For a long time I’ve told people that if they show me an app then I’ll show them how it can be virtualized. Yes, I’m a little bigoted I guess working for VMware but I do believe there’s not one x86-based workload out there that can’t be virtualized today. To help me prove that point there are 2 great guys that got together to write a book on virtualizing Tier 1 workloads.

This new book written by Charles A. Windom and Hemant Gaidhani just got published last week and it’s available at Amazon. Hemant Gaidhani says: Looks good and worth all the efforts. Click ‘Look Inside’ at Amazon to get sneak preview.

Working with VMware vSphere 4, this book shows you how to virtualize Microsoft applications that require high CPU and high I/O and/or are critical applications for business operations—“Tier 1”applications. With authors who are not only insiders at VMware but who also have developed best practices for multi-tier applications for VMware environments, this book will guide you step-by-step in virtualizing the latest versions of Exchange Server, SQL Server, SharePoint Server, Active Directory, Windows Server, Internet Information Server, and Remote Desktop Services. The authors cover critical topics: reasons why to virtualize the application, considerations to be made when virtualizing the application, setting up a Proof-of-Concept of the application, storage, high availability, and monitoring. Material is organized such that readers can choose which chapters to read, depending on which applications they are considering to virtualize.

Well, this isn’t exactly virtualization related – or is it. I was bopping around the web late last night and came across a rather interesting idea on how to work from home a little better. For those that don’t know I work out of my house exclusively unless I’m on a trip. I’m of the firm belief that all you need is an Internet connection and a phone and you can work from anywhere these days. For example, I’m typing this from the beach right now. (I’m sort of on vacation – at least for part of the day).

Anyhow, one of the things I love about traveling out to corporate in Palo Alto is I can just walk down the hall and find someone I need to talk with and have a chat with them. I can run into people in the cafeteria and get caught up there as well. There is a good bit of social interaction missing when you’re in the house with nothing but a couple of dogs all day.

Texai to the rescue! Some ingenious people over at Willow Garage developed a system to let you teleconference with people while on the move through an avatar of sorts. It’s hard to explain so make sure you go read all about the project and then watch the short video below. Now I just want to know how I can train one of these things to climb stairs and navigate around the pond at corporate. Who knows – maybe at the next VMUG you’ll see one of these things roaming around instead of me personally. I can just see the first VMworld where all of the vExperts are Texai robots.

One of the most talked about things in clouds these days is the ability to move data from one cloud to another cloud with little to no downtime. People have been doing this for a long time within a single datacenter using technologies such as VMware VMotion. Heck, I can remember first showing that off to people in 2003 and making their heads spin. Well, prepare for your head to spin again. The good people over at F5 have been hard at work and have an amazing demo of long distance VMotion (across the country to a different datacenter – live) up on the web. Watch the video below and then read on for some insights into what this means.

Pretty awesome, right? What’s interesting about this setup is that it doesn’t really require anything special on the storage side. Since they’re doing a storage VMotion over an extended distance that’s really the slow part. And if you remember from storage VMotion I can go from any storage to any storage while the VM is running. By using the unique technologies from F5 that allow for traffic redirection they’re able to move application stacks seamlessly between datacenters. The same thing could be done between clouds. What I like even more about this is that they do this by leveraging vCenter Orchestrator. That has become one of my favorite products here at VMware and it’s even included with vSphere for free. More on that product later in another post though.

Anyhow, I hope you enjoy this. For more information make sure to reach out to F5.

One of the coolest sites I’ve seen in a long time in the VMware Labs site. I’m really surprised how many people I meet don’t know this site exists. Think of Google labs and you’ll start to understand the type of things posted to this site – internal side projects that are just so cool we can’t keep them internal anymore.

There are several really great, free utilities on the site. One of my personal favorites is Onyx. Ever want to repeat something that you do in the vCenter Client over and over again with the Powershell CLI but don’t know how to write Powershell? Go ahead and install this utility in-band between the client and the vCenter server and then do some operations. Onyx will capture the network packets, inspect the API calls being made, and then translate it all into Powershell commands for you. Pretty awesome. I wish I had something like this for just about any tool I used on a regular basis.

The fun doesn’t stop there. For cell phone junkies there’s also a cell phone client to vCenter. It’s still a work in progress but already it’s proven pretty useful for getting into things in my lab. Of course now that I have my iPad I’m going to have to sit down and make a client for that device as well. I just need to find out where the extra 38 hours in the day went to get to it.

Well, I hope you find this site useful. It will be interesting to see what else our developers come up with to drop up on the site. I know I’ll be watching.

Allowing 3rd parties to write plug-ins for VMware vCenter was one of the best things I think we’ve ever done. One of the companies that’s taken advantage of this with some really cool and very useful tools is EMC. There are now 3 really great plug-ins for EMC users. I’ll link to the man himself (Chad Sakac) for full write-ups. Here’s a recap of the plug-ins below. All of these are free.

1) EMC Storage Viewer – This little gem allows some really great views all the way down into the array that’s underneath you hosts. Here’s a short video.

And here’s where you can grab it. Don’t forget the great whitepaper that goes along with it.

2) EMC Celera SRM Failback Tool – This one is awesome. If you’ve failed your environment over using VMware SRM then this tool will help you configure the storage to fail back to the original site. You can grab it here.

3) EMC Celera VDI Deployment – This will let you create a single VM on a share and then it will automatically clone that share out a bunch of times and automatically register the VMs in vCenter. Really nice way to scale out a bunch of VMs for VDI. It’s also available here.

Enjoy all of the new tools brought to you by our parent company, EMC.

I get stopped a lot at conferences and events and asked about storage layouts. I’m not sure why that is but there’s one common thread I’ve seen through all of these conversations – people really try and overcomplicate things. Usually someone is trying to over engineer a solution because that’s what you had to do in the physical world. Well, actually you didn’t need to do it in the physical world but for some reason every person I talk to thinks that their account has the biggest, meanest apps that require all of this complicated tuning in order to make run. Truth be told I’ve run into very few of those types of apps.

To make a long story short I ran across a post by Chad Sakac recently on dispelling some of the myths around VMFS. Stuff like number of VMs per volume, size of volume, and the biggest one – whether or not to use NFS. Chad goes into some great detail on all of these points and more. His most recent blog post is definitely worth a read. Actually his whole blog is worth a read but for this post I really want you to go and read the VMFS information to build your knowledgebase. I think you’ll find that keeping it simple and going with a lot of defaults makes things perform and scale well.

Go read Chad’s full post here.

A couple of weeks ago I posted about SQL Server running in a VM and how disk writes were assured to happen in contradiction to a poorly written article on SQL Solutions. After working with VMware Engineering there’s now a KB article that talks about how and when I/O writes happen with different VMware products. Below is the full text of the KB article. You can also find the source here.

IO crash consistency is defined as maintaining the correct order of writes in order to allow an application to restart properly from a crash. Alternately, crash consistency posits an IO acknowledged successfully to the application is available persistently on disk before any other IOs that depend on data read/written by the original IO.

IO crash consistency for any applications running inside a guest operating system varies based on the VMware product used. VMware virtualization products include VMware ESX, which uses a bare-metal or hypervisor architecture, as well as VMware Workstation, Server and Fusion, which use a hosted architecture.

VMware ESX acknowledges a write or read to a guest operating system only after that write or read is acknowledged by the hardware controller to ESX. Applications running inside virtual machines on ESX are afforded the same crash consistency guarantees as applications running on physical machines or physical disk controllers.

For hosted products, write handling depends on the host operating system.

On Linux hosts, VMware does not use unbuffered IO, because it is not safe or supported across all the Linux versions that VMware supports. So currently, VMware hosted products on Linux hosts always use buffered IO.

On Windows hosts, VMware hosted products use unbuffered IO by default.

On Mac hosts, VMware Fusion uses buffered IO by default. Mac users can change the buffering mode through the Fusion user interface by selecting Optimize for virtual machine disk performance (buffered mode) or Optimize for Mac OS application performance (unbuffered mode). Note: Mac OS X 10.5.0 through 10.5.4 cannot successfully use unbuffered mode.

When using buffered IO, VMware hosted products do not bypass the host’s buffer cache to produce crash consistent virtual machine IO. Consequently, if the IO is buffered within the host operating system, an application running inside a guest operating system on VMware hosted products might lose crash consistency.

I’m sure whoever is reading my blog also reads Jason Boche’s blog. If not, then go subscribe now. Jason is a customer and writes a lot of great stuff from his point of view. He’s also very active in the VMware Communities. One of his recent posts was about how to get more VMs to VMotion at one time. This comes in really handy when you want to do maintenance on a host that’s running a ton of VMs. So click on to read all about how to increase the number of VMs that can migrate at a time.

Well, my last tip on putting your Mac to sleep faster was such a huge hit as you can see below that I thought I’d post another Mac tip up here. Don’t worry virtualization people, I’ll get back to that in a minute.

I stumbled across this tip when I hit the wrong key one day. If you’re typing along and you hit the “esc” key in the middle of a word then a list of possible words pops up. Use the arrow keys to get to the one you want and hit tab and the word completes. This works in any normally behaving Mac app. I say normally behaving because Microsoft Office doesn’t support this for some reason. Leave it to Redmond to screw that up.

What’s even neater is that it works with any word that it sees in the current document or page as well as dictionary words. This comes in real handy if you’re coding and need to complete some long entry. It also comes in handy for all the times you need to type in Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

Enjoy the tip!

OK. Not exactly related to virtualization but I thought I’d share this anyways. I am always on the move and I’m usually bringing my Mac with me. One of my favorite things about the Mac is that I can really just close the lid and walk to a meeting and open the lid and it’s ready to work instantly. That’s just incredible to me. Sure, a PC can sleep and even hibernate but neither makes the thing come alive quickly. The one painful thing for me has been waiting for my Mac to sleep. I run a lot of stuff all the time. Right now I have 21 different apps open plus a VM running in VMware Fusion. That means that when my Mac goes to sleep I have to wait for it to write most of the 4 GB of RAM to disk. A fellow engineer just showed me a faster way to make the Mac sleep – adjust the hibernatemode variable.

The innovation in Apple’s “Safe Sleep” is that it goes ahead and writes out the disk image, but then suspends to RAM. If you just resume, everything’s already in RAM and you can avoid the delay from resuming the image. If you lose power (or change battery), then it resumes from the disk image. By comparison, Windows offers both suspend-to-RAM and suspend-to-disk, but not at the same time.

You can change the Mac’s hibernate behavior using pmset; here’s the reference for it:

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/pmset.1.html

“sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0″ = suspend to RAM only (default on desktops)
“sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 1″ = suspend to disk only
“sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 3″ = suspend to disk + RAM (default on laptops)

To see your current hibernatemode: “pmset -g | grep hibernatemode”. Right now I have mine set to hibernatemode 0 and man do I love it. Instant sleep and instant recovery. This even works with 4 different VMs running in VMware Fusion with no hiccups. Can life get any sweeter?

I hope this helps some of you Mac lovers out there.