VMware Blogs

There have been many tests published showing great performance of SAP software running on VMware vSphere in a two-tier configuration. Both the application server and database server are running on the same VM in a two-tier configuration which reflects how many customers run SAP solutions in small and mid size configurations. In larger configurations, it becomes necessary to split out the application server and database server onto separate systems. In order to demonstrate how SAP software scales in a three-tier environment running on vSphere, a test was set up with three application server VMs and one database server VM.

Working with the Dell TechCenter lab, a PowerEdge M710 blade server with VMware vSphere 4.0.0 was used to test a set of SAP VMs in a three-tier configuration. The blade server had two quad-core Intel x5570 (Nehalem) processors and 72GB of RAM. Storage was provided by three PS5000XV Dell EqualLogic iSCSI arrays.

Each of the four VMs was configured with 18GB of virtual memory and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 x64 was installed as the guest OS. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 was used as the database and enhancement pack 4 for SAP ERP 6.0 was running on the application server VMs. The database VM also had the SAP application server components installed, but no transactions were directed through it.

Using a well understood SAP transactional workload on this three-tier configuration, three series of tests were run to measure how performance scaled as resources were added to the VMs. A one second response time criteria was used to determine the number of users. The graph below shows how the response time increased as users were added to each of the three configurations tested.

The first test configuration with four 2vCPU VMs achieved 1386 users. This initial test configuration had 8 virtual CPUs, one for each of the 8 physical cores in the server. In order to test the performance scaling when using SMT, the second configuration used a 4vCPU configuration for the VMs, allowing all 16 logical threads of the server to be used, and achieved a 24% increase in supported users. The Intel 5500 series processors implement Hyper-Threading, a form of Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) which allows for two logical threads to run on each physical core. The two socket M710 used in this testing had 8 cores and 16 logical threads. It is not recommended to use CPU affinity for SAP VMs in production, but for this high stress testing scenario it was used to assign the vCPUs for each VM to specific logical threads.

For a final test, a second server with the same configuration was added. All four VMs kept the same configuration from the previous test with 4vCPUs, but two of the VMs were moved to the new server. This third configuration is similar to the first, with the number of virtual CPUs being equal to the number of physical cores. There are 16 vCPUs assigned across the four VMs and there are a total of 16 cores across the two physical servers. Spread across two hosts, a total of approximately 2630 users could be run at under 1 second response time representing a 90% increase in performance from the first configuration.

In terms of CPU utilization the servers were heavily utilized in all of the tests at the one second response time criteria. In the first test the core utilization as reported by esxtop averaged 85% and in the second test with all 16 logical threads being utilized it increased to 93%. In the final test with two hosts, the core utilization was 77% and 80%.

The results show that using SAP in a three-tier configuration on vSphere allows for excellent scaling. Additional performance was achieved by simply adding more resources to the existing VMs (in the form of more physical cores) without making any changes to the operating system, database, or application servers running inside the VMs.

You might have noticed something different here today. Yes, we've changed the name of this blog to The Support Insider. Why you ask?

We've found that the more we reach out to our community, the better. Our customers love to interact and get their news instantly. So why restrict this blog to just news about the Knowledgebase? We have so much more to talk about!

We're going to start using this platform to tell you about changes going on in the support organization. You'll see (and hear) Podcasts coming from various staff members. We're going to use this place to alert you to outages or changes to support that may affect you. And we're building more interactivity into the blog as well, since many of you have great ideas and knowledge to share.

Lastly, but not least, we're also evolving the Knowledgebase itself to be more interactive and social in nature. Watch for some changes real soon!

In has been a while since the last update and a lot of exciting things has happens with regards to both OVFs and vApps in the meantime.

In the real code department:

I am very happy to annouce that  we just released our latest OVF-related fling on labs.vmware.com: vApprun 1.0. This is a free, command-line tool that implements vApps and, OVF properties, and OVF environments for both Workstation and Fusion users. Thus, vApps are no longer just for vSphere 4. From the vApprun release notes:

A vApp is a container for a distributed, multi-VM software solution. It has power-on operations just as a virtual machine, and can be imported or exported as an OVF package. The OVF properties and OVF environment provides a flexible mechanism for parameterizing guest software inside a VM upon deployment. Using the OVF properties, it is possible to both configure OS level properties, such as IP settings, and application level parameters, such as IP addresses of external servers. The features of vApprun include:

• vApps that contain multiple VMs and nested vApps.
  
• For a vApp, the start/stop sequence of the child entities can be configured.
  
• Start/stop/shutdown of vApps.
  
• Create OVF properties and access the OVF environment from guest software.
  
• Supports ISO and guestInfo OVF environment transports.
  
• Supports fixed, transient, and DHCP IP allocation modes and IP pools.
  
• Import OVF packages and run it with vApprun (using OVF Tool 2.0).
  
• Export vApps and VMs created with vApprun to OVF packages (using OVF Tool 2.0).
  
• Command-line, workspace-oriented user interaction.
  
• Cross-platform - available for Windows/Mac/Linux.
  
• VMware vSphere 4 compatible.
  

As a teaser, here is how to create a vApp with 2 VMs and a property:

>vapprun init
>vapprun create-vapp MyVApp
>vapprun create-vm VM1
>vapprun edit VM1 parent=MyVApp
>vapprun create-vm VM2
>vapprun edit VM2 parent=MyVApp
>vapprun def-property MyVApp key=ip type=ip:Network
>vapprun list MyVApp
Name.......: MyVApp
Type.......: vApp
IP Policy..: fixed

Children:
 Name    Order StartWait WaitForTools StopWait
 ------------------------------------------------------------
 VM2    30  30   True   30
 VM1    30  30   True   30

Property Definitions:
 Key      Type   Value      UserConfig
 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 ip      ip:Network         True

Property Settings:
 Key      Value
 ------------------------------------------------
 ip

You can download it here: vApprun 1.0 and start playing with vApps today. We will soon follow up with an more in-depth look at vApprun on this blog.

In the specification department:

The OVF  1.1 specification was released in January. This is a minor, fully backwards compatible update to the 1.0 specification. From the DMTF newsletter:

There are several new components that differentiate the OVF 1.1 specification from the original version, including:

• Capability for file system-based images to increase flexibility at deployment time
  
• A property attribute to hide password values at the user interface
  
• Joliet extensions for ISO transport image
  
• Clarification of how the OVF manifest contain entries for individual file chunks
  
• Clarification of the referencing of manifest and certificate files from descriptor
  

In even more exciting news, the OVF 1.1 specification has been submitted to ICITS to become an ANSI standard, which is the first step to become an ISO standard. From the DMTF site:

DMTF has been busy extending and refining the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) specification. The organization recently completed version 1.1 of the spec and has submitted it for consideration as an ANSI and ISO standard.

This is an important milestone for DMTF. The specification will be put through a number of tests to ensure it meets a complex system of checks and balances of reviews before it is adopted as an American and International standard.

That is all the news for this time. Take care,

/Rene

I am very excited this morning to discuss the all new VMware Express. Seen below, the Express is VMware's all new mobile data center to showcase all of our virtualization technologies. Any visitor will be able to see all aspects of VMware vSphere along with VMware View and VMware vCenter (Server and the family of vCenter products). The Express hits the road soon and you can see the schedule by clicking on the microsite link below the picture. This is especially important for any of you that are VMware partners as we can bring the Express to your location if you qualify (again, see the microsite for more details). 

To learn more, you can visit the Express microsite or the VMware press release issued this morning. 

I had a lot of fun working on this project and I hope you like the Express! 

-Mike

VMware Converter

Virtual machine conversion fails when using using the Copy as New feature (1017501)

Date Published: 3/3/2010

VMware ESX

Creating a new snapshot on the service console fails: VMControl error -3: Invalid arguments (1008058)

Date Published: 3/4/2010

A VMware ESX 4.x host becomes unresponsive and displays a purple diagnostic screen after changing the value of netPktHeapMinSize (1018714)

Date Published: 3/1/2010

Storage vMotion operations occasionally fail (1018746)

Date Published: 3/5/2010

Cannot VMotion virtual machines in an EVC cluster after changing BIOS settings (1018756)

Date Published: 3/3/2010

Pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del in ESX 4.0 service console powers down all running VMs on host and reboots host (1018950)

Date Published: 3/4/2010

VMware ESX 4.0, Patch ESX400-201002401-BG: Updates vmkernel64, vmx, hostd, etc (1017458)

Date Published: 3/4/2010

VMware ESX 4.0, Patch ESX400-201002402-BG: Updates initscripts (1017459)

Date Published: 3/4/2010

VMware ESX 4.0, Patch ESX400-201002404-SG: Updates glib2 (1017460)

Date Published: 3/4/2010

VMware ESX 4.0, Patch ESX400-201002405-BG: Updates megaraid-sas (1017461)

Date Published: 3/4/2010

VMware ESX 4.0, Patch ESX400-201002406-SG: Updates newt (1017462)

Date Published: 3/4/2010

VMware ESX 4.0, Patch ESX400-201002407-SG: Updates nfs-utils (1017463)

Date Published: 3/4/2010

Availability of two upstreamed drivers in the Linux kernel 2.6.32 and 2.6.33 (1017560)

Date Published: 3/4/2010

VMware ESX 4.0, Patch ESX400-201002408-BG: Updates Enic driver (1018036)

Date Published: 3/4/2010

"MPC table is too large" error when rebooting host with large number of logical processors (1018108)

Date Published: 3/3/2010

VMware ESX 4.0, Patch Release ESX400-201002001 (1018403)

Date Published: 3/4/2010

VMware ESXi

VMware ESXi 4.0, Patch ESXi400-201002401-BG: Updates Firmware (1017465)

Date Published: 3/4/2010

VMware ESXi 4.0, Patch ESXi400-201002402-BG: Updates VMware Tools (1017466)

Date Published: 3/4/2010

VMware ESXi 4.0, Patch Release ESXi400-201002001 (1018404)

Date Published: 3/4/2010

Updating ESXi 4.0 with the Remote CLI fails with the error: signature mismatch: metadata.zip (1018477)

Date Published: 3/3/2010

VMware ThinApp

Deploying Internet Explorer 8 Packages Fails Depending on Capture and Deployment Operating Systems (1018994)

Date Published: 3/4/2010

Log Monitor Affects Virtual Application Startup on 32-bit Windows 7 (1018999)

Date Published: 3/4/2010

Virtual NX Client for Windows Creates .nx Directory With Incorrect User Profile (1019003)

Date Published: 3/5/2010

VMware vCenter Lab Manager

Unable to import virtual machines or templates into Lab Manager from vCenter Server (1017537)

Date Published: 3/4/2010

VMware vCenter Server

vMotioning a guest with hardware version 7 takes over one hour to complete (1015786)

Date Published: 3/4/2010

A DRS cluster on vCenter Server 4.0 shows the warning: Load imbalanced (1017291)

Date Published: 3/4/2010

The Migrate Virtual Machine wizard displays the message: The virtual machine must be powered off to perform this function (1017486)

Date Published: 3/3/2010

VMware View Manager

Adding an existing disk to a new virtual machine in View (1016628)

Date Published: 3/4/2010

VMware Workstation

Workstation 7 virtual machines fail with the error: NOT_IMPLEMENTED d:/build/ob/bora-203739/bora/vmx/main/pollVMX.c:3981 (1017832)

Date Published: 3/4/2010

Installing VMware Workstation or VMware Tools fails with the error: 1327 Invalid Drive (1017886)

Date Published: 3/4/2010

There often comes a time when we need to stop what we're doing in order to acknowledge our friends. With all best wishes from your colleagues, Happy 40th Birthday Dean!

From the ThinApp Team

A lot of you have been very busy this week, patching ESX hosts(That would be you Jason ;-)) and hopefully reading all the excellent articles being aggregated on Planet V12n...

• Duncan Epping - CPU/MEM Reservation Behavior
  The above paragraph is a bit misleading , as it seems to imply that a VM has to access its full reservation. What it should really say is “Memory which is protected by a reservation will not be reclaimed by ballooning or Host-level swapping even if it becomes idle,” and “Physical machine memory will not be allocated to the VM until the VM accesses virtual RAM needing physical RAM backing.” Then that pRAM is protected by the reservation and won’t be reclaimed by ballooning or .vswp-file swapping. If there is any .vswp memory at all as no .vswp is created when the reservation is equal to the provisioned memory.
• Scott Lowe - PXE Booting VMware ESX 4.0
  Next, you’ll need the PXE boot files. Specifically, you’ll need the menu.c32 and pxelinux.0 files. These files are not on the DVD ISO image; you’ll have to download Syslinux from this web site. Once you download Syslinux, extract the files into a temporary directory. You’ll find menu.c32 in the com32/menu folder; you’ll find pxelinux.0 in the core folder. Copy both of these files, along with vmlinuz and initrd.img, into the root directory of the TFTP server. (If you don’t know the root directory of the TFTP server, double-check its configuration.)
• Stu Radnidge - Challenge Convention & Garbage In / Garbage Out & Engage Support Early & Engage Support Early
  The notion of GIGO is of course much older than I am, but it’s one of those concepts that is timeless. In relation to Cloud, it’s more pertinent than ever. The marketing hype would have you believe that Cloud is a panacea, and many people hawking their wares artfully dodge the subject of your existing tools and processes. But ignore these at your own peril. The COO of the company I work for has a great quote, which goes something like “God made the earth in 6 days, because he started with a clean slate.”. The same is true of internal Cloud (or whatever you want to call it – I’m going to call it that for the sake of convenience) – you could probably nail down the platform code and functionality that you want to launch with in a few weeks, but making the requisite changes to existing processes and integrating with existing tools in your environment is what will take the lion’s share of time to address.
• Luc Dekens - Counter the self-aware VUM
  Today there was quite a bit of activity on Twitter following Jason Boche’s blog post titled VMware Update Manager Becomes Self-Aware. The problem Jason discovered was that the VUM skipped the guests which are hosting the VUM server and the vCenter server. As a consequence you can not select a cluster, select “remediate” and go out for lunch anymore. The resolution was a rather cumbersome and error prone manual procedure. But of course PowerCLI can help the human vSphere administrator...
• Chris Wolf - RSA, Intel, and VMware Take a Big Step Forward in Cloud Security
  In the past, I have talked about this security dilemma in a couple of couple of key areas. First, we need a standardized set of cloud isolation levels. We also need standard metadata (either de facto or industry standard) so that third party audit tools can properly query an application’s relationship to cloud security policy in relation to virtual and physical controls that are in place. I covered those issues in more depth in the post “The Cloud Mystery Machine: Metadata Standards.” In addition, virtual resources need to be able to answer the question “Where are you?” That applies to both the runtime location and data location. It’s important to ensure that data privacy and governance concerns are met, and regulatory compliance issues such as data export restrictions are satisfied.

Recently Miercom published a report that was commissioned and paid for by Citrix. VMware did not participate in these tests they, and we have no knowledge around how Miercom/Citrix set those tests up, how they configured VMware View 4, or how they arrived at some of their conclusions.

All that being said, we would gladly welcome the opportunity to take part in unbiased, apples to apples comparison with Citrix as we're confident that VMware View can stand on its own.

As we’ve previously announced, VMware has sold more than 1M VDI seats and leads the virtual desktop market. View 4 has experienced strong uptake since its release in Q4 2009 and customers are reporting excellent results with their desktop virtualization implementations and PCoIP – they like the superior user experience that comes with the industry’s only protocol that features dynamic bandwidth allocation, the ability to have a superior experience across rich media as well as standard office applications, and enjoying this experience in both LAN and WAN environments. Our customers are our best references – and we’d be happy to connect you with them so you can hear from them first hand.

With all that being said, I'd like to comment on some of the specific points made in the Miercom report:

In a comparison of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) implementations, Citrix XenDesktop 4 provided better overall performance when compared to VMware View 4

It appears that the Miercom report did not consider the image quality of office applications. XenDesktop 4 uses lossy client side image caching compared to VMware View 4’s lossless techniques, which favor the View 4 user experience.

Many customers insist on lossless image delivery – image compression artifacts are totally unacceptable to them. The PCoIP protocol provides network efficient progressive image refinement that builds the desktop image to a lossless image. As a result, View is consistently chosen to deliver a high-quality desktop experience.

XenDesktop 4 used 64% less bandwidth than View 4 with PCoIP for typical tasks

In our testing utilizing the Sysmark benchmark View 4 used 40% less bandwidth when run on a 1Mbps network compared to running the same test on a 100Mbs network. However, XenDesktop 4 used essentially the same bandwidth in both cases – pointing out the weakness of a fixed quality system – Citrix cannot take advantage of additional network resources when available. Miercom used 100Mbps as their ‘WAN’ for the single user test which skews the results and is not a real deployment scenario.

To reiterate – the PCoIP protocol dynamically adapts the image quality based on the available network resources – thusly View 4 favors the best user experience when operating on an unconstrained network. So using a single user session to measure bandwidth performance is not a valid testing scenario. A more realistic scenario would be to compare View 4 to XenDesktop 4 on a constrained network supporting multiple users – this would result in significantly less bandwidth used by each View 4 session, while giving the best experience possible for the concurrent users.

On the other hand, Citrix HDX uses a fixed quality (set by IT) that cannot adapt to available network resources (even if more bandwidth becomes available) and does not allow them to efficiently use/share the total bandwidth therefore not giving the best user experience.

Dynamic adjustments in display compression quality result in the best and most consistent user experience for a given network environment. The PCoIP protocol will fairly share the bandwidth across the active users for a given network segment.

Flash video was delivered with an average of 65% less CPU usage, 89% less bandwidth, and excellent Quality of Experience by XenDesktop 4 compared to View 4

Part of the strength of PCoIP is the fact that it adapts to the network. So, if you were to test a single desktop, as an example running multimedia, then you would observe that PCoIP consumed whatever bandwidth was available at the time. If bandwidth is available, it will use it to deliver the highest quality experience. If bandwidth is restricted, as is recommended in constrained environments, PCoIP "throttles down" to consume less bandwidth and is a “good citizen” in the network. Our customers report that PCoIP has been game changing for them and enables the delivery of a desktop environment that is secure, scalable, and easy to manage.

For environments where bandwidth is a concern, PCoIP can be configured to limit the amount of bandwidth it consumes. Customers have found they can limit bandwidth and still have a strong user experience.

With regards to the flash video test, this is not an apples to apples comparison – since the tests were conducted running Flash redirection with an unrealistically high packet loss of 0.5 to 5%.

A correctly provisioned network will have packet loss of 0.1% or less which would result in great video performance.

A 100Mbps “WAN” link is an unconstrained network environment (again, single user test on an unconstrained network is not a "real world" test).

Finally, the PCoIP protocol has no reliance whatsoever on client side driver compatibility, however that is not the case for Citrix’s Flash redirection (in addition to mandating a locally installed Flash client, the Citrix solution also requires more powerful client hardware and increases the operational cost of the client). Because the Citrix solution only works with Adobe Flash they chose to ignore various other video cases – such as Microsoft Silverlight, Google’s On2 etc. With the PCoIP protocol, current or future versions of Flash, QuickTime or other CODECs/plug-ins will just work.

Overall, XenDesktop 4 uses system resources more efficiently and is capable of scaling more effectively

Enterprises have an investment in their networks and by not dynamically adjusting the user bandwidth to take advantage of the available network resources real dollars are wasted and the user experience is impacted.

Depending on multi-media redirection (MMR) solely does not provide real scalability. It does not handle the case of common office applications and requires constant investment (by Citrix and the resulting increased IT management) which translates to real cost to IT. It also does not cover other video options like Apple Quicktime, Microsoft Siliverlight, and Google’s On2 (expected to replace Adobe flash on Google websites including Youtube).

Interesting that Miercom/Citrix does not call out the management costs of HDX Flash optimization/redirection. In addition to requiring a more powerful (and costly) client, the client media CODECs must be constantly updated as Adobe, Microsoft etc update their media protocols.

Only VMware View 4 supports a true zero client on the desktop to provide the lowest operation cost, highest security and future-proof scalability (supports any media or graphics).

In closing, we really do believe that VMware View is the only desktop virtualization product that has been designed from the ground up to deliver and manage virtualized desktop environments as a service. And, we do that with less cost and complexity than any other solution on the market.

We just published a SPECweb2005 benchmark score of 62,296 -- the highest result published to date on a virtual configuration. This result was obtained on an HP ProLiant DL380 G6 server running VMware vSphere 4 and featuring Intel Xeon 5500 series processors, and Intel 82598EB 10 Gigabit AF network interface cards. While driving the network throughput from a single host to just under 30 Gbps, this benchmark score still stands at 85% of the level achieved in native (non-virtualized) execution on equivalent hardware configurations.

Our latest benchmark results show that VMware, with our partners Intel and HP, is able to provide virtualization solutions that meet the performance and scaling needs of modern data centers. In addition, the simplification achieved through consolidation in a virtual environment, as demonstrated by the configuration used in our benchmark publication, contributes to eliminating complexity in the software environment.

Let me briefly discuss some of the distinctive characteristics of our latest benchmark results:

Use of VMDirectPath for virtualizing network I/O: VMDirectPath is a feature in vSphere 4 that builds upon Intel VT-D (Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O) capability engineered into recent Intel processors to virtualize network I/O. It allows guest operating systems to directly access an I/O device, bypassing the virtualization layer. The result we just published is notably different from our previous results in that this time we used VMDirectPath feature to take benefit of the higher performance that it makes possible.

High performance and linear scaling with the addition of virtual machines: VMDirectPath bypasses the virtualization layer to a large extent for the network interactions but, a measurable number of guest OS and hypervisor interactions still remain. The possibility still exists that the hypervisor can become a scaling limiter in a multi-VM environment. The excellent performance achieved by our benchmark configuration using four virtual machines shows that this should not be a concern.

A highly simplified setup: Results published in the SPECweb2005 website reveal the complexity of “interrupt pinning” that is common in the configurations in a native setting, generally employed in order to make full use of all the cores in today’s multi-core processors. By comparison, our benchmark configuration does not use device interrupt pinning. This is because the virtualization approach divides the load among multiple VMs, each of which is smaller and therefore easier to keep core-efficient.

Virtualization Performance: Our results show that a single vSphere host can handle 30 Gbps real world Web traffic and still reach a performance level of 85% of the native results published on equivalent physical configuration. This demonstrates capabilities several orders of magnitude greater than those needed by typical Web applications, proof-positive that the vast majority of the Web applications can be consolidated, with excellent performance, in a virtualized environment.

For more details, check out the full length article published on the VMware community website in which we elaborate upon each of the characteristics that we briefly discussed here.

Folks,

Just a friendly reminder. The Script-O-Mania contest ends March 15th, 2010. We shot a short clip that helps explain the contest goals and objectives. Look forward to seeing some fascinating scripts from our community.

http://vmware.com/go/scriptomania

If you haven’t seen it, Alan Renouf has made a great script called “Who created that VM?” that populates custom variables to tell you who created a VM and when they did it.

I was showing this to a user the other day and they noticed they could also use this to figure out how many VMs they’re creating a month and help track their growth rate that way. Sure enough, once you’ve run Alan’s script it’s really easy to get just such a report.

Here’s a sample of the script in action against my vCenter.

You can also export this stuff to a spreadsheet, just follow the sample code above.

VMware will be performing a system upgrade to several VMware Web applications on March 5, 2010. Maintenance will begin at 6 p.m. Pacific Time and end March 6 at approximately 2:00 a.m. Pacific Time.

While this upgrade is in progress, you will be unable to:

• Access or manage your VMware account
• Submit support requests online
• Download, purchase or register VMware products Manage VMware product licenses.
• Access to VMware Communities

If you need to file a support request while the upgrade is in progress, call VMware Technical Support for assistance.

We appreciate your patience during this maintenance period. These system upgrades are part of our commitment to continued service improvements and will help VMware better serve your needs.

Recently John Arrasjid(@vcdx001), Steve Kaplan(@roidude) and I (@DuncanYB) released a book titled "Foundation for Cloud Computing with VMware vSphere 4". The book as John Arrasjid described it "provides a starting point for understanding the requirements to design and optimize a virtualized data center that also serves as the foundation for efficient and safe cloud computing."

The book is published by USENIX/SAGE and it is the 21st book in the Short Topics series. SAGE is a Special Interest Group of the USENIX Association. Its goal is to serve the system administration community by organizing conferences and training to enhance the technical and managerial capabilities of members of the profession.

Twenty copies of the book have been given away via Twitter and Mark Vaughn was one of the lucky people who won a copy and published a review. Here's an outtake from Mark's review:

Review by Mark Vaughn
This is not a technical manual designed to walk you through a vSphere installation, this is the book that will explain why you need to develop a virtualization strategy and identify the key items that you will need to address in developing that strategy. This book is a must have reference source for people working with virtualization, whether you are deploying it, developing strategies around it, or simply looking for a better understanding of virtualization technologies and strategies. This is the 21st book in the Short Topics series by USENIX, available on the SAGE website. In fact, I like this book so much that I will probably join SAGE to get access to more of the Short Topics series.

I’m happy to announce that we’ve released PowerCLI cmdlets for Update Manager, a.k.a. VUM, that are compatible with PowerCLI 4.0 U1. This new PowerShell snapin provides 13 cmdlets as follows:

Cmdlet Name	Cmdlet Description
Attach-Baseline	Attaches baselines to the specified Template, VirtualMachine, VMHost, Cluster, Datacenter, Folder, and VApp objects. Attaching a baseline to a container object such as a folder or datacenter transitively attaches the baseline to all objects in the container.
Detach-Baseline	Detaches baselines from the specified inventory objects.
Download-Patch	Downloads new patches into the Update Manager patch repository from the enabled patch download sources.
Get-Baseline	Retrieves the baselines specified by the provided cmdlet parameters.
Get-Compliance	Retrieve baseline compliance data for the specified object of type Template, VirtualMachine, VMHost, Cluster, Datacenter, Folder, and VApp.
Get-Patch	Retrieves all available patches or those specified by the provided cmdlet parameters.
Get-PatchBaseline	Retrieves all patch baselines or those specified by the provided cmdlet parameters.
New-PatchBaseline	Creates a new patch baseline. Patch baselines can be applied to either hosts or virtual machines. Depending on the patch criteria you select, patch baselines can be either dynamic or static (fixed).
Remediate-Inventory	Remediates an inventory object against the specified baselines.
Remove-Baseline	Deletes the specified baselines from their servers. Before the removal, the baselines are detached from all entities they have been attached to.
Scan-Inventory	Scans inventory objects for baselines attached to them.
Set-PatchBaseline	Modifies the properties of a patch baseline. You can specify explicitly the patches you want to include in the baseline through the IncludePatch parameter.
Stage-Patch	Initializes staging of patches. Staging allows you to download patches from the Update Manager server to the ESX/ESXi hosts, without applying the patches immediately.

Download the VUM PowerCLI cmdlets now, remember you will also need PowerCLI 4.0 U1.

First month at VMware. Like the energy level within the teams. Lots of work ahead - primarily on adding functionality that helps our developers, partners and integrators. Feel free to comment on what you think are some of the important things VMware should do to help you, the developer.

While browsing through the Microsoft Virtualization website, I stumbled across this table included in the Cost Saving section that presents cost and feature checklist comparison between Hyper-V/System Center with few vSphere editions.

While Microsoft’s spin on the theoretical cost advantage of Hyper-V/System Center over vSphere isn’t surprising (I am not going to address it here, since we have already shown how it doesn’t hold water), the checklist comparison struck me as having a few factual errors and misrepresentations of actual product capabilities which I think are worth pointing out:

• vSMP Support – Microsoft’s support for vSMP is actually much more limited than the table shows. Hyper-V R2 supports 4-way vSMP only in VMs running Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7. For Windows Server 2003 VMs, Hyper-V R2 supports up to 2-way vSMP and for Linux (SUSE /RHEL) VMs just single virtual CPU. vSphere, on the other hand, supports up to 4-way vSMP with Standard, Advanced and Enterprise Editions and 8-way vSMP with Enterprise Plus edition on any vSphere supported guest OS (over 50 versions).

• HA/Clustering – The table incorrectly shows that vSphere Standard does not include HA/Clustering, when in reality it does. Microsoft seems also very generous with Hyper-V by implying it provides equal HA capabilities as vSphere. Unlike vSphere, for example, Hyper-V R2 does not provide VM restart prioritization, which means that there is no easy way for admins to make sure that critical VMs are being restarted first. Incidentally, the lack of VM restart prioritization is one the reasons why Burton Group stated that Hyper-V R2 is not an enterprise production-ready solution. In addition because Hyper-V R2 lacks memory overcommit (a feature that is totally missing from Microsoft’s checklist), it can restart VMs only if the failover server has enough spare memory capacity to accommodate the VMs of the failed host.

• Hot add – Microsoft gives Hyper-V R2 a check on Hot Add and then below the checkmark specifies “Storage” to indicate Hyper-V supports only Hot Add of a VM’s virtual disk capacity. vSphere gets a checkmark too, but what the table doesn’t tell is that it not only provides Hot Add of a VM’s virtual disk capacity, but also of virtual memory and CPU

• Storage VMotion – This checkmark is funny to say the least. If you don’t know what the word “quick” means in Microsoft’s marketing jargon (and believe me I have heard illuminating translations of the term from Microsoft’s own employees), you’d think that Microsoft has a fast Storage VMotion (possibly faster than VMware’s). The reality is that even just talking about Storage VMotion in Hyper-V’s case doesn’t make sense, because Microsoft’s Quick Storage Migration, just like Quick Migration for VMs, cannot migrate VM virtual disks without downtime. VMware Storage VMotion, on the other hand, can migrate virtual disks without any application downtime.

• DRS/PRO – Even now that Hyper-V has live migration, positioning PRO as a DRS-equivalent isn’t accurate. PRO is a fundamentally less usable and more complex solution for resource balancing. Unlike DRS, which can be configured from vCenter in a matter of few clicks, PRO Tips requires both System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) and Operations Manager (SCOM). As Microsoft TechNet shows, SCOM is a very complex product that consumes a considerable amount of servers and databases that - opposite to what Microsoft wants people to believe - are neither free nor included in the cost of SMSD licenses. In addition to being hard to set up, PRO is dependent on software packages (PRO Packs) that each hardware vendor creates for its own products Last but not least, PRO lacks a global view of the resources of a group of servers (like DRS does with Resource Pools) and consequently it cannot optimize resource allocation across a cluster, but only react to the local conditions of a certain workload.

• vNetwork/Host Profiles – in my opinion, this line wins the Oscar for best checkmark in a “mis-leading” role. First, Microsoft drops the words “Distributed Switch” from VMware’s vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS) making it look like a generic virtual networking feature. Then, it gives Hyper-V R2 a check for the vNetwork/Host Profiles combination implying that System Center also provides the same functionality as VMware Host Profiles when in reality the only way it could would be through extensive development of custom scripts and customization of SC Configuration Manager (should we include the extra cost to the System Center price at the top of the table?)

While there is more that could be said about this table from Microsoft, this already shows how easy it is for Hyper-V to pass Microsoft’s checkmark exam. . This isn’t something new, though. Looking through the Virtual Reality archives, I found a 2 year old post (“Can I have the check, please?”) by a former VMware SE now with Microsoft on this same checkmark issue. I guess it is true that old habits die hard.

 

Well, friends.  The results are in and VMware Fusion 3 took the top spot in this year's About.com Readers' Choice Awards.  In the category of "Best Applications for Running Windows" VMware crossed the finish line with 52% of the vote in a category with four additional players!

Just wanted to share the good news and thank the Fusion community for your votes and ongoing support.

Here is our Top 20 KB list for February. This list is ranked by the number of times a Tech Support ticket was resolved by following the steps in a published Knowledgebase article.

• Upgrading to ESX 4.0 and vCenter 4.0 best practices (1009039)
• FAQ: Supported/Unsupported Devices and Configurations (1184)
• Downloading and Installing VMware Fusion (1005466)
• Enhanced VMotion Compatibility (EVC) processor support (1003212)
• Recreating a missing virtual disk (VMDK) header/descriptor file (1002511)
• Restarting the Management agents on an ESX or ESXi Server (1003490)
• VMware Data Recovery 1.0 and Essentials Plus licensing (1012295)
• Powering off an unresponsive virtual machine on an ESX host (1004340)
• Uninstalling, reinstalling, and upgrading VMware Fusion (1014529)
• Unpresenting a LUN containing a datastore from ESX 4.x and ESXi 4.x (1015084)
• Configuring networking from the ESX service console command line (1000258)
• Consolidating snapshots (1007849)
• Troubleshooting Email Issues (1001628)
• Virtual machine does not power on because of missing or locked files (10051)
• Decoding Machine Check Exception (MCE) output after a purple screen error (1005184)
• Virtual machines stop responding when any LUN on the host is in an all-paths-down condition (1016626)
• Upgrading a VMware Fusion virtual machine from Windows XP to Windows 7 (1015396)
• Best practices for using and troubleshooting VMware Converter (1004588)
• Extending partitions in Windows using DiskPart (1007266)
• Increasing the amount of RAM assigned to the ESX Server service console (1003501)

VMware Consolidated Backup
Removing snapshots causes "unable to find device: XXXXX-vmname-xxxxx-delta.vmdk" errors in vmkernel logs (1011533)
Date Published: 2/22/2010
VMware Converter
VMware Infrastructure Client unrecoverable error: (app) Exception 0x0000005 (Access Violation ) (1018400)
Date Published: 2/25/2010
VMware ESX
Installing VMware Tools on a Linux virtual machine using the .RPM produces the error: service vmware-tools does not support chkconfig (1018532)
Date Published: 2/26/2010
ESX host disconnects from vCenter Server and hostd logs contain the error: Exception: Not Reached: @ bora/vim/hostd/vmsvc/vmMisc.cpp:1610 (1016583)
Date Published: 2/26/2010
External USB devices showing as Storage Adapters on Dell hardware using iDRAC (1013818)
Date Published: 2/25/2010
Converted virtual machines experience poor performance (1013857)
Date Published: 2/25/2010
An ESX host reboots to an Illegal OpCode message after upgrading ESX on HP BL465C G5 (1015559)
Date Published: 2/25/2010
ESX host may stop responding or abruptly reboot on IBM xSeries 336 or 346 servers (1015661)
Date Published: 2/25/2010
ESX host fails to start or install with the error: The BIOS reports that NUMA node X has no memory (1016154)
Date Published: 2/25/2010
Performance tab in vSphere 4.0 fails: Root element is missing (1018601)
Date Published: 2/25/2010
NPIV-enabled virtual machines fail to create VPORTs when run on ESX/ESXi hosts with Emulex HBAs (1018326)
Date Published: 2/24/2010
Manually install the VMXNet driver in Windows NT GOS on ESX 3.0.x and ESX 3.5 (1018546)
Date Published: 2/23/2010
Unable to add ESX 3.0 or higher hosts to vCenter (1018212)
Date Published: 2/23/2010
USB floppy drives are not supported in ESX/ESXi 4.0 (1016911)
Date Published: 2/22/2010
VMware Fusion
Upgrading a Fusion virtual machine from Windows Vista to Windows 7 (1018441)
Date Published: 2/26/2010
VMware vCenter Converter
Virtual machine fails to power on or boot after being converted (1016828)
Date Published: 2/26/2010
VMware vCenter Lab Manager
Upgrading Lab Manager fails with the log error: Invalid NIC IP address error (1016767)
Date Published: 2/26/2010
VMware vCenter Server
Understanding the Active Directory Application Mode (ADAM) database (1017480)
Date Published: 2/26/2010
vCenter Agent Preupgrade Check Tool generates the error: A cryptographic error occurred (1018486)
Date Published: 2/26/2010
Accessing the Storage View tab in vCenter 4.0 Update 1 fails (1018608)
Date Published: 2/26/2010
Upgrading from to vCenter fails with multiple schema errors (1017410)
Date Published: 2/25/2010
Plugins, extensions, and applications experience errors after upgrading to vCenter Server 4.0 from VirtualCenter 2.5.x (1018203)
Date Published: 2/23/2010
HA fails to configure at 90% completion with the error: Internal AAM Error - agent could not start (1018217)
Date Published: 2/23/2010
vSphere agent upgrade checker asks for a 32-bit system DSN (1018405)
Date Published: 2/23/2010
Performance data is not collected if the time on the vCenter Server has been modified to a future value (1018256)
Date Published: 2/22/2010
VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager
Disabling Fast Path Volume Open Failure for iSCSI LUNs (1017286)
Date Published: 2/27/2010
VMware View Manager
Configuring PCoIP for use with View 4 (1018158)
Date Published: 2/23/2010
The same virtual machines are repeatedly reconfigured if cloned from a template (1018254)
Date Published: 2/23/2010
VMware vSphere Management Assistant
Java commands result in a command not found error (1018507)
Date Published: 2/25/2010
VMware Workstation
vmware-fullscreen does not support copy and paste between a host and guest or virtual machines (1016832)
Date Published: 2/24/2010

Creating a top 5 seems to be getting more difficult week after week. Not only does the quality of the blog articles increase, the amount of blogs listed on PlanetV12n and the amount of articles also increase steadily. I hope I can keep up with you guys, or I might just need to get a cute assistant to help me out with this.... Hmmm, that's actually not a bad idea. Anyway, here's the list!

• Eric Gray - Taking snapshots of VMware ESX 4 running in a VM
  Clearly, the capability introduced with VMware vSphere 4 that allows VMware ESX 4 to virtualize itself is a real crowd-pleaser. However, one limitation that some have discovered while using this lab-testing technique is the lack of ability to use snapshots with virtual ESX systems. In fact, after taking a snapshot of a virtual ESX VM, you will see the system boot into the recovery shell.
• Kenneth van Ditmarsch - Using LeftHand Snapshot techniques within a VMware Environment
  Well, currently no integration exists between the LeftHand Snapshot technique and vCenter. If the LeftHand Snapshot process is started, vCenter isn’t alerted to quiesce the VM’s and therefore the VM’s are able to continue processing while a LeftHand Snapshot is made, which leads to inconsistent VM states. Last year the LeftHand roadmap indicated that vCenter application integration would be available in the new SAN/iQ 8.5. SAN/iQ 8.5 is currently shipped with the HP/LeftHand P4000 G2 nodes and will be available for download on 29th of March for existing P4000 user. For some reasons however vCenter application integration is shoved back to Q4 2010 or later.
• Steve Kaplan - The multi-hypervisor fallacy
  Implicit in multi-hypervisor advocacy is an undertone of virtualizing servers rather than the data center. This myopic perspective limits both savings and synergies. Cisco studies, for example, show a lack of vNetwork capability results in 30% fewer servers that can be virtualized along with 30% higher administrative requirements. Network administrators have no way to monitor traffic over a vSwitch for compliance, auditing and troubleshooting purposes, and they cannot apply network and security policies that follow a VM as it live-migrates. Since only vSphere enables vNetwork capabilities, multiple hypervisors leave at least a portion of the data center running less efficiently and less secure.
• Steve Chambers - IT Departments and the Collapse of the Silos
  Today I had the opportunity to present at the National Computing Center Think Tank. The NCC have a fantastic remit to bring together practitioners from the private and public sector to explore the current realities. Add to this the vendor invitations where folks like me can share our observations with no axe to sell, and it makes for a really great discussion. Awesome stuff. Prior to this invitation I prepared two documents. First I wrote a blunt paper based on my observations and feedback via Twitter. Second I wrote a Prezi for that to share the findings in ten pieces.
• Craig Risinger - The Resource Pool Priority-Pie Paradox
  We run into this on a daily basis; Misunderstanding of the “shares” concept in combination with resource pools. To start with a bold statement: A few VMs in a Low-shares Resource Pool can outperform each of many VMs in a High-shares Resource Pool. How is this possible you might ask. Resources are divided at the Resource Pool level first. Each Resource Pool is like a pie whose size determines amount of resources usable (during contention). Then that pie is subdivided among the VMs in the pool. A Resource Pool applies to all its VMs collectively. Thus a smaller pie divided among fewer VMs can yield more resources per VM than a larger pie divided by even more VMs.

Hello all,

Last night we released our first patch for SRM 4.0.  It is an important one and I wanted to talk a little about it.  Incidentally, the URL for the release notes is not shown in our SRM documentation page yet but hopefully soon will be.  The readme is available at the same place where the updated bits are in the SRM downloads area - make sure to read it before applying.

Some of the important things this update covers off includes:

• It is a complete update, meaning that it is not a collection of files that are copied over, but rather a complete install package.  This means if you need to uninstall it, you will need to also restore the database, and install the previous version to match the database.
• Test recovery times have improved for ESX 4.0.1 hosts that use iSCSI.
• Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 IP customization is now supported.
• A problem that would cause a recovery plan to hang while powering off virtual machines at the protected site if the virtual machine's storage goes offline while the plan is running has been fixed.
• IP customization for the /etc/hosts file will now work properly.

These are not the only fixes / improvements, but they are key ones that I know people are waiting for!

I did have a small issue when I tested the GA version (build 236215) of this patch.  On one of my lab VC's it had trouble during the update with registering the updated SRM service.  I tried the retry option, and I restarted the update several times with no improvement.  I restarted the host, and noticed that there was no SRM service and I did the update again.  The update worked fine now.  I did a test restore after the update and it worked fine.  I recommend you do a test restore before the patch and after to make sure things go smooth.  If you have any trouble with your SRM installation, generally I recommend you solve those issues before upgrading.  If the troubles you have are solved by the update than update first.  BTW, I did pass this on to engineering so if it is more than just my lab we will know about it.

If you have registered for patch notice, the SRM patch notice has not gone out yet but should real soon.  If you don't use this service you can find it here.

Let me know in the comments how the update goes and any future things you would like to learn in this blog.

Michael

Folks,

Just wanted to share with everyone the status of the sample code project we have been working on. The goal of the project was to make it easier to add sample code into our community, make it easier to search and share code.

We built a Plug-In into the Jive platform using a popular open source syntax highlighter and added some other cool features. We were inspired by our friends at poshcode as they really have taken this to the next level. The project is still in its early stages and we expect to go live with our Revision March 19 2010.

Here is a sneak peek

Landing Page

FAQs

Q. The new site will have its own search and format attributes, what will happen to the code that exists on the older site.

A. We looked into manually migrating the existing code into the new site but after careful evaluation our dev team could not guarantee preservation of file attributes (owner, points, date, views, etc) This means that if moved your sample code our DBA would not be able to guarantee the file owner name, points, and page views would be preserved. It just was not worth it. What we decided to do is to keep the existing data as is and encourage people to start using the new platform. Please note:  In a few months we will make the data on the old platform read only - meaning you will not be able to post new sample code to old platform.

Q. Will this new format be rolled out to the other communities ?

A. No not in the near term, we want to roll this out slowly in order to ensure platform stability.

Q. How will I be able to report bugs, comments, rfe's ?

A. Please post your bugs, comments, rfe's on the Dev Community API Forum, or PM heyitspablo.

Q. When will the first version be rolled out ?

A. We are targeting March 19th 2010 if all goes well in QA.

Critics are raving about Hal Rottenberg’s new TrainSignal video “The Case of the Open Snapshot”, a taut psychological thriller that will send your emotions on a roller coaster ride as our sysadmin hero fights bravely to save his datastore, keep his servers up and avert an international crisis. Ok maybe I made some of that up but this still pretty useful information.

Hal shows how to:

1. Report on snapshots, including snapshot size and age.
2. Delete snapshot en-masse, including snapshots that are so big they can take hours to remove.

Great work Hal!

Also don’t forget to check out TrainSignal’s vSphere Pro Series Volume 1 for all this great PowerCLI content and more.

Posted by Ben Verghese
Chief Management Architect, Virtualization and Cloud Platforms Business Unit

Today VMware announced a definitive agreement to acquire certain management products from the EMC Ionix portfolio, including Server Configuration Manager (formerly Configuresoft), FastScale, Application Discovery Manager (formerly nLayers), and Service Manager (formerly Infra).   These products will provide new capabilities to VMware’s vCenter family of products.

Over the years, VMware has led the industry in virtualization of IT infrastructure. We have empowered customers to reduce costs, increase automation, and deliver new services that they could not before. Now, as the enterprise has increasingly adopted a virtualized model, the foundation has been built for the transition to cloud computing.

There is so much hype around the word “cloud” these days, but what I am referring to is a way of doing computing that enables a revolutionary business model for enterprise IT. Start with efficient pooling of infrastructure to create on-demand virtualized capacity, add automation based on industry-wide and user-local policies, self-service access to a catalogue of IT services, charge-back and usage reporting, and you achieve public-cloud economics with private cloud control. This is IT-as-a-Service.

An IT-as-a-Service model demands strong capabilities and automation across several aspects of management: provisioning, capacity, configuration, performance, business continuity. With the acquisition of the Ionix products, VMware will extend the capabilities of vCenter in order to meet these demands, especially around configuration management and compliance in the enterprise private cloud.

Let’s take a look at a couple of examples where the Ionix products complement what we already have in the vCenter line. In the drive to IT-as-a-Service, customers have been asking for visibility into full-stack compliance, from metal to apps. We recently announced the ConfigControl product that works closely with vCenter to provide configuration management and compliance to policies in highly dynamic virtualized environments. Ionix Server Configuration Manager enhances this functionality in two important ways. First, it adds visibility of the guest OS and application configuration on virtualized and non-virtualized servers. Second, it provides built-in capability for Compliance Reports ranging from the ESX hardening guide to HIPAA and PCI. The Ionix Application Discovery Manager product (formerly nLayers) automatically discovers complex applications with components on multiple servers, virtual and physical. The combination of these three products, when integration is complete, will give us comprehensive configuration and compliance capability across a broad domain with virtual infrastructure at the core, but extending to the adjacent areas of the OS, complex applications, and physical hardware if needed.

There are many opportunities to integrate these two sets of products to deliver management value in the private cloud.  Another example of synergy is the potential to integrate Studio and the acquired Ionix FastScale provisioning engine.  Studio enables the application developer or integrator to describe the application and the OS and how it should be put together as a Virtual Appliance. The FastScale engine can slim down the Virtual Appliance and deploy or update the image to a VM (or bare hardware if desired). 

Let me be clear: our goal is to simplify management of IT as customers move to an increasingly dynamic and virtualized infrastructure. However, our customers have varied needs and have also made significant investments in management platforms and tools from our partners.  As we integrate the Ionix products into the vCenter family and accelerate innovation towards a new more agile management model, we remain committed to open APIs, and co-operation and integration with our partners.  This approach has allowed us to jointly provide robust solutions for our customers and we will continue to lead in this area.

Recently someone asked me if there was a way, programmatically, to figure out the “observed IP ranges” and “observed VLANs'” that you can see in vSphere Client. Don’t know what I mean? Here’s a picture to help you out.

The data is available as a tooltip in the network configuration tab (naturally!) when you hover over Observed IP Ranges. How do you get this stuff out of the API.

Turns out there’s a rather obscure little function called QueryNetworkHint. This function takes the name of the physical NIC as input, which makes it perfect for pairing with our Get-VMHostNetworkAdapter cmdlet. Here’s a PowerShell advanced function that does exactly that, followed by some screenshots of it in action.

Let’s have a look at that in action. First some basic usage, combining Get-VMHost, Get-VMHostNetworkAdapter and the Get-ObservedIPRange advanced function.

Comparing these to the screenshot above you’ll see they’re the same. Let’s take it a step further and suppose we want to determine if a certain adapter can see a certain VLAN, let’s say 2903. Here’s some code that does it:

This function can really help you out if you use sophisticated networking to your ESX hosts but don’t control the switches directly, so you have to coordinate with a member of the networking team.

Update 1: As a reader kindly pointed out, this will only show VLANs for which the ESX server has seen actual traffic, it will not probe the switch for configuration.

Update 2: The code sample has been updated to fix the type name in the advanced function. The old function used a type name that only worked in internal builds of PowerCLI.

Whew.  With Macworld 1020 now behind us, we are extremely energized by being on the show floor and spending time with the dedicated Mac community.

Speaking to various VMware Fusion who came by to say "hi" was as enlightening as ever -- especially when we heard about the wide range of uses for VMware Fusion software!  From wizard games and sewing machine plug-ins to operations management software, we were pleased to hear from VMware Fusion users that are able to address their PC computing needs on their Macs.

Here's a snapshot of what some of them had to say: 

For those of you that came by during the event, thanks for taking the time to talk to us.  We really enjoyed hearing your VMware Fusion stories.

Also, we learned that VMware Fusion 3 is up for the About.com Reader’s Choice award! VOTING ENDS TOMORROW, so if you (or someone you know) is a happy VMware Fusion, please vote today.

 Last chance to vote is tomorrow, February 25, so please spread the word, and vote soon!

Today we are proud to announce that VMware has acquired the assets of Alpharetta, GA based RTO Software adding their technology and talented people to the VMware View team.  For those of you not familiar with RTO software they are well known for their Virtual Profiles, PinPoint and Discover products which help IT organizations simplify desktop deployments while providing end-users with a rich, robust and flexible experience.

The RTO technologies add a critical component to the View solution providing the foundation for robust persona management.  With persona management end-user specific information such as user data, settings and application access is separated from the desktop image enabling increased flexible access and portability of the desktop service.  This integration will provide end-users with a consistent user experience while IT organizations will benefit from simplified and optimized management of these assets.

For more information on this acquisition please see the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) document here.

Also be sure to check out Scott Davis’ View Point Blog for his perspective on the RTO acquisition.

Warren Ponder’s take can be found on the Virtual Desktop Blog here.

At VMworld this past fall, we announced an OEM agreement with RTO Software to integrate their Virtual Profile technology into VMware View.  This was and is a strategically important technology for VMware and is destined to become a critical component of the View solution, providing the foundation for robust persona management.  As a matter of fact, it's critical enough that we are pleased to  announce the acquisition of RTO Software by VMware and that I am pleased to welcome the talented RTO team to VMware's Desktop BU!

We've been talking about provisioning users, not devices, and the importance of composition or layering in a desktop virtual machine - that a desktop VM is comprised of independent virtualized component parts that are dynamically brought together on demand into an encapsulated VM. One of those critical parts is the user persona, a user's profile, data files and settings. Clean, efficient user persona virtualization is vital to our vision and that is precisely what RTO's industry-leading Virtual Profiles will deliver for VMware View. With persona management, end-user specific information such as user data files, settings and application access is separated from the desktop image and centrally stored, enabling increased flexible access,  greater portability and seamless file management and backup.

This is an exciting technology. For those unfamiliar with the specifics of what Virtual Profiles actually does, the technology seamlessly virtualizes, caches and synchronizes a desktop user's roaming profile, while improving both the performance and data integrity of the profile. When a user logs on, instead of monolithically delivering the entire user profile and making the user wait for all of it, Virtual Profiles performs a "just-in-time" delivery. Windows thinks the entire profile is present, however the contents of each segment or file is brought down and subsequently cached when accessed.  When files are updated and closed, Virtual Profiles automatically synchronizes the files  with the profile server, maintaining data integrity across user sessions in real-time and speeding up logoffs.  This  preserves user configuration integrity independently of the desktop image; and also propagates those changes to any other concurrent user sessions that may exist, maintaining data integrity across sessions as well. Registry updates are handled in a similar manner; but at finer granularity. Profile registry changes are automatically synchronized with the stored profile on the server. Since only what has been written to the registry locally is copied back, hive corruption is prevented.

VMware Tools is a suite of utilities that enhances the performance of the virtual machine's guest operating system and improves management of the virtual machine.

To address questions we receive about installing VMware Tools we have created a set of knowledgebase articles complete with videos. Each Guest operating system has slightly different steps to perform this common operation, so we've created a general article, which then branches out to more specific articles/videos for your specific Guest OS.

We recommend that when you need to install VMware Tools, start with article: General VMware Tools installation instructions (1014294).

Then, depending on your VM's operating system, see one of:

• Installing VMware Tools in a Windows virtual machine (1018377)
• Installing VMware Tools in a Novell virtual machine (1018299)
• Installing VMware Tools in a Linux virtual machine using RPM (1018392)
• Installing VMware Tools in a Linux virtual machine using Compiler (1018414)

Are there any other videos you'd like to see about VMware tools?

In ThinApp’s upcoming 4.5 release (currently in beta), we’ve managed to accelerate the startup time for some virtualized applications like Office up to 200% compared with previous versions!  One big secret to the optimization comes from internal file format changes that occur when building packages.  ThinApp performs static analysis on the applications and rearranges executables and DLLs bits on disk so they can be mapped into memory with minimal disk and cpu overhead.  Because this optimization relies on drastic file format changes, it could be nightmare of backward and forward compatibility issues when rolling out to customers and technology partners.  But, thanks to some clever design, it’s just another regular release with no process changes for our customers and partners.

File format backward and forward compatibility is a classically difficult problem to solve.  Even the most carefully planned file formats evolve after years of use, and the inability and difficulty involved in changing file formats is are large barriers to innovation.

As an example, let’s look at ZIP, the most popular archive file format in the world.  In the early days of PCs, 4GB of disk seemed impossibly big so ZIP used 32-bit numbers to represent file sizes and block offsets.  As a result, the original ZIP file format could not support archives larger than 4GB or individual compressed files in archives that were larger than 4GB.  PKWARE eventually released an update to the file format specification (ZIP64) which used 64-bit numbers instead of 32-bit numbers, allowing files of any size to be supported.  While this problem solved one problem, it created another.  Older applications (like Explorer in Windows XP) didn’t know anything about ZIP64 and couldn’t read this new format.  Explorer in Vista supports ZIP64, but if it creates new files in this format Windows XP users may not be able to read them.  Going from 32-bit to 64-bit is one obvious reason to change a file format, but there may be many more subtle reasons.  For example, what if PKWARE discovered they could achieve a 10% compression boost by tweaking their compression & decompression algorithms?  They would be prevented from making smaller changes because the file format is set in stone and the same adoption problems would result from such as change.   At some point there could be so many incompatible file formats and apps to cause developers and users to abandon the format for something simpler.  In effect, the need to maintain a widely usable file format prevented PKWARE from further innovating in the very area which  brought them original fame: compression.

Most developers turn to pre-made libraries which they can use to open and read ZIP files, and link these libraries into their applications or load as dynamically loaded libraries (DLLs).  If a new file format specification for ZIP becomes available, a developers can upgrade the libraries and ship out new versions of their product.  If the interface between the library and the application is designed well enough, a developer only needs to replace a single DLL file on end user machines to enable reading of old and new file formats alike.  This works, but not without effort:

1. The library maintainer must create a new library which reads old and new file formats and make it available to app vendors.

2. The app vendor must obtain the latest version of the library and ship it out.  Often shipping any changes to end-users, no matter how simple they are, requires a full Testing/Quality Assurance cycle.

3. The end-user must update their applications. Even with persistent nag dialogs, users typically have better things to do with their time than sitting around updating their applications.

File format changes take a long time to propagate to apps and users.  More often we are stuck with old files and applications forever.  The result is that innovation is slowed and everyone from library maintainer, to app vendor, to end user is taxed by time and effort.

VMware ThinApp avoids this tax on innovation in many new ways.

Binding format logic & data together.  ThinApp creates self-contained EXE files which are similar to self-extracting ZIP archives. They contain information such as a virtual file system, virtual registry, package options, and most importantly – a copy of the ThinApp runtime. Like self-extracting ZIP files, ThinApp packages have all the logic needed to read their own contents baked into the file itself.   Because applications can be run directly from the “archived” state, the time, disk space, and install/configuration changes related to self-extracting ZIPs are eliminated.   And because each ThinApp package contains its own copy of the runtime which understands the attached file format, VMWare is free to change the internal file formats with every release.  Additionally users and Administrators don’t need to worry about compatibility between runtimes previously deployed and currently available.   

ThinApp is able to efficiently bind the runtime with each package because of continuous focus on three key areas.  

• Small Runtime.  We know if the runtime get’s too large, people may become concerned with the extra disk and bandwidth involved with including a copy with every application.   Over the last 9 years of development we’ve managed to keep the runtime to only 600k!  Blaise Pascal once wrote “I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter”.   We expect with more time, we can make the runtime smaller while accomplishing even more.
• Fast Startup time.  Often applications and runtimes use the installation process to do expensive, one-time tasks in order to optimize subsequent executions.   ThinApp is designed for fast startup every time, so there is no need for a separate runtime installation process.   One way this is accomplished is by carefully arranging data and code on disk so it can be mapped into memory without impacting disk or CPU.  The ThinApp runtime can be loaded into memory and “mount” the virtual filesystem, registry, etc. in a matter of milliseconds!
• Restricted User-mode only code.  ThinApp pioneered device driver-less application virtualization so it can eliminate the installation (and uninstallation) steps needed to perform operations requiring Administrator rights like device driver installs.   Today,all new AppVirt solutions are based on this approach because of its clear advantages.
  

Exposing ThinApp file format libraries to 3rd parties.

Over the last few years, VMWare’s ThinApp team has worked with technology partners in the desktop management systems and security space to provide a library (ThinApp Management SDK) to interrogate information inside ThinApp packages and processes.   These partners are using this library to do things like inventory scanning, anti-virus protection, and user management.   This library was made available to all VMware partners at the same time as the ThinApp 4.0.4 release.   As mentioned earlier, in ThinApp 4.5 we will be changing our internal file format because we have found we can greatly accelerate application startup times by rearranging the data on disk in specific and non-obvious ways.   Despite this file format change, neither our partners nor their customers will need to perform any updates in order support the new file format.  

How is this possible?  The ThinApp Management SDK library doesn’t actually have any logic to read package contents.  Rather, it simply loads the runtime from the package into memory and then asks the loaded runtime to read the package contents on its behalf.   In this fashion, older versions of the management SDK library can work with newer ThinApp packages even as file formats have changed, and can support both backward and forward compatibility.

Security concerns 

Because the ThinApp management SDK is loading and executing code from random packages, we need to make sure the loaded code isn’t booby-trapped to do bad things.    Packages may come from random dangerous sources, and code which inspects the packages may be running from elevated security accounts.  As a result, we need to ensure the ThinApp runtime inside the package hasn’t been tampered with.   This is accomplished by using a public/private key signature system.   All runtimes are signed by VMware using a private key, and the management SDK verifies the code has not been modified by checking the code hash with a public key. 

Working around MSI performance and 2GB file format limitations  

ThinApp provides the option to produce MSI (Microsoft Installer) files when creating virtual packages for easier deployment through software delivery systems.   The Quantum compression algorithm used in MSI CAB files was one of the first compression algorithms to significantly beat ZIP. Microsoft licensed the algorithm from David Stafford (good friend of mine) in order to save millions of dollars on floppy disks for software distributions.  Similar to ZIP, Windows MSI files are limited by their format specifications to 2GB or less.    Unlike ZIP, Microsoft never released an update to the MSI format to enable larger packages.  Instead, users must create a single MSI file plus multiple separate CAB files, each no larger than 2GB each.  This limitation is a pain.  If you want to point a user to a large installer located on a website via an http link, you need to provide the files inside another archive format like ZIP or ISO.  In ThinApp 4.5, we have solved this problem, and for the first time you can deploy a single MSI file of any size.  Our solution is to create a small MSI file which contains only boot-strap installation logic. Then, we append compressed file data to the end of the MSI file in our own format.    When the boot-strap logic gets executed by windows installer, it can read and decompress the required file data found at the end of the MSI file.  

Besides being limited to 2GB, one additional downside of the CAB format is that it doesn’t offer random access to data inside of a file.  In order to read the byte located at 1GB, you need to decompress everything preceding the location.  Tthis can be very slow, especially for larger files.   We wanted the management SDK to work with both ThinApp EXEs and ThinApp MSIs at the same blazing speed.  Since we use our own format for compressed data, the bulk of ThinApp 4.5 MSI data is not actually stored in CAB format, and the ThinApp management SDK can operate on ThinApp produced MSI in an identical manner as ThinApp EXEs.

Conclusion

ThinApp has creatively solved file format compatibility issues in many areas by combining code and data to eliminate discontinuities between old applications and new formats.  This results in faster release cycles, faster innovation, and a smoother user experience.   Because all of these innovations are invisible to most people, the next time you launch a ThinApp application - it will just work!

VMware ESX
Editing virtual machine and host custom attributes and annotations (1005720)
Date Published: 2/19/2010
Hewlett Packard systems with a Smart Array P212, P410, P410i, P411, or P712m controller become unresponsive (1014611)
Date Published: 2/19/2010
Virtual machine fails to boot with the error: One or more of the disks used by this virtual machine was created by an unsupported version (1014720)
Date Published: 2/19/2010
Understanding High Availability Host Isolation Response with Network Attached Storage (1018325)
Date Published: 2/19/2010
Snapshots Sometimes Do Not Appear in the Recompose Wizard in VMware View (1018210)
Date Published: 2/18/2010
Troubleshooting network issues with the Cisco show tech-support command (1015437)
Date Published: 2/17/2010
Adding an ESX host to vCenter inventory or accessing an ESX host directly with vCenter client fails: Bad username or password (1018270)
Date Published: 2/16/2010
Rescanning of SAS storage adapter might take more time (1017636)
Date Published: 2/16/2010
VMware ESX 3.5, Patch ESX350-201002401-SG: Updates Net-SNMP (1017660)
Date Published: 2/16/2010
VMware ESX 3.5, Patch ESX350-201002402-SG: Security updates to Python package (1017663)
Date Published: 2/16/2010
VMware ESX 3.5, Patch ESX350-201002403-BG: Updates VMkernel, vmx, hostd, vmnix (1017664)
Date Published: 2/16/2010
VMware ESX 3.5, Patch ESX350-201002404-SG: Security update to BIND (1017665)
Date Published: 2/16/2010
VMware ESX 3.5, Patch ESX350-201002405-BG: Updates Aacraid driver (1017677)
Date Published: 2/16/2010
VMware ESX 3.5, Patch ESX350-201002406-BG: Updates bnx2x driver for Broadcom (1017678)
Date Published: 2/16/2010
VMware ESX 3.5, Patch ESX350-201002407-SG: Updates Libxml2 (1017679)
Date Published: 2/16/2010
VMware ESX 3.5, Patch ESX350-201002408-BG: Updates MPT SCSI driver (1017680)
Date Published: 2/16/2010
VMware ESX 3.5, Patch ESX350-201002409-BG: Updates iSCSI driver and iSCSI daemon (1017682)
Date Published: 2/16/2010
VMware ESX 3.5, Patch ESX350-201002411-BG: Updates ATA PIIX SCSI driver (1017684)
Date Published: 2/16/2010
VMware ESXi
VMware Tools requires to be uninstalled when running the installation through the command line (1016314)
Date Published: 2/17/2010
VMware ESXi 3.5, Patch ESXe350-201002401-I-SG: Updates firmware (1017685)
Date Published: 2/16/2010
VMware vCenter Lifecycle Manager
Registering a resource or datastore in Lifecycle Manager fails with the error: The plugin VMware3 cannot be found (1015277)
Date Published: 2/18/2010
VMware vCenter Server
Removing a linked vCenter server from vSphere client fails: vCenter server not connected (1017631)
Date Published: 2/18/2010
I2C errors in vCenter (1016152)
Date Published: 2/18/2010
Cloning a virtual machine in vSphere fails with the error Number of virtual devices exceeds the maximum for a given controller (1016221)
Date Published: 2/18/2010
Datastores and networks are moved to upgrade folders after upgrading to vCenter Server 4.0 (1016236)
Date Published: 2/18/2010
Moving View-managed desktops between vCenter Servers is not supported (1018045)
Date Published: 2/18/2010
Configuring VMware vCenter Server to send alarms when virtual machines are running from snapshots (1018029)
Date Published: 2/16/2010
vCenter plugins fail after adding custom SSL certificates (1017577)
Date Published: 2/16/2010
VMware View Manager
Log in as current user feature requires DNS suffix and AD domain to match (1017226)
Date Published: 2/19/2010
Microsoft smart card removal group policy does not work with View smart card SSO (1018142)
Date Published: 2/19/2010
Color Settings for the Virtual Printer Sometimes Get Overridden by Local Client Settings (1018211)
Date Published: 2/18/2010
Virtual machines and VMware Tools stop responding when using a Windows 7 32bit virtual machine (1016879)
Date Published: 2/18/2010
Black View Client log in screen when using PCoIP (1016961)
Date Published: 2/18/2010
VMware Virtual Desktop Manager
Connected users do not display on the VDI Active Sessions tab (1009285)
Date Published: 2/16/2010
VMware VirtualCenter
Cannot add a virtual machine deployed from a template to a resource pool (1017524)
Date Published: 2/19/2010
Converter Import Wizard reports the error: Unable to find the server (1010829)
Date Published: 2/16/2010
VMware Workstation
Installing Windows XP to a physical partition in VMware Workstation fails with the error: vmscsi driver could not be found (1013225)
Date Published: 2/19/2010

Let me start by congratulating two well known community members with achieving the VCDX certification. Congrats Jason Boche and Scott Lowe, well done. These two guys just received the news that they passed the final stage and I am already been preparing the upcoming VCDX Defense Panels in Munich. Upcoming week is an exciting one for me personally, shifting jobroles... As of Monday I will be a vCloud Architect for VMware Advanced Services. My focus, in terms of blogging, will remain the same but of course will include more cloud related topics. But enough introduction blabla, let's start digging into the top-5:

• Frank Denneman - Impact of host local VM swap on HA and DRS
  This rule also applies when migrating a VM configured with a host-local VM swap file as the swap file needs to be created on the local VMFS volume of the destination host. Besides creating a new swap file, the swapped out pages must be copied out to the destination host. It’s not uncommon that a VM has pages swapped out, even if there is not memory pressure at that moment. ESX does not proactively return swapped pages back into machine memory. Swapped pages always stays swapped, the VM needs to actively access the page in the swap file to be transferred back to machine memory but this only occurs if the ESX host is not under memory pressure (more than 6% free physical memory).
• Jason Boche - My VCDX Defense Experience
  During the days leading up to my defense, I felt very confident.  I had been studying my design and going over all the Enterprise Admin and Design exam study material on a daily basis.  I had been brushing up on white papers and blog articles for areas which I felt I was weak on or had forgotten details of.  I brought a 3 ring binder filled with about 400 pages of documentation as well as every VI3 published .pdf known to mankind on my thumb drive.  While I didn’t read all the .pdf files, they were with me if I needed them for reference.  As it turned out, a few of the documents I crammed on the night before my panel would play a nice role during part of my defense.
• Scott Sauer - Performance troubleshooting VMware vSphere CPU , Memory
  Watch pCPU0 on non ESXi hosts.  If pCPU0 is consistently saturated, this will negatively impact performance of the overall system.  If you are using third party agents, ensure they are functioning properly.  A couple of years ago we had issues with HP System Insight management agents (Pegasus process) which was creating a heavy load on our COS.  All of the virtual machines looked fine from a performance perspective, but once we dug a little bit deeper, we discovered this was our root cause.
• Gabrie van Zanten - Converting vscsiStats data into Excel charts
  Some time ago I wrote a posting on how to use vscsiStats to gather even more data from your VMs and their SCSI performance ( See: Using vscsiStats – the full how-to). Last week I received an e-mail from Paul Dunn who had written an Excel macro that can read the output from the vscsiStats exported csv file and convert it into Excel histograms.Using the macro is very straight forward. First you let vscsiStats run for a while and have it export the data to csv file. For example with the following command (Do pay attention to just one capital S in vscsiStats): /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vscsiStats -p all -w id -c > /root/vscsiStats-export.csv
• Simon Gallagher - The Computing Super-Powers are Aligning Their Stacks
  With HP’s recent acquisition on 3Com and their existing HP ProCurve range I would hazard a guess that they will stop selling Cisco blade switches in future – I also note from an email that all HP partners got this week that all Cisco manufactured blade switch components were facing supply issues, stoking the fires somewhat to resellers to push the HP product with some choice anti-Cisco FUD which I won’t repeat here.

The View team is happy to announce the availability of VMware View 4.0.1, a maintenance release which includes bug fixes and resolutions to known issues such as the following:

• Single sign-on support using PCoIP for third party providers such as Sentillion and Imprivata
• Support for Virtual Printing (ThinPrint) with PCoIP enabled virtual desktops
• Localization of the View clients and documentation in French, German, Japanese and Simplified Chinese
• Support for international keyboards

This release is available as a free upgrade to customers with a currently active VMware View Support and Subscription (SnS) contract.

For more details on this release please see the release notes here: http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/view_pubs.html

4.0.1 is available for download here

For more information and to evaluate VMware View, please visit the VMware View website here

VMware is happy to report all systems have returned to normal.

You may contact Technical Support at this time for all severities at 1 877-4VMWARE

We deeply regret any inconvenience this may have caused.

Paravirtualized SCSI (PVSCSI) is a high-performance storage adapter available in VMware vSphere 4. The PVSCSI adapter is best-suited for virtual machines that run applications which generate heavy I/O.

The vSphere 4 performance study compares the performance of PVSCSI with LSI Logic for Fibre Channel and software iSCSI protocols. The experiments show that PVSCSI greatly improves CPU efficiency and improves throughput when the workload drives very high I/O rates. For Fibre Channel, the test results show that PVSCSI reduces the CPIO by 10%-30%. For iSCSI, PVSCSI reduces the CPIO by up to 25%.

Normalized CPIO for Fibre Channel (lower is better)

To read the full study, go to http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsp_4_pvscsi_perf.pdf. To learn how to configure disks to use the PVSCSI adapter, see http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1010398. For one workload exception where LSI Logic is better, see http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1017652.

If you’ve been to any Microsoft virtualization session over the past year, you’ve seen Microsoft comparing VMware vs. Microsoft costs to deploy 5 virtualization hosts and how VMware is supposedly much more expensive. We’ve already blogged in great detail about why Microsoft’s approach makes little sense in a virtual environment (because it totally ignores VM density, which is critical for accurate cost calculations in a virtualized datacenter) and how the claim itself is not credible.

But there is another point that needs to be considered – the cost of support. In these Microsoft cost comparisons, Microsoft likes to compare the cost of VMware Production SnS (25% of license price per year, formerly known as Platinum SnS) to that of Microsoft Software Assurance (25% of license price per year). VMware Production SnS includes subscription and 24x7, unlimited support to give our customers the peace of mind of knowing they can get support when they need it. Microsoft SA, on the other hand, includes subscription, but only one support incident for every $20,000 of server/CALs licenses purchased.

So what does a customer do once they’ve burned through the support incidents “included” with SA? Well, they have to buy more support from Microsoft of course. Option 1 is to purchase more per-incident support at $259 per incident (business hours only) or $515 per incident (after hours support). Option 2, if they are a larger enterprise, is to buy Microsoft Premier Support, which costs $210/hour (purchased in blocks of pre-paid hours). Microsoft’s cost comparisons to VMware leave out these additional support costs.

Now, your final support cost with Microsoft will depend on your environment and support requirements. But the next time you hear about or decide to do a cost comparison, remember to factor in VM density and the additional Microsoft support costs beyond SA.

VMware PEX 2010 was great... but it did mean I was extremely busy and didn't have time to create the top-5. I just picked the 5 best reads this week. Check it out:

• Jason Boche - My VCDX defense experience
  The first 75 minutes is spent “defending” my design.  I’ve got about a 15 slide deck to get through and to use as reference throughout the design defense.  I’d highly recommend putting as much reference as you can in the slide deck which you can yourself refer to during the defense.  It will help illustrate design choices and jog your memory for design elements which you’ve forgotten due to nervousness. The first 5-10 minutes I was pretty nervous and stuttered once or twice during my presentation. After that, I warmed up and it felt more like a good technical discussion with co-workers which I enjoyed.
• Mike La Spina - Running ZFS over NFS as a VMware Store
  In this architecture we are defining a fault tolerant configuration using two physical 1Gbe switches with a quad or dual Ethernet adapter(s). On the OpenSolaris storage head we are using IPMP aka IP Multipathing to establish a single IP address to serve our NFS store endpoint. A single IP is more appropriate for VMware environments as they do not support multiple NFS IP targets per NFS mount point.  IPMP provisions layer 3 load balancing and interface fault tolerance. IPMP commonly uses ICMP and default routes to determine interface failure states thus it well suited for a NAS protocol service layer. In a effort to reduce excessive ICMP rates we will aggregate the two dual interfaces into a single channel connection to each switch. This will allow us to define two test IP addresses for the IPMP service and keep our logical interface count down to a minimum. We are also defining a 2 port trunk/aggregate between the two physical switches which provides more path availability and reduces  switch failure detection times.
• Hany Michael - vSphere In Motion: A Real-World Live Migration Scenario
  I was having a discussion with one of the large enterprises here in Qatar lately, and I was quite surprised to know from them that they are hesitated to migrate their VI3.5 environment to vSphere because of the associated downtime. What surprised me was not the fact that they can't afford a downtime, I've spent 6 years of my career working in the Telecom sector and I know for a fact that 1 second of downtime could mean a disaster, or even translate to a loss of thousand of $$. What surprised me was that they didn't know that it is possible to do this migration without any downtime!
• Scott Drummonds - Inaccuracy of In-guest Performance Counters
  Every couple of months I receive a request for an explanation as to why performance counters in a virtual machine cannot be trusted. While it is unfairly cynical to say that in-guest counters are never right, accurate capacity management and troubleshooting should rely on the counters provided by vSphere in either vCenter or esxtop. The explanation is too short to merit a white paper but I hope a blog article will serve as the authoritative comment on the subject.
• Bouke Groenescheij - Removevmha
  Today I've updated the popular removevmhba script to version 5.0. This version now includes the removal of the drivers in vSphere ESX 4.0 update 1 isos. Thanks to Dinny Davies who did excellent work again on finding a solution for removing them on vSphere ESX4 (he just beat me to it Wink). Check the original ESX 3.x.x version here, and the new ESX 4.x.x document here. Go ahead, grab removevmhba from the downloads section and give it a try. It removes the drivers only during installation, so you don't need to bother disconnecting your SAN or zone out anything during installation (both Emulex and Qlogic - and also hardware initiated iSCSI adapters). It's much safer for a scripted installation of ESX using the UDA or EDA. After the installation you will have the drivers (since it is installed as a package) - so you will get connection back to your SAN.

VMware Converter
Windows Short File Name changes when performing a file-based cold conversion (1016020)
Date Published: 2/9/2010
VMware ESX
High I/O traffic in RHEL virtual machines after upgrading its host to ESX 4 (1015810)
Date Published: 2/12/2010
Troubleshooting unresponsive ESX Hosts (1017135)
Date Published: 2/12/2010
Failed to bind heartbeat socket using any IP (1017695)
Date Published: 2/12/2010
Cannot put ESX hosts in Standby Mode using vCenter (1018147)
Date Published: 2/12/2010
ESX 4.0 host fails to boot with the error: bootfsc.ext3: Unable to resolve UUID (1017162)
Date Published: 2/11/2010
Reformatting the local VMFS partition's block size in ESX 4.0 (1013210)
Date Published: 2/10/2010
ESX 4.0 Update 1 boot error: Can't boot system as genuine NUMA (1016141)
Date Published: 2/10/2010
Virtual machines display as invalid in vCenter Server (1015778)
Date Published: 2/8/2010
Raw Device Mapping option is greyed out (1017704)
Date Published: 2/8/2010
VMware Fusion
Troubleshooting a .kext file error when installing VMware Fusion (1017768)
Date Published: 2/8/2010
VMware vCenter Chargeback
VMware vCenter Chargeback and VMware vCenter Lab Manager Compatibility (1017829)
Date Published: 2/8/2010
VMware vCenter Converter
Importing a virtual machine causes the error: unknown error generated by converter client (1016125)
Date Published: 2/8/2010
VMware vCenter Server
Accessing the Storage View tab in vCenter Client fails (1012793)
Date Published: 2/12/2010
Uninstalling vCenter Server 4.0 fails (1017596)
Date Published: 2/12/2010
After a power outage or abrupt shutdown, vCenter Server service fails with the error: Windows No disk (1017804)
Date Published: 2/11/2010
Virtual machines with vNetwork Distributed Switch lose network connectivity after HA failover (1017861)
Date Published: 2/11/2010
Determining the root cause of vCenter status alarms continually changing from green to yellow (1017878)
Date Published: 2/11/2010
Installing Converter plug-ins through vCenter fails (1018057)
Date Published: 2/10/2010
Storage Management Service fails to initialize with error: java.lang.NumberFormatException: For input string (1017227)
Date Published: 2/9/2010
Sysprep customization fails with the error: Software Licence agreement for Windows has been tampered with (1016050)
Date Published: 2/9/2010
VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager
Determining which Storage Replication Adapter is being used with Site Recovery Manager (1017904)
Date Published: 2/8/2010
VMware View Manager
Collecting diagnostic information for VMware View 3.x and 4.0.x (1017939)
Date Published: 2/8/2010
VMware VirtualCenter
Health status of all sensors on VirtualCenter Server and VI Client inconsistent on localized versions (1018219)
Date Published: 2/12/2010

plowing (photo by william couch)

article by David Hunter - Chief Technology Officer, WWW Public Sector

Last month I wrote an article about integrating virtualization and Desktop Virtualization into a Social Distancing contingency plan to deal with a Pandemic outbreak.  The weather events of this past week in Washington, DC offer another catalyst for introducing this technology into your playbook as well.  A record 55.6 inches of snow has fallen in Washington DC this week, surpassing the previous 1898-1899 record of 54.4 inches and forcing portions of Federal Government to shutdown.  The inability for  employees to get into the office undoubtedly contributed to a decrease in productivity for those agencies without a TeleWork program.  Not only are Federal employees impacted, but think of all the contractors, consultants and temporary workers affected as well.  Add it all up, and according to OPM's John Berry, the current Federal Shutdown is costing upwards of $100 million per day.

VMware has been working with many Federal agencies and departments to include Desktop Virtualization to enable a robust TeleWork Program.   Imagine you are in your house sitting in front of a window watching the snow come down, yet still able to perform portions of your work as if you were sitting in your office chair.   But what do you need to realize this picture of warm and cozy computing?  Start with a full end to end virtualization solution, from the back end servers to a flexible delivery mechanism that delivers the best end user experience.  Combine this with cost effective scalability, ease of management, flexibility, and security and have a recipe for success.

VMware's View Desktop Virtualization provides Federal users with instant, reliable and secure access to their desktops from any device – government furnished equipment or personal computers - or platform over the network. VMware View streamlines desktop and application management, accelerates provisioning and improves security through centralization, resulting in an immediately accessible, always available desktop for Federal employees.  Just like the recent Air Force recruiting television commercials, this isn’t a game but reality.  If you want to hear more specifics, I recommend that you attend the View Teleworking Webcast on Feb. 25th. 

Many of you are familiar with Hal Rottenberg, who is the co-host of the PowerScripting Podcast along with Jon Walz. Hal’s resource is a great resource for anyone learning or using Windows PowerShell. You may also recall that Hal is the guy who wrote the “PowerCLI Bible”, Managing VMware Infrastructure with Windows PowerShell.

Well Hal’s been hard at work again this time producing some great PowerCLI content for TrainSignal in their newest video training series, vSphere Pro Series Volume 1.

vSphere Pro Series Volume 1 doesn’t just cover PowerCLI, in fact it covers:

• VMware View
• VMware ThinApp
• Cisco Nexus 1000v
• And of course PowerCLI.

For you PowerCLI fans out there here’s what to expect in Hal’s PowerCLI training:

1. Introduction to PowerCLI
2. PowerShell Basics
3. PowerCLI Concepts – Parts 1 and 2
4. PowerCLI in the Real World
5. PowerCLI Cmdlet Deep Dives

We’re finding that the admins who know PowerCLI really well are the rock stars of their team because through their script-writing kung fu they save their team mates tons of time and can easily come up with solutions to most any crisis. These videos will put you directly on the path to PowerCLI mastery.

As a big bonus, those of you who were paying attention at VMworld 2009 will also remember that VMware View is soon going to introduce its own set of PowerShell functionality, so if you’re a View expert there’s no better way to get ready for the new power and flexibility you’re soon going to have.

So be sure to visit TrainSignal and check out Pro Series Volume 1 today!

Greetings –

By way of introduction my name is Mike Coleman and I’m a member of the Technical Marketing staff here at VMware. Part of my role is helping our customers and partners understand our value proposition vis-à-vis other desktop virtualization offerings on the market.

Just a bit on my background - early in my career I spent over a decade as a senior level IT engineer working on some pretty big installations. From IT I moved to Microsoft and worked as a product manager on desktop operating systems including Windows 98 (I apologize), Windows 2000, and Windows XP. In January of 2008, after a brief stint at Intel helping to deliver virtualization solutions to the reseller channel, I joined VMware in the role I have now.

But enough about me – onto the topic at hand . . . .

Recently Citrix posted some documents around architecting and deploying desktop virtualization implementations, and I wanted to take a few moments to give you my perspective.

First, I think it’s great that Citrix is getting around to publishing some real scalability numbers for XenDesktop – I’m not sure they’ve gone far enough in their efforts, but I think it’s great that they’re doing something.

As most of our customers know VMware has put out a number of different reference architectures for VMware View, and our take has always been that reference architectures need to provide a comprehensive picture on what it takes to deploy an enterprise implementation of our solution. This includes not only detailing the requisite software and hardware components, but how do those components scale in a real world implementation.

Unfortunately for Citrix customers the documents released fall short in a lot of areas.

First, their “reference architecture” (titled “XenDesktop Reference Architecture”) merely outlines the multitude of components their solution requires. There is no indication to customers on how these components scale – which is the type of information companies need if they want to being to understand how to build and deploy a desktop virtualization implementation.

As mentioned before, we have always given prescriptive guidance not only on the components necessary for a successful View implementation, but also how customers can expect those components to scale.

While the “reference architecture” didn’t elaborate on scalability, Citrix did publish a couple of documents that dealt with sizing various XenDesktop features.

One of the documents entitled “Delivering 5,000 Desktops with XenDesktop 4” discusses how Provisioning Server can theoretically (I say theoretically because they actually only tested to just over 3,000 desktops) scale to deliver 5,000 desktops from a single physical server.

It certainly sounds impressive, but there appears to be some confusion inside of Citrix as some of their press materials refer to these as “virtual desktops” while other sources more accurately refer them as streamed desktops. To be clear this document is not about managed virtual desktops – it refers to PC’s being booted across the network to fat client PC’s (or diskless workstations) and operating the same way a traditional PC operates today (along with all the headaches of a traditional PC).

I will say one thing that’s interesting to note is that this solution isn’t virtualized on XenServer – it is, in fact, virtualized on VMware ESX 3.5 – finally something both Citrix and VMware can agree on.

Lastly – there is a document on single server scalability where Citrix touts being able to host 16 (actually 16.25 – but since you can’t host .25 desktops we’ll just call it 16) virtual desktops per CPU core. This is something to be proud of, we were certainly proud when we published the VMware, Cisco, EMC reference architecture (VCE RA) several months ago and demonstrated the ability to deliver 16 virtual desktops per CPU core. The thing that makes the VCE RA even more impressive is that we were able to deliver that density in only 48GB of RAM whereas the Citrix architecture uses 72GB of RAM.

If you would like to read the VCE RA you can check it out here: http://www.vmware.com/go/vce-ra-brief

In the end scaling a desktop virtualization solution isn’t about how many VMs can you cram onto one server. A true scalability discussion needs to include all the components needed for an end-to-end desktop virtualization implementation – desktop brokering, secure access, provisioning services, etc. This is the approach we’ve taken when creating our reference architectures, and it’s one that resonates with our customers

In closing, our leadership in scalability – along with our advantages in licensing costs allow us to deliver virtual desktops at a price that can come in at ½ of what a similar Citrix solution would cost. Couple that with the fact that VMware View is less complex, while delivering a complete desktop virtualization solution and you can see why more and more customers are choosing VMware View every day.

I plan to come back over the next few weeks and discuss in-depth our advantages in terms of cost, complexity, and completeness of our solution (ok that doesn’t sound great, but I’m a sucker for alliterations) – so stay tuned.