Day 2 Started with another Networking session, this one I felt was a little better than the last and I will post a link to the Slides when they appear but some of the highlights are :

• VM’s that need to talk to each other should be on the same Vswitch so the external network is never touched.
• A typical esx server with 4 network cards should have the service Console and vmkernel on the first vswitch connected to two physical Nics ie one onboard NIC and one PCI NIC. Vmtraffic should be on the second vswitch which also has two physical NICS attached.
• Use separate portgroups for different VLAN’s
• If you have 5 to 10 network cards use network trunking
• Virtual port ID teaming is faster than MAC based teaming and is the preferred option. It load balances all VM’s across the switch not load balanced per vm.
• IP Hash load balancing does per vm teaming but apparently you have to channel the ports so its not recommended unless you have a VM with a really high load.
• There is a Link state tracking KB article coming soon.
• NIC members in a team must be in the same layer 2 domain.
• If you use channelling then use IP Hash teaming but make sure you disable channel negotiations  as this is not supported.
• Avoid using Native VLAN’s.
• TSO/LSO (TCP segment off load) is not supported
• VMware` are working on pass through where the guest can access the physical NIC directly for near native performance
• Infiniband is supported
• 10 GB Ethernet copper is coming soon.

Next was a session called Top support issues another good download when the slides arrive but highlights were.

All the support guys are Irish (based out of Ireland, I’m still not to sure how good the VMware support is).

They did an example of how to recover if you loose access to the console which is exactly what happened to me in the past so it is obviously a common problem also chapter 7 in the following document is good.

Google : serviceconsole-guide.pdf

• Issues with STP (spamming Tree Protocol) can cause HA to fail over.
• Don’t expand a VMDK  disk which has snapshots on it as it will buggered
• Then he went on to explain how snapshots can fill the entire disk and corrupt the VM so you have to restore from backup. Which is exactly what happened to me when working for NSK last week. Hence you should all have read the email I sent out. (when snapshots go bad).
• You can crop snapshot delta files but you loose the data.
• You can have a maximum of 32 snapshots.
• Don’t use extents but if you have to add one to an ESX server make sure you then manually rescan the LUNS all the other ESX servers so they know about it.
• 2TB is the limit of VMFS
• There was a section on how to recover after deleting a VMFS partition.

Another Support session was next with another invaluable slide set.

VI3 won’t let you present the same LUN to two ESX servers with a different LUN ID as it will presume it is a snapshot LUN and automatically hide it. This happened to one of our customers.

• You can see the LUN being hidden in /var/log/vmkernal

There are two ways to deal with it :

·         Resignature – used when presenting same lun to the original ESX server you have to reregister the VM’s

·         Disallow snaphot LUNS can be changed to 0 so LUNs are visable.

There is a driver that allows writes to VMFS2 volume when doing an upgrade.

VCB issues

o   Disable automount

o   The same LUN id’s must be used on the proxy as our being used on the ESX server

o   Multipathing is not supported on the proxy

Did the VI3 VCP exam and passed .

Next I went to the ACE session which is the VMware product that no one has ever heard about as it is niche and VMware still can’t get their act straight when positioning it in the market. (Also there probably isn’t a Sales person alive that could understand/sell it – Ok well not one at Ultima anyway – the gauntlet has been laid down...).

Basically its VM running on workstation  6 that is wrapped in a security layer.

You can set

o   When it will expire

o   How many times it will run

o   Who can use it A.D. integrated

o   Password protect it

o   Restrict its networking

o   Block keyloggers

o   Manage it with ACE Server

o   And loads more

So it might be great for outside consultants coming in to your company where you give them this VM on a USB key (oh yes its portable) and its a totally locked down VM.

Marketing give you all this rubbish about other scenarios like training and demo’s so I pointed out to the presenter that none of the LABS or other DEMO’s were using it at TSX.

I was really looking forward to this session as Gareth told me that ACE 2 was going to have some great new features like VDI integration. Well it doesn’t  its just a polished ACE v1 with USB stick compatibility. So thanks for wasting an hour of my life Gareth! In your defence though, they did say at VMworld that they might do some of that stuff but never did. I think this product is basically like a Virtual Appliance and will probably merge with the VA’s.

Highlights from the trade show : --

            Got two highlighters, three pens, a knife, a polo shirt a nice rucksack and a USB hub. – RESULT!!!

            SCRIPT LOGIC have a stall and are pushing all their normal stuff which I won’t go into as the Microsoft guys will already know about that.

            Double Take where there – they have all their normal “in-vm” replication but more excitingly and ESX level replication engine to compete with vizioncore and ESXreplicator – its agent less and called Double Take for VMware Infrastructure. – DEMO from website.

            Aexia – Never really heard of them before but they also have a replication engine at the esx level Virtual Solution Box (VSB) which is a Virtual Appliance and has similar functionality to esxRanger. – FREE Demo from website.

All in all a very good day can’t wait to get back and try out some of these new products.

This session was on  CPU scheduling and was rubbish. There was this poor mumbling Indian chap who drowned on for an hour. It was just like making a support call to Bangladesh. After an hour he had to rush the last slide which had the important stuff on it.

Esxtop is a command line tool used in the console to monitor performance.

When VMware use the term virtual worlds they mean virtual cpu’s.

%used = cpu utilization

%readytime=the amount of time the VM is waiting for a cpu cycle

%TWAIT=the amount of time the cpu is waiting and idling

%CSTP=the amount of time the m is in a descheduled stop state  ( I think descheduled is a word that VMware made up).

A High %readytime means you have hardware constraints.

A HIGH %wait time means its not CPU intensive

A High  %CSTP means you need to reduce your number of VM’s

Next on the list was some intensive networking, once again I got there on time and got a chair, those late arrivals had to sit on the floor.

I will cover some high lights but its all in the slides to be published later if anyone understands this in depth networking stuff.

Virtual switches maintain a Mac port forwarding table like a normal switch

Their is a direct channel from the virtual Nics to the physical Nic for checksum and segmentation offload.

There is no learning of unicast.

There is no ICMP snooping for multicast

5 Different Nic types

• Vlance – Old slow AMD PCnet emulation
• E1000 - Used for 64 bit guest emulation
• Vmxnet which most VM’s use (1GB)
• Vswif – service Console Nic based on Vmxnet
• Vmkernal – Used for ISCSI traffic and vmotion stuff.

These are all strictly layer 2 NIC devices

Virtual ports are the same as physical ports

Port groups allow common network configurations to be recorded across separate ESX servers. They contain VLAN Info – teaming policies, traffic shaping and vswitch name.

Uplinks connected on the same switch are teamed automatically so you don’t need to do trunking, though in a later better lecture they told me that if you have more than 4 physical nics then it is worth doing trunking.

Beacon probing doesn’t work in 3.01

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Lastly I did the programming session in the hope that I might come out of a conversation with Bonde next time, feeling like I new what he was talking about.

But its all gobbledey gook to me. We spent time editing some basic scripts checking syntax and stuff on a French keyboard that was setup as U.S. so there wasn’t a chance in hell anyone was going to get the right funny { and it has come to my attention that the French have pretty much removed or hidden the dollar sign from their keyboard in a move designed to raise two fingers at our Yankee brothers. So the end result was that no one had progressed past exercise 3 of 7 by the end of session, the only good thing about the keyboard was that it levelled the playing field between the have skills and have no skills, a bit like the labour government  was supposed to do. Perhaps we should get a French government ?

Basically there is a Perl toolkit you can download with SOAP built in to keep it clean. Once you have got this you can use some of their sample scripts to report on interesting things like VM disks filling up.

Scripts are found at

www.Run-virtual.com

 and  www.VI3Demo.com

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I spent the rest of the evening smooching round all the stalls on the ground floor in the hope that their might be a foxy looking sales lady to remove the blurred images  of all those sandals and pony tails from may poor tired eyes. – Oh yeah they had free bear and wine plus dubious looking French finger food

Highlights from the stands (in no particular order)

-          got a couple of pens and a magnetic paper clip holder, plus one dubious object that looks like a fish hook but I’m not sure what it is.

-          Provision Networks offer a Virtual access suite for VDI but not sure how good it is

-          ThinPrint do a printing solution for VDI – ask the citrix guys!

-          VizionCore – covered earlier

-          Told the HP guy their outsourcing was rubbish (I used to work for them)

-          Met this Welsh guy who works for HP that used to work for Robin (during the war) and did the best “Shuffa” impression I have ever seen, I should have videoed it for you guys.

-          ZXTM do a whole networking SSL and I quote “Layer 8” management thing and have tagged on the end a connection broker

-          Pinched the lab documentation for SDK programming and VCB so we can use it back in the office

-          Sysload do agent based performance management which is probably no use to Ultima for Vmware

-          HP have a snapin for insight manager that manages virtual machines but I get the impression its pretty rubbish.

-          Nobody in Europe knows what an Elevator pitch is (or cares) despite the fact its in the Vmware VSP exam.

-          Dunes have some great stuff built around business processes but basically you can tailor it to do pretty much anything for VMware. They already have a connection broker module. Looks like it could be great for enterprise customers.

-          Left hand networks have an ISCI SAN you build on HP or IBM hardware the magic bit being that it can be distributed across sites and will automatically replicate.

-          Equalogic also have a great ISCSI network offering but based on their own SAN hardware.

-          Storage vendors are desperate to get some sales on the back of VMware and realise that customers are clever enough to know that they don’t need to pay through the nose any more to get a SAN. They keep pushing SAN virtualisation though and its just not necessary unless you are an enterprise customer.

Met our ETC product development Services manager at supper, he was a nice chap who new what he was taking about ( looks like the spitting image of Family Guy). Basically ETC are making all the money from training in VMware as the demand is huge and margin is enormous while making no money from software sales or box shifting. They also have techies that can do the pre-sales and consultancy for those resellers that don’t have the skills. If you ask me (not that you did) I can’t see where the line starts or ends between disti and reseller any more.

Notes From Day One - Session One

We had the normal introduction session this morning where VMware really seem to be pushing their virtual appliances. These are essentially virtual machines which are prebuilt with their O.S. and apps already installed and ready to go, So you don't have to go through the rigmarole of reading the instruction manual and putting 3 Cd's in. They will also be releasing the manager for their new Ace Product as a V.A.

They hope that software suppliers will catch in and start distributing software preconfigured as a V.A.and in fact one of the partners at the event was already doing this. If they make it to easy we could all be out of a job!

VMware have a techie network where you can read blogs WIKI's and support forums. The home page is RSS enabled now as well. See www.vmtn.net

Their are supposed to be only 1700 VMware Certified Professionals in VI3 since October 2006 across emea. With the UK being the biggest area.

They have a new 4 day advanced training course coming along which is supposed to follow on from the basic 4 day "Install and Configure" The new one will be "Deploy Secure and Analysis".

Also an new 2 day Operator course will be available aimed at the likes of operators - good for the South African community perhaps... and by that I mean the NOC and Gordon Cass.

There is also going to be a bootcamp or fastrack which will basically be the two four day courses amalgamated into one.

To really keep the money coming in they are also going to have an Advanced Certification coming out in Q3.  

First session of the day was Vmware Consolidated Backup or Vmware's LAN free Backup for those atheists.

Its an improvement on their initial scripting known as VMSNAP and basically tells the vmtools running on a virtual machine to quieses the disk and run any third party scripts to quiese applications such as SQL and Exchange. Then it copies the contents of a VM off of the SAN on to a local windows disk belonging to a windows server known as a "backup proxy". at this point the normal backup software takes over and backups up the files to disk or tape.

The VCB proxy can't run on the same machine as Virtual Center and it won't work inside a VM with out a hell of a lot of work.

The backup software must use timestamps as its not allowed to write directly to the VM during backup.

Restore of an entire VM is a two step process where you do your normal restore with your backup software then copy the files to a VMFS partition and run a vcbrestore script. There is a trick here where you can restore to a windows share which is actually a mount point on an NFS share on the ESX server to make the process simpler.

There is a bug at the moment where a VM's disks must all exist on the same LUN for VCB to work.

The vmware TSX didn't start till Tuesday  (had a nice weekend with the wife in cannes though untill I reversed the brand new audi A3 hire car in to a green metal post. Turns out that they don't sell Tcut in france but nail varnsih remover is a god send). Also when the little man turns green at a pedestrian crossing in france it doesn't actually mean that it is clear to cross.

 But I did make some notes for Monday.

I went for dinner with the product manager for magerius (one of our distis) in Germany.

Magerius have a remote training facility that we can use to deliver onsite training to customers. Something we can't do at the moment due to the amount of hardware required.

Magerius are a German company.(this should obviously count against them)

Magerius have an online quoting system in the UK now to give instant quotes including margin to their resellers. 

I was chatting with this German guy and just saying how I felt San virtualisation wasn't necessary as vmware does it at the front end when the lead technical guy for equallogic walked buy and took me apart. (where is Steve Dawes when you need him).

Equallogic do iscsi only sans where you pay one price only for the hardware and all the software including snapshotting and multipathing comes free. It does sata sas and scsi. Can aggregate the storage and the networking. 10gb over ethernet coming soon. One management interface, you can carve up the storage on the fly. Any luns are spread across all the spindals. Looks really good.

Anyway got to go now since the consolidated backup lab is starting now. I got here early (first time ever) and am sitting in the front row. Bound to have some complete geek sitting next to me.