Mike D’s Blog

There are a handful of mainstream bloggers in the virtualization space that really “get it”. Brian Madden is in that handful. Sure, every once in a while I think he’s in left field but hey, maybe that’s where you have to play to catch a ball. It always takes different views of the world to make it go round.

Brian had a recent post on vClient – VMware’s upcoming bare-metal client hypervisor. This was announced at VMworld so no one is spilling the beans. Make sure to go read Brian’s article in full here. The main point that I think he hits on that vClient solves is the underlying OS in a VDI deployment.

“This is the exact problem that a Type 1 bare-metal client hypervisor can solve. In this scenario, there’s only one OS to manage.”

I’ve heard this question over and over again from clients – how do I manage the underlying OS on the client device in a VDI environment. You still have to patch the thing and license it and virus scan it. I’ve seen a lot of customers trying to turn their PCs into thin clients using a Linux install. There are other 3rd party solutions out there as well such as ThinLaunch. VMware’s vision is to simply have this built in as part of the hardware. This lets you take the main job of the operating system (abstracting the hardware from the Apps) out of the picture. If you have a truly universal abstraction layer in place then you get to what I call the “I don’t care” state. You don’t care what client is out there. You don’t care what OS is running where. You simply have an application with some data that you want to get to the client. Now you can truly write your app once to run in a VM and deploy it anywhere. That was the promise of Java and .Net that can now be realized with the help of virtual machines.

So to sum it up vClient is really about “I don’t care”. Remember those 3 words – you’ll hear them a lot more from me as time goes along and I explain some other VMworld announcements.

Tags: client, vclient, VMware

Some of my colleagues put together a great post on “debunking the myths of memory overcommit” as I like to call it. These myths come from our competitors trying to spin the fact that they don’t have the ability to oversubscribe memory in their systems. Well, to be fair, Citrix has added a balloon driver to XenServer 5 but more on that later. It’s a very good post and shows the true value of the technology. Go read it now.

Even with great information like this out there I still see a lot of people balking at memory overcommitment like it’s some voodoo witch magic that’s going to do nothing but cause huge headaches. This is a myth primarily produced by the rest of the virtualization industry that is missing this key core feature of virtualization. This leads us to the question – is resource overcommitment bad?

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Tags: VMware

As I have mentioned before in previous posts on this blog and comments on other blogs I really haven’t seen many issues installing VMware ESXi on various hardware platforms as others have seen out there. Maybe I got lucky when I went and picked out my inexpensive hardware for the lab. Who knows. I’ve had a lot of people ask me about my configuration so here it is in detail. Note: This is what I used to put together the lab I run at the house. This may or may not be what you want for production. I’m sure everyone knows all the caveats around support and such when you build your own servers. With that out of the way here’s the specs.

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Tags: VMware

Lori MacVitte over at DevCentral posted an interesting article on virtual server sprawl. I’ve seen this topic come up over and over again on panels, in the press, on blogs, and in customer conversations. What’s virtual server sprawl? It’s the theory (or fact) that because virtual machines are so easy to create that once you virtualize your servers will start to multiply like rabbits. I’m here to tell you there’s a lot of fact behind that statement. After doing virtualization for 6 1/2 years here at VMware I don’t think I’ve seen one customer reduce their server count ever. Sure, they’ve gotten rid of a lot of physical hardware. I guess you could call those servers. However, I’ve never seen the actual server count (OS/App stack) go down. Usually it starts to ramp up rather quickly. There are various reasons for this.

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Tags: VMware

Earlier this year VMware released the VMware Infrastructure Toolkit (for Windows). This was a new PowerShell interface for VMware Infrastructure 3. I’m a big fan of the power and simplicity of PowerShell so I thought I’d try to create something with the script and show it off during my talk at VMworld on Deploying VMware in a Microsoft Shop. The question is what do I create? Well, there has been some great debate of Microsoft’s Quick Migration and VMware’s VMotion and are they equal or not, do they solve the same problems, etc. This post isn’t to go back into that debate. One of the things that was also brought up over and over again in the debate was the fact that Quick Migration was free and came with Hyper-V since it was based on Microsoft Clustering whereas VMware VMotion was only available in the most expensive Enterprise SKU of VMware Infrastructure. So there it was – I need to create Quick Migration for the lower priced and free VMware solutions. I went off, built my little script, and showed it off at VMworld. There was a GREAT response to it so I’m posting it here for others to use or improve upon however you see fit.

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Tags: API, powershell, VMware

Amrit Williams, the CTO of BigFix, has an interesting blog on all sorts of topics. Recently he posted about some of the myths in virtualization. This sparked a very interesting conversation between Amrit and myself. I agree with the myths he brings about but felt some of them really should be busted rather than confirmed. At any rate it’s worth a read to see the different viewpoints for sure. Go here and make sure to read the comments.

Thanks, Amrit for being open and opinionated!

Tags: myths, VMware

A few posts ago I was replying to some FUD from a new competitor of VMware’s called Marathon. You can read the first post and second post on the blog. These two posts generated a lot of comments. A few of the comments were from a poster called TopGun. In his first comment he leaves the following at the end:

“And I agree with the previous poster, my site was one of those that were done do to the license “foul up”. Not sure I’d want to trust my most critical apps to this software, especially version 1.0.”

I want to say it really is bad that people got screwed up by what’s called the “time bomb”. If TopGun were an actual customer I would feel even worse. The only problem is he’s not a customer. He works for Stratus – another VMware FT competitor (sort of).

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Tags: VMware

I’ve been working a lot lately with some people from Veeam on a demo for my Deploying VMware in a Microsoft Shop session. Veeam recently acquired nWorks who makes this great plug-in for Microsoft Systems Center so it can see VMware environments. Alec King from Veeam put together a great demo of what is possible with the plug-in. I’ve included that demo below.

VMworld Veeam Demo

You can learn more about the plug-in by visiting Veeam’s site here. While you’re there you might just want to look at all of the other great stuff they have for a VMware environment. They’re one of my favorite technology partners. What’s really been amazing to me is how these guys were everywhere at VMworld last week. They were on my room key for the Venetian. They were mentioned in the partner day keynote. They had a session during partner day. They were actually in a lot of sessions throughout the week. And they had a great booth. Definitely an interesting company to keep an eye on.

Tags: VMware, VMworld

I’m not sure why this is but every year after VMworld I get a head cold and a sore throat for a couple of weeks. I thought I had escaped the trend this year but low and behold I woke up this morning sick as a dog again. Maybe the delayed reaction came from walking around Vegas on a broken foot all week. Who knows. For those of you that did attend I hope you really enjoyed the show and aren’t sick now. For those that didn’t attend the show you missed what I think was the best VMworld ever.

I got a lot of comments about the demos during my sessions so in between naps and cold medicine shots and trips to the Orthopedist this week I’ll be posting the source and documentation for all of my demos on the blog here. Hopefully some of you will find this useful – especially the PowerShell stuff.

Thanks again for everyone’s support during the show and moving forward as customers and partners. If you have any questions or comments on the stuff I’ll be posting please don’t hesitate to comment or email me directly.

Tags: VMware, VMworld

After reading and responding to a horribly inaccurate article from Marathon about VMware FT I decided to look through the rest of their site now that I have some time during my 5 hour flight delay home and see what else they may have missed a little. I came across the following information from this page of their site where they try to compare VMware HA versus Marathon everRun. It shows further that either they have never used VMware’s products or they are having real trouble checking a single checkbox to enable HA in a VMware environment. Here are the corrections.

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Tags: VMware

It’s the last day of VMworld and boy does my head hurt. Way too much information out there. Only 5 more sessions to present at today and then I’m done. I did get a small break to check email and such today and ran across a rather interesting blog posting from Marathon. In this posting they try to tell customers why VMware FT (fault tolerance) is so horrible. I’m fine with people talking bad about VMware as long as it’s accurate. In this case it’s nowhere close and obviously was written by someone that just doesn’t understand VMware or virtualization. I thought I’d take a second to make some corrections here. Go read the source article first. Most of it is quoted here for reference.

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Tags: marathon, VMware

It’s finally here – VMworld 2008. I made it into Vegas last night. Let me pause and say the airlines need to get MUCH better on how they treat people with disabilities. I have a broken foot so my disability is only temporary but air travel while you’re disabled (especially when you need to stretch out your leg) is NOT fun. OK. Enough complaining about getting here.

Today is Partner Day/TAM Day/Lab Day at VMworld. You can tell the event has kicked off since the AT&T network is now down. No sending or receiving email. No browsing the web. Nothing. Why does the AT&T network crumble under these conference loads? It wouldn’t be too bad if you could actually get on the wireless network here. That’s the other thing. I’ve never been to a technology conference of any decent size where the wireless has worked. I really think conferences should stop paying these providers for their services.

So far the event is great. Steve Houck got up first to talk about our commitment to Partners and recap the VMware Affiliate program where partners get paid by our partners to sell their products in conjunction with VMware. Paul Maritz spoke this morning to the partners about our future direction. It was great to hear the feedback from partners. It seems we’re heading in the right direction. Carl Eschenbach spoke as the clean up hitter and got everyone energized about the opportunity that’s in front of us. Even though it was a dawn patrol (it started at 8 am) there was a LOT of energy in the room.

I’ll try to fill everyone in on things happening during the conference but it’s a very busy schedule for me. The big news should hit tomorrow during the official Keynote from Paul to the world.

Tags: VMware, VMworld

I’ve been heads down this week working on some last minute stuff for VMworld 2008. I get a day off today before I fly out this afternoon and so I’m just catching up on all of the news in the virtualization space from last week and boy was there a lot! While reading through some articles to get more details on Microsoft’s new Hyper-V 2008 Server offering I found a good blog post here. It’s pretty much in-line with what everyone else is saying, but that’s not the purpose of this post. What struck me as odd was this comment:

Hyper-V server is not open source or free software. It’s downloadable at no cost.
Microsoft is dedicated to providing an open and interoperable platform strategy as an alternative to VMWare’s closed strategy. I guess making Hyper-V open source is a bridge too far…

Closed strategy? How exactly does VMware have a closed strategy? This is something I’ve heard thrown out there before but it’s very puzzling for the following reasons:

1) VMware was the first (and the only right now) to support the Open Virtualization Format (OVF). Note – this is on Citrix’s roadmap as part of Kensho. I do have to give Kudos to them for (a) participating in helping make this standard and (b) getting it into their products quickly. This does nothing but help the IT world as a whole and hopefully drive the adoption of more virtual appliances. Most of the appliances on VMware’s Virtual Appliance Marketplace site have been converted to OVF. VMware Workstation 6.0.5 supports opening these appliances – so does the free VMware Converter – so does the free VMware ESXi. VMware was also on the committee that came up with the Open Virtualization Format helping to drive that standard. So how is that closed and proprietary?

2) VMware has a Community Source Program where you can just sign a piece of paper and bam – you’ve got access to the source code so you can develop deep integrations into the product (which a lot of people have as you’ll see at VMworld this week). How is that closed?

3) VMware has the broadest ecosystem of partners and products in the whole virtualization industry. At last count I believe VMware has 130 times the number of list partners as Microsoft – the topic for this article. This is all thanks to our free and open SDKs and APIs. For the Windows people out there you can even download and use the awesome PowerShell interface which I’ll be doing a demo of during my talk on “Deploying VMware in a Microsoft Shop” at VMworld this week. These same APIs are what’s allowing Microsoft and Citrix both to manage VMware environments. Again, how is that closed?

So all of you FUD slingers out there – it’s time to pick something else to lie about. VMware is the most open virtualization vendor that’s out there to date. I guess it really is time to start my “Debunking the Myths of Virtualization” series of blogs I’ve been meaning to do. This post is definitely in that category. If you’ve heard other rumors you’d like me to drill into and put some facts behind just let me know by commenting here.

Tags: standards, VMware

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

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