PLANET VIRTUALIZATION

SimDK – VMware vSphere4 simulator from NTPRO.NL, Uncategorized (Eric Sloof)

Andrew Kutz already has released amazing pieces of code during the past years, back in May 2007 he revealed the source code of his tool that can add port groups to all your ESX servers. In February 2008 he released the source code of his tool that can be used to create a VI 2.5 plug-in. Andrew really became famous after releasing the Storage VMotion Plug-in. These days Andrew is doing amazing stuff at Hyper9 and announced the immediate availability of the open source (BSD) project from Hyper9, SimDK, a VMware vSphere4 simulator which provides vSphere4 API-compatibility for official vSphere4 clients and other applications built using the vSphere4 SDK.

The picture is taken by Viktor van den Berg.

Andrew Kutz: I think SimDK is one of the most exciting pieces of software released in the realm of virtualization in a long time. If you’re interested in learning more about SimDK or want to become involved with the project, please visit the SimDK homepage (a work in progress). In the meantime, if you have any questions, feel free to e-mail me at sakutz at gmail. Thanks!

http://akutz.wordpress.com/2010/03/09/simdk/

Posted in NTPRO.NL, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Windows Phone 7 Breaks Cover. I want one. from Uncategorized, Xtravirt Knowledge (Xtravirt Knowledge)

Posted in Uncategorized, Xtravirt Knowledge | No Comments »

VM powered on Alarm? from Uncategorized, Yellow Bricks (Duncan Epping)

One of my readers(Thanks Andrzej!) emailed me something that I thought might be interesting for those who are closely monitoring their environment.

Did you know that there are two similar VM event triggers in Alarms in vCenter?

1. VM powered on
2. DRS – VM powered on

The first only works for VMs outside of DRS enabled clusters. The second only works for VMs inside DRS enabled clusters. Now that’s definitely something you should be aware off when enabling Alarms / Event triggers. Imagine you want to know when a VM has been powered on and you enable the first even trigger but didn’t notice it will only sent an alarm when the VMs are not part of DRS cluster… You could be waiting for a very long time before you receive a single event alarm.

Just when I wanted to click “Publish” I received an email from one of my colleagues. Horst Mundt wrote an excellent article about Alarms and created a very handy spreadsheet which contains all alarms / events.

vSphere alarm triggers
In terms of alarms, vCenter 4 has much more to offer than vCenter 2.5. There is a whole range of default alarms available when you install vCenter 4, and they will give you a very good first shot for monitoring your vSphere  environment. If you’ve never wondered what exactly the default alarms mean, or how to tune them – that’s fine. If you’re interested in a bit more detail – read the attached PDF.

• vSphere Alarms v2.xlsx (69.3 K)
• Fun with vSphere Alarms.pdf (656.6 K)

Make sure to visit the VMTN source page and leave a comment or rate the article.

Posted in Uncategorized, Yellow Bricks | No Comments »

Cars, social media, phones, windows media and there’s no hiding with co-pilot. from James O'Neill, Uncategorized (James O'Neill)

As titles go that’s an odd one, but stay with me.

I’ve written before about my Citroen C6: Before Christmas a warning message popped up saying something was wrong with the hydro-pneumatic suspension which give the big Citroens their wonderful ride. A visit to the garage confirmed the problem was real – not a diagnostic issue, and lay with a part which rarely goes wrong i.e. one no dealer keeps in stock. It would be take a day or two to get the part and by the time it was fitted I needed to be at Tech-ed in Berlin. I expected the car to be ready when I got back, but it wasn’t. Having replaced the faulty part it turned out it had failed because of a fault in the hydraulic pump: this is beyond rare – Citroen UK told me later that they’d only ever supplied one before and that was after an accident, but I’m getting ahead of myself. The pump should have arrived before I got back from Tech-ed, but there was no sign of it. We then began a sequence where every few days I would call the garage or they would call me, and I’d get the news the pump had not arrived but would be there in a couple of days.

I’m not totally without patience, but after 3 weeks I was getting cross and started to tweet about it, and found Citroen UK on Twitter. So I posted things like Day 26 of my Citroen C6 being in the Garage. @Citroenuk promised to deliver the part today and they #Fail to. Now promising Thursday. It was partly to vent and partly to see if Citroen responded - if your organization is “doing social media” you really should know what you’re going to do if someone complains – we try to do this at Microsoft when it isn’t the “I hate Microsoft because they’re a big money making concern” variety.  Citroen UK’s twitter account turned out to be someone from  marketing who took enough ownership of the problem to get some information and make sure the right person saw it.  That was how I ended up talking to Brian (I’ll keep his last name out of it – I can see just people calling Citroen asking for him). If Brian was trained in customer care (rather than doing it by instinct) his teacher would have been pleased: he apologized (sincerely - not in an over the top way), saw the customer’s point of view “I know Caterpillar have a ‘parts anywhere in the world in 24 hours, or Cat pays’ promise. You should be able to get a part here in 24 days for your top of the range model”,  explained why it had gone wrong (the pumps showed as in stock but been taken to be modified to the latest specification), committed to speeding the resolution of the problem and promised to follow-up to talk about how Citroen could rebuild the relationship. I’ve had Citroens (7 of them) for 16 of the last 20 years, so I guess I qualify as a loyal customer they’d want to keep. 

Brian had an unexpected spell off work so it was well into January by the time he got in touch, and offered me a choice of accessories as compensation. I wanted to be able to plug in a music player in the car – I’ve tried those little FM transmitters and found on a decent length journey they’re more trouble than they’re worth. The accessory catalogue had a “USB box” which plays MP3s. Some of the other options which Brian was willing to pay for were pretty pricey and would have felt like taking advantage, but this seemed OK. It took a while to get the kit and sort out a day to fit it, but it went in last week and I have to say it’s a pretty neat gadget. The handbook suggests it goes in lot of cars - Peugeot and Citroen across the PSA group; it has a USB socket which is powered, so will charge my phone (I’ve twice blown the cigar lighter socket fuse with cheap adapters), plus a dedicated iPod socket – which will work with my wife’s nano, and a 3½mm jack plug for anything else. I tried playing a few MP3s I’d copied to a memory stick – and the first impression was nice sound quality: the integration with the built in Stereo isn’t perfect but is quite good enough.  But there was better news: it turns out the USB box plays pretty much any format, including WMA, WAV and even OGG format. Most of my music is in WMA format and sync’d to my phone, so just I tell the phone to connect in storage mode by default , plug it in (even if locked) and the USB box reads the files and plays them.

Playing OGG isn’t quite the advantage it might be when Co-pilot is installed on the memory card, because it uses OGG files for all its messages, and the USB box thinks it should play them – so the first thing it played was “Take 1st exit at roundabout” , “Take 2nd exit at roundabout” and so on. I set the files to hidden, interestingly file explorer on the phone ignores the hidden attribute, so I can’t blame the USB box for doing the same. It’s not an insurmountable problem, unlike its predecessors this phone has enough main memory to allow me to move Co-pilot’s sound files off the storage card.  So that’s another plus for the phone.

And as far as the car is concerned it’s one more thing to like about driving it, I’ve had another, minor problem since which was quickly fixed and thanks to Brian I’m back in the happy customers column.

Posted in James O'Neill, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Virtualization Short Take #36 from Uncategorized, blog.scottlowe.org (slowe)

It’s been a busy couple of weeks! I was in Vienna, Austria, all last week, and I’m on the US West Coast this week. Even though I’ve been on the go, I’ve still been collecting various virtualization-related posts and tidbits. Here they are for you in Virtualization Short Take #36! I hope you find something useful.

• You might recall that in early 2008 I wrote about how thin provisioned VMDKs on NFS storage tend to inflate. In a recent post, Chad Sakac pointed out that VMware has addressed this problem, which is caused by the use of the eagerzeroedthick VMDK format instead of the zeroedthick format. The fix requires ESX 3.5 Update 5 and VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 6, plus a configuration change that is outlined in this VMware KB article. Kudos to VMware for fixing the underlying issue instead of just forcing customers to upgrade to vSphere.
• VMware’s Scott Drummonds provides a bit more information on the memory compression technology previewed by Steve Herrod at Partner Exchange 2010 a few weeks ago. In my opinion, anyone who says that the hypervisor is a commodity isn’t paying attention to the fact that VMware is still innovating in this space.
• If you perform virtualization assessments using VMware’s Capacity Planner tool, you’ll find Gabe’s Capacity Planner troubleshooting tips helpful.
• Gabe also published a “wish list” for VMware datastores. If you take a deeper look at what Gabe is really trying to address, though, a great deal of the functionality he’s looking for could be achieved through a combination of policy-based storage tiering and greater integration between VMware and the storage array. Would you really need category labels on VMware datastores if the underlying storage was tiering data effectively based on utilization? Probably not. It might still make sense in some cases, but I think the vast majority of cases would be addressed. I think that you are going to see some very cool innovation in this space over the course of this year.
• Simon Gallagher recently asked this question: with the move to ESXi, is NFS more useful than VMFS? It appears that a large part of Simon’s argument centers around the speed at which files can be transferred into VMFS using ESXi, and it seems to me that VMware needs to do some optimization there. I’m not knocking NFS—I’ve used it extensively in the past and I have and continue to recommend it to customers where it is appropriate—but I’m not sure that you can build an argument for NFS based on ESXi’s file transfer performance. My friend and former colleague Aaron Delp (whose blog was recently added to Planet V12n; congrats!) points out that fixing VMDK alignment using ESXi could be an issue; now that’s a great point. Even third-party utilities like vOptimizer don’t work with ESXi. In my opinion, these points underscore the need for VMware to concentrate very heavily on ESXi if that is indeed going to be the “platform moving forward”.
• I came across an interesting VMware KB article while browsing the weekly VMware KB digest for the week ending 2/28/10. The article, which discusses a situation in which VMware HA would fail to configure at 90% completion, describes how some network switches—HP ProCurve 1810G switches with automatic denial-of-service protection enabled and Cisco Catalyst 4948 switches with ICMP rate limiting enabled—can drop packets that are necessary for VMware HA to configure and start correctly.
• Unfortunately, the latest VMware KB weekly digest (for the week ending 3/6/2010) didn’t include links to the actual articles that were published. Bummer! Still, it’s easy enough to simply look up the articles directly.
• EMC today released a couple of plug-ins for vCenter Server. The Celerra plug-in for VMware Environments brings Celerra NFS provisioning into the vSphere Client. The Celerra Failback Plug-in for SRM automates failback in VMware SRM environments. The official press release is here, which contains links to more information on the individual plug-ins. (Disclaimer: I work for EMC.)
• Newly-minted VCDX #029 Frank Denneman posted a good article on using reservations on resource pools to bypass slot sizing. As Frank points out, it’s not a recommended practice necessarily, but it might be warranted depending on customer requirements.
• Duncan’s recent article on the behavior of CPU and memory reservations is also helpful, especially for those who might not be familiar with the differences between the two types of reservations.
• Similarly, this guest post on Duncan’s site by VCDX Craig Risinger also helps explain how shares on a resource pool work. This is good information to have if you are unfamiliar with the topic.
• I’m not a security geek, but I did think that the RSA-Intel-VMware announcement at RSAC 2010 (third-party coverage here) was pretty cool. Security experts, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter. What was good about the announcement? What was missing?
• If you will be working with distributed vSwitches, this post by EMC’s Gregg Robertson might help; it underscores the need to ensure that your environment is being consistently and thoroughly patched and maintained. vCenter Update Manager, anyone?

I do have a few other articles in my “things to read list” that I haven’t yet gotten around to reading:

The Official Quest Software Desktop Virtualization Group Blog » Blog Archive » How to Integrate ThinApp with Quest vWorkspace 7.0
DRS Resource Distribution Chart
HP Flex-10 versus Nexus 5000 & Nexus 1000V with 10GE passthrough

That’s it for now. I hope that you’ve found something useful here, and—as always—I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

This article was originally posted on blog.scottlowe.org. Visit the site for more information on virtualization, servers, storage, and other enterprise technologies.

Virtualization Short Take #36

• Virtualization Short Take #30
• Virtualization Short Take #35
• Virtualization Short Take #31
• Virtualization Short Take #32
• Virtualization Short Take #33

Posted in Uncategorized, blog.scottlowe.org | No Comments »

Generate a Random Password – Powershell from Technodrone, Uncategorized (Maish Saidel-Keesin)

A task that I do quite often when building a new System is to create random password a local user on the machine – Don’t ask – it is a an OPSEC requirement from way before my time.

So instead of Running my fingers of the keyboard in a random way and having my colleagues ask what I am doing each time I decided to simplify this Powershell.

Dmitry Sotnikov’s post set me in the correct direction, the result below is a function that will prompt you for the length you want, create a password and put it in your clipboard

#========================================================================
# 
# NAME: Generate-password
# 
# AUTHOR: Maish Saidel-Keesing
# DATE  : 09/03/2009
# 
# COMMENT: Will generate a random password according to required length
#
# ========================================================================

function Generate-Password () {
    param ()
    PROCESS {
        	if ($args.count -eq 0)  {
                do {
        	       $length = Read-Host "How many characters long should the password be?"
                } until ($length -ne $null)
            } else { $length = $args[0] }

    #load Assembly
    [Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.Web")
    $password = [System.Web.Security.Membership]::GeneratePassword($length,3) 
    $password | clip
    Write-host The password is now in your clipboard
    }
}

Line 16-20. If there is no argument passed then it will prompt you for the number of characters needed in the password

Line 23. load the System.Web.Security Namespace

Line 24. Generate the password. The two parameters that are needed are password length and numberOfNonAlphanumericCharacters

Line 25. clip is a command line utility for the clipboard. In this case I piped it into the clipboard so I could paste it into the password window.

Posted in Technodrone, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Adding NICs to your vSwitch on ESXi? from Uncategorized, Yellow Bricks (Duncan Epping)

I just finished installing vSphere ESXi 4.0 update 1, I used all the default settings. I expected that all my portgroups would inherit all their settings from the vSwitch that was configured during installation… unfortunately this is not the case as can be seen in the screenshots below.

Default install with no redundancy:

VM Network inherits from vSwitch:

Management Network does not inherit from vSwitch:

For the default “VM Network” portgroup everything works as expected. But for the “Management Network” it doesn’t. So what’s the problem? Well it might not be a huge issue but it is something you will need to keep in mind. I wanted to add two NICs to my vSwitch0 and expected that both would be marked as “active” on the vSwitch. And this is what happens on the vSwitch, BUT the “Management Network” does not inherit the vSwitch settings so what do you think will happen? Again see the screenshot below for the details:

For some weird reason one of the vmnics is set to “unused” instead of active… Keep this in mind when installing / configuring ESXi as you might end up with less redundancy then expected. I just did a quick search if it was a known/documented change and it appears that I am not the only one who ran into this, but is does not seem to be a commonly known “issue”/change.

Posted in Uncategorized, Yellow Bricks | No Comments »

The vmClient 4.0 is released from NTPRO.NL, Uncategorized (Eric Sloof)

The vmClient is a lightweight tool which enables you to control the power of your virtual machines, it’s also capable of presenting the MKS console of your virtual machines. Before you can use the vmClient, you have to install the vSphere client on the same system. After starting the vmClient, you can logon to your vCenter server or individual ESX4 or ESX4i host. A list with available virtual machines will be presented after choosing the Virtual Machines menu item, you can also easily identify the power state of the virtual machines. Grey is powered off, green is powered on, yellow is suspended and red indicates that the virtual machine has an alarm. When you’re working in an RDP session there’s a menu item which can generate a Ctrl-Alt-Del in the guest OS instead of pressing Ctrl-Alt-Ins. The vmClient can run without borders in borderless mode. The menu bar has an option to search for virtual machines, just type in the first characters of your virtual machine name and the list will be filtered. 

The number of virtual machines can be too high to fit in the “Virtual Machine” menu item so I’ve added an extra option to disable this menu and use the search menu instead. The option to customize the user interface of the vmClient can be done by changing a few registry settings. You’re able to show or hide menu items using this hive.

 HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\VB and VBA Program Settings\NTPRO.NL\vmClient

You can also pre-select a default virtual machine in this hive. There are two recorded demo sessions available, one which show a walkthrough and a second which shows how to convert the vmClient into a VDI client. The trail version is limited to a maximum number of 50 virtual machines and shows a splash screen with my picture in it. The registered version can be bought online and has no virtual machine limit, you can also get rid of the splash screen. :-) The Buy Now link is available in the help menu. If you have any ideas or suggestions on improving the vmClient or you’ve found a bug, you know where to reach me. Have fun with it.

How to convert the vmClient into a VDI client

A general walkthrough

The vmClient 4.0 can be downloaded from this location: http://vmclient.nl/

Posted in NTPRO.NL, Uncategorized | No Comments »

A FAT (32) lot of good that did me … from James O'Neill, Uncategorized (James O'Neill)

First rule of blogging. Don’t blog when angry.

I’ve been through a time consuming process which could be called educational – in the sense of “Well ! That taught me a lesson”. My drug regime has been mentioned before in my posts, and this is one of those times when the drugs don’t seem to be working – so lets just say I was a shade cranky when before I started and now…

Up on youtube I have a video showing Hyper-V server R2 booting from a USB flash drive, (which I described in this post please note the recommendation to check supportability before going down this path yourself).

And I have a second video showing how I made my phone into a bootable USB device from which I could install windows. .

Why not, I thought, Boot HyperV server R2 from a phone – in fact why stop at phones ? I’ve had a good laugh at Will it Blend ? So I was thinking of doing a Will it boot series. Can I boot HVS from my camera ? etc.

Let’s stop for a second and think. What file systems do cameras, phones, MP3 players support ? NTFS – er no. They use FAT, in most of its forms, new memory cards show up formatted as FAT32.
And what is the limitation of FAT32 ? A maximum file size of 4GB: not a problem for installing Windows because WIM files are sized at less than 4GB to fit on DVD disks.  A bit of a challenge for VHD files as 4GB is shade small by today’s standards. In fact when I ran the setup for Hyper-V server against my sub-4GB VHD it wouldn’t install. Undeterred I have a customized Hyper-V server R2 VHD – which I use as a testing VM on a server 2008 box – I’d pared this down before so it uses comfortably less than 3.5GB on a 6GB VHD. I attached that VHD as a second drive on another VM which has the Windows Automated Installation Kit installed, created a 3.5GB VHD and added that as third drive, and fired up the VM. I used ImageX to make a WIM image of the this disk, and then it was question of partitioning my new VHD, activating the partition, formatting it, applying the image and making sure the VHD was bootable, and testing it in it’s own VM on server 2008. It worked like a charm. Next I copied it to a “4GB” SD card – the card is 4,000,000,000 bytes, which is only about 3.7 true gigabytes (taking 1GB as 2^30 bytes). I switched my test VM on Server 2008 to use the VHD on the SD card and all was well. I went through the steps to make the card bootable. Abject failure. I tried lots of things: without success – to retain one’s optimism and avoid anger, these are classified as things eliminated rather than failures.

Slowly, a picture began to emerge. I tried testing the VM from the SD card on Server 2008 R2, first I attached the VHD to a VM

A file system limitation ? Hmm. OK,  let’s see if we can attach VHD files on the SD card Windows 7’s Computer management or Server manager on Server 2008 R2 , go to storage, then to disk management, right click choose “attach VHD” browse to the disk and

I know that R2 removed the ability to use VHDs which had been compressed, and I think I probably did know that R2 also introduced a requirement to keep the VHD on NTFS.

There’s no reason why Windows can’t format an SD card as NTFS, and I can probably use my camera as a card reader for an NTFS formatted card; but the camera can’t save pictures to it. I’m sure I could partition the 16GB MicroSD card which I’m using in the phone so that there was a roughly 4GB active partition which could boot and 12GB left for camera / phone / whatever but I want to be able to reclaim the space at a moment’s notice if I need to put pictures on it – and such a scheme rules that out.

Angry at the time I’ve wasted ? No, no I’m calm, composed and working on other ideas for what I can do booting from off the wall devices.

Creating an image of me , in a pram, throwing toys from it is left as an exercise for the reader .

Posted in James O'Neill, Uncategorized | No Comments »

VMworld 2010 – Call For Papers Announced from TechHead, Uncategorized (Kiwi Si)

Yes folks, it’s that time of year where the ‘Call For Papers’ for VMworld 2010 has been announced.  If you fancy submitting a paper for consideration then log onto the VMworld portal to enter the required details.

Competition for acceptance will no doubt be tough so make sure you do your homework before hand and choose a topical subject to give yourself the best chance of success.

I look forward to seeing the final session list…

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