Roger Lund

Join the VMware Virtualization forum is going on now

http://vshow.on24.com/vshow/virtualization

http://www.mikedipetrillo.com has a very interesting article, titled : Using Perfmon in a Windows VM

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I got a question from a customer as well as a partner recently about whether or not they should use Perfmon in a Windows VM. I emailed our internal performance team to make sure that my answer of “no – it could give you bad results” was an ok answer. Turns out they’re in the process of writing a KB article on the subject and with their permissions I’ve pasted the draft of that KB article below. NOTE: This applies to ESX 3.5 and prior. Talk to your local VMware SE to get some insight into how things are changing. Unfortunately, I can’t talk about future offerings that haven’t been publicly talked about (press, VMworld, etc) in a blog posting.

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To ensure the performance numbers are accurate for a virtual machine, perform functional testing on the virtual machine. The internal workings of the virtual machine should not be known by the tester or the performance tools. Follow these guidelines:

• Use performance tools that are located outside of the virtual machine you are monitoring.
• If possible, run the performance tools on a host where the virtual machine is not running.
• For load tests, generate the load outside of the virtual machine being measured.
• Do not use benchmarking tools. Instead, measure real applications.

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Please refer to the Full Link to read the KB Article, I have quoted just a part.

http://www.mikedipetrillo.com/mikedvirtualization/2008/12/using-perfmon-in-a-windows-vm.html

Thanks to Mike.

http://www.mikedipetrillo.com has a update on the ESXi writing via the RCLI. Titled : UPDATE: VMware RCLI now writes to ESXi Free Hosts

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I wrote a few days ago that the ESXi 3.5 U3 update unlocked the API set. Well, this was only partially true. I was just trying out some power operations and the command line kept staring back at me blank. I went back and pinged some of the folks in engineering and low and behold I ran into bigger issues. Turns out that while fixing an API bug the API set got partially unlocked. Yes, you read that right, VMware didn’t mean to unlock the API set – at least not wholly and not yet.

So, if you went out and started madly coding some killer VirtualCenter Client replacement then hold off because I’m told the U4 update will lock things back down again. Good news is that only customers who are using the free version of ESXi have been affected. VirtualCenter and VI (Foundation, Standard, Enterprise) customers are not affected since they had rights to the API set all along.

That’s what I get for running off and blogging about new finds too quick.

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Thanks for the update Mike. I guess that it’s back to the drawing board for those of us trying to do more with less.

Full Post http://www.mikedipetrillo.com/mikedvirtualization/2008/12/update-vmware-rcli-now-writes-to-esxi-free-hosts.html

http://blog.scottlowe.org has a blog post titled : Enabling Enhanced VMXNet

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I’ve been doing some additional digging into jumbo frames and other networking configurations, and along the way I came across references to VMware’s Enhanced VMXNet network adapters. These were apparently introduced in VMware ESX 3.5 and are necessary in order for virtual machines to take advantage of features like TCP Segmentation Offload (TSO) or jumbo frames.

The funny thing is this: even though the Enhanced VMXNet adapters are supported on both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2003 and a few different flavors of Linux, the only way to be able to specify that you want to use an Enhanced VMXNet driver is if the virtual machine is configured as 64-bit Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition. This is outlined in this VMware KB article describing to how enable enhanced VMXNet drivers in Windows Server 2003.

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Please refer to the Full post for the full document.

Full Post : http://blog.scottlowe.org/2008/12/15/enabling-enhanced-vmxnet/

Thanks to the Author.

Jason posted a blog entry on ESX partitioning per my request, tiled: MEPS (my ESX partitioning scheme)

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Here is a topic that has been discussed in great depth on the VMTN forums over the years but Roger Lund has asked me if I would post my ESX partitioning scheme. Here it is, with a bit of my reasoning which I’ve learned along the way. Enjoy!
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Please look at Jason’s blog for the table and information below.

Full Post http://www.boche.net/blog/?p=674

Thanks Jason!

I signed up for http://twitter.com Find me at http://twitter.com/rogerlund

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PlanetVM http://planetvm.net/blog has posted a blog entry titled: What to do with your NICs

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I was going to post on pNIC configuation, but it seems that Ed Haletky (Texiwill) has already done so,

• Blue Gears – 2 Physical NICs with VMware ESX
• Blue Gears – 3 Physical NICs with VMware ESX
• Blue Gears – 4 Physical NICs with VMware ESX
• Blue Gears – 5 Physical NICs with VMware ESX
• Blue Gears – 6 Physical NICs with VMware ESX

Why reinvent the wheel I say, thankyou Ed for an excelent series of posts

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Thanks for the links Planetvm

Full post http://planetvm.net/blog/?p=142

Jason Boche @ http://www.boche.net/blog posted a blog post titled : hgfs registry value causes issues with Terminal Services VMs

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originally brought this up back in October with my Tip for virtualization Citrix servers invovling user profiles post. I’m bringing it up again because this week VMware updated their knowledgebase document 1317 Windows Guest Cannot Update hgfs.dat and it’s missing a piece of key information that administrators need to be aware of. I’m not going to rehash the whole hgfs registry value again. You can read the details about that in my October post linked above. The workarounds for hgfs issues caused by VMware Tools do work, however, what’s not mentioned is that a re-installation or upgrade of VMware Tools will re-install the hgfs value back in the registry thus introducing problems again. With the amount of ESX/ESXi version upgrades coming from VMware lately, which in turn cause VMware Tools upgrades, this scenario is not going to be uncommon for anyone who is virtualizing Terminal Services or Citrix. Add to that, VMware even recently released an interim VMware Tools upgrade patch subsequent to ESX 3.5.0 Update 3 (ESXe350-200811401-T-BG).
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Please refer to the full post http://www.boche.net/blog/?p=659

This is one of those things that is a good read, even if you are not running TS in VMware.

Thanks to Jason.

http://vmguy.com posted his weekly KB articles, below I quoted him.

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Well, VMware can update their HCL distribution format but I can still blog on new/updated KB articles that I see customers asking the most questions on. Here’s this week’s list:

• VMware Update Manager Network Port Requirements
• Manually removing VMware Tools for Windows
• Tech Support Mode for Emergency Support
• USB devices not supported in ESX host virtual machines
• Is Running Older VMware Tools in ESX Server Guests Supported?
• Guidelines for Extending a VMFS Volume
• How do I change a forgotten root password on my ESX Server Host?
• Determining the correct version of sysprep to use
• VMware Tools Upgrade for Windows Guest Cannot Continue

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Full post http://vmguy.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/306