About the same time I pressed publish on my impressions of iPhoto ’09, looks like another article went live on Gizmodo. It is full of tips and tricks and is a more exhaustive review of the software. http://i.gizmodo.com/5142596/iphoto-09-the-definitive-review-and-tip-sheet
January 2009
I had pretty high expections of iPhoto ’09 after its debut during MacWorld. The features I saw weren’t revolutionary, but they were welcome additions to the software. Facial recognition and geo-tagging were the two key features introduced, but it was the social networking ties that really shined. I have been playing with the software for several days and overall the features added are nice. But the software seems a little sluggish compared to the ’08 version and we can see some of the eye candy (core animation effects) added throughout, which don’t really add much.
Jason Boche has taken the time to outline Idle Memory Tax in VMware ESX.
Jason, I wanted to thank you for taking the time on this, and I am hoping you do not mind me quoting your Article.
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Memory over commit is a money/infrastructure saving feature that fits perfectly within the theme of two of virtualization’s core concepts: doing more with less hardware, and helping save the environment with greenness. While Microsoft Hyper-V offers no memory over commit or page sharing technologies, VMware has understood the value in these technologies long before VI3. I’ve mentioned this before – if you haven’t read it yet, take a look at Carl Waldspurger’s 2002 white paper on Memory Resource management in VMware ESX Server.
One of VMware’s memory over commit technologies is called Idle Memory Tax. IMT basically allows the VMKernel to reclaim unused guest VM memory by assigning a higher “cost value” to unused allocated shares. The last piece of that sentence is key – did you catch it? This mechanism is tied to shares. When do shares come into play? When there is contention for physical host RAM allocated to the VMs. Or in short, when physical RAM on the ESX host has been over committed – we’ve granted more RAM to guest VMs than we actually have on the ESX host to cover at one time. When this happens, there is contention or a battle for who actually gets the physical RAM. Share values are what determine this. I don’t want to get too far off track here as this discussion is specifically on Idle Memory Tax, but shares are the foundation so they are important to understand.
Back to Idle Memory Tax. Quite simply it’s a mechanism to take idle/unused memory from guest VMs that are hogging it in order to give that memory to another VM where it’s more badly needed. Sort of like Robin Hood for VI. By default this is performed using VMware’s balloon driver which is the more optimal of the two available methods. Out of the box, the amount of idle memory that will be reclaimed is 75% as configured by Mem.IdleTax under advanced host configuration. The VMKernel polls for idle memory in guest VMs every 60 seconds. This interval was doubled from ESX2.x where the polling period was every 30 seconds.
Here’s a working example of the scenario:
- Two guest VMs live on an ESX/ESXi host with 8GB RAM
- Each VM is assigned 8GB RAM and 8,192 shares. Discounting memory overhead, content based page sharing, and COS memory usage, we’ve effectively over committed our memory by 100%
- VM1 is running IIS using only 1GB RAM
- VM2 is running SQL and is request the use of all 8GB RAM
- Idle Memory Tax allows the VMKernel to “borrow” 75% of the 7GB of allocated but unused RAM from VM1 and give it to VM2. 25% of the unused allocated RAM will be left for the VM as a cushion for requests for additional memory before other memory over commit technologies kick in
Here are the values under ESX host advanced configuration that we can tweak to modify the default behavior of Idle Memory Tax:
- Mem.IdleTax – default: 75, range: 0 to 99, specifies the percent of idle memory that may be reclaimed by the tax
- Mem.SamplePeriod – default: 60 in ESX3.x 30 in ESX2.x, range: 0 to 180, specifies the polling interval in seconds at which the VMKernel will scan for idle memory
- Mem.IdleTaxType – default: 1 (variable), range: 0 (flat – use paging mechanism) to 1 (variable – use the balloon driver), specifies the method at which the VMKernel will reclaim idle memory. It is highly recommended to leave this at 1 to use the balloon driver as paging is more detrimental to the performance of the VM
VMware recommends that changes to Idle Memory Tax are not necessary, or even appropriate. If you get into the situation where Idle Memory Tax comes into play, you need to question the VMs that have large quantities of allocated but idle memory. Rather than allocating more memory to the VM than it needs, thus wrongly inflating its share value, consider reducing the allocated amounts of RAM to those VMs.
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I thought this was very interesting, I my self have never played with this setting.
I did have some questions on performance on both the VMware Host side, and VMware Guest side. Do either have a performance hit when ESX is using Idle Memory Tax to move that memory.
I could see large uses for this, if you have a system that only uses large amounts of memory at certain times of the day.
In fact, would you want to design your systems to use this ( by forcing low ram ), if you have certain systems that run at night, when other systems are idle ( with more ram) that normally are only used during the day?
Source Post http://www.boche.net/blog/index.php/2009/01/29/idle-memory-tax/
One of my other passions is the TV show LOST on ABC. I’ve been an avid Lostie since it debuted about four years ago. And what I’ve found as a geeky side-game is the producer’s use of old Apple hardware in the series. We have seen one of these in the Swan station, which played prominently into the story line as the survivors had to enter their string of numbers every 108 minutes to keep the station from exploiding. We also saw another in the Pearl station, with an Imagewriter attached… Given the history on the island and the timelines, its a very cool addition for the core geek audience that follows the show.
In the past couple weeks, we saw another Apple computer at the tail end of the episode, off the island. One character is trying to track the location of the Island using the computer and a giant pendiulum. (I feel sorry for anyone reading this who doesn’ watch the show… I’m sure you’re Lost.) But it has to say something about culture that these machines have endured for almost 30 years. I think its a major highlight for the significance these computers played in the personal computer revolution. And just one of those geeky tie-ins that I feed on…
A local vendor sent me these links, and I thought I would share.
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http://www.xiotech.com/About_Press_Release.aspx?ID=NR-09-17-08 Virtual View, recognized in Storage Software for Virtualization category, dramatically simplifies storage monitoring, management and provisioning tasks in VMWare virtual environments
http://www.drunkendata.com/?p=2100 “Xiotech gets my nod for best technology initiative of 2008”
http://www.byteandswitch.com/document.asp?doc_id=169956&WT.svl=news2_1 Article featuring Dan Lewis of USC Marshall School of Business. Lewis declares that his Emprise 7000 system provides an 8x better performance than his old HP EVA3000. He also praises Virtual View, self-healing capabilities, and reduced energy consumption
http://searchstorage.techtarget.com.au/articles/28223-Five-hot-storage-technologies-for-2-9-and-five-flops- ISE among the top 5 technologies for 2009
http://www.drunkendata.com/?p=2085 Jon Toigo comments on the most important IT-related things that happened in 2008. Xiotech holds both the #1 and #2 spots – with ISE and Web Services based management.
http://www.crn.com/storage/212501502;jsessionid=4JXY4Y42KKETWQSNDLRSKH0CJUNN2JVN?pgno=9 The 10 Biggest Storage Stories Of 2008
http://www.xiotech.com/About_Press_Release.aspx?ID=NR-12-15-08 Xiotech Selected as 2009 Hot Companies Finalist
http://www.xiotech.com/About_Press.aspx# More, more, more
http://www.networkworld.com/supp/2009/ndc1/012609-storage-rethink.html?page=1 Article on Web Services and ISE
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Source Xiotech and local Vendor.
Exchange 2003 Outgoing SMTP delivery issues
We have had an Exchange 2003 mail server for a few years and have had great results without many big configuration changes, until now. Recently we added a new Qwest T-1 and changed our firewall to a Watchgaurd. After the change we have had a number of problems delivering mail to certain hosts. These hosts require that your mail server send mail with certain mail header requirements.
I am trying to get input on what’s required on all levels for mail delivery.
For outgoing mail to pass header requirements what should be in place at your DNS provider Ex: A record, your ISP Ex: Reverse DNS, your firewall and internal Windows DNS server, and your Exchange server?
Currently our mail server is sending an EHLO that won’t resolve. The format is internalhostDNSserver.internaldoamin.xxx.
Here is an example display of full headers received portion when I receive mail in my Yahoo account.
Received:
from 209.188.99.98 (EHLO appsrv10.mahowaldins.net) (209.188.99.98) by mta152.mail.re2.yahoo.com with SMTP; Wed, 28 Jan 2009 19:14:08 -0800
What should this be? If the internal mail server is called “exch” can you use mail.doamin.com then rely in internal DNS to do the rest?
How should this also correlate with your ISP reverse DNS, should they matchup some how?
Solution:
The solution was provided by Web: http://www.linkedin.com/in/astorrs Twitter: twitter.com/astorrs
http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/Sender-Policy-Framework.html
SPF or Sender Policy Framework will help your Exchange Server delivery mail smoothly.
Dave Graham @ http://flickerdown.com wrote a blog about going tapeless.
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I was asked the other day about the potential for finally going tapeless in Commercial and Enterprise spaces. Truth be told, this is becoming a more common occurence as those mechanical beasts hit the tail-end of their maintenance windows. With that in mind, what are some (not all) of the business drivers that move enterprises from tape to disk (or other mediums)?
“Tape is Dead!” has echoed through the halls of storage IT for quite some time. It’s been an ideological pursuit of the “next generation backup” mantra hawked by the Tier Ones in the storage space. What has been noted is the continued price depreciation of disk as capacity has increased, the tighter compliance metrics from government agencies, as well as the legacy of natural disasters that have arrived on the scene since 2001. Let’s unpack these a bit.
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He discusses the following topic’s.
Price Depreciations and Increased Capacity
Tighter Compliance
Remediating the Problem
Price Depreciation and Capacity Increase – Tapeless
Tighter Compliance – Tapeless
Natural Disasters – Tapeless
Please check out the full post
http://flickerdown.com/2009/01/going-tapeless-in-enterprise/
http://technodrone.blogspot.com has a write up on Converting a VM from A older version of Xen to VMware using the VMware Converter 4.0 titled : Converting a Linux Virtual Machine With an LVM
He went through quite a process. Make sure to check it out.
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I was entrusted with the task to try and migrate a VM from Xen 3.2 to ESX. Well you would think that is a trivial task – it should be. But let us not forget that we are talking here about version 3.2, which is two generations back from the current Citrix Xensource which is in use today.
After successfully migrating it I would like to share with you the procedure.
This was done on a Xen Guest VM runnning Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES release 3 (Taroon Update 7)
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Full Source Post.
http://technodrone.blogspot.com/2009/01/converting-linux-virtual-machine-with.html
I saw these come across the VMware RSS feed today, and I have personally had time problems in Linux VM’s, so I wanted to post these links.
Time in a Linux virtual machine jumps backward when using clock=pit
KB Article
1006086
Updated
Jan. 27, 2009
Time runs slower than real time due to lost timer interrupts
KB Article
1006088
Updated
Jan. 27, 2009
KB Article
1006113
Updated
Jan. 27, 2009
Time in virtual machine drifts due to hardware timer drift
KB Article
1006072
Updated
Jan. 27, 2009
Time runs too fast in a Windows virtual machine when the Multimedia Timer interface is used
KB Article
1005953
Updated
Jan. 27, 2009
KB Article
1005861
Updated
Jan. 27, 2009
Time drifts in virtual machines and the service console due to the HPET misreporting its frequency
KB Article
1006090
Updated
Jan. 27, 2009
I hope these help those of you that are having time issues in VM’s are able to
Thanks to VMware.
http://vmguy.com/wordpress/index.php posted his weekly Notable KB Articles from the week.
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27 Articles new or updated this past week. The first one is very relevant.
- We are experiencing issues with the knowledge base
- Verifying isolation mode usage in ThinApp
- Troubleshooting Adding an ESX Server Host to a VMware High Availability Cluster
- Limitations to application support in ThinApp
- Troubleshooting the build process in VMware ThinApp
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None of these hit home for me, ( just didn’t apply) so I went looking for more, and found the following.
How to Store Snapshot Files on an Alternate LUN
Datastores no longer available during upgrade
I’ll quote them below.
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How to Store Snapshot Files on an Alternate LUN
KB Article
1003023
Updated
Jan. 26, 2009
Products
VMware ESX
VMware VirtualCenter
Details
Snapshot files are stored in the directory where the <VMname>.vmx file exists.
If you have limited space on the LUN where the <VMname>.vmx file exists, it may be necessary to specify an alternate location for the delta files that are created when you take snapshots of a VM.
Solution
This can be accomplised by defining an alternative working directory in the <VMname>.vmx for the VM. The side effect of defining an alternative working directory is that the swap file will also be created in the alternative location.
The step to do this are:
1) Power off the VM
2) Edit the <VMname>.vmx file
* add a line that looks like the following **
workingDir = "/vmfs/volumes/47384c5e-41fd4f1c-69c3-00163581bcf/directory_for_vmname_snapshotfile/"
3) Remove the VM from inventory in VirtualCenter
4) Add the VM to inventory in VirtuaCenter
5) Power on VM
6) Take snapshots as desired
Note: It may not be necessary to remove from inventory and add back into inventory, but in repro this produced consistent results.
You cannot use the advanced edit setting feature in VirtualCenter to add this line to the <VMname>.vmx file and have this take effect.
Note: This appears to only work as expected when you edit the .vmx file directly.
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And
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Datastores no longer available during upgrade
KB Article
1008031
Updated
Jan. 25, 2009
Products
VMware Lab Manager
Product Versions
VMware Lab Manager 3.0.x
Symptoms
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Cannot complete an upgrade from Lab Manager 2.x to 3.x.
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Required VMFS datastores no longer available.
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An error is received while upgrading Lab Manager from version 2.x to 3.x after specifying VirtualCenter credentials in the configuration wizard.
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The wizard does not proceed forward until each unavailable datastore is deleted from the configuration.
Resolution
This issue occurs when the credentials you gave for VirtualCenter do not have sufficient permissions to access the datastores and other required objects.
To verify the permissions, connect to VirtualCenter using the same credentials specified in the Lab Manager configuration wizard. If you are not able to see the configured hosts, clusters, or datastores, you must reconfigure the account privileges to make these objects accessible, or use a different account.
For more information on configuring VirtualCenter permissions, see the Basic System Administration guide, specifically the Managing Users, Groups, Permissions, and Roles section.
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Those two caught my eye.
Thanks to The VMguy and VMware.