No blogs for a while, I’m afraid, not due to lack of topics but lack of (priority of) time. I have recently started working on a major cloud project at a large investment bank in the City (of London). This is using vCloud Director and some other nascent products from VMware. All very interesting and challenging and I certainly hope to blog about it when I have the time!
Brian Madden was speaking at a Quest Desktop Virtualisation event at the Landmark Hotel in London on Tuesday so I went along to listen. (Nice hotel by the way). Brian is as entertaining and thought provoking as ever and here are a few extracts from notes I jotted down.
One set of slides that stuck in my mind were the “Shit!” and “Yay!” ones. People saying “Shit!” are users (mostly) and VMware, Citrix. People saying “Yay!” are Microsoft (and virtualisation consultants). This is because you cannot get away from Microsoft apps and Microsoft apps need a Microsoft O/S to run. And that O/S has a built in registry which makes turns the whole package into a “brick”. This is the historical legacy we live with. The technology has, and does, evolve rapidly making many new architectures possible. But the inertia of big business and the desire to keep doing the tried and tested method (operations people hate change) means we have to carry around a large ball and chain (like we read a scroll of punishment).
There is of course a new breed of app which lives in the cloud, (dropbox was mentioned) and it is impossible for corporations to stop people using that stuff. Ultimately it is all about the apps and I am sure that a tipping point will occur when there is sufficient functionality in “cloud” on demand apps to run a business with. The younger generation, it was pointed out, are the first to have grown up with computers and this technically savvy generation will be a force for change.
In the meantime, to realise the benefits of the technologies now at our disposal, we have to continue designing and implementing extremely complex systems to bridge the software generations. There are lots of 16 bit dependencies out there, which in itself is a case for virtualisation because the latest operating systems won’t run them and they won’t die.
So, the best way to run new apps is in a virtual environment and the best way to run old apps is in a virtual environment.
I completed an experiment on ESXi 4.0 to confirm what many people have known about guest startup and vmotion since vsphere 3.x which is that the two features don’t work together.
Guest A set to 1 on host X
Guest B set to 1 on host Y
Migrate B from Y to X
B appears in “Any Order”
migrate B back to to Y from X
B appears in “Any Order”
It seems the startup feature is host based and doesn’t know what to do if a guest arrives at or leaves. I will do a bit of digging and see where the startup data is stored: probably on the host somewhere (as opposed to in the guest config).
I think to provide a solution where all the guests in a given datacentre have a defined startup sequence will require a virtualcenter plug-in which stores that information in the database. It will need a “startup resolution” algorithm and a human interface to manage it. As far as I know, no-one as written such a thing but it could be worthwhile.
Because I was using a lot of space on my local datastore disk, I decided to move the big iso folder to the QNAP using an NFS datastore. It’s not totally obvious and I refered to http://files.qnap.com/news/pressresource/product/How_to_set_up_QNAP_NAS_as_a_datastore_via_NFS_for_VMware_ESX_4.0_or_above.pdf to get it to work. The main un-obvious thing is that you need to prepend the mountpoint with /share to access the correct area on the QNAP.
To come back to the question about auto-power on of guests, having looked in an environment with several hosts, it is much clearer. Of course, every VM, regardless of it’s state has a host (something I should have known). So when the instructions say “Display the virtual machine’s host in the inventory” that makes total sense. For a given hosts, all the VMs assigned to that host are there. Selecting “properties” from the Virtual Machine Startup/Shutdown panel allows you to change things around.
Incidentally, the “properties” link (and some similar ones in the vsphere client) are a bit over-engineered as my first instinct is to drag and drop the guest VMs on the first panel. That functionality would not be hard to achieve and would be much more intuitive.
The remaining question is what happens to the power settings of a guest when it migrates to another host? I can guess that the “Manual Startup” and “Any Order” properties would migrate with the VM but what if a set of guests are all set to start as number 1 on three different hosts and they all get migrated to one host…?
I guess an experiment is called for…(I only have one machine!)
This is not rocket science as there is an easy to find solution at http://communities.vmware.com/message/1602618. This changed from previous versions of vSphere where I think the option was in the VM. Makes much more sense now. I assume (because I have only got one host) that in a cluster of ESXi hosts all guests would be shown and the ones specified for power-on would be powered on on *this* host.
The online help for this topic says:
1 Display the virtual machine’s host in the inventory.
as the first line but I am not too sure what it means by “the virtual machine’s host” (if it does not have one).
For the record, my own picture is:
And I will try an experiment with multiple hosts in the office lab tomorrow.
Today I stumbled across boot.kernel.org. It is cool. The use of gPxe and wanbooting is something I have wanted to do for a while. Even in a Solaris environment Wan booting is so, well…useful. Wan booting opens up a whole new range of architectural possibilities, which sit quite nicely in virtual architectures.
I’ve loaded it onto a small USB device and booted by HP2133 laptop with it. Neat. I gave Debian a whirl but it got stuck looking for a NAS mount. Never mind, another utility I tried worked fine as I’m sure most of the other options do.
BKO is cool and I commend it to the house!
I mentioned a few days ago how I P2V’d my laptop to try and use a Virtual CD drive to run some software. I couldn’t keep that VM because it needed Windows re-activation (the joys of Microsoft).
However, I had a really, really old laptop with a 650Mhz Pentium III, 192M of RAM and a 12G hard drive which makes a perfect candidate. I had installed XP on it years ago and it ran (very slowly). Having installed VMware converter on it (which took a couple of hours), the conversion ran without a hitch. Impressive! And the VM version, which I boosted the memory on to 1G (and it now has an i5 processor) flies along.
Of course, there is still the question of re-activating the copy of Windows but it is good to know that old home PCs can be virtualised so easily.
Back in April, when I started this blog, I explained my reasons for doing so: to contribute to the Virtualisation revolution (having been through two major changes to IT in my career as more of a spectator).
Now, I am happy to announce that I have found a much better way of being a part of Virtualisation: I have joined RedPixie, a Virtualisation specialist company.
This means I can work on virtualisation solutions all day instead of an hour a day in the evening!
What this means for the blog is that the flavour will change. I will still be blogging about virtualisation in a technical and vendor agnostic way (other than maybe the odd plug for RedPixie products!)
I look forward to new projects and challenges.
I suppose it is a bit ironic that a blog born out of a p2v project, called p2vpro.com does not have much mention of p2v’s. In my defense, that is understandable given that p2ving is something that larger organisations are engaged in, and not your typical home lab user.
However, yesterday I downloaded vmware converter and virtualised my notebook running windows XP. Why? I had bought some software which needed a DVD drive and my notebook doesn’t have one. Not a problem, I thought, I can use my iMac to rip the dvd and make an iso out of it. Then I use Microsoft’s virtual cd control panel (which I found explained at http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/620/xp_small_free_way_to_use_and_mount_images_iso_files_without_burning_them/. This worked fine to install the software but it still didn’t run, it seems to insist on a physical CD drive presence and a different volume name.
So, as a last ditch effort, instead of using a virtual CD tool, I virtualised the whole machine. The virtualisation worked very well and it goes an awful lot faster as a VM than a 2 year old notebook. Of course, Windows complains verbosely about the hardware changing and having to re-activate within three days.
Unfortunately, the software still doesn’t work but I think that is due to some kind of copy protection built into the program rather than the VM. Now it complains that the wrong DVD is mounted.
I have a couple of even older Windows laptops lying around the house and they are definitely candidates for virtualisation.
Too long a gap there from my last post so let me try to catch up. It struck me that I was looking at the datastore problem the wrong way (the problem being I could not delete a datastore), and even an ESXi reset did not help. The state must be on the disk itself which are scanned at start-up (I have yet to prove this theory). So instead of re-installing ESXi, which probably would not help, I re-partitioned the hard drive. At first ESXi is a bit confused, it pauses for a long time at boot but does succeed and doesn’t seem to suffer any ill effects. I had no VMs of course. I created another datastore, rebooted and ESXi just seems to forget about the old one.
Since then I have been playing with building some VMs, finding new blogs (Simon Long) and reading Ruben Spruijt’s excellent Application Virtualisation smackdown.
Plenty more projects in the pipeline!