Eric Sloof - Entries from June 2012

Thursday, June 28. 2012

A whitebox is for sissies - Real men use a Super Workstation

During my search for a new VMware homelab server, I’ve seen many models that were suitable to run ESXi 5. I specifically searched for a model that’s able to hold loads of memory and has dual CPU sockets. The nice thing about the Super Workstation is that VMware has certified the system and it is listed in the hardware compatibility matrix. Sander over at twp.nl as configured the Supermicro 7047A-TB tower with 128 GB of memory (16 x Kingston 8GB DDR3 1333mhz ECC REG) and two 2 x Intel E5-2603 1.8Ghz Quadcores for a total price of € 2465,00.

The 7047A-TB tower is a high-end workstation comprised of two main subsystems: the SC743TQ-1200B-SQ tower/4U chassis and the X9DA7/X9DAi dual Intel® Xeon® processor server board. In addition to the server board and chassis, various hardware components have been included with the SuperWorkstation 7047A-73/7047A-T, as listed below:

Two 8-cm hot-swap PWM "SuperQuiet" chassis fans
One 9-cm PWM "SuperQuiet" exhaust fan
Two active CPU heatsinks
SAS/SATA Accessories
One SAS/SATA backplane
One iPass cable
Eight hot-swap drive carriers

At the heart of the SuperWorkstation 7047A-73/7047A-T lies the X9DA7/X9DAi, a dual processor serverboard based on the Intel® C600 chipset. Below are the main features of the X9DA7/X9DAi.The X9DA7/X9DAi supports single or dual Intel E5-2600 processors in LGA 2011 sockets.

The X9DA7/X9DAi has sixteen DIMM slots that can support up to 512 GB of registered/unbuffered ECC DDR3-1600/1333/1066/800 LRDIMMs (load-reducedDIMMs). The X9DA7 includes an LSI 2308 SAS controller, which supports eight SAS2 ports. The hot-swap SAS drives are connected to a backplane that provides power, bus termination and configuration settings.

A SATA controller is integrated into the chipset to provide a Serial ATA subsystem that supports RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 (RAID 5 is not supported with Linux OS). The SATA drives are hot-swappable units. The 7047A-73 (X9DA7) supports two SATA 3.0 and four SATA 2.0 ports while the 7047A-T (X9DAi) supports six SATA 3.0 and four SATA 2.0 ports.

Tuesday, June 26. 2012

Performance Study of Oracle RAC on VMware vSphere 5.0

IT organizations that have implemented Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) often use RAC to support critical functions of their business. Performance of these database clusters is key to enabling IT organizations to meet the requirements of their businesses, customers, and shareholders.

VMware vSphere provides a high performance virtualization platform that is capable of hosting the most critical portions of infrastructure, including Oracle RAC databases. vSphere 5 has increased these capabilities, including support for virtual machines with up to 32 vCPUs and 1TB of RAM. This support for larger virtual machines (VMs) combined with vSphere’s high performance capabilities makes vSphere a great platform for running large Oracle RAC database clusters.

EMC IT has implemented vSphere throughout many parts of their infrastructure and is now in the process of moving the largest and most critical applications to vSphere. EMC and VMware worked together to evaluate the performance of one of EMC’s largest Oracle RAC databases on vSphere 5. A copy of this database was used to conduct a series of tests to compare physical performance versus virtual performance.

This testing, which was done with an Oracle RAC cluster made up of six 32-CPU-based nodes, four of them virtual and two of them physical, found that virtual performed within 12% of native and was acceptable to be used for the production instance. EMC IT plans to adopt this virtual configuration in its next refresh cycle.

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/OracleRAC-perf-vSphere5.pdf

Sunday, June 24. 2012

VMware vCenter Operations – Tell Your Story and Enter for a Chance to Win a Ticket to VMworld 2012

vChat #28-vCenter Operations Contest and Overview – Interview with David Davis and Ben Sheerer

Since VMware introduced VMware vCenter Operations in early 2011, customer users have shared their enthusiasm and sentiments surrounding its inaugural release to its highly touted 5.0 release last January. We would like to hear your story – And perhaps give you a little something in return...

We are seeking the most compelling story on how you used vCenter Operations Manager to help solve, or predict any issues in your environment – it’s that easy! Once submitted, your story will be judged by a panel of experts both from VMware and the VMware community.

http://www.vmware.com/go/vcops-story

Video - NexentaVSA for View

NexentaStor storage software provides advanced features and functionality suited to handle the demands of a virtual desktop environment. Because virtual desktops create a largely random write in nature, the power and flexibility of NexentaStor, with ZFS architecture, greatly lends itself to solving workload requirements.

Arguably the most important feature is the ability to tune performance in the software and accelerate the desktop demand for low latency response times and IOPS. NexentaStor leverages system RAM as a first layer cache device. Additionally, second level cache devices, such as SSDs, can be incorporated as well.

Additional features include:

128-bit File System: ZFS-based technology provides the most scalable and flexible 128-bit file system.
Unified Appliance: Support for NAS (NFS, CIFS WebDAV, FTP) and support for SAN (iSCSI & FC) means flexibility.
Data Deduplication & Native Compression: Inline data dedupe and compression reduce use of primary storage.
Hybrid Storage Pools: Ability to use specialized devices, such as SSDs, to accelerate read and write performance.

Try NexentaVSA for View free for 60 days!

Thursday, June 21. 2012

Performance Study - VMware vCenter 5.0 in Remote Offices and Branch Offices

As VMware vCenter has become the most popular tool to manage VMware vSphere ESXi hosts and virtual machines (VMs), customers have deployed vCenter in many networks, such as local area network (LAN) with high-bandwidth and low-latency links, and wide area network (WAN) with low-bandwidth and high-latency links.

Deploying vCenter in a remote offices and branch offices (ROBO) environment is a representative use case for customers who have ESXi hosts distributed over large geographical distances. These customers choose to centralize the management of ESXi hosts and VMs by keeping only one vCenter and configuring it to manage ESXi hosts over WAN.

To help customers understand vCenter performance over WAN, VMware has studied the performance of VMware vCenter Server 5.0 in the ROBO environment in this white paper. First, to establish a baseline, we evaluated the time and bandwidth consumption of vCenter tasks over LAN (high bandwidth, low latency). Then, VMware evaluated the time and bandwidth consumption of vCenter tasks in five representative WAN (low bandwidth, high-latency) cases.

The experimental results show that vCenter performs well in the ROBO environment in terms of both time and bandwidth consumption. For a vCenter task, time consumption increases very slowly when network latency1 increases by several times. Furthermore, network bandwidth is not saturated even if it decreases from 1.5 Mbps to 64 Kbps.

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/VMW-WP-Performance-vCenter.pdf

Available for download - VMware WSX Server for Windows

This feature is still HIGHLY experimental at this time. This yet to be officially named service enables users to access their Shared virtual machines via a web browser without installing any plug-ins or web controls. This service renders an HTML5 web page that can connect to your Workstation hosts or ESXi servers (requires vSphere 5.0), enumerate the available virtual machines and allow you to power them on and interact with the desktop. Both the Windows .msi and Linux .bundle installations are available for download as part of the Technology Preview.

This software has several limitations

You must be on the same network as your host to access you VMs. This feature requires a very modern browser that supports HTML5 with WebSockets. We have had success with Chrome 17, Firefox 10, IE 10 (currently not as well supported), Safari 5 on Mac OS hosts and iOS 5 on the iPad. This may work with other browsers and on Android tablets running Ice Cream Sandwich with the latest version of Google Chrome installed, but we need to do more testing to get a more complete list. This feature is not scalable. VMware has not yet tested this for scalability and only expect it to work well for a couple of concurrent connections.

To run WSX on a Windows host

Install WSX and choose a port
Open a browser http://localhost:8888 (port defined above)
The login and password that you need to use is your system login and password

To run WSX on a Linux host

Ensure that your Linux server has Python 2.6 installed!!!
Install WSX and choose a port
Launch the server by typing: sudo /etc/init.d/vmware-wsx-server start
Open a browser http://localhost:8888 (port defined above)
The login and password that you need to use is your system login and password
You can go to the configuration page and add additional hosts.

For more information about WSX you can read this blog post from the lead developer Christian Hammond http://blog.chipx86.com/.

Source: VMware Workstation Technology Preview - June 2012 Overview

Wednesday, June 20. 2012

Tintri - Snapshots and Clones

The guys over at Tintri are about to release a new cool feature. This new feature lets you clone and snapshot individual virtual machines at the storage array instead of the vCenter side. David Friedlander invited me to a sneak preview and I managed to make some screenshot of Tintri’s advanced snapshots and clones. This new features will be available to customers within a few weeks.

Created with flickr badge.

Tintri snapshots and clones are operations on the VM itself (and just the VM!), and make very efficient use of data and metadata and impose very little, if any, performance overhead. This is achieved by sharing both data and metadata at a fine granularity and by designing the core data paths from the ground up to work efficiently with snapshots and clones. Snapshots and clones can be created instantaneously regardless of the size of the VM, and use no additional space until they are modified. Furthermore, because snapshots and clones can be created and managed on a per-VM basis, it gives the user more flexibility in managing the data protection policies for different VMs.

Friday, June 15. 2012

VMware Labs presents its latest fling - ThinApp Factory

The ThinApp Factory is a virtual appliance that brings centralized administration and automation to the process of creating virtualized Windows applications with VMware ThinApp technology. ThinApp Factory utilizes vSphere API's to spawn workloads which automatically convert fileshares of application installers into ThinApp application containers. These workloads can be run in parellel to maximize throughput and increase ROI for virtualization projects. Packagers and administrators can now utilize 'Recipes' during this packaging process. Recipes are simply small json files which contain a redistributable blueprint of the customizations and optimizations necessary for packaging complex applications. These recipes can be created and now exchanged freely with other customers via the ThinApp community site.

Key Features

Automates packaging of application installers into virtualized Windows applications.
Leverages vSphere, vCenter for automation of workloads to efficiently package 1000’s of applications.
Provides and utilizes ‘Recipes’ as redistributable blueprints for application packaging.
Provides a lightweight web UI with a dashboard for administrators to use for the entire workflow of packaging to distribution.
Enables administrators to import and edit existing ThinApp projects and modify package.ini, registry, and file settings through the web UI.
Integration with Horizon Application Manager application catalog for automated population of application metadata and deployment with the Horizon ThinApp Agent.

http://labs.vmware.com/flings/thinapp-factory

New Training - VMware vCloud 1.5 Design Best Practices

VMware has released a new training course. This three days of instructor-led training course is designed to guide students through the decision points and policy choices available for designing and implementing a VMware vCloud environment. Students will learn to appreciate the effects of design choices in VMware vSphere, VMware vCloud Director, VMware vCenter Chargeback, and the VMware vShield Edge capability that is included with vCloud Director. The course culminates in a comprehensive workshop on VMware cloud design. By the end of the course, you should have an understanding of the VMware cloud and be able to do the following:

Evaluate and design a multitenant environment to address both private cloud and public cloud customer needs.
Configure vCloud providers that can accommodate heterogeneous server, storage, and network resources.
Design a network infrastructure optimized for vCloud.
Integrate vCloud Director security with existing LDAP systems and design appropriate security hierarchies with security roles.
Design a vCenter Chargeback implementation.

Course Datasheet

VMware Horizon Application Manager - GA Release

The VMware End-User Computing team is happy to announce the general availability release of VMware Horizon Application Manager 1.5. VMware Horizon Application Manager gives IT the capability to manage Windows-based appliactions as well as public and private cloud applications via enterprise policy and provides holistic visibility into their usage. End-users get a simple secure workspace and an enterprise application catalog for on-demand access to any of their apps.

This cross-platform solution gives organizations the flexibility to make the transition to the post-PC era without added complexity and cost. Now, from one central platform, IT can manage all SaaS, Web and Windows applications and view their usage. End users gain easy, on-demand access to applications via their preferred devices, which increases their productivity and simplifies their overall experience.

http://www.vmware.com/go/horizon

(Page 1 of 2, totaling 20 entries)