I’ve already mentioned (and posted) about the vSphere Blog Contest current topic of thin provisioning, but I’ve been thinking about another “product” that has always functioned thin provisioned – The VI administrator. That’s right, I’m talking about the guys and gals that manage all the hypervisor hosts, the server and desktop virtual machines, the networking, and the storage.

Have you thought about the systems to administrator ratios we work under these days? Sure, server consolidation to virtual infrastructure has enabled doing more with less, but is there a better way to explain thin provisioning and over allocation than by looking at the small teams responsible for the virtualized data center? I say not!!

This is my small VM /ETC tribute to the ones who truly are “thin provisioned and over allocated”.

Do me a favor, leave a comment letting everyone know how many administrators are on your team and how many VMs you are responsible for. I expect the numbers to be staggering!

The GestaltIT Tech Field Day is one week away. This time next week I will be just arriving in the San Francisco Bay Area and getting ready for 2 full days of storage and virtualization product sessions about which I will be reporting here on VM /ETC in the form of tweets and posts. Stephen Foskett, the event coordinator, has already hinted about special announcements and sessions during the event planning, but he’s not even letting the attendees know what’s exactly in store. Although we know the presenters, we haven’t received and agenda. All I know is I had to change my return home flight times so that I wouldn’t miss something important. I am looking forward to the experience that is for sure!

As a warm up to Tech Field Day, GestaltIT.com has announced the Do You Know Contest. Multiple “Do You Know” posts per day are appearing on www.gestaltit.com. In each post is a short quiz to complete in order to receive an entry in a drawing for a prize package including an iPod Nano with video. The winner will be drawn randomly from the list of entries on November 10th. For each quiz you take you get another contest entry up to a maximum of 7. You don’t even need to answer the questions correctly, so just take the quizs to increase your chance to win. All VM /ETC readers are invited to participate.

Hurry up an take the first 2 quizs released today.

• Do You Know MDS Micro?
• Do You Know Xsigo?

Look for more quizs over the next few days on GestaltIT.com.

You didn’t get to participate in School Field Days if you didn’t complete your testing first, right?

Follow the links above for the contest page, but here’s the general contest information:

Our quiz is simple: We would like to know how familiar everyone is with these companies. We have a short series of questions from “How familiar are you with Company X?” to “What products does Company Y offer?” We will also be adding a few fun ones in, including “How do you pronounce Xsigo?” Don’t worry about getting the questions right or wrong, just answer honestly based on what you already know.

What Do You Get?

The contest is simple, too. For each entry (up to a maximum of seven, one per quiz), you will be entered in a random drawing to be held on Tuesday, November 10, 2009. One winner will receive a prize package including an awesome new Apple iPod Nano with video!

What Are The Rules?

1. Correct answers are not required. Just fill out the quiz honestly and to the best of your knowledge. The only item required to be answered correctly is the email address!
2. Winners will be chosen at random on November 10, 2009 from the email addresses associated with completed quiz entries. Winners will be notified using the email address used when filling out the quiz and must respond to that email within 24 hours.
3. Gestalt IT will announce the winner in public on November 11, 2009. We will protect your privacy and will not use your full name, job title, employer name, or email address. But we will use your first name and last initial and give a general indication of your employment. For example, we might announce that “John S., a network administrator for an investment bank” has won.
4. In accordance with our privacy policy, we will not share your name, email address, or other information with third parties, but we may use it to contact you in the future regarding this web site.
5. One entry per person per company quiz, for a maximum of seven entries per person. Persons who are caught or suspected of entering multiple times will have all entries disqualified. This is supposed to be fun!
6. Employees and contractors of the companies sponsoring the event are not eligible. Gestalt IT authors (other than Stephen), event attendees, analysts, press, customers, mothers-in-law, and others are eligible provided they are not paid employees or contractors of those companies or Gestalt IT itself.
7. We reserve the right to disqualify any entry, especially if it seems not to be in the spirit of this contest. We also reserve the right to cancel the contest entirely.

Fine Print

No purchase is necessary or, in fact, even possible! Void where prohibited by law, as are most things. Gestalt IT Media LLC is running this sweepstakes and may be contacted at editor@gestaltit.com. Odds of winning are cunningly calculated based on the number of entries, currently estimated at about one in 50. One prize will be awarded at the contest end with an estimated value of US$200. Canadians and others with similar laws must demonstrate the skill of knowing the answers to the quiz questions. Americans apparently need no special skills.

HP is announcing it’s own Converged Infrastructure Architecture with associated services and partner offerings later today which will “integrate existing silos of compute, storage, network, and facility resources with unified management to deliver a virtualized, highly automated technology environment ..”. The timing of this announcement obviously serves as a “us too” response to the VMware, Cisco, and EMC (VCE) vBlock architecture announcement, but more importantly positions HP as the provider of the only private cloud infrastructure solution under a single company logo combining HP servers, storage, and networking.

HP is also announcing availability of new storage virtualization products based on storage pooling features first introduced to me at the HP Tech Days in Colorado Springs, CO, which ultimately become pillars of the Converged Infrastructure Architecture. With HP’s new products, virtual storage pools can be created across multiple storage devices enabling high availability and dynamic adjustment for any workload.

Finally, hidden among the infrastructure product announcements is a high level indication of EVA integration with Hyper-V Live Migration. As of this writing it is not clear to me what this technically means and I am waiting for more information. It was made clear to me that HP is not establishing a competitive stance to the VCE partnership, and HP remains as an active VMware OEM partner.

Look for the official announcements from HP and the links in this post to go live around 9:00 a.m. EST today (Wed 11/4/09). HP lifted the embargo for press, analysts and bloggers as of Thursday 11/04 at 12:01 a.m. EST so I am publishing quick information from an embargoed call I attended Tues (11/3) afternoon with Lee Johns, HP Director of Marketing – Unified Storage, and links found in draft copies of the official press releases.

HP’s Converged Infrastructure Architecture is made up of 4 technology innovations:

• HP Infrastructure Operating Environment
• HP FlexFabric
• HP Virtual Resource Pools
• HP Data Center Smart Grid

On the call, Johns specifically focused on new products considered part of the new HP Virtual Resource Pools technology innovations.

• HP StorageWorks x9000 Network Storage System Family (initial product release from the IBRIX acquisition)
• SVSP v3.0
• Cluster Extension EVA software integrated with Hyper-V Live Migration

I’ll try to publish my thoughts on HP’s Converged Infrastructure Architecture after these announcements are fully released and more information is made publicly available.

So, we should all know what VCE stands for by now, right? Let’s say it together: “VMware, Cisco, EMC.” Using a bad analogy of Adam Lambert, a contestant on American Idol last season, the three companies “came out of the data center” today and publicly announced what we already knew; they’ve been working together to build the most integrated cross technology cloud infrastructure solution known to mankind. They are so integrated they’ve cross trained each other’s support staff so that anyone of the three partners can be a single “choke point” for those customers that implement vBlock Architecture. They call their union a “Computing Environment Coalition.” At the same time, EMC is promising that VMware can continue to “play the field” with technology partners that want to hook up. Hey, if you love somebody let them go. if they come back then it was meant to be!

Confused? Me too. Time will clear the fog and, as promised, reveal the vBlock based Cloud.

VCE vBlock is big, bad, and designed for scale like VMworld 2009 Infrastructure (without being told as much, my bet is that what we saw at the bottom of the stairs in the Moscone Center was a vBlock test drive). Apparently, VMworld’s spotlight on vCloud Express provider Terremark was another hidden VCE vBlock showcase from Vmworld. It all was happening in plain sight. If we only knew then what we know now. 

My thoughts (or this rant) can best be described as “now what!?”. I’ve spent the last 5 years figuring out how to design customized, application specific, performance optimized, and product feature specific virtual infrastructure designs for the enterprise data center. This is because I’ve listened to everybody explain that a “cookie cutter” infrastructure is not adequate for their solutions. Change this setting for feature A, provision these LUNs for feature B, add these VLANs for feature C, etc., etc. Now, VMware, Cisco, and EMC have figured out all the tough stuff and come up with a “connect the dots” data center reference architecture to make it easy to move to the Cloud? Really? I mean, I know we’ve been told this had to happen in order for the Cloud to work, but REALLY?!! Oh well, the only constant is change.

Ok, I feel a little better. Anybody else care to vent?

Here’s some more random links and quoted information to help others with similar change anxiety issues as me.

From the Cisco press release: Cisco and EMC, Together with VMware, Form Coalition to Accelerate Pervasive Virtualization and Private Cloud Infrastructures The following family of Vblock Infrastructure Packages is being offered by the Virtual Computing Environment coalition:

• Vblock 2 is a high-end configuration supporting up to 3,000-6,000 virtual machines that is completely extensible to meet the most demanding IT needs of large enterprises and service providers. Designed for large-scale and ‘green field’ virtualization, Vblock 2 takes advantage of Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS), Nexus 1000v and Multilayer Directional Switches (MDS), EMC’s Symmetrix V-Max storage (secured by RSA), and the VMware vSphere platform.
• Vblock 1 is a mid-sized configuration supporting 800 up to 3,000 virtual machines to deliver a broad range of IT capabilities to organizations of all sizes. Designed for consolidation and optimization initiatives, Vblock 1 is comprised of a repeatable model leveraging Cisco’s UCS, Nexus 1000v and MDS, EMC’s CLARiiON storage (secured by RSA), and the VMware vSphere platform.
• Vblock 0 will be an entry-level configuration available in 2010, supporting 300 up to 800 virtual machines, for the first time bringing the benefits of private clouds within reach of medium-sized businesses, small data centers or organizations, and for test and development by channel partners, systems integrators, service providers, ISVs, and customers. Vblock 0 is also comprised of a repeatable model leveraging Cisco’s UCSand Nexus 1000v, EMC’s Unified Storage (secured by RSA), and the VMware vSphere platform.

Cisco VCE vBlock Youtube video

The Coalition leaders calls VCE vBlock “IT as a Service”

Chuck’s Blog: Announcing The VCE Coalition

Introducing The Vblock

Building virtualized infrastructure at scale?  We’ve created a new option for you — the Vblock.

We’ve taken the best of the best from the three respective companies, and create a pre-architected and pre-qualified environment for virtualization at scale: storage, fabric, compute, hypervisor, management and security.  We’ve also characterized its behavior for specific use cases as well.

Whether you actually want to buy one, or just use the reference architecture as a blueprint for your own efforts — there’s an entirely new option available to accelerate the transition to a fully virtualized environments.

VMware has been running a blogging contest in order to promote the new vSphere Blog. The current contest topic is vSphere Thin Provisioning. A lot has been written on this topic already, but I thought I would point out a storage design conclusion I’ve come up with based mostly from the explanations and recommendations of others about handling what happens when an over allocated, thin provisioned LUN runs out of space.

This post first walks through an basic explanation of the administrative concern caused by thin provisioning and how built in vSphere monitoring and alerting can be used to proactively handle an over allocation issue. I’m using quotes from a few bloggers to help describe the potential for problem and offer ways to handle it. At the end I make a simple LUN provisioning suggestion based on combining the vSphere feature with storage device’s thin provisioning capabilities. 

vSphere Thin Provisioning and over allocation

First of all VMware explains thin-provisioned virtual disks as a feature that lets you:

“subscribe more capacity to virtual machines than they actually have, eliminating the waste of resources and space caused by unused over-allocated storage.”

To be clear, VMware vSphere provides thin provisioning independent of any storage device’s similiar features. In fact, vSphere can create thin provisioned virtual disks on the local or shared storage (VMFS or NFS) of any ESX host.

VMware vSphere even makes it easy to convert existing guests to thin provsioned virtual hard disks. The blog post Using Storage VMotion to Leverage Thin Provisioning explains:

On the surface thin provisioining is great! If a virtual machine (VM) is created with a 20 GB C:\ drive with only 10 GB actually in use then that VM only takes up 10 GB of physical space of the physical storage. A problem arises after stacking multiple thin provisioned VMs in a storage volume, and then one or more of those VMs has data growth that “cashes in” in all of it’s allocated storage. To thier credit, VMware has thought this scenario through and provides monitoring and alerting to make sure administrators can be notified before this happens.

Here are a few blog post examples that demonstrate using vSphere monitoring and alerting of vSphere thin provisioning.

Responsible Thin Provisioning in VMware vSphere

“Now in vSphere 4 there is a new element in the capacity section of the datastore summary tab that shows total provisioned space — the maximum potential growth of all virtual machines if thin provisioned disks were fully utilized:

“

From that borrowed screen shot you can see that 371 GB of VM disks have been provisioned in a 49 GB LUN!

Get Thin Provisioning working for you in vSphere

“This is one of the most important pieces to thin provisioning in my opinion.  At the minimum you need to setup Virtual Center alerts to monitor when your datastores are approaching critical levels.  You can’t implement thin disks in your vSphere environment and walk away.  The smart people over at VMware have given us the ability to monitor datastore disk space usage and over-allocation with the latest release of Virtual Center.  Setup your monitors so you are e-mailed when some of these thin disks begin to grow and you need to take some action.”

PowerShell Prevents Datastore Emergencies

“When a datastore is about to run out of space, the fastest resolution may be to simply migrate virtual disks to another datastore.   VMware Storage VMotion provides that capability with zero downtime for VMs and no disruption to end users.”

Additional advice creating an alarm and the next screen shot is also provided in the same post

“Create a new alarm at an appropriate level in the vCenter hierarchy, such as a datacenter, and configure like this:

On the Triggers tab, add a “Datastore Disk Usage (%)” trigger to alert at a reasonable percentage — I opted for 93″

Combine vSphere Thin Provisioning with Storage Device Thin Provisioning

When you consider that a common feature of a lot of storage devices today is the ability to thin provision physical disk usage when creating LUNs regardless of which OS or file system will be used, you end up with the possibility to “double dip” thin provisioning with vSphere. Although a scarey thought for a lot of administrators, the possibility exists to do so. Personally, I’m not sold on the thin provisioning “double-dip”. Especially without a complete monitoring solution, a storage device’s ability to hot add disks or shelves to dynamically expand LUNs, and a budget that gets me new hardware ASAP!

However, I have no problem using storage device thin provisioning on the LUN created to hold ISO files for the VMs. Normally, this LUN would be provisioned < 50GB in size, but why not make it big enough to hold your largest VM + 20%? Thin provisioning from the storage device means it’s not actually taking up any space, but when your vSphere datastores need breathing room you could temporarily storage vmotion a VM or 2 to the ISO LUN as needed to resolve other over allocation issues.

Cashing in the storage needed for the ISO LUN still requires reserve physical disk capacity. Be aware that the same over allocation problem exists at the storage device level, but leveraging the hardware’s dynamic add ability gives an administrator more flexibility to re-allocate the capacity without taking systems down. For example, if some of your disk space is dedicated to LUN snap shots or VM backups, you might be able to afford to delete the oldest copies, free up some disk space, and then dynamically shrink/grow volumes/arrays/LUNs to create some needed space.

You could also provision a stand by LUN independent of the ISO LUN to accomplish the same purpose.

Does combining the storage thin provisioning with vSphere thin provisioning make sense to you? Any advantages or disadvantages I am missing with the strategy I describe in this post? Let me know!

Unlike it’s big brother VMware Workstation 7, nowhere is it published that ESX/ESXi 4 is a supported guest OS of VMware Player 3.0. In fact, ESX 4 is not even among the listed choices in the Version drop down box when building a new virtual machine (VM), nor is it mentioned in the VMware Player Release Notes or Getting Started Guide. I was surprised when I was able to perform an Easy Install of ESXi 4, and just like ESXi 4 VMs running on Workstation 7, VMware Player nested ESXi successfully hosted guests. Best of all, ESXi 4 in VMware Player 3.0 can be run without any additional manual (ESX in a box) configurations (just like VMware Workstation 7).

Interestingly enough, the full Console ESX 4 install DVD is not recognized by VMware Player 3.0 for an Easy Install. However, performing a full ESX 4 Easy Install is possible with a last minute switch of the install media. That is, first browse to the ESXi 4 .ISO, complete the new VM Easy Install wizard, but modify the hardware before booting and change to the ESX 4 DVD .ISO. Watch the video at the end of this post for a demonstration on getting full ESX4 to work.

The rest of this post highlights the important parts of the Easy Install of ESXi 4 on VMware Player 3.0 with screen shots. To get an idea of more of the Easy Install screens check out my post about installing Windows 7 as a VM in Workstation earlier this year.

ESX/ESXi 4 not listed as a supported version

If you choose to install the OS later you won’t find a pre existing option to build an ESX VM. In Workstation 7 ESX 4 is found under “Other” Guest operating systems, but it is missing as a selection in the free Player (shown in the next image).

Starting the ESXi 4 Easy Install

However, when you select the ESXi 4.0 .ISO image as the installer disk during the New Virtual Machine Wizard an Easy Install becomes possible. In the image below the mouse is pointing at the informational message “ESX Server 4.0 detected” that appeared after I browsed to the ESXi 4 ISO file.

As I previously mentioned, selecting the full ESX 4 DVD did not detect and therefore an Easy Install was not possible.

This almost feels as if Workstation 7 code was accidentally left in the new release of VMware Player. Remember when remote administration of ESXi 3.5 was accidentally left enabled? Otherwise, this is the first VMware “virtual Easter Egg” that I am aware of.

Getting back to using the ESXi 4 .ISO, clicking Next launched an Easy Install just like in Workstation 7. A few clicks later the settings summary screen showed that a template was in fact used, and my VM would be built with 2 GB RAM, 2 vCPUs, and an operating system of “ESX Server 4.0″. I want to point out that I was never prompted to confirm or select any of these settings other than the size of the hard disk. The hard disk was 40 GB by default and thin provisioned. The only time I deviated from the default options was to choose to split the .vmdk in 2GB files.

Clicking Finish started the new VM and launched the install with the usual Easy Install footer message and instructions. See the next screen shot:

After the installation finished I was able to install the vSphere Client on the hosting desktop and connect to my ESXi 4 VMware Player instance. Using the nested ESXi’s local VMFS I tested running 2 different VMs. I created a DSL (Damn Small Linux) VM which I then booted to the live CD. Later I downloaded the Nostalgia virtual appliance and ran it completely from the nested, local VMFS datastore.

UGHtv video – Full ESX 4 Easy Install work around

I recorded the workaround process for invoking the Easy Install with the ESXi ISO and then switching to the full ESX 4 DVD. I’ve also started a VIMEO channel called UGHtv! Look for more virtualization videos I create there as well as other’s videos that I’ll share from that channel.

UGHtv VMware Player Easter Egg? ESX 4 Easy Install from Rich Brambley on Vimeo.

VMware’s free Player 3.0 now can create new VMs, but unlike the licensed VMware Workstation 7, ESX/ESXi 4 is not listed as a supported guest operating system. However, this video demonstrates that if you select the ESXi 4 install ISO an Easy Install routine is started that pre-configures a nested ESX 4 VM capable of running it’s own guests.

Social networking continues to prove to be a valuable communication and marketing channel for vendors. Large technical conferences have been the shining example so far, but the recent HP Storage Tech Day event in Colorado Springs was a small event with a big reaction. HP sponsored a handful of bloggers who were able to engage IT professionals world-wide with real time commentary. It was a simple but effective format: 2 days of interactive presentations, demonstrations, and hand on labs without non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). The bloggers were free to tweet, podcast and post about the experience.

The event proved to be so successful in it’s reach that other vendors immediately expressed interest in doing the same. GestaltIT founder Stephen Foskett contacted me shortly afterwards with the news that because there was enough sponsor interest he would be organizing a new series of multi-vendor events called GestaltIT Field Days. The first one has already been scheduled and will be held in Silicon Valley on November 12 and 13, 2009.

Stephen describes the event on the GesatltIT Field Day web page:

“This is not a trade show, a junket, or an analyst day. Rather, the participating sponsors will be engaging the attendees, inviting feedback, and fostering open communication. We were inspired by HP’s series of Tech Days and wanted to broaden the concept, bringing in more products and a broader range of technologies. We also liked the idea of creating and managing a similar event as an independent third party.”

The tentative November line up of bloggers is currently:

Name	Blog / Web Site	Twittername
Rich Brambley	VM /ETC Gestalt IT	RBrambley
Carlo Costanzo	VMware Info	CCostan
Chris Evans	The Storage Architect Gestalt IT	ChrisMEvans
Greg Ferro	EtherealMind Gestalt IT	EtherealMind
Robin Harris	StorageMojo	StorageMojo
Rod Haywood	Musings of Rodos	Rodos
John Hickson	Studio Sysadmins	StudioSystems
Greg Knieriemen	Storage Monkeys	Knieriemen
John Obeto	Absolutely Windows	JohnObeto
Devang Panchigar	StorageNerve Gestalt IT	StorageNerve
Nigel Poulton	Ruptured Monkey	NigelPoulton
Bas Raayman	Renegade’s Technical Diatribe	BasRaayman
Ed Saipetch	Breathing Data Gestalt IT	EdSai
Rick Vanover	Virtualization Review Tech Republic	RickVanover
…and one more we can’t mention quite yet	????	????

I’m looking forward to this first Field Day, and GestaltIT has plans for more just like it 2010! Look for posts and my usual Tweetgrid(s) here on VM /ETC in a few weeks.

Call to Virtualization vendors

Personally I’d like to see more cloud computing and virtualization infrastructure content in future Field Days. Technology Vendors who wish to showcase their solutions in this format please checkout the Field Day Sponsor Page on GestaltIt or contact me at the email address on my About page.

• VMware Workstation 7 is optimized for maximum performance when running on 32-bit and 64-bit Windows 7 PCs and works seamlessly with Flip 3D and Aero Peek to show live virtual machine activity.
• Run even more 3D applications with support for Windows Aero, DirectX 9.0c Shader Model 3 and OpenGL 2.1 in Windows virtual machines.
• VMware Workstation 7 streamlines software development and testing with new IDE integrations for the SpringSource Tools Suite and Eclipse IDE for Java & C/C++ along with Record Replay Debugging improvements that make it faster to find non-deterministic bugs.
• Run 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems with up to four virtual CPUs and 32GB of RAM dedicated to each virtual machine.

As previously mentioned in my post about the Workstation 7 RC, another significant new feature is that ESX/ESXi 4 is now a supported guest operating system. ESX/ESXi can now be selected in the drop down list of OSes when building a new VM. This greatly simplifies using VMware Workstation as a platform for administrator training and VCP certification preparation.

For more information about VMware Workstation 7 go to www.vmware.com/workstation. VM /ETC readers can also take advantage of an additional 10% discount when ordering Workstation here.