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2007 Holiday Contest Winners

First of all, VMware has released VMware ESX 3i. The 'integrated' version of ESX that no longer needs a service console and has feature parity with ESX 3.5. If you've got an ESX 3.x license and support you should be able to download the new 3i installer over at http://vmware.com/download.

vmprofessional.com also has some goodies to give away to nice little girls and boys. The winners of the 2007 holiday contest are as follows:

VMware Fusion License: Mark Mathers
Eric Retherford: VMware Bag
Patrick Rowley: Bumper Stickers
Tyler Bindel: Polo
Clay: T Shirt
Jarrod Collision: Stress Ball(s)

If you're a winner, you'll receive an email from me in the next hour or so so I can get your shipping address.

Posted by Dominic Rivera at Tuesday, December 25, 2007.

The power of COWs

First, a primer on COW ( Copy on Write ) disks:

When you create a virtual disk in VMware ESX, chances are that it is what is known as a 'monolithic' virtual disk. That is, for each byte of data that can exist inside a virtual machines hard drive there is a byte of data that is reserved on the physical drive and/or LUN. A COW disk on the other hand only occupies as much space on the physical hard drive as the is space occupied inside of the virtual machines hard disk. For example, if I had a Windows XP VM with a 20GiB virtual hard drive and 15GiB of free space inside the VM the COW disk would occupy 5GiB of disk space on the physical hard drive. Here is the syntax for creating both a 'thin' ( COW ) disk and a 'thick' ( Monolithic ) disk. Also, I've added the output of 'du -hs' which displays the actual file sizes for these virtual drives. Note that the COW disk at this point only occupies 1M and the monolithic disk has been allocated all 20GiB.

[root@esx01 esx01-storage2]# vmkfstools -c 20G -d thin cow.vmdk
[root@esx01 esx01-storage2]# vmkfstools -c 20G -d thick monolithic.vmdk
[root@esx01 esx01-storage2]# du -hs *
1.0M    cow-flat.vmdk
64K     cow.vmdk
20G     monolithic-flat.vmdk
64K     monolithic.vmdk

It's little known fact that VMware ESX can in fact make use of COW (Copy on Write) disks. It's little known because this functionality isn't exposed through the virtual infrastructure client, and for good reason. It's hard to effectively plan how much space your VMs will need in the future and it's very easy to get into trouble if you get into a situation where you have multiple VMs competing for the same physical drive space.

One particularly good use for COW disks is templates. Templates are generally full of free space, and they're also powered off nearly 100% of the time which gives them little chance to grow and cause problems. Even nicer is that when you deploy a template from a COW disk the deployed VM is automatically converted to a monolithic disk. Should you ever need to copy a template to a remote site it will take less time because the size on disk is also reduced. The only drawback is that you must create the virtual COW disk from the command line ( for now ).

Labels: monolithic cow template

Posted by Dominic Rivera at Tuesday, December 18, 2007.

Who loves you?

I'm happy to announce that vmprofessional.com is going to hand out some freebies during the 2007 holiday contest. I've cleared out my desk and cobbled some VMware prizes together, so head over to the contest page and try your hand. One submission please.

Posted by Dominic Rivera at Monday, December 17, 2007.

Site Changes

After a few weeks of continuous development and testing, vmprofessional.com has been updated with a fresh new look. I'd like to throw a shout out to Chris DeCaro of DeCaro Studios for all of development help. Without Chris' help I'm sure I'd still be weeks away from launching the new design.

Along with a new design, I'm also happy to announce that Jae Ellers of Mister VM has joined the vmprofessional.com team and will be contributing to both the news blog and generating technical content. If you've spent much time on the VMTN forums you will probably recognize Jae as one of the most prolific posters, and for his technical prowess.

In honor of these changes, and in the giving spirit of Christmas I've decided to hand out a few freebies. I'm going to have a little raffle and give away a few VMware prizes. Stay tuned for your chance to win.

Posted by Dominic Rivera at Sunday, December 16, 2007.

Kickstart Adjustments for ESX 3.5

Now that ESX 3.5 is generally available, I'm sure that many companies will start to cut their installations over as soon as possible to take advantage of the new features. I've been tweaking my scripted install process to accommodate the new release and have a few notes to share.

1. The way to enable VMotion on a port group has been altered in this release. The 'new' way to enable VMotion on a VMKernel port group ( assuming the port group that you want to enable VMotion on is the first VMKernel port group added ) is as follows:
vimsh -n -e "/hostsvc/vmotion/vnic_set vmk0"

2. There seems to be a bug in this release when adding multiple links to a vSwitch. In the past, when a vmnic was added to a vSwitch it was added in an 'active' state. In this release, any vmnic after the first that is added is put into a 'standby' state. Putting the vmnic into an active state has proved to be quite difficult but it has been found that unlinking the vmnics, relinking them and then setting the active state with vimsh appears to be a workaround. For example if we had a vSwitch with 2 vmnics attached ( vmnic0, vmnic1 ) the workaround would look like the following:

# First Add the vmnics to the vswitch
esxcfg-vswitch vSwitch0 -L vmnic0
esxcfg-vswitch vSwitch0 -L vmnic1

# Second, remove the vmnics from the vswitch
esxcfg-vswitch vSwitch0 -U vmnic0
esxcfg-vswitch vSwitch0 -U vmnic1

# Relink the vmnics back to the vswitch
esxcfg-vswitch vSwitch0 -L vmnic0
esxcfg-vswitch vSwitch0 -L vmnic1


# Restart the vmware management daemon, and wait 2 minutes for the service to restart
service mgmt-vmware restart
sleep 120


# Set the vSwitch policy with vimsh
vimsh -n -e "hostsvc/net/vswitch_setpolicy --nicorderpolicy-active vmnic0 vSwitch0"
vimsh -n -e "hostsvc/net/vswitch_setpolicy --nicorderpolicy-active vmnic0,vmnic1 vSwitch0"

I have not yet found a reliable way to expand this past 2 vmnics.

3. New hardware agents are necessary.
HP SIM Agent 7.9.1
Dell Open Manage 5.2.0
IBM Directory 5.20 Update 1

Otherwise ESX 3.5 appears to be a solid product and my scripted installs were left mostly unmodified from ESX 3.0.x -> ESX 3.5

Update 12/31/2007: New workaround for network changes
Reader Clay Kohl wrote in to let me know about a new workaround for ESX 3.5.0 to get all of the vmnics in an active state. The trick here is to create port groups, and link the vmnics to the port groups. In this example I link 2 vmnics ( vmnic0, and vmnic1 ) to the port group "Service Console" on vSwitch0 ( with 64 ports ). This method of getting the vmnics in an active state works beyond 2 vmnics reliably.

# Create the vSwitch with 64 ports
esxcfg-vswitch -a vSwitch0:64
# Create the port group "Service Console"
esxcfg-vswitch -A VMotion vSwitch0
# Link the vmnics to the port group
esxcfg-vswitch -M vmnic0 vSwitch0 -p "Service Console"
esxcfg-vswitch -M vmnic1 vSwitch0 -p "Service Console"
# Link the vmnics to the vSwitch
esxcfg-vswitch -L vmnic0 vSwitch0
esxcfg-vswitch -L vmnic1 vSwitch0

Posted by Dominic Rivera at Friday, December 14, 2007.

ESX Patches 11/30/2007

While VMware cliams these patches were out on 11/30/2007 I can tell you that they didn't show up until either 12/4/2007 or 12/3/2007. I know because I checked for them and there were none to be found. So head over to the usual place and grab your patchlist.txt. We need something to do while we sit around waiting for ESX 3.5 / VC 2.5 right?

Posted by Dominic Rivera at Wednesday, December 05, 2007.