Virtualization Team

Checking out Vkernel Capacity View has been on my todo list for over a month, as I have been exhausted at work lately. Though now that I have given it a fast try, I think its really worth the effort. Vkernel Capacity View has a great dashboard that give you a laser vision sight of your Virtual enviornment Capacity usage. Vkernel Capacity View Dashboard has been one of the things that had really attracted me to the product. Below you can see an image of the dashboard.

VKernel Capacity View can provide information in two main areas:

1- Capacity Alerting

Capacity View collects CPU, memory and storage allocations and utilization levels. It then analyzes this data to provide you with desktop Capacity alerts concerning:

I am sure many of you have been looking for a comprehensive comparison between VMware ESX 4.0 & MS Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V.  I am sure you have found plenty of them with one problem they all were mostly sponsored by one of the vendors. Many of us were ready for a real independent comparison. If you were, then I have a great news for you. ITComparison.com has just released an updated version of their famous Hyper-V & VMware comparison. If you are in a rush just go and check it out at: VMware ESX 4.0 vs MS Hyper-V R2.

Few days back, I had the chance to evaluate Hyper9 Virtual Environment Optimization known by Hyper9 VEO. Actually as most of our internal testing equipment is currently out of the office, the guys at Hyper9 was kind enough to provide me with a SandBox on their side to test the product. Below is my feedback based on my experience with their sandbox.

In order to improve VMware Snapshots  & enhance them further, VMware has just published a Snapshot feedback to its users. The return of the feedback will be used to guide future development of VMware Snapshots & enhance it depending on your feedback. If you believe VMware Snapshot technology is in need for any enhancement its the time for you to get your voice heard. I have just filled my VMware Snapshots feedback, so file yours now . Below is the link to the feedback forum:

The URL to this survey is:  http://www.surveymethods.com/EndUser.aspx?B094F8E2B1F2E0E6B6

Thanks to Duncan Epping, as I have got the above info on his blog at: http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2010/04/13/feedback-on-vmware-snapshots/ & thought its worth sharing to help VMware improve its snapshots. So please take your shot at it. It will not take you more than 15 minutes.

In the past few weeks, I was lucky enough to get the chance to look over many third party monitoring solutions for VMware vSphere. I have decided its worth covering few of them on my blog. I will start today with Veeam nworks  MP Microsoft Ops Mgr.

Earlier last year, I had a look at Veeam monitor which I thought of being a very basic performance monitoring tool though I expected that from its price tag (I have not yet tried Veeam Montir 4 & that is on my to do list). Though  Veeam nworks  MP Microsoft Ops Mgr has changed my view of Veeam when it comes to monitoring. Its a 360 degree full VMware monitoring solution & I would definitely rate it as an enterprise ready. I believe Veeam should revamp their Veeam monitor to match Veeam nworks  MP Microsoft Ops Mgr.

As many of my customers are still on VMware ESX4 & not yet upgraded to ESX4U1, I get many complains about virtual machine console timeout error from web access for non administrator users. Yeah, I have already pushed an upgrade recommendation, but as usual most companies take more time approving the change request than to carry out the change. If you have VMware ESX4U1 & you are facing a problem & hit this page, then please ignore this post as this bug was fixed in update 1. If you want to read the VMware KB on this issue you should check out:

Accessing the console of a Windows virtual machine through Web Access in ESX 4.0 times out

I am sorry if this is too obvious for some of you, but it seems not obvious to most of my customers. Every few days I get the following question from my customers, which I will try to briefly answer in this post.

Where can I find vmware vCenter converter in VMware vCenter 4?

Unfortunately, unlike most other VMware feature the VMware vCenter Converter does not have any obvious shortcut in vCenter.  To start vCenter converter in Virtual Center you will need to follow the below steps:

1. Make sure you are in host & clusters view.
2. Choose one of your hosts or clusters in vCenter
3. From the top drop down menu choose one of the following paths depend on if you have chosen a host or cluster in step 2.

VMware ESX host can disconnect from VirtualCenter & have a problem connecting to it again for many reasons. Below I will cover few ways to diagnose the problem, few common resolutions to this issue.

In these cases usually the first thing you want to do is to log on through ssh, vcli, or directly on the server console & check the following log files for errors:

Vmkernel – /var/log/vmkernel
Vmkernel Warnings – /var/log/vmkwarning
ESX Server host agent log – /var/log/vmware/hostd.log
Service Console – /var/log/messages
VirtualCenter agent – /var/log/vmware/vpx

Note: it would be great if you get to know what each of the above log files is for.  VMwareWolf has a great post explaining these log files that can be found at: http://www.vmwarewolf.com/which-esx-log-file/

Veeam Backup & replication is one of my personal favorite DR solution for VMware, specially when SAN replication is not an option. Though just as with any other backup or Disaster Recovery solution you will have to test your backup or disaster recovery plan regularly. As Veeam Backup & Replication does not include a button for testing the DR, many people don’t test their DR or get to restart the full replication over & over again after every DR test. For that I have decided to document my Veeam Replica test procedure & share it with you to save you the time & ensure you can test your DR as often as you like without affecting your production or replication.

After installing or upgrading to VMware ESX 4, the Guest operating system’s memory usage might be overestimated on Intel systems that support EPT technology or AMD systems that support RVI technology. This issue might cause the memory alarms in vCenter to go off spuriously even if the guest is not actively accessing a lot of memory.

I have today visited another customer who had a problem that their virtual machines are always reporting a very high memory usage in vCenter while their OS task manager & TOP command in Linux machines were showing a very low memory usage. They did not face this problem before upgrading to vSphere which has made them unhappy with the upgrade. Fortunately, I was aware with this problem & was able to apply the magical VMware patch that has restored the customer happiness & confidence in VMware. The require VMware ESX 4.0 Patch was ESX400-200909401-BG: updates vmx and vmkernel64.

Many companies have always considered running Virtual Center in a virtual machine due to many advantages found below:

· Server Consolidation: instead of dedicating an entire physical server to VirtualCenter, you can run it in a virtual machine along with others on the same ESX Server host.
· Mobility: by encapsulating the VirtualCenter server in a virtual machine, you can transfer it from one host to another, enabling maintenance and other activities.
· Snapshots: A snapshot of the VirtualCenter virtual machine can be used for backup,
archiving, and other similar purposes.
· Availability: using VMware HA, you can provide high availability for the VirtualCenter server

As our company is a partner of VMware, Citrix, & Microsoft. Yop, you heard it all of them at one shop. I get to visit many customers & try to help them find the best virtualization product for their enviornment. Lately, I have noticed a tendancy of many customers saying, “I will go Hyper-V as Microsoft know how to virtualize their products better than others.” It seems the Microsoft local partners have found a good stereo type to use that “the solution for every customer virtualization need is a hammer.”

I decided to do some study & find out if Microsoft really support their products in Virtualization better than others & below some of the findings that make me believe the opposite.

We have finally just finished the face left to our blog. We hope you like it better than the earlier design. Below are few of the improvement in the design:

1- Faster Load time.

2- Better search functionality.

3- Compatible with more web browsers.

4- Eliminated the html errors we had with the earlier design.

5- Less Ads.  (I know many of you wish there will be no ads at all, but we have to pay for our hosting & ISP. Though we have reduced the ads to minimum and removed them from interfering while reading the articles and comments).

Please let us know what do you think of the new design, & if you have any further suggestion.

One of the errors my customers repeatly complain about while upgrading to vCenter Server 4 or even when trying to install it from scratch is the following error:

“The DSN is pointing to an unsupported ODBC driver. Please re-configure your DSN to use one of the supported drivers.”

If you face this problem the first thing to do is to ensure that you are running a supported Database. Hint! Hint! SQL 2000 is no longer supported. If you are running SQL 2000 then you must upgrade to SQL 2005 or SQL 2008 before upgrading to vCenter Server 4.0

As a start don’t let the title fool you this is not related only to Microsoft virtualization, but to every virtualization platform out there. Don’t let vendors mislead you as the saving can be higher on Microsoft Licenses with non Microsoft Hyper-visor like VMware where you can put more virtual machines on the same hardware box. Ok, so clearing the confusion out of the way read below to find out what I am talking about.

Being on the consulting role, I get to meet customers everyday on all levels (Administrators, Managers, CEOs,  Directors, Business). When they ask our advice on consolidating their enviornment & I bring the idea of virtualization one question I get hammared with every time ” How would paying for virtualization licensing is going to save us money?”.  Below are some of our & yours traditional answers & how a stubrn customer will reply to it: