History

vizioncore published a nice guide to use VMware ESX Server with a NFS remote storage hosted on Microsoft Windows.

Read it here.

While this method provides a very low cost solution for ESX Server testing environments, it still implies the availability of a Windows license.
To cut away this cost as well I strongly recommend considering 2 open source projects:

• OpenFiler (supporting CIFS/NFS/iSCSI)
• FreeNAS (supporting CIFS/NFS)

Both allow to create a fully working network storage from bare metal, and without the hassle of configuring a complete Linux distribution.

Quoting from the Egenera official announcement:

Egenera, Inc., a leader in datacenter virtualization architecture, today announced it has joined the VMware Community Source program. This will enable Egenera to port VMware ESX Server?part of VMware Infrastructure?to the Egenera BladeFrame system, complementing Egenera’s virtualized computing architecture with the server virtualization capabilities of VMware ESX Server and giving customers flexibility in hypervisor technology options…

This is a very interesting announcement which will open new and unexpected possibilities for VMware high-end customers. Worth to observe evolution of the deal.

Quoting from the SANRAD official announcement:

SANRAD Incorporated, a leading supplier of open enterprise IP SANs, today announced its product portfolio of IP SAN solutions fully supports VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3. SANRAD?s support for VMware enables VMware customers to utilize their existing IP network and storage resources to consolidate storage management and data recovery.
…
SANRAD?s GDR supports VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 delivering business continuity and enabling customers to replicate data to a remote site for disaster recovery. All storage services for VMware are delivered and managed from SANRAD?s consolidated IP SAN solution using a single graphical user interface…

The IBM RedBook department published a new paper about the virtualization capabilities offered by System p5 servers:

This IBM Redpaper provides best practices for planning, installing, maintaining, and operating the functions available using the Advanced POWER Virtualization feature on IBM System p5 servers.
…
This paper begins where Advanced POWER Virtualization on IBM System p5, SG24-7940, ends by adding additional samples and scenarios harvested by a select team that works at client and outsourcing sites, running both small and large installations. The experiences contained within are select best practices from real-life experience.

A working understanding of the Advanced POWER Virtualization feature and logical partitioning and IBM AIX 5L is required, as well as a basic understanding of network and VLAN tagging…

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1 – Introduction
• Chapter 2 – Administration, backup, and restore
• Chapter 3 – Networking
• Chapter 4 – Storage
• Chapter 5 – Performance and planning

Read the whole paper at source.

One of the most expected solution at upcoming VMworld 2006 is VMmark: a reliable benchmarking system to measure virtual machines performances.

After gradually introducing the benchmarks topic during these months, VMware finally reveals some details about this system with a new 14-pages whitepaper:

…
Clearly, a more sophisticated approach is required to quantify a virtualization environment’s performance and ability to run an increasing number of diverse virtual machines as physical resources increase.

First, all relevant hardware subsystems should be exercised as they would in an actual datacenter. The individual virtual machines should also operate at less than full utilization to mimic consolidation within a datacenter environment. The benchmark must scale in a controlled fashion to make comparisons between systems meaningful. Small fluctuations in the performance of individual virtual machines can be used to discern minor differences between similar systems. Larger gaps in performance can be measured by increasing the number of active virtual machines. The benchmark must also exhibit stable, reproducible performance.

This paper presents a benchmark, VMmark, to address these goals. The paper is structured as follows:

• Workload Tiling on page 2 introduces the concept of a multi-workload tile that encapsulates several diverse workloads.
• Workloads on page 3 describes the individual workloads
• The scoring algorithm is presented in Scoring Methodology on page 6
• Scores from a 2-CPU server are presented in Experimental Results on page 7

…

Read the whole paper at source.

To all virtualization.info readers:

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• The Virtualization Industry Survey is not required or endorsed by a vendor, so results interpretation is not influenced in any way.
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• Your participation will be rewarded with the full report, available free of charge later this year.

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Summary
A virtual evolution in IT organizations throughout the world has begun. It is estimated that currently 3% of all servers run virtually and that number is expected to grow rapidly over the next 5 years. Server Sprawl and escalating IT costs have managers and system administrators scrambling to find ways to cut costs and reduce Total Cost of Ownership of their physical infrastructure. Combining software applications onto a single server, even if those applications are from the same software vendor, can be dangerous and problems hard to troubleshoot. Virtual Server allows you to consolidate 15 to 20 or even more servers onto a single physical server reducing hardware, electrical, cooling, and administrative costs. These virtual servers run completely independent of each other so if one crashes the other are not affected. Planning and implementing a server consolidation is a complex process.

This book details the requirements for such a project, includes sample forms and templates, and delivers several physical to virtual migration strategies which will save both time and costs.

Abouth the Author
David Rule Jr. (VMware VCP, VAC, MCP, Citrix CCEA, CCA) is a Senior Consultant for Choice Solutions LLC, an Overland Park, KS-based systems integrator that provides IT design, project management, and support for enterprise computing systems. David’s primary role is in developing virtualization strategies for Choice Solutions’ clients.

Kenneth Majors (MCSE, MCSA, Project+, VMware VCP, Citrix CCEA, CCA, IBM X-Series Expert, Avaya ACA) is a Consultant for Choice Solutions LLC. Choice Solutions is a systems integrator headquartered in Overland Park, Kansas. Kenneth is a key contributor to defining best practices for deployment and implementation of Microsoft technologies including Windows Server, Virtual Server and SharePoint, Citrix Presentation Server, VMware ESX, and development of documentation standards. Kenneth holds a bachelor’s degree from Colorado Technical University.

Matthijs ten Seldam (MCSE, CISSP) is a senior consultant with the infrastructure technologies group at Microsoft Consulting Services. His expertise focuses around virtualization, platform management and deployment, security and networking. One of his specialties is automation of management tasks through various interfaces like WMI and COM using languages like VBScript and C#. He has developed a technical training on Virtual Server 2005 R2 and delivers this to customers and partners. He currently provides consulting to enterprise customers, delivers technical workshops and runs early adoption programs of products like ISA2006 and Virtual Server 2005 R2 Service Pack 1.

Twan Grotenhuis (MCT, MCSE NT4, 2000 and 2003, MCSE+messaging 2000 and 2003, CCNA) is a consultant with Sylis Netherlands. He currently provides strategic and technical consulting to several of the Sylis customers in the Netherlands. His specialties include Microsoft Exchange and ISA architecture, design, implementation, troubleshooting and optimization. Twan has done several Virtual Server 2005 projects where virtualization of physical servers was his main focus.

VMware continues to issue maintainance updated for its ESX 2.x branch since the large amount of customers still unconvinced to move on the new VMware Infrastructure 3.

This new build (32233) introduces support for 5 new guest operating systems:

• FreeBSD 4.11
• Novell Open Enterprise Server Support Pack 2
• Red Hat Linux Enterprise Server 3.0 Update 8
• Red Hat Linux Enterprise Server 4.0 Update 4
• Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 with Update Roll-up

and widens support for systems, devices and management agents.

Read complete Release Notes here. Download it here.

Quoting from the EqualLogic official announcement:

EqualLogic, a leading provider of enterprise-class iSCSI storage area network (SAN) solutions, today announced that EqualLogic’s PS Series storage has been qualified with VMware Infrastructure 3. Based on the completion of interoperability testing, EqualLogic PS Series will now be included in the Storage / SAN Compatibility Guide for VMware ESX Server 3, now part of VMware Infrastructure 3, as a supported storage platform.
…
The compatibility between the EqualLogic PS Series and VMware Infrastructure 3, as noted in the Storage / SAN Compatibility Guide for VMware ESX Server 3, includes iSCSI base connectivity, storage processor failover, boot from SAN, network interface card failover and host bus adapter failover. In addition, the PS Series is compatible with VMware Infrastructure 3’s advanced features including VMware VMotion technology for eliminating downtime, VMware High Availability to ensure uptime of virtual machines and VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler for automated workload distribution…

At the end of August Amazon beta-launched the first rentable virtual datacenter based on the Xen hypervisor: the Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2).

It’s possibly the largest Xen implementation available to customers and is a notable opportunity for Xen development team (and several commercial companies surrounding it) to demonstrate reliability of the project.

Unfortunately after just 1 month since launch Amazon is hit by the a severe security warning on the system (not depending on Xen in itself): data leakage.

Samuel T. Cossette detailed on his blog how it’s easy access other EC2 customers data, after they released used Xen virtual machines:

…If you plan to give it a try (and you definitely should), don’t forget to use an encrypted partition or wipe your instances’ hard drives, since Amazon won’t do it for you. In fact, when you terminate an instance, Amazon simply shuts the machine down. Then, if the same physical machine is allocated to somebody else, a hamster goes to that machine, powers it up, formats the hard drives and reinstalls a brand new operating system. Herein lies the problem – the hard drives are only repartitioned and formated, not initialized. This means that all the data is still physically on the hard drives, even though it is not readily accessible!

I have looked at a couple of hard drives and found some sensible data in the form of “private” source code, OpenVPN (complete with key and certificate) configurations, S3 access keys, EC2 keys and certificates, logins and passwords to domain name administration interfaces, etc. It was easy to find out who the owners were – they ranged from individuals to profitable startups (according to their pictures on flickr).

Who’s to blame? Of course, Amazon could (and should) do something about the clean-up process, but organizations storing their intellectual property in plain text is also somewhat of a questionable practice…

Read the whole article at source.

At the moment of writing the author already reported Amazon solved the problem, filling used partitions with random data, anyway this incident helped pointing the attention to some usually uncovered aspects of provisioning.

The more we’ll go towards fully automated virtual infrastructures, the more we’ll need severe (and scalable) controls on the provisioning phase: authorization for requesting, deploying and using new VMs, and strict control on usage and re-allocation of physical resources (RAM and disk space).