Virtualware
VMware vSphere takes me by storm
May 26th
Official download was available on May 21st, 2009, and I was waiting anxiously for my license keys for the new vCenter (management console) and host license keys (that which is the hypervisor)…
I got them on that day, and then proceeded to spend way too much time with it. For some people, addiction is a bad thing. For me…no need to guess.
I find playing and working with VMware (and the suite of tools available) to be on par with playing World of Warcraft. I can lose myself for hours and hours. With WoW, I complete quests, work with groups of people (9 or 24 others) accomplishing a goal. With VMware, I make clusters, I play virtual networking games, I make one computer act like many.
Since Thursday, I have upgraded my not-for-resale copies of vCenter and installed an Enterprise level host (well, upgraded from ESX 3.5 to vSphere 4 Enterprise). I want to get used to things. It hasn’t taken very long to get comfortable. Sure, some things have changed, but the core methods have not.
Hopefully over the next 2-4 weeks I can upgrade our VMware cluster(s) to vSphere 4 from ESX 3.5. The added performance benefits (according to VMware), the prettier and better organized client software (still no native Mac client, BOO!), and the eventual vNetwork Distributed Switch implementation.
My testing so far (ha, hard to believe what you can do in 4 days), upgrading the infrastructure shouldn’t be hard at all, and should be pretty seamless in our data center, though before the clusters get some love, I’ll be doing a few more test installs and test upgrades.
Until next time… VMware addict out!
VMware vSphere – 1 more day of waiting!
May 20th
Tomorrow, May 21st, 2009, normal people around the world will get a chance to download VMware’s newest edition of their infrastructure ’cloud operating system’ products named vSphere.
I am very excited to see what this all entails. I have read the documents, reviewed the upgrade steps and procedures, have read many a blog entry from those special enough to have early access.
What will it do for our infrastructure here at ipHouse? That I don’t know. The new Cisco Nexus 1000V stuff looks great, but initial reports of pricing push it out of our market space pretty quickly as what I have read so far show it to be over $10,000 per physical host. I do hope I am wrong, but until I can get someone on the phone (or even email) from Cisco dealing with this software, I am marking it as unobtainium.
Until tomorrow…when maybe I won’t be so lame with my lack of content…
ipHouse releases VMware based server services
Apr 24th
Virtualization, one of the buzzwords flying around the Internet today, is a method of running separate servers (guests) with separate operating systems on shared physical hardware (the host). I wrote a quick summary back in February, 2009 that should help give some context.
Here at ipHouse, we have chosen to use VMware for our virtualization products. We chose VMware because of its reliability, great support for many guest operating systems, and integrated set of management tools for both the hosts (the physical servers) and the guests (the running virtual machines). In fact, ipHouse is an official licensee of the VMware Service Provider Program (VSPP), a requirement to sell virtual server services to 3rd parties (and as far as I know, the only authorized hosting provider in Minnesota, though I would love to be corrected).
Dubbed ‘SV’ internally, there are 4 different server editions available.
But before I get into the servers (and their configurations) themselves, I’d like to list the supported operating systems (and Linux distributions), many of which are ready for quick deployment where only the final configuration options need to be entered.
Immediately we support:
- Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Standard and Enterprise, 32/64bit
- Microsoft Windows Server 2008, Standard and Enterprise, 32/64bit
- FreeBSD 7.x, 32/64bit
- Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), 32/64bit
- RedHat Enterprise Linux 5, 32/64bit
These systems are available with and without operating system maintenance handled by ipHouse, and if you choose to maintain your own system(s), we have an interface in place to facilitate your needs for a virtual console that will give you the ability to power on, power off, and reset the system, as well as doing recovery in case of a configuration error.
How does this work? Here is a tutorial I whipped up (with editing help from Ben) using the client tools we will supply.
(and it was fun to make, but really needs a voice over)
Virtualization War II (VWII)
Apr 4th
Oooh, the virtualization wars are reaching a new level, and with this new video from Microsoft we have reached a new level of marketing misdirection with some future capabilities included.
The video focuses on 10 items that VMware says they have over Hyper-V…that are being refuted by the marketing and tech guy in the video.
Right away the viewer is presented with the first (of many) misdirection(s). There is a claim that Hyper-V supports live migration (compared to VMware vMotion), but you need to listen closely, it is in Windows Server 2008 R2, which hasn’t been released yet. They even say that, but it is quite subtle and could easily be missed. To do this kind of feature, a clustered filesystem is needed, which they talk about in the video…but it also is not released yet. This is just marketing for future enhancements, it isn’t a fact fighting battle, it is more of a tweedle beetle battle.
Two items are are ‘announced’ within the first 90 seconds. Ignore the techno error of Windows presenting the same LUN – Windows isn’t doing this, the SAN is doing so.
There is more, but I don’t want to ruin your viewing pleasure. So check it out, giggle where you need to, learn something new where you can.
One item in Microsoft’s favor is hardware support – only requirement is Hyper-V requires Intel-VT or AMD-V, otherwise, whatever Windows Server 2008 supports works out of the box. No issues on whether you can use straight SATA disks or this random RAID controller from the corner computer store. If it has a Windows driver…you can virtualize.
Virtualization and you – the business user
Feb 16th
Why virtualize? Better yet, why use virtualized server services for your business?
I’ll try to answer that question in this blog post, though from a service provider point of view, but I’ll try to remove my bias where feasible.
Summary: For many business needs, a virtualized server on a hosting providers infrastucture is very cost effective, very secure, and highly reliable. When those 3 items are combined, the argument to use separate, physical servers becomes moot. Virtualized server services are not for everyone, nor for ever task at hand, but for many, it is the more right solution.
Now that the summary is done, you can can read on for details as to why I think the above statements are true or just head on over to ipHouse and talk to sales and see what we can do for you, or both.
First, virtualization has a few meanings, but for this context, I am talking about the concept of taking a physical server (call it a host) and carving it into many virtual systems (call them guests) running concurrently. Here’s a picture from using VMware atoms to help visualize what I am getting at:
VM -> Host visualization
This allows the ability to spread the cost of a fast and expensive physical server amongst multiple guest systems.
