The voting for VMworld Call for Papers is now Open.

Cody Bunch and myself have submitted a session – based on the customer stories behind the
vExpert HoL that we are designing for the upcoming VMworld.

If you would like to see the story behind the lab – we would appreciate your Thumbs Up for the session.

1996 Managing Your Day-to-Day Administrative Tasks with vCenter Orchestrator

There are 1222 different sessions that you can vote for – so wading through them all – can be tiresome.

I will be posting my choices in a future post.

As always the VMworld labs are always a hit. Everyone wants to try out the new technology, see the new stuff, and get a hands on feeling with the latest and greatest. To add to my HoL post from VMworld, the Fast Pass was gone within a very short time, so my apologies about that one.

Borrowing from Duncan Epping's post VMworld Labs 2011.

The labs were (as they always are) impressive, two monitors at each seat, with a thin client. A great user experience, albeit a bit sluggish at times. The aquarium was nice touch and a good visual aid as to what was was being deployed during the show. By the way - the racing car dashboard from last year - beats the pants off the aquarium. Just sayin..

One of the sessions I attended was LAS4000 VMworld Labs Hardware Architecture. Here I learned several things some I found surprising, and others not. The not first.

1. The entire infrastructure was running in the cloud. Why was this not surprising - because - Cloud is what VMware is selling, it is their vision. It is what they are betting their chips on. So they have to (and rightfully should) present solutions using this technology.

I was surprised to hear..

1. The entire Lab Environment  was running on NFS. Not FC, not FCoE, only NFS. That is change from previous years. If my memory serves e well, last year is was mostly FC and a small amount of NFS storage.
2. EMC was not the only player for the underlying spindles. Nexenta (a much smaller company) was used to power a good amount of the storage used for the labs. I was originally led to believe that it was only Nexenta storage, but that turned out to not be entirely accurate.

A few closing comments regarding the organization.

1. Extending the labs to provide options to test also the partner integration is a great addition - just it should be kept to a minimum (like it was). 
2. Waiting in line for 45 minutes to get a lab seat is not good. Not for those who want to take the labs. That time spent in line is wasted - it could have been spent on the floor, or in a session. There has to be a better way of doing this. Perhaps pre-register for labs (like sessions), but also allow for walk-by's as well. Those who have pre-registered will get quicker access. That way those who really want to do the labs, and close off time on their schedule and are there on time - do not have to spend an hour in line.
3. The real world scenarios - were perfect!!! Whoever had that idea - brilliant!! Well done!
4. Looking at the number above from Duncan's post I noticed something which troubled me. On his post VMworld Labs wrapup 2011 – Las Vegas 
   I noticed that the number of Labs was less than last year and the number of VM's was only slightly higher, despite the fact that there were more hours, an increase of 2% despite the increase of 13% more lab hours. Again a record was broken, but not by much.
   
   

But what really troubles me is the huge difference in goal vs actual. 148,000 vs. 225,000, that is a really big miss. It would be nice to hear what actually was the reason for not achieving the pre-defined goal. Was it performance? Was it architecture? Was it logistics? Was it over-zealous goals?

I do want to stress again. The labs are amazing - the technology behind it is amazing. The option of trying something hands-on is wonderful - and for some it is the main reason to come to VMworld. If the post-mortem analysis could be shared - I am sure that this is something we would all benefit from. This is not to criticize any of the the VMware Integration Team in any way. So if someone could share more details on why the big differences, I would be grateful.

Hands-on Labs
Even though the Solutions Exchange closes tonight at 5:30pm, you can stop by and take a Lab until 10:00pm – or- stop by tomorrow morning at 7:00am.
So far 4,900 labs have been with 54,000 VMs deployed, and any attendee who has completed more than 4 labs can now get a Fast Pass which will get you to the front of the line.

Jason Boche - The Future of VMware Lab Manager, Ian Koenig - Lab Manager is dead.. Long Live Lab Manager and Mike Laverick - VMware Lab Manager vs. VMware Cloud Director: Another Case of "Spanners" and "Hammers?" - the writing was on the wall.

For those of you who saw this - my apologies, but if not, VMware has posted an update on Lab Manager - announcing that there will be no more major releases for Lab Manager

We want to provide you with an important update about the vCenter Lab Manager product.  As customers continue to expand the use of virtualization both inside the datacenter and outside the firewall, we are focusing on delivering infrastructure solutions that can support these expanded scalability and security requirements.  As a result of this focus, we have decided to discontinue additional major releases of vCenter Lab Manager.  Lab Manager 4 will continue to be supported in line with our General Support Policy through May 1^st, 2013.

As VMware continues to invest in our customers' journey to cloud computing, we are focusing on delivering secure multi-tenant enterprise hybrid clouds with VMware vCloud Director.  vCloud Director is a new software solution that provides the scalability and security necessary to deliver catalog-based self-service provisioning across different workload types, across multiple enterprise tenants, and across both private and public deployment models.

As a customer of Lab Manager, we would like to offer you a special opportunity to leverage the scale and security of vCloud Director.  Customers who are active on SnS may exchange their existing licenses of Lab Manager to licenses of vCloud Director at no additional cost.  This exchange program is entirely optional and may be exercised anytime during Lab Manager’s General Support period.  This provides you the freedom and flexibility to decide whether and when to implement a secure enterprise hybrid cloud.

The part in bold is something that I am interested in hearing an answer from VMware about. At present Lab Manager is licensed per CPU

And as you may know vCloud is per VM.

From my experience the conversion rates are not always in the customers favor. What will the conversion rate be?

SR has been submitted, looking forward to a reply.

No - I have not gone over to the Dark Side. And forgive me for the Powershell pun, but I read an article by Ronald Beekelaar on the Microsoft Virtualization Team Blog - demonstrating the wonders of Virtualization that were used in MMS 2010 Labs: Powered by Hyper-V, System Center & HP...

The numbers are impressive - very impressive - I would suggest that you read the article.

The numbers were as follows:

• 6 half racks - ~7 Servers per rack
• 41 HP Proliant DL380G6 servers (Dual socket, quad-core, Nehalem Processors with SMT, 16 LPs per system) each configured with 128 GB of memory and 4x300 GB SAS drive of local storage striped
• All networking was 1 Gb/E switched (no 10 Gb/E) and demonstrates the efficiency of Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). Even with hundreds of labs going on simultaneously, network bandwidth was never an issue on 1 Gb/E
• Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and System Center
• Virtual machines were configured on average with 3-4 GB of memory each and the majority of labs used multiple VMs per lab.
• ~40,000 Hyper-V VMs for ~80 different labs in 5 days

Ok, so I did a bit of math. I came to the conclusion that the most that they could run on 1 server at any given time would be 40 VM's per server.

Let me explain the calculation - and forgive me for my assumptions, and I not sure that they are 100% accurate but you will see where I am getting here.

My assumptions:

• The hosts were not CPU / network / Disk constrained
• RAM Usage on each host should not be higher than 120GB (90%) - I was being conservative.
• The average RAM used per VM that was quoted was 3-4GB, I assumed that it was 3GB .

Using those assumptions I got to the following numbers.

120GB (Host RAM) / 3GB (VM RAM)  = 40 VM's per host.

40 (VM's) x 41 (Hosts) = 1640 Virtual machines running simultaneously

So 1640 VM's running simultaneously is a good amount of VM's, now of course not all of them run at the same time. and bringing up labs and down throughout the 5 days - I can imagine how they got to the impressive number of ~40,000 Hyper-V VMs.

But I wanted to try an see what would the comparison be with vSphere.

Again I made assumptions (in addition to the ones above) - which I think are safe and conservative.

• Since almost all the VM's on the host are the same OS, same configuration - the amount of memory that could be reclaimed was 30%.
• I did not calculate any further benefit from the additional shared memory after that.

Using those assumptions I got to the following numbers:

40 (VM's) x 3GB (RAM) = 120GB

30% of that that RAM is Shared - 120*70% = 36GB

36 (GB) /  3 (GB per VM) = 12

40 (VM's) + 12 (VM's - from page sharing) = 52 VM's

1640 (simultaneous VM's) / 52 (VM per host) = 31.5 (Servers)

31.5 (Servers) / 7 (Servers in a rack) = 4.5 (Racks)

10 (servers less) x $20,000 (Cost per server) = $200,000 less using vSphere

This is not taking into account:

• 10 (servers) x 200 (watts per server) = 2000 watts
• Additional charges for shipping costs
• Network Components
• etc.

Perfect example of - even if vSphere is more expensive, it will save you a hell of a lot of money!!!!!! And to quote Microsoft themselves

Still, in the end, the big question to ask yourself is the following: Is it worth all this expense for VMware, when the Microsoft solution offers a comparable or even better feature set for much less cost?  Is it worth the extra line item on the invoice, the extra line in the budget, to use VMware virtualization when it's built into Windows?  That is a question I think many customers will be asking themselves in the coming months and that is just another reason that you should start using Microsoft Virtualization solutions.

So do you know the answer???

We continue our Saga. Part 2 ended with configuring our cluster and now we go onto shared storage and vMotion.
If you looked at the previous topology of my lab you will notice that there was no interface configured there for shared storage. That was a small oversight on my part which I corrected by adding a additional NIC, by the way, that is why I love working on virtual machines as a lab - hardware does not cost anything!!

I added a fourth NIC to each ESX host with a VMKernel port connected to 1.1.2.x - named NFS.
So after adding a new nic to each of my ESX hosts the topology looks like this

ESX4-1	ESX4-2

 

We will now add a shared NFS volume to each server. I know that NFS is not the most popular choice for shared storage out there, but I do have to say that I am extremely pleased with the performance, and in my personal production environment, the benefits we receive with, ease of use, backup times and administration, has made NFS the de-facto choice for all our ESX deployments.

The NFS share is hosted on an Openfiler server (well I am exaggerating a bit - it is actually a desktop with a large disk). Extremely stable - as you can see from the screen shot below.

"There is more than one way to skin a cat" - so go the saying, and there is more than one way to add an NFS volume.

We can do it through the VI client.

 

 

Or we can do it from the command-line on the ESX host.

esxcfg-nas -a <volume name> -o <hostname/ip> -s <share name>

or in my case

 

And now we have both Servers which see the same Shared Storage.

And this is a diagram of my environment

I now fired up a Windows Server machine to test out my vMotion

 

Next up on the menu Fault Tolerance