Mike D’s Blog

A colleague of mine sent me an interesting post that he wrote over on the Ubuntu boards. Basically he stripped down Ubuntu to its bear minimum in order to run VMware Server on top of it. He originally did this to get around the limited HCL for ESXi. Of course I’m still of the camp that you can run ESXi on a lot more than you think. I’ve got 2 ESXi servers running in the basement. I built each of them for $380 with parts from Frys. Never-the-less, if you want to go play around then this is an interesting how-to.

Tags: VMware

Here’s an interesting solution I found while looking for some VMworld material. Looks like there’s a new development company out there called bluebear that’s concentrating on the virtualization space. They make a small (less than 5 pounds) server for virtualization called the koala. They also make a universal management package called kodiak. The management client looks pretty neat. The other benefit is it runs on anything (Mac, Linux, Windows, etc). I haven’t gotten my hands on the beta yet but it looks to be pretty interesting. Make sure to go check out the screenshots.

Tags: Management

One of the demos I’m doing during my VMworld “Deploying VMware in a Microsoft Shop” presentation involves showing off Systems Center Virtual Machine manager hooking into a VMware environment. It also shows some of the alternatives such as nWorks (now Veeam). Since I had SCVMM all setup I decided to setup a Hyper-V host to play around with it. I’m also doing a similar presentation on deploying in a Linux shop and so I started to create some Linux VMs. Not a problem on the VMware environment. On the Microsoft side it’s a little trickier since they only support one LInux vendor (SUSE) and since the Linux additions are nearly impossible to locate. I had done all of this a while back as well so I just went to the same site I found the Linux additions at last time. Low and behold they’re gone! Here’s the message I got found in the related newsgroup:

All -

I just wanted to provide an update on the Linux Integration Components. We
had to pull them down rather unexpectedly last month. While I can’t go into
details as to why they were pulled, I can say with confidence that we’ll be
posting a new version – the RTM version of the Integration Components – this
month.

All users who are registered with the Connect site will recieve a mail when
the binaries are available for download.

Regards -

Mike Sterling
Hyper-V Program Manager
Microsoft

So here I sit with new Linux VMs on Hyper-V with no additions to support them. I’m really puzzled as to why they pulled down all prior versions of the tools as well – and so suddenly. This means that no one running Hyper-V can deploy Linux VMs. So much for loving Linux like they promised to the EU and the rest of the world. For now it’s back to working on my VMworld demos since that doesn’t require Hyper-V.

Tags: hyper-v, Linux, Microsoft

During one of my VMworld talks I go into some detail on timekeeping in a Linux VM. One of our distinguished engineers, Garrett Smith, is doing a deep dive on time keeping in a VM. For anyone that has issues with keeping time in a VM you should definitely check out this session. Hopefully I won’t steal all of this thunder.

Thursday

12:30 PM

1 Hour

PO3008 – Timekeeping and Time-Sensitive Applications in VMware Virtual Machines: Best Practices

When Virtualizing highly time-sensitive applications, additional care should be taken to ensure consistent performance and accurate timekeeping. In this talk we will review the fundamentals of timekeeping and scheduling for virtual machines as well as their interactions. We present best practices for configuring VMware ESX and Windows and Linux guest operating systems for accurate timekeeping and reduced virtualization-induced latencies for time-critical workloads. Diagnostic tools and techniques for identifying resource contention issues and tools for measuring and diagnosing timekeeping issues are also covered.

Garrett Smith

Senior MTS Engineer

VMware, Inc.

Tags: Linux, timekeeping, VMware

Some of you have been wondering where some recent blog posts have been. Truth be told I’ve been pretty busy working on several things for VMworld 2008. Behind the scenes I’ve been helping a lot of people out with various things. I’m also presenting two sessions.

Deploying VMware in a Microsoft Shop (PO2569) – This one talks about how to integrate VMware VI3 with all of the things you already use in a Microsoft dominated environment.

Deploying VMware in a Linux Shop (PO2575) – This one is similar to the Microsoft one only it goes through the Linux side of the house.

Both sessions should contain a lot of great information for everyone. Neither are “competitive”. They’re just chock full of great useful information. Each session also has 4 live demos of the technology I’m talking about. It’s been interesting trying to get all of these demo environments together and running on my Mac. I’ll make sure to start posting some of the interesting details I find along the way. The first two are going up today in a few minutes.

If you happen to be going to VMworld and want to meet then stop by one of the sessions or just shoot me an email. I’ll be there Sunday through Friday.

Tags: VMware, VMworld