Mike D's Virtualization Blog - Latest Comments

Re: Virtualization Team vs. Security Team: It is important to remove the “vs.”!

team building — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 05:12:50 -0000

The blog gives us the opportunity to talk a bit about virtualization security and more specifically the relationship between the virtualization team and the security teams within the customers that we talk to.

Re: Cloud vs Grid Thoughts from Mike D

goddysoft — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 06:20:10 -0000

You said this "...The point of cloud is you don’t have to care if you have a grid" this is if you are a common user but we are not common users we try to design what is best for our enterprises and cloud fits in as a solution just like grid.
I was expecting to have some facts on why an enterprise would abide for a cloud and not a grid. The differences, the maintenance and the cost.

As for me from a technological point of view cloud and grid are the same because we can run them on heterogenous platform and provide the maximum capacities of our infrastructures and services.
From a servicing point of view that is where there is a difference because grid is put in place in other to respond with the max capacity available to request coming from users meanwhile cloud while expected to do the same is open to mere users without them just waiting for the job to be done.

Goddy EPIE
http://oraclecameroon.blogspot.com/

Re: Using Perfmon in a Windows VM

Jaap — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 06:53:22 -0000

It may be true that the VMware performance monitoring tools are sufficient if you want to monitor the usage of your virtual machines as a whole, but I'd still go for Performance Counters within Windows guests to differentiate between processes using up a lot of time. Same goes for disk monitoring; you still want to know if your Windows VM uses it's swap file correctly, or if it needs increasing for whatever reasons thinkable.

Re: Building a $500 VMware ESXi Host

guruleenyc — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 19:33:18 -0000

Nice post, thanks for the guidance!

Re: Using Perfmon in a Windows VM

Dale Sides — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 22:36:40 -0000

This article is true to an extent. Remember CPU and Memory are not the only measures of performance. I have solved a lot of problems by observing disk and I/O statistics (which can drive up memory and cpu utilization as the app churns waiting for I/O response). Those are still valid within the guest OS and if you are seeing high CPU and MEM this could be caused by the I/O. See the following blog entry and look at the VMware Product Mgr's response in the comments section.
"Importantly, other counters when measured inside the guest such as Memory, Disk and Network don’t really suffer from accounting problems (i.e. they are accurate) as compared to CPU utilization numbers captured over a period of time (which may be accounted different due to the scheduling and de-scheduling the hypervisor does). So the numbers for Disk, Memory and Network when captured inside the Windows guest will be the same as the VI client."

Re: Quick Migration for VMware - The Power of PowerShell

fabiodangelo — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 07:20:44 -0000

Hi Sangepu,
i'm talking about the script "Quick Migration for VMware", Mike's script.
I've 2 esx server(3.0.1 e 3.0.2), I 've used the script invoking it on 1 of them(by its address), the script works but it doesn't see the second esx server (v. 3.02).
For this reasom, I've tought that the 2 esx server have to be "joined" through a VMware Virtual Center Server.
Thanks for any help,
regards
Fabio

Re: Quick Migration for VMware - The Power of PowerShell

sangepu — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 13:26:02 -0000

hey....sorry for the late reply as i was on vacation.

which script you are talking about ?

Re: HOWTO: PXE Boot ESXi

Dale S — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 00:47:51 -0000

Thank you. I am learning to hate ESXi because of the booting issues I have been having as of late.

Re: Quick Migration for VMware - The Power of PowerShell

fabiodangelo — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 11:00:05 -0000

Hi Sangepu,
I have some problems using this script and I think that the problem is that I'm using the script with Virtual Infrastructure and not with VMware Virtual Center Server.
Can I ask you with what application are you using the script?
Thanks
Fabio

Re: VMware RCLI now writes to ESXi Free Hosts

Dave — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 08:29:53 -0000

Is this read/write situation carried through to ESX 4i?

Re: VCP Exam Guide Review

Bill — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 10:00:37 -0000

The book is a nice review, but it does have some errors. Some of the test exam questions have incorrect answers, or they use the wrong terms. For example, they use 8GB instead of 8Gb for the answer to a SAN throughput question.

Also, some of the concepts in the book are incorrect. For example, the author's definition for hard versus soft zoning is just wrong.

Overall, it is a good review outline, with some errors.

Re: Quick Migration for VMware - The Power of PowerShell

sangepu — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 11:05:50 -0000

Great, this script really worth if a company don't want to spend on vmotion. Does anyone know how to migrate/move the VM directly from ESX without shutdown/restart

Re: 2008 VMware Fusion Reviews

Name — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 12:06:58 -0000

Not only a great product, but when I ordered my copy, there was a computer glitch, and I wasn't sure if the order had gone through. I called the company, at 9am east coast time (6am California time, where they are), thinking no one would be there. Someone actually picked up the phone! He checked my order, confirmed it had gone through, sent me an email with my product key, and when I didn't get the email in a minute or so, also gave me the key over the phone. The whole time the rep was pleasant, helpful and entirely professional. It was a great experience. Huge props to vmware and desktop services rep Robert Banks!

Re: Quick Migration for VMware - The Power of PowerShell

justingrote — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 15:40:24 -0000

Awesome script Mike! I've rewritten it as a function, so you can pipe VM objects to it via powerCLI, like this:

get-vm -folder "MyVMs" | quickmigrate-vm "mynewhost"

http://poshcode.org/1249

Re: Quick Migration for VMware - The Power of PowerShell

fabiodangelo — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 10:41:09 -0000

Hi Mike,
I'm very interested in your script but I've the same problem that had "glmrenard".
The script works but it doesn't see the second esx server (v. 3.02).
The two servers have to be in cluster?
Have you some suggestions? (esx version, VMware Infrastructure Toolkit ver ?)
Thanks for any help,
Fabio

Re: HOWTO: PXE Boot ESXi

Parul — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 06:31:22 -0000

Thanks!! Mike for replying though. Just an update so that if someone else out there is trying out ESXi 4.0, one change is to append the PBHOST after vmkboot.gz as below:
append vmkboot.gz PBHOST=10.128.132.5:3333 --- vmkernel.gz --- sys.vgz --- cim.vgz --- ienviron.tgz --- install.tgz --- image.tgz --- lance-boot.tgz ipappend 2

That way I did get the birth message atleast. Now either I cn wait for new technote from VMworld or continue with configuring the Midwife scripts as per my environment requirement. :-)

Re: HOWTO: PXE Boot ESXi

mikedatl — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 11:43:28 -0000

Lots of things have changed with ESX 4 for doing this. There's a new technote coming out around VMworld timeframe I believe on how to set all of this up as well as an appliance that's already setup with everything to do this. I'm not the one working on that project but I would just wait for that technote if you can. Sorry I can't be any more help right now.

Re: HOWTO: PXE Boot ESXi

Parul — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 11:26:54 -0000

Hey Marc,

I am having the same issue, no birth message. Were you able to get through? I have provided the PBHOST and lance-boot.tgz in my boot file as below:
append vmkboot.gz --- vmkernel.gz PBHOST=10.128.132.5:3333 --- sys.vgz --- cim.vgz --- ienviron.tgz --- install.tgz --- image.tgz --- lance-boot.tgz ipappend 2

My ESXi 4.0 installation halts for user inputs after loading all the modules including lance-boot.tgz.

Any idea what can be missing?

Re: 2008 VMware Fusion Reviews

lekhmall — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 11:57:45 -0000

Thanks for the comments and the pointer to the discount - swung it for me! will use in our busienss, Appleby Mall Chartered Accountants in Wolverhampton UK.

Re: HOWTO: PXE Boot ESXi

Rupali — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 08:01:03 -0000

Hi Mike,
A couple of quesions:
#1. I am trying to do stateful PXE boot install for ESX 4.0. I am using "append vmkboot.gz --- vmkernel.gz ---sys.vgz --- cim.vgz --- ienviron.tgz --- image.tgz --- install.tgz" in my configuration. However, the image.tgz does not load entirely and hangs at a specific point. I had extracted the ISO as per the VMWare document. Can you point out what can be the probable cause of the image.tgz load failure? I tried giving mem=512M as well and also tried using the SYSLINUX mboot.c32 instead of the default ISO mboot.c32. But invain. Please help.
#2. Is there any official document from VMWare for ESXi 4.0 stateful install via PXE boot?

Thanks and Regards,
Rupali

Re: God Speed, Ed Freeman

mikedatl — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 12:57:04 -0000

You know, you're right. Snopes has the best layout of the events.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/military/freeman...

Re: God Speed, Ed Freeman

HowiPepper — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 12:55:54 -0000

That is totally awesome! Thank you for posting this.

Re: God Speed, Ed Freeman

Name — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 12:23:46 -0000

I echo your sentiments, but Ed Freeman died 8/20/2008.

Re: God Speed, Ed Freeman

Gude — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 12:05:34 -0000

I got goosebumps reading this. What a true hero.

Re: The Cloud is Kicking My Butt

mikedatl — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 00:05:22 -0000

Networking will work different ways for different clouds. There's a
lot of clouds being built up with private links right now. This helps
solve some of the SLA issues as well as security concerns. That's the
most logical way for enterprises to start getting into the cloud. A
lot of the telcos and providers that terminate a lot of links see this
as a real chance to expand on what they already offer with customers.
Of course that doesn't prohibit customers from using cloud services
over the Internet. Amazon and others have already shown that to be
quite popular. Some of the same people offering private link access
are also offering public link access (Verizon, Terremark, etc).