Tag:

ESX

VMware PowerCLI rocks

by Philip Sellers March 23, 2011

written by Philip Sellers

Its pretty easy to see where I stand on PowerCLI from the headline on this entry. Disclaimer, I haven’t used it extensively, but I can already see the why VMware has chosen to embrace PowerCLI for scripting. These are some of my initial thoughts after some light usage — in short, I think PowerCLI is extremely powerful.

Up until January, we had scripted everything for VMware in VI-Perl. I don’t begin to call myself a Perl programmer, but I can crawl in and modify a canned Perl script and I am able to make it do what I want. That said, it was always a pain to do it.

For our VMware environment, we have monitoring scripts that report low disk space for our guests, a daily snapshot report and what VM’s have been provisioned or deleted from the system. All of these were things I had to find scripts that had already been written in VI-Perl, and so we relegated scripting to simply monitoring in our environment. After we added the VMware Management Appliance to our network, we used it occasionally for Storage VMotion in the ESX 3.5 days, before it was added to the GUI.

With PowerCLI, however, we have moved into doing more actual configuration and changes — real work — using it. Because PowerShell support piping the objects between commands, we have quickly realized gains in efficiency by retrieving a list of targets and issuing a command against the group. Some things we have done manually in the past make much more sense in PowerShell. Performing a VMotion or Storage VMotion is a good example of this. Storage VMotion involves a number of steps (click, click, click, click, click) to perform in the GUI. In Powershell, its a simple, one-line and easy to understand command.

PowerCLI is much more user friendly to me than writing Perl. Soon, I plan on rewriting my management scripts using PowerCLI. There are some security related things I must figure out (haven’t even looked into them yet) – like signing PowerShell scripts with a certificate, which will be required for executing scripts on a schedule. (In our environment, we plan on making all of our PowerShell instances run in remote-signed execution policy to maintain security.

March 23, 2011 3 comments

Datacenter Storage Virtualization

Lessons learned from initial rollout of ESX4

by Philip Sellers December 21, 2009

written by Philip Sellers

Following my November upgrade of Flex-10 VirtualConnect on my blade enclosure, I have begun my rollout and upgrades to ESX4 on a new blade cluster as well as one existing cluster. There are quite a few lessons that I’ve learned on my roll-out.

December 21, 2009 1 comment

Virtualization

vSphere official announcement – licensing & pricing

by Philip Sellers April 21, 2009

written by Philip Sellers

Today, VMware made their official announcement of vSphere, the next generation of virtualization technology in their flagship ESX line. There has been a lot of coverage of vSphere online in the weeks leading up to today’s big announcement. To me, the most interesting information and the most sought after is the answer to one simple question – what will this upgrade cost me as a current VMware customer with an active support agreement.

April 21, 2009 0 comments

Compute Datacenter Virtualization

HP Blades, Virtual Connect & ESX considerations

by Philip Sellers March 9, 2009

written by Philip Sellers

I may have already mentioned that one of our projects for the year is to transition our corporate ESX cluster from 2U hardware onto blades. The process of transitioning does not come without some concern and some caveots moving to the blade architecture. We feel that blades are a good fit in our case for this particular cluster (we run several ESX clusters). Our VMware View deployment is our first production ESX workload on blade hardware. We have learned a few things from this deployment that might be helpful.

March 9, 2009 7 comments

Compute Datacenter Projects

Month of silence, because of a blade enclosure

by Philip Sellers March 5, 2009

written by Philip Sellers

I can’t believe it, but its been almost a month since my last post. And what a month its been around my work. This has been one of the busiest and most difficult months that I can remember with the company. I have my hands in several different technologies, VMware and our blades are just two of my primary responsiblities. Over the past month, though, we’ve experienced a catastrophic failure of one of our blade enclosures. The failure has only occurred once, but the fall-out from this has taken almost a month to work out. And honestly, we’re still not through working out the kinks.

Of course, my story has to begin on Friday the 13th… Sometime around 9:00am, we started getting calls for both our SQL 2005 database cluster and our Exchange cluster. After investigation, we found that the active nodes were both in the same enclosure and a third ESX host in the same was experiencing problems, too. The problems were affecting both network and disk IO on the blades. All of our blades are boot from SAN, so the IO had to be a fiber-channel issue.

Several hours later, we were finally able to get enough response out of the nodes to be able to force a failover of services for Exchange, shortly followed by SQL 2005. As I worked with HP support, nothing improved on the affected servers. We were finally diagnosed with a problem mid-plane on the enclosure.

While waiting for the mid-plane to be dispatched to the field service folks, I requested that we go ahead and do a complete power-down on the enclosure and bring it up clean. This required physically removing power from the enclosure after powering down everything that I could from the onboard administrator.

After the reboot, everything looked much healthier. The blades came back to life and everything began operating as expected. After intense discussions on the HP side, we reseated our OA’s and the sleeve that they plug into on the back side of the enclosure. Net outcome was the same – everything still operating well. The OA’s nor the sleeve were loose, so we doubted that was the cause.

One nugget I learned from HP support (please vett this information on your own), is that the Virtual Connect interconnect modules require communication with the onboard administrators (OA’s). I’m still not sure I fully understand, but HP support did tell us that if VC lost communication to the OA, its possible that it caused our problems. If this is so, this smells like very, very bad engineering and design…

Continued investigation on HP’s part has pointed us back to the original diagnosis – a faulty mid-plane. Only by default did we return to that conculsion, however. This is the only piece of hardware common to the problems. Our only other conclusion was that this was a very bad, “hiccup” — which obviously buys us no real peace of mind…

So, sometime soon, we will be replacing the mid-plane of our enclosure. I have, of course, lost some faith in the HP blade ecosystem. We have plans to migrate our corporate VMware cluster onto blades, as well as some Citrix and other servers. Losing an enclosure like this has un-nerved those plans. We were fortunate to have drug our feet to only have 3 blades populated and serving anything at the time this happened. I will post updates as we move forward…

March 5, 2009 2 comments

Datacenter Storage Virtualization

Running Virtual Center/vCenter as a virtual machine or virtual appliance

by Philip Sellers January 26, 2009

written by Philip Sellers

I’m wondering what everyone else in the world does… I’m investigating running Virtual Center/vCenter as a virtual machine in order to remove two additional physical servers running Windows 2003 Enterprise in a cluster. I’m also very interested in running vCenter as a Linux virtual appliance when that becomes available. Is anyone out there running vCenter as a virtual machine? If so, how do you do it? Do you run it on a separate ESX cluster from the clusters it manages? How do you protect this in the event of a storage or ESX failure or some kind? Does anyone else NOT do this for specific reasons? Anyone else running vCenter 2.5 in a Windows cluster (MCSC)? If not, how do you protect your vCenter to make it resilient to failures? Just looking for other people’s personal experiences, not necisarily a corporate recommendation…

As a side note, we recently upgraded our farm from Virtual Center 2.0 to 2.5. Since that time, I’m seeing some things that I don’t necessarily think are working properly. We have Update Manager and Converter Enterprise installed and both services seem to go AWOL on us from time to time, disconnecting or just going unavailable from the Plug-Ins in Virtual Infrastructure Client. Not seeing much so far in VMware KB to help with running these peripherial services in a Windows cluster… Any help there would be greatly appreciated too…

January 26, 2009 0 comments

Compute Datacenter Projects Storage

Twas the Night Before New Years, sysadmin style

by Philip Sellers January 3, 2009

written by Philip Sellers

Twas the night of new years, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. The little one had passed out, and we’d put her to bed. We had all celebrated with Carson, Dick Clark and the rest. Mom in her kerchief and I in my cap, had just settled in for a long winter’s nap. When all of a sudden, I awoke to a clatter, it must be my text paging, I wonder what is the matter? I spring from my bed and stumble to the Mac, oh man, my VMware at work has gone all to crap.

That’s how my 2009 started… about 13 hours later, I finally left work and resumed my long-interrupted nap.

January 3, 2009 0 comments

Virtualization

Where virtualization sits in my datacenter

by Philip Sellers October 7, 2008

written by Philip Sellers

I had a fairly major revelation during VMworld. Its not something that I had stopped to think about and I guess the week of sessions and discussions helped me assemble several random thoughts together.

First, I’ve always relegated virutalization to a status where it is certainly a valuable technology and integral part of HTC’s datacenter strategy, but there is a trade-off where you have over-head and lose some performance. I realize that the trade-off is very small, but understand that our datacenter has one farm of dual-core servers – our VMware farm.

Second, I realized that our processors are just out pacing the computing needs of our current generation of software. Much of this can be blamed on Microsoft’s inability to keep their server OS up to snuff, in my opinion. But these two concepts never seemed to co-exist in my mind, until VMworld.

One keynote talked briefly about how ESX is optimized for multi-core and how it makes efficient use of gobs of memory. And, I’ve got two blade centers with blades that meet that description collecting dust as we try and figure out what to run on them. So, why at this point am I hesitant to put Exchange, SQL Server and other ‘high-impact’ applications on a virtual platform? I know that Windows Server 2003 can’t use all the memory or multi-cores. It wasn’t architected to.

We’re not making the move into Windows 2008 at this point, partially because of the Vista effect (our company is also swearing off Vista upgrades and sticking with our trusty XP). And I guess that’s a third point. Windows 2003 is just good enough for our busines. We’re comfortable with that OS, what it provides us and supporting it. I know that Windows Server 2008 has some improvements to handle the additional hardware, but I’m still hearing it doesn’t do an efficient job of it. But when you combine the complacency with Server 2003, XP and the ability to squeeze more performance out of the hardware by applying ESX, I think we have a winning combination.

In our datacenter, we run multiple instance of Microsoft SQL Server in virtual and we have very good results from this. I’m also facing a migration of Exchange onto a quad-core blade with 8Gb of RAM and thinking that’s way too much hardware for what our Exchange is doing. And that thought is a major turn – because never in my past 8 years working with Exchange have I wanted LESS hardware for a server.

And Exchange 2007’s architectual changes really has decentralized the whole Exchange “server” concept into multiple pieces which use many small servers for redundancy. That defeats the big server, multi-core, gobs of memory hardware idea that all of Microsoft’s hardware partners are pushing, except with virtualization.

So, at today’s crossroads, I’m dropping a lot of my resistence to keeping certain applications physical. And that’s a big shift in my mentality. There is too much horsepower to waste on an operating system which really can’t take advantage of it. What do you think?

October 7, 2008 1 comment

Virtualization

Why ESX’s Update 2 bug is a big deal…

by Philip Sellers August 18, 2008

written by Philip Sellers

First, let me say that a wise man once told me that procrastination solves many a problem. While I don’t think it always applies, when it comes to software patches and upgrades – I tend to tread water for a while before applying anything in production.

Everyone else has chimed in with their perspective on why the Update 2 bomb bug is a big deal. I probably approach this from a slightly different angle. I’m never fond of any software company which time limits your software. I don’t really care much if its beta software or final release, but anything which bundles a mechanism to expire the software at some point in time to me is not production software. Any time this is included, you run the risk of the exact scenario that VMware setup on us. To me, there is only one thing worst – a HARDWARE based license shackle (I have one I absolutely despise in the office right now!).

I have always been a fan of VMware’s solution to licensing – because it wasn’t a date or hardware shackle solution. That’s what makes me so worried with VMware at this point. Why would a company whose central mechanism for license control add a date layer when its not necessary. If you’re VMware, do you really care that someone is running a pre-release version of your patches instead of the final revision? Why did the date of August 12 matter? If someone is crazy enough to run their production systems on pre-release patches, let them.

Those darn pirates
Yeah, yeah. I get that some people pirate software. But many of the anti-piracy measures only serve to agonize the legitimate customers of the software companies. Many years ago during my consulting years, I maintained a dental software package which relied on a parallel port hardware shackle to operate. This was the pain of all pains. There wasn’t a move the office could make without having problems. And should the one workstation with the key go down, well, the office was down.

Microsoft has been combatting piracy for years, with little success IMO. The things that they have added to their operating systems continue to do little other than annoy their legitimate customers. As an enterprise, I find it rediculous that we’d have to activate every copy of Windows we deploy. They already rape extort persuade us into “Enterprise Agreements” on the threats of audits and in the olden days, rewarded us with the ability not to have to activate each copy in the enterprise. With the advent of Windows Server 2008 and Vista on the desktop, we lose that ‘reward’ and are forced to allow this needless traffic through our firewalls and security framework to allow Microsoft to certify that we have legitmate copies of their operating system. [EA’s are for a whole ‘nother blog post]

Then what?
So everyone must wonder what my solution would be? Simple actually. Disable the ability to add new data to the software – whatever the software may be – but NEVER should a software simply stop running cold because of a licensing issue – regardless of type.

Take my dental software – how should it have acted if the hardware shackle was gone? It should have allowed for normal check-in, check-out, appointment scheduling for existing patients. It should allow for day-to day operation. But, perhaps hit the pirate where it hurts – stop them from running financial reports, submitting insurance claims, etc. But don’t stop a legitimate customer with a technical problem from running their office.

It ultimately comes down to whether the software company really values the customer, but that’s a whole ‘nother post.

August 18, 2008 0 comments