virtual machines

The virtualization wars are slowly starting to yield some benefits!

So this just in. Just in case if you were still wondering if there was anything to the virtualization mantra that is being constantly recited through the IT community, Symantec has announced that you no longer need to purchase individual Symantec Backup Exec agents for each guest OS that exists on one physical box. Instead you only need to license once per Hypervisor with Symantec Backup Exec 12.5.

That’s right, you heard me, one agent, multiple virtual servers, one physical box. Can I get a booyah!?!?! I told you this competition would be great for consumers! Microsoft breaking into Hyper-V to compete with VMWare has been great for the market. First VMWare’s ESXi becomes free, then Microsoft relaxes their licensing restrictions in relation to VMWare, and now Symantec makes it cheaper for businesses to use Symantec’s backup software if they virtualize.

Now that’s what I’m talking about! It’s about time companies stopped penalizing people for virtualizing and instead start encouraging it! This is a great move and I commend Symantec for taking this step. Symantec Backup Exec is probably one of the most popular pieces of backup software out there and this announcement will definitely help push business in what I believe is the right direction towards virtualization.

 I hope this war doesn’t end for a long time, because the longer it plays out, the more benefits to the consumer it will bring! You can read more about the announcement here.

 -RP

Microsoft relaxes licensing around virtual mobility for 41 server applications

Hi folks, before when you had to move virtual machines from one server to another using technologies like vmotion you had to ensure you had a license for the server applications on both host physical servers. The only way you could move this was if you did it once every 90 days.

Microsoft has now announced that they have removed the 90 day restriction and are allowing moving of virtual machines between host physical servers for 41 server applications. They call it “Application Server License Mobility”.

This is great news for the virtual world and Microsoft has obviously done this only now due to Hyper-V. Like I said before, this competition can only be good for the consumer. When licensing expensive server application products this can save a significant amount of money in your IT budget!

You can read about this further at these links:

Microsoft Press Release regarding the relaxing of it’s license policy

Microsoft: Application Server License Mobility (word doc)

-Raj

VMWare’s ESXi vs Hyper-V, the details on what free really means

I was speaking to a co-worker today and he pointed me towards Mike’s blog at http://mikedatl.typepad.com/mikedvirtualization/2008/07/esx-35i-for-fre.html. After reading through it, it was obvious he had made some really great points.

 Microsoft has offered Hyper-V for free essentially with Windows 2008 but it doesn’t include the cost of Windows 2008 itself. ESXi on the other hand is a bare metal Hyper-visor which requires no OS for it’s installation and requires no purchase of Hyper-V.

 Also, in my humble opinion, once you grow out of the SMB market and start moving up, the features of VMWare trounce what Microsoft has to offer with Hyper-V. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure Microsoft will continue to develop their offering and play catch up, but VMWare is there right now at what I find a very reasonable price.

 -RP

Power Planning

One of the most overlooked items during a server implementation is power planning. I have seen many administrators get excited about ordering their new servers or other network equipment, plan the outage for the day of the install and then once they have all their equipment realize that they can’t even plug them in because they either have the wrong type of outlets or they don’t have enough circuits or UPS’.

 Here are a few tips to follow when power planning:

• Always get dual power supplies for your servers, it doesn’t cost much more to purchase these and it’s worth the extra money.
• Always plug dual power supplies into separate UPS’ and plug the UPS’ into separate circuits. There is no point plugging them into the same UPS and/or circuit. This gives you a single point of failure and basically defeats the purpose of having two power supplies in the first place.
• Power strips for racks with readouts for the amount of amps being drawn are great for seeing how much of a load your are placing on circuit. Many different companies sell these.
• A cheap meter for measuring the draw on a piece of equipment can be your best friend in troubleshooting issues. Sometimes a large enough power spike during boot up can trip a breaker and you can use a meter to determine what’s going on.
• Use an online power calculator before your installation day to determine how many circuits, UPS’, power cords, etc. you will need for all of your equipment. Then budget accordingly. It can be quite embarrasing if you don’t think about this beforehand and you get stuck up the creek without a paddle on the implementation day.
• If you are worried about increased power costs, look into blade systems and virtualization. The amount of money and energy you can save is quite substantial.
• Do some reading on electricity if you don’t understand all the terms. There are plenty of resources out there on the web.

-RP

VMWare Tools in Windows Server 2008 Core

Hi folks, if you have ever used VMWare before, then you will be familiar with the VMWare Tools. This is a set of tools you can install into a guest os in VMWare to allow better functionality with your virtual machine. However this is a graphical install and it isn’t exactly clear how to run VMWare Tools if you have installed Windows Server 2008 in Core mode in your virtual environment.

Just recently I ran into this problem while running some testing and was able to do it by choosing to install VMWare tools first and then changing drive letters to the d:. Then I ran the setup.exe file to start the VMWare Tools installer.

This started the VMWare Tools gui. However this throws a DLL error on the screen. Just go to task manager during the install and kill the rundll process. Then click past any errors and the install should finish without a hitch. I used the “typical” install mode.

Then reboot the virtual machine and when the server comes back up you should have a working guest os with Windows Server 2008 Core and VMWare Tools installed!

-RP

Installing BES in a Virtual Environment

Hi folks, today I’d like to talk about BES installations. I find that BES is one of those server installations that lends itself well to virtualization. You see I like to run BES on it’s own server so if you need to reboot it or perform any maintenance, it won’t affect other services.

Of course buying a brand new server just for BES isn’t exactly cost effective. This is where virtualization comes in. Using VMWare you can easily setup a tiny VM with minimal resources just for BES. The downside to this however is that how are you going to plug in a BlackBerry directly to the BES server via USB cable if you need to troubleshoot a BlackBerry device that isn’t synchronizing properly wirelessly?

Well the solution to this is actually pretty straightforward. In most virtualized environments you will usually have one server that is not virtual (a management server as I like to call them), that allows you to manage the virtualized environment with all the administration tools installed on it and perhaps even backup software to backup or replicate the virtual machines to another location. On this same server you can just install the Blackberry Management console and point it at the BES server. This way you can plug in USB devices to the physical management server and the devices will communicate with your virtual BES server.

-RP

Server consolidation

There is one commonality here in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Lots of servers, using a lot of power. Being a province that generates our own Hydro, we have pretty cheap electricity without having to worry about the expense of power like other provinces or states do. However this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be a little more green to help out the rest of the world.

It is quite often I will see server rooms filled with racks and racks of servers with no heed paid to virtualization at all. A lot of people believe it or not, still haven’t even heard of it as they are busy focusing on other things in their business and don’t keep their ear to the ground in the IT world. It’s at times like these that I like to point out the benefits of virtualization.

You can easily take an HP C3000 blade enclosure (this enclosure, aka the “shorty” is targeted at the SMB market) and fill it with server blades, a tape blade and a storage blade, and consolidate racks worth of servers down into 6U of space. Then you can install VMWare ESX Server on the server blades and potentially have tons of virtual machines per blade server. If you haven’t looked into these technologies lately I suggest you do, they are the next big thing in IT and have just been getting better and better.

 By doing this you can save your company money on power, thermal, physical space constraints, and sheer amount of servers and racks you have to buy. Also by implementing VMWare on a blade enclosure, you increase the level of redundancy you have greatly over what you would typically have in standard configuration of one server installation per rack mounted server by taking advantage of the features available to you in VMWare and in the blade enclosure.

 -RP

Tuning VMWare

One of the most common mistakes I see when out in the field with VMWare, is incorrectly configured VMWare ESX servers. It is very common to see people configure virtual machines as if they are physical machines. If you are going to implement VMWare in your environment I highly suggest going through the VCP training. The knowledge a VMWare instructor can share with you during your course can be invaluable. They can tell you about all those little things you just can’t find in a book.

In the mean time you can follow this simple guide from VMWare on performance tuning. It is quite helpful in guiding you along the path on how to get the most out of it. Check out this link:http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi_performance_tuning.pdf

 -RP