Posts tagged Virtualization
Over Subscription vs Over Capacity – huh?
Jan 15th
Recently, a whole slew of tweets showed up across my feed dealing with the perceived and measured issues across multiple public cloud providers infrastructure.
Image via Wikipedia
One of the posts comes from Chris Hoff (this post in particular) that describes quite clearly what the differences are.
Service providers (anyone doing cloud services, virtualization, colocation, bandwidth, whatever) live upon the idea of over subscription. We make our revenue banking on the fact that not everyone needs their full allotment all the time.
With over subscription there is a chance of reaching a state of over capacity. Anyone using this business model needs to understand that they must be ready for it to happen. It isn’t an issue of ‘will’ but an issue of ‘when’. Good engineering can keep the ‘when’ at bay, virtually forever, and that is what you need to be prepared for.
Another recent posting via The Register (featuring @GeorgeReese) had some data dealing with network latency within the Amazon EC2 network. I don’t have any opinions about what was in this article, but it is something that is going to come up again and again as this new model of computing (for the masses) solidifies and grows up on the Internet.
Comments?
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VMware releases vSphere 4.0 Update 1
Nov 20th
The crowd cheers!
Though that might just be me :)
I am very excited for this update and I hope that it goes as smoothly as other updates have gone.
I have already updated 2 non-production systems (both ESX) and I am in the process of updating some non-production ESXi servers.
One of the items I need to schedule is the update of the vCenter software – this will require an actual outage for customers who are managing their VMs through ipHouse.
I hope that this update fixes 2 problems I have seen in the past (from the vSphere Client point of view):
- Inability for a datacenter administrator to view or clear host alerts and alarms from the hardware
- Interesting permissions issues that end up being more restrictive than the topic states
Both of these have been difficult to work around.
The first one requires the customer to contact us to ‘reset’ their hardware sensors.
The second one has actually hampered one customer from controlling their VMware cluster because of issues dealing with datastore management and the ability to attach an ISO image to their newly created VMs.
One item that is really exciting is the raising of the number of vCPUs (virtual CPUs) per physical CPU core to 25 per. Since we are able to sell VMware based virtual servers to customers, the ability to scale this higher could mean higher savings long term. Be nice to update pricing to reflect these savings later as well, though don’t know if there will be enough right now. At this point we really aren’t reaching the previous limit of 20 vCPU per pCPU.
Added support for Microsoft Windows Server 2008R2 is also welcome as we were wanting to deploy this version of Windows for customers.
Full release notes can be found here and are worth reading if you are into the enterprise products from VMware.
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- VMware boasts a half mil vSphere downloads (theregister.co.uk)
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Example cost: Virtual Private Cloud on VMware
Sep 4th
In the last 6 months, I have helped multiple customers achieve their dream of a virtual machine environment built for them exclusively, but with abilities to control their virtual machine setup, configuration, turn up, tear down, etc. These dedicated infrastructure environments are in the ipHouse data center.
This isn’t ‘cloud computing’ as many people think of it (thanks to Amazon EC2 and the like), but it is pretty close to that vague definition, and with far more control available in terms of everything-vm-wise.
What do I mean? With this virtual private cloud, a customer can set up 3 Ubuntu systems, 2 Windows Server 2003, 1 FreeBSD, and 7 Windows Server 2008 systems. There really isn’t anything novel about this (again, reference Amazon EC2 and the like).
What is novel is that the customer can configure these VMs as they wish. Disk space allocation, partitioning, memory configurations, number of vCPUs. Basically, if you can do it on a physical server – you can do it virtually.
Another differentiating feature is that VMware vSphere 4 supports many operating systems while most public cloud providers offer a very limited number in comparison. This choice alone can be enough to warrant looking at this kind of solution.
No per hour fees, no storage fees (above what the customer has purchased), highly available (if configured to do so), dynamic resource scheduling (if configured to do so), bandwidth fees that are predictable. (see VMare vMotion and Storage vMotion, VMware HA, VMware DRS via website)
I’ll build a configuration example offering shared storage between the VMware physical servers. I’ll be doing some cost estimates for the per month fees. These estimates will be high and are purely shown for example. You would want to contact ipHouse Sales to get a real idea for the costs involved.
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…
