with the 4.5 beta)
Presentation Virtualization (TS, TS RemoteApp, TS Gateway)
Desktop Virtualization (Virtual PC; to solve app-to-os issues)

But the big thing according to Microsoft is of course managing the virtualized environment with their System Center products. During the keynote, but also during another session (Virtualization 360), System Center Virtual Machine Manager was demoed. They already have a build where the Hyper-V name is used and they also had a couple of ESX 3i servers in the Hosts pane. According to Microsoft, somewhere next year, you will be able to manage your VMware servers as you do with VirtualCenter, including live migrations and so on.

Microsoft needs to focus on the bigger picture because they are still behind when it comes to server virtualization. We have Windows Server Virtualization running in our labs and it really is not that great yet. So focussing on management issues and other virtualization technologies is what keeps them going for now.

Some other things that were shown during the keynote were SQL Sever 2008 and SCCM (System Center Configuration Manager 2007). A new November CTP of SQL 2008 will be available with almost all features. Some of the nicer features are the resource governor, policy-based management (can be tied into SCOM 2007) and a revamped report designer tool.

The SSCM demo mainly focussed on server deployment with add-on tools from Dell to change things like BIOS settings with just a few clicks.

The last part of the keynote showed another great enterprise technology, Windows Home Server ;-). It looks ok but really targetted to the average consumer that wants a home server with some backup capabilities.

vizioncore: vRanger Pro 3.2

rastix — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 16:35:00 +0200

vizioncore have announced vRanger Pro 3.2, their backup/restore solution for VI3. vRanger Pro was previously called esxRanger Professional. There are several new features such as:

VSS integration
P2V D/R
Enhanced write speeds
Restore to separate datastores
NoZip Restores

You can find more information about these features here.

The VSS integration interests me the most because it provides a better way to quiesce the Windows file system with support for database applications like SQL Server and Exchange Server.

Until now, you had the VMware Sync Driver to help you with quiescing the file system. When you perform a VCB backup, the sync driver is triggered and tries to flush writes to the file system. This driver is too generic and that has its impact on some applications. The standard way to deal with this was to disable the sync driver or to implement a pre-freeze or post-thaw script.

With VSS integration these issues will go away because applications that implement a VSS writer can be asked to prepare their data for a snapshot. Each application does that in its own specific way (e.g. flush transactions to disk, etc...) After the application has prepared its data, the system is frozen and the VMware snapshot can be taken.

Microsoft already provides VSS support for Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 and DPM 2007 (Data Protection Manager) can be used to leverage this support backup a running virtual machine in a consistent state. Naturally, Windows Server Virtualization (Viridian) also supports this. So it is great to see that this is now also available for VMware environments.

XenSource XenEnterprise v4: Working with virtual machines

rastix — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 20:37:00 +0200

Working with virtual machines is easy and with the new XenCenter just a bit smoother than before. I created a new virtual machine called EX2007DC. Because XenSource now supports x64 guests, I installed Windows Server 2003 x64 edition and gave the virtual machine two virtual CPUs and 4GB of RAM. Here's the screenshot of the Overview tab of the virtual machine's properties:

The General tab provides more information about the virtual machine and allows you to change the VM Memory, number of VCPUs and the VCPU priority among other things. Note that the VCPU priority is a XenEnterprise feature and thus not available in XenExpress (free version). You can change the amount of memory and the number of VCPUs while the machine is running but of course, the changes will only take effect after a reboot. Here's a screenshot of the General tab:

It is a bit weird you can define more VCPUs than cores in the physical box. In the screenshot above I defined 4 vCPUs while the physical box (DL380 G5) only has one dual-core CPU. After doing that, the machine refused to boot and I had to revert to 2 vCPUs. Logical but the UI should prevent the user from making that choice.

You can note from the General tab's screenshot that the Virtualization: label reads Optimized. Like before, you have to install the XenSource tools in the Windows virtual machine to provide it with optimized drivers. The XenSource tools are on an iso (xs-tools.iso) that is automatically mounted when you select the option Install XenSource Tools from the VM menu in XenCenter.

Because I only have local storage on my server the virtual disks of my virtual machine are LVM logical drives. From the Storage tab, you can add storage to the virtual machine while it is running.

In the screenshot above you can see two disks. The second disk (extradisk) of 5GB was added while the virtual machine was running. Windows will pick up this disk (use Disk Management). As noted in the XenSource docs, the numbering of disks can be a bit different than expected. In my case, the second disk I added was numbered disk 0 in Windows and the first one was disk 1:

Note that you cannot hot remove WIndows disks.

The virtual machine's network settings can be seen from the Network tab:

Hot-adding and removing of virtual network cards is supported.

The Console tab lets you take control of the virtual machine and has several buttons for stuff like going fullscreen, undocking the window and so on. If you have installed the XenSource tools, there is a button that allows you to start remote desktop to the IP address of the virtual machine. There is also a dropdown list with ISO images to connect.

The Performance and Logs tabs:

It's interesting to see that XenSource surpasses VMware when it comes to virtual machine abilities. VMware ESX's vSMP supports four virtual CPUs while XenSource XenServer supports 8. You can also assign more than 16GB of RAM and you can hot-add and hot-remove virtual network adapters. In most of our deployments these differences do not matter that much because most customers still use physical boxes when they need more CPU or memory resources. But interesting nonetheless.

XenSource XenEnterprise v4: First Look

rastix — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 00:23:00 +0200

I just downloaded the XenEnterprise v4 trial from http://www.xensource.com and installed it on an HP DL380 G5. I highly appreciate the fact that you do not have to do much or wait to get a trial. Just fill out a small form and start your download. XenSource immediately sends you a 30-day trial license key to unlock the extra features of XenEnterprise.

I am not going to bore you with the installation steps because they are trivial. XenSource installed without any issues on this box and the install was very fast. I believe it was something like 15-20 minutes. Child's play...

After installation on the server, you need to install the new XenCenter software on a management system. I installed it on my laptop which runs Windows Vista. The XenCenter software is on the same cd as the XenServer sources and the installer autoruns. The XenCenter software does not require a management server or a SQL database. It is just an application you run to manage one or more XenServers or resource pools. Here's a screenshot:

The first thing you need to do is connect to your XenServer(s) so I connected to mine:

The root password was set during installation of the server. After connection you get:

When you click the name of the server in the left window pane, you get some tabs to the right with more information about the server: Overview, General, Storage, Network, NICs, Console, Performance and Logs. See the following screenshots for the content of those tabs (click to enlarge):

That's it for the first look. This fourth version leaves a very good impression so far as I was up and running in about 25-30 minutes, ready to start deploying virtual machines. More about virtual machine deployment in a later post.

Windows Server Virtualization: some features postponed

rastix — Thu, 10 May 2007 21:01:00 +0200

Microsoft is postponing some features to a future release of Windows Server Virtualization (WSV):

No live migration
No hot-add resources (storage, networking, memory, processor)
Support limit of 16 cores/logical CPUs

You should note that you will be able to move virtual machines between WSV hosts if those hosts are part of a Longhorn cluster. Doing so will give you a downtime depending on the configured memory of the virtual machine and the speed of the storage system. This could be several seconds.

This news makes WSV less compelling than originally thought and we will have to wait a bit more (Longhorn RTM + 0..180 days + x days) for the really interesting stuff.

PowerShell script to check ESX patch status

rastix — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 17:49:00 +0200

You can use the simple PowerShell script below to check ESX server patching status from your Windows client. Requirements:

.NET Framework 2.0
PowerShell v1.0
plink.exe (from the Putty download page) in your path
An account and password to remotely connect over SSH and execute the command esxupdate query.
Change the $servers array with your servers and also update the $account and $password variable.
Keep the $patches array up-to-date with ESX patch names.

The script:

$patches="ESX-2158032","ESX-1410076","ESX-1006511","ESX-9986131","ESX-8173580","ESX-6921838",
"ESX-2066306","ESX-6075798","ESX-5497987","ESX-3996003","ESX-2092658","ESX-2031037",
"ESX-1917602","ESX-1271657","ESX-9865995","ESX-6856573","ESX-6050503","ESX-5885387",
"ESX-5031800","ESX-3199476","ESX-9916286","ESX-9617902","ESX-8852210","ESX-8174018",
"ESX-7780490","ESX-7737432","ESX-5011126","ESX-3416571","ESX-1161870","ESX-2559638",
"ESX-2257739","ESX-1541239"
$servers="server0","server1"
$account="root"
$password="password"
$servers | % { $a=plink -pw $password $account@$_ "esxupdate query"
$server=$_
$patches | % {
$patch=$_
if( [regex]::match($a, $_).success ) {
     $summary="Installed"
}
  else
{
    $summary="Not installed"
}
new-object psobject |
add-member -pass NoteProperty Server $server |
add-member -pass NoteProperty Patch $patch |
add-member -pass NoteProperty Summary $summary
}
}

Save the above script as a .ps1 file (e.g. c:\patch.ps1) and run it as follows:

./patch.ps1 | ft -groupby server

You will get an overview of all patches grouped by server.

XenSource XenEnterprise 3.1: Virtual Machine Management

rastix — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 20:08:00 +0200

This is the second post in a series about XenSource XenEnterprise 3.1. The first post was about installation and basic management. This post is about virtual machine management. I will limit myself to Windows virtual machines because that is basically what I am interested in the most. I tinker a bit with Linux once in a while but our customers mainly use Windows.

Windows XenVMs

XenEnterprise 3.1 supports Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP. Version 3.2 will support Windows 2000 Server SP4. Version 3.1 also has some limitations when compared to the upcoming version 3.2:

Only 1 vCPU (4 in version 3.2)
No suspend/resume (available in 3.2)
2GB of RAM (>2GB in 3.2)
Unsigned paravirtualized drivers (should be signed in 3.2 with WHQL certification)

Version 3.2 has other improvements like better network performance and VLAN trunk support.

Installing a Windows Server 2003 XenVM

A new Windows virtual machine is installed from the XenServer management console by right clicking the XenServer and selecting Install XenVM. The virtual machine options can then be specified (click to enlarge):

I created a virtual machine with the maximum amount of memory (2047MB) and three virtual disks (the maximum). Windows Server 2003 can be installed from a cd image (iso) that is uploaded to /opt/xensource/packages/iso. I guess you can also use /var/opt/xen/iso_import. The iso can be uploaded with any scp client such as WinSCP or Bitvise Tunnelier. If you do not want to work with an iso, you can use the physical cd-rom of the XenServer host.

You should note that there is not a lot of free space for iso images in /. The XenSource website has more information about the creation of an iso repository. It is done by creating a new logical volume in the XenStorage volume group. There are other ways to do it as well.

When the Install button is clicked, the XenVM is started and you can take remote control from the management console (click image to enlarge):

The disks are presented as regular IDE devices. During installation, you do not need to load any device drivers (F6). Installation is fast as expected.

Let's take a look at the finished WIndows Server 2003 installation without the paravirtualized drivers. Here is a view of device manager (click to enlarge):

This Windows XenVM works without any additional drivers but that is not recommended. The paravirtualized drivers need to be installed from the supplied ISO image. To install the drivers, go the the Overview tab of the virtual machine and connect the xswindrivers.iso. When you connect the iso, autorun will be triggered to start the installation. During installation of the drivers, some warnings will popup because the drivers have not been signed. After installation of the drivers and a reboot, the Found New Hardware Wizard will appear to install the drivers for the network card. After that, device manager looks like:

After the drivers are installed, the XenEnterprise management console knows the ip address of the XenVM and will enable the remote desktop button. That button, when clicked, will launch mstsc.exe and connect to the XenVM with RDP. Note that you need to enable remote desktop in the vm. It is not like Windows Server Virtualization (Longhorn) where RDP will be used as the remote control protocol even during the boot up phase or during installation from cd.

Virtual Machine Storage

VMware ESX works with two types of storage: vmdk files on a vmfs volume or rdm (raw device mapping). When you use vmdk files on vmfs you simply encapsulate the disks of your virtual machine in a file on the host server. When you use rdm, you give a virtual machine more direct access to a SAN LUN for applications that require it. With XenEnterprise, don't expect your virtual machine disks to appear as files on the filesystem of the Xen host. Although Xen supports this, XenEnterprise uses LVM for virtual machine storage and each virtual machine's disk is a logical volume in the volume group that was created during installation. I believe that XenSource is planning to add support for other storage types, including the use of vhd files.

How does it actually work? Well, remember my server had one RAID5 volume with four local SAS disks (about 220GB in total). During installation, XenEnterprise creates three partitions: /dev/cciss/c0d0p1, /dev/cciss/c0d0p2 and /dev/cciss/c0d0p3 (it's an HP box). The first two are quite small and used by the system. The third is used to host an lvm 2 volume group. With pvdisplay, the physical volumes are shown and you can see to which volume group they belong. In my case /dev/cciss/c0d0p3 is used for volume group VG_XenStorage-1f64f92b-56f8-4e7f-adbb-812d62abe84f. To get more info about the volume group, use the vgdisplay command. To see the logical volumes created in the volume group (something like partitions on a regular disk), use lvdisplay. In my case, I see seven logical volumes. One is used by the system and the others correspond to the disks of the XenVMs.

A common requirement is the ability to resize a virtual machine's disks. With XenEnterprise that is easy. When a XenVM is shutdown, the new size of the disk can be set with the management console. No need to go to a command line!

Other possibilities

There are some other features that you might find useful:

XenVM export and import to and from the system that runs the management console.
XenVM cloning: simpler than VMware VirtualCenter but it does the job
Mounting of virtual machine disks on the XenServer (command line).

Conclusion

Virtual machine management is pretty easy and straightforward with the management console. Installing a Windows XenVM is like installing a physical machine but you can also use cloning in combination with sysprep. XenEnterprise 3.1 has some serious limitations (vCPUs, memory, disks) for Windows XenVMs but this will improve with version 3.2 and higher.

vizioncore esxReplicator 2.0 Beta 8 preview

rastix — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 18:03:00 +0200

My colleague Vincent has a post about the next version of esxReplicator. We are working at the same customer where we have implemented VI3 in their datacenters. At the moment, we are evaluating the use of ESX in remote sites. The infrastructure at those sites is rather basic. There is no SAN, no iSCSI so just local storage. To have some level of high availability, products such as vizioncore esxReplicator and Double-Take for VMware Infrastructure can be a solution.

I already posted a short review of the Double-Take product. Just like esxReplicator, it is easy to install and uses snapshots to perform replication. But I must say that esxReplicator has better scheduling options, a better GUI and reports its progress better. It can also send reports by e-mail so that you have some idea about what is going on.

XenSource XenEnterprise 3.1: Installation and Basic Management

rastix — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 00:01:00 +0200

As a follow-up to my previous post, I decided to install XenEnterprise and share my impressions with you. It is only right that when you feel you cannot recommend a product to a customer, you have some hard facts and real experience to back that up. So I took a DL380G5 with 8GB of RAM and 1 dual-core CPU and decided to give the installation a go. I installed XenEnterprise 3.1 because that is the latest release. Version 3.2 is in the works and has some features that you might want to wait for. Version 3.2 supports things like SMP for Windows guests (up to 4 vCPUs) and VLAN trunking support for virtual bridges.

Installation

Installation is very simple and straightforward. XenEnterprise 3.1 installs perfectly on the HP DL380G5. One thing to note is that you are asked to configure all the detected network interfaces. In my case, I was asked to configure both eth0 and eth1 (the 2 built-in connections). With ESX, you are asked to configure just one interface, the management interface for the console operating system and you can select the interface you want to use. I my test setup, I only configured eth0 and gave it an IP address on my private network (10.0.0.10). At the end of setup, you are asked for the date and time if you choose not to configure NTP.

I had four SAS disks in the DL380 and I configured them as one RAID5 volume. During setup, the volume is detected and partitioned for you. It is not yet clear to me how storage works with Xen and XenEnterprise because it is not very well explained in the documentation. With ESX, you just partition the system like any Linux configuration and then create some VMFS partitions for virtual machine storage. That concept is very clear and simple and well explained in the VMware documentation. I guess I need some more reading and experience to see how this all works with Xen.

After installation, you get a message to install the management software on a Linux or Windows system and connect to this XenEnterprise server.

Management Software

The installation cd contains a executable to install the management software on Windows. I installed the management software on a Windows XP SP2 machine and fired it up. The first time you start, you are asked to provide a password. That password is used to save host login information to disk in encrypted form. You are asked to provide this password when you start the management console:

After starting the console for the first time, you need to add the XenServer host you want to manage with the File / Add XenServer Host menu option. You then provide the host name or IP address and the password of root (set during installation). After the host is added, you can start to manage it. I created a Windows Server 2003 XenVM and a Debian XenVM. A later post will provide some details about working with XenVMs. The management console with these two virtual machines looks like this (click image to enlarge):

The two XenVMs are listed under the XenServer host I imaginatively called "xenhost". You will notice that both XenVMs have a small Xen logo in front of their status. That indicates that the XenVMs have been "enlightened" with paravirtualized drivers. Although not strictly needed, performance with these drivers is much better. This has also been discussed in the whitepaper published by XenSource where they compare their product with ESX 3.0.1.

XenServer Host Management

Management of the XenServer host from the management console is limited. When you right click the XenServer host, you get the following menu:

You can also get a text console to the XenServer host directly from the management console (click image to enlarge):

Some very basic performance graphs are also available (click image to enlarge):

Let's take a look at networking and storage. During installation, I only configured eth0 with an IP of 10.0.0.10. A network is created automatically called xenbr0 and it uses eth0 to "bridge" the virtual machine's virtual interfaces.

You can easily add and remove networks with the + and - buttons. In the screenshot below (click to enlarge), you see I added an internal network called vbridge0. Because I only have eth0 enabled, I can only create internal networks because eth0 is already in use.

What I miss here a bit is the wealth of options you can set with VMware's management tools. With VI Client, virtual networks are graphically represented as switches with ports for virtual machines, management, VMotion etc... With VI Client, you can also configure load balancing and set security options such as allowing promiscuous mode, permitting MAC address changes and so on. ESX also supports VLANs but that is coming with XenEnterprise 3.2. VI Client also allows you to set the IP address for your management interface, DNS servers and host name. XenSource's management tools only show this information. To change it you need to use the command line. That is no big deal but it should be added to the management console to make configuration as easy as possible.

Storage configuration with the XenEnterprise management console is simple. You can see what's in use and what is left:

Actual storage management needs to be done from the command line. You need to use XenServer sm commands and Linux lvm commands. To see what you have to do to add storage, take a look here. Storage management with ESX and VI Client is much simpler. Adding and removing storage (VMFS volumes), issuing SAN rescans and setting HBA failover policy can all be done from the management console. There are command line tools available but they are not required for general use.

Something that is really missing is good documentation for network and storage configuration. The user manual is very basic and does not explain the internals of the system. There is a knowledge base with quite some information and the forums are full of helpful posts but that is not enough.

Conclusion

Installation of XenEnterprise 3.1 is very simple on supported hardware. Installing the management console and performing basic management tasks is simple because of the Windows based management console. The bad news is that the management console only allows basic XenServer host management. You quickly need to use the command line to perform management tasks and managing storage and networking is not as straightforward as with VMware ESX. Most of these problems can be easily fixed however by building a better management GUI and writing better documentation. The basic technology works and is actually quite impressive if you think about it. In time, I fully expect this software to be a valuable alternative to ESX at a much lower price point. Well, maybe until Windows Server Virtualization arrives anyway.

In a later post, I will talk a bit about working with virtual machines on XenEnterprise.

VMware ESX 3.0.1 vs XenSource Enterprise

rastix — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 14:01:00 +0100

XenSource have published their hypervisor performance comparison with ESX 3.0.1 data included. As you might recall, VMware started this by publishing a whitepaper comparing ESX 3.0.1 with the open source version of Xen 3.0.3 (not a good idea if you ask me). A bit later, XenSource answered by publishing a paper with their own results but without ESX 3.0.1 data as that is forbidden by VMware's EULA. XenSource compared ESX 3.0.1 to XenEnterprise, their commercial implementation of the Xen hypervisor.

The results are interesting because performance is very similar. But is this enough to conclude that the XenSource product is a valid alternative to the VI3 offering? We think not and this for several reasons:

It is important for our customers to use a product that has established itself in the market. The XenSource product is not there yet and will need some time to mature.
The management tools have to be top-notch. Our experience shows that most customers virtualize Windows systems and are primarily running Windows in their environment. They do not want to mess with Linux configuration and management so it is important that the management products allow this. VI Client with VI3 comes very close to this need although some actions do require some command line knowledge.
Hardware compatibility and support. ESX 3.0.1 supports a wide array of hardware and storage devices. Installation and configuration is very straightforward. XenSource's products are not at that level yet.

There are probably other reasons but I currently do not see any good reason to recommend XenSource XenEnterprise to customers instead of VMware's VI3. Maybe you have another opinion? Feel free to comment! ;-)

VMware License Checker

rastix — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 17:58:00 +0100

If you modified the VMware VI3 server based license file and you want to have it checked, you can use the following web application: http://www.vmware.com/checklicense/.

Just paste your license file contents and let the tool check it. It will respond with the number of licenses for each feature and report errors.