I wanted to wish all the viewer’s a Happy Holiday’s. I also wanted to thank everyone for viewing the Blog. I hope everyone has a Fantastic Holiday, and a Happy New Year!
Roger L
Category:
News
blog.scottlowe.org reports random reboots, check out this Blog Post : Random Reboots with VMware ESX 3.5 Update 3
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I’ve been communicating with a reader who is experiencing random reboots of virtual machines on his HA/DRS-enabled cluster running VMware ESX 3.5 Update 3. At first, I thought his problem was related to the bug with VM failure monitoring that I discussed here, but upon further discussion the random reboots are continuing to occur even when VM failure monitoring is disabled. The only relief the reader has been able to find thus far has been to completely disable VMware HA on his cluster, which—to be honest—is a less than acceptable solution.
After a little bit of digging around, I turned up this VMware Communities thread, in which several other users also indicate they are seeing the same kinds of problems. The thread closes out by referencing this post by Duncan Epping regarding the VM failure monitoring bug. Clearly, though, this bug should not be affecting users who do not have VM failure monitoring enabled. I also found this blog post about another user having the issue, although it sounds like his problem was solved by disabling VM failure monitoring.
Further research turned up this KB article on a post-Update 3 patch that may address some of the random reboot issues. Judging from the KB article, it looks like the random reboots may be caused due to an unexpected interaction between VMotion and an option to automatically upgrade VMware Tools. This is just speculation, of course, but the symptoms seem to fit.
Have any other users out there experienced this problem? If so, what was the fix, if any? It sounds like there may be more to this issue than perhaps I first suspected.
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Thanks for this update, if this is a problem, we need to know about it.
Full Post : http://blog.scottlowe.org/2008/12/23/random-reboots-with-vmware-esx-35-update-3/
http://www.yellow-bricks.com has a blog titled : Heap size VMFS3
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Posted by Duncan Epping in December 19th, 2008
I was talking to a fellow consultant today. He ran into the following error messages at one of his customer sites:
vmkernel: 8:18:59:58.640 cpu2:1410)WARNING: Heap: 1370: Heap_Align(vmfs3, 4096/4096 bytes, 4 align) failed. caller: 0×8fdbd0
vmkernel: 8:18:59:58.640 cpu2:1410)WARNING: Heap: 1266: Heap vmfs3: Maximum allowed growth (24) too small for size (8192)
During the conversation I knew I’d seen this problem before. But the problem that I witnessed was related to a high threshold value in Vizioncore vFoglight. I knew it was possible to change the setting:
1. Open vCenter, and click a specific host
2. Click on the “Configurations” tab
3. Click on Advanced Settings, VMFS3
4. Change the value of “VMFS3.MaxHeapSizeMB”
The default value is 16MB, this allows for a maximum of 4TB of open vmdk’s on a single host. The max setting is 128MB which allows for a maximum of 32TB of open vmdk’s on a single host. Keep this in mind when designing your environment.
Keep in mind that this is ESX 3.5 only, you can’t change the heap size in ESX 3.0.x.
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Looked like something that we could all run into.
Full Post http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2008/12/19/heap-size-vmfs3
Microsoft has a new Security Advisory : Microsoft Security Advisory (961040)
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Microsoft is investigating new public reports of a vulnerability that could allow remote code execution on systems with supported editions of Microsoft SQL Server 2000, Microsoft SQL Server 2005, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Edition, Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Desktop Engine (MSDE 2000), Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Desktop Engine (WMSDE), and Windows Internal Database (WYukon). Systems with Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 Service Pack 4, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 3, and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 are not affected by this issue.
Microsoft is aware that exploit code has been published on the Internet for the vulnerability addressed by this advisory. Our investigation of this exploit code has verified that it does not affect systems that have had the workarounds listed below applied. Currently, Microsoft is not aware of active attacks that use this exploit code or of customer impact at this time
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Please refer to the following link for more information.
Full Post http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/961040.mspx
http://www.mikedipetrillo.com has a blog write up on Microsoft, and them fibbing about their licensing Titled : Microsoft Lies to Their Customers – Again
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Over the past couple of weeks I’ve seen a trend at customer sites. Nearly every customer I visited in the New York city area told me the same thing when the competition was brought up.
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So for those playing along at home. Here’s the part where I show you where to find the correct information on Microsoft’s site.
Windows Server 2008: Microsoft Licensing FAQ for Windows Server 2008 clearly states the following.
Q. Do the virtualization licensing rights of Windows Server 2008 apply when used with non-Microsoft software virtualization technologies?
A: Yes. The use rights apply regardless of the virtualization product being used.
Windows Server 2003: Page 7 of the “Licensing Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 to Run with Virtualization Technologies” document also states the following.
If you have assigned a single license of Windows Server Standard Edition to the server running ESX, then you may run one instance at a time of Windows Server Standard Edition. If you have assigned a single license of Windows Server Enterprise Edition to the server running ESX, then you may run up to four instances at a time of Windows Server. You may not run a fifth instance under the same Enterprise Edition license because that right requires that the fifth instance be running hardware virtualization software and software managing and servicing the OSEs on the server. However, Datacenter Edition permits unlimited running of instances in virtual OSEs.
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Thanks Mike, always looking out for us.
Full Post : http://www.mikedipetrillo.com/mikedvirtualization/2008/12/microsoft-lies-to-their-customers-again.html
http://www.hypervizor.com has a nice Video titled : Video Tutorial: VMware SRM : 01 Installation
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This is the first video tutorial in a series to come for VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM), one of the most interesting and efficient products from VMware. It’s my very first video in my blog also so please leave your comments and let me know your opinion. Don’t forget to subscribe to my RSS feed to be notified in time for future videos.
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Check it out.
http://it.anandtech.com/ has a nice write up on Server CPU’s Titled : The Best Server CPUs Compared, Part 1
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The past several months have seen both Intel and AMD introducing interesting updates to their CPU lines. Intel started with the E-stepping of the Xeon. Even at 3GHz, the four cores of the Xeon 5450 need 80W at the most, and if speed is all you care about a 120W 5470 is available at 3.33GHz. The big news came of course from AMD. The “only native x86 quad-core” is finally shining bright thanks to a very successful transition to 45nm immersion lithography as you can read here. The result is a faster and larger 6MB L3 cache, higher clock speeds, and lower memory latency. AMD’s quad-core is finally ready to be a Xeon killer.
So it was time for a new server CPU shoot out as server buyers are confronted with quickly growing server CPU pricelists. Talking about pricelists, is someone at marketing taking revenge on a strict math teacher that made him/her suffer a few years ago? How else can you explain that the Xeon 5470 is faster than the 5472, and that the Xeon 5472 and 5450 are running at the same clock speed? The deranged Intel (and in a lesser degree AMD) numbering system now forces you to read through spec sheets the size of a phone book just to get an idea of what you are getting. Or you could use a full-blown search engine to understand what exactly you can or will buy. The marketing departments are happy though: besides the technical white papers you need to read to build a server, reading white papers to simply buy a CPU is now necessary too. Market segmentation and creative numbering…a slightly insane combination.
Anyway, if you are an investor trying to understand how the different offerings compare, or you are out to buy a new server and are asking yourself what CPU should be in there, this article will help guide you through the newest offerings of Intel and AMD. In addition, as the Xeon 55xx – based on the Nehalem architecture – is not far off, we will also try it to see what this CPU will bring to the table. This article is different from the previous ones, as we have changed the collection of benchmarks we use to evaluate server CPUs. Read on, and find out why we feel this is a better and more realistic approach.
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Thanks to the lower world switch times, higher clock speed, and larger cache, the new “Shanghai” Opteron 8384 improves the already impressive scores of the AMD “Barcelona” 8356 by almost 43%. The only Intel that comes somewhat close is the hex-core behemoth known as the Xeon X7460, which needs a lot more power. IBM is capable of performing a tiny bit better than Dell thanks to its custom high performance chipset.
It is clear that the Xeon 7350 is at the end of its life: it offers a little more than 2/3 of the performance of the best Opteron while using a lot more power. Even the latest improved stepping, the Xeon X5470 at 3.33GHz, cannot keep up with the new Opteron quad-core. The reason is simple: as the number of VMs increase, so do the bandwidth requirements and the amount of world switches. That is exactly where the Opteron is far superior. It is game over here for Intel… until the Xeon 5570 2.93GHz arrives in March.
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Closing Thoughts
If you skipped to this page immediately, you can find our “market analysis” on the previous page.
Looking at the Server CPUs from the point of view of the market was surprising and refreshing. The whole problem with running every benchmark you can get your hands on is that it just gets confusing. Sure we can have 10 more benchmarks that can be categorized under “other”, but if either the Xeon or Opteron wins them, would that give you a better view of the market? That is why we decided to focus on finally getting that Oracle and MCS benchmark right. That is also why we rely on the more reliable industry standard benchmarks to make our analysis complete.
Right now, it is clear that the latest AMD Opteron is in the lead. We are really at the pivotal moment in time. No matter how good the current Xeon “Harpertown” and “Dunnington” architectures are, they lose too many battles due to the platform they are running on. The FSB architecture is singing its swan song. Only a small part of the market, namely:
* The ERP people who don’t care about power, but who need the highest performance at any cost
* The HPC people who have extremely intensive code which does not work on sparse matrices
* The people who render
…can ignore the shortcomings of the FSB-based platform.
For most other applications, the AMD platform is simply better in price/performance and performance/watt (see our previous Shanghai review). It won’t last long though, as the performance that the new Nehalem architecture has shown in OLTP, ERP, and OLAP is simply amazing. Moreover, there is little doubt that the dual Xeon 5570 with 34GB/s of bandwidth (dual Opteron is 20-21GB/s) will shine in HPC too. AMD servers can use the HyperTransport 3.0 and higher clock speeds to counter this, but that is for a later article….
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I find the results interesting, what are others thoughts?
Full Credit to Anandtech
Full Article http://it.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3484&p=1
I thought this was intresting Forum Discussion at the VMware Communities, Using multiple SAN solutions
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Hi everyone,
I am reviewing our vmware environment and I have a question regarding multiple SAN implementations.
Currently we have diverse clusters and I am looking at combing these where possible.
In our environment we have two different SAN solution and this could be more in future.
We will be looking into storage virtualization but that is another story.
In the mean time I would like to know if it is ok to connect a host to more than one storage array?
Actually all hosts in cluster would probably have this configuration for obvious reasons.
Reasons for wanting to do this is obviously because we have them and also so I can mix workloads on the servers.
My fast or critical vmdks could be stored on the enterprise SAN while the entry level SAN can be used for less
critical VMs.
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Check out the comments, if you don’t know the answer.
Full Post : http://communities.vmware.com/message/1130420#1130420
http://professionalvmware.com has a blog post titled : What RAID level do you use for your VMFS?
I saw this, ( and more at Professionalvmware.com ) and I didn’t get a chance to post it right away, and there was some good discussion on it as well.
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Many of you will say “RAID 5, of course!” and for those of you that do I would like to ask why? Is it because you really understand the differences between the different RAID levels? Granted that you may but have you ever had to do a RAID rebuild of a RAID 5 volume? How long did it take? Was it actually successful?
What RAID level would I use for my VMFS? RAID 10, of course! 😉
Needless to say this post is not about asking questions, but instead give you insight into my years of experience with this very subject. RAID 5 was an acceptable choice when the cost of hard drives were so high as to be prohibitive. However, these days quite the opposite is true. The benefits for using RAID 10 (performance, recovery, etc) far outweigh the costs for the additional drives required.
Art S. Kagel has written an excellent article about the different RAID levels (including RAID 3 and 4) as well as why he also chooses RAID 10 over RAID 5:
http://www.miracleas.com/BAARF/RAID5_versus_RAID10.txt
If you are currently using RAID 5 for you critical uptime production VMFS then you may want to consider creating a new RAID group, carve out a LUN and Storage VMotion your VM’s.
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Check out my comment, as well as others. I also have a simular question about raid levels on my forums. Here.
Full Post http://professionalvmware.com/2008/12/19/what-raid-level-do-you-use-for-your-vmfs
