Linux

VMware: beware of bridge-building competitors

VMware may be king of the virtualization mountain now. But it should beware of bridge-building competitors.

Chris Wolf, an analyst with the Burton Group, warned that Novell Inc. was similarly at the top of the world in the late 1980s with its NetWare network operating system, which filled a key gap in Microsoft products. Addressing the problem, Microsoft responded with Windows NT, a weaker alternative to NetWare but “good enough” and stronger over time, and featuring a Gateway Services tool with just enough interoperability to make it easy to port data between the two systems.

But that “gateway” eventually became a floodgate, siphoning off Novell NetWare customers, who now had an easy way to migrate to Microsoft NT and a motive for doing so: Microsoft had a much larger package of software solutions while Novell’s NetWare was just a single point solution. Farewell, Novell NetWare.

Fast forward to 2008. VMware is the undisputed leader in virtualization, the hottest thing in the software market. And as part of its interoperability measures, Microsoft’s new System Center Virtual Machine Manager will have extenders to VMware. Microsoft will also launch its far more modest Hyper-V virtualization software at the giveaway price of $28 per server this summer. But, clearly, Microsoft will be working at furious speed to make it more competitive.

VMware, like Novell NetWare, is a point solution, and Microsoft, even more than in the 1980s, is a giant ecosystem with an overwhelming share of the global software market.

“This is a great strategy for Microsoft,” Wolf said. “It’s providing just enough interoperability [with VMware] to give some management with the goal of facilitating migration. And when users get comfortable with those tools, they will slowly migrate over to Microsoft.

“It’s exactly the same runbook as Microsoft ran against Novell,” Wolf said. “It’s pretty eerie.”

VMware ESX Console Commands :: esxcfg-info

VMware ESX has many commands on the console that you can use to get detailed information on the status or configuration of many elements of your installation. Recently I had an opportunity to run esxcfg-info on the console (or can be run in the same fashion over ssh) and really liked this information. This tool will give you basically everything about the ESX host, including an inventory and details of the virtual machines on the host.

Lots of Data in This File

I ran the following series of commands to make a place for these files on the ESX system:

cd /home
mkdir adminprofiles
esxcfg-info > esxcfg-info.export.12.7.2007.text

Yes, the name of the file is long - but that will come into play later. Don’t run this command interactively on the screen; way too much information is generated. On my single system with only nine virtual machines in the inventory, it was around 900KB. I really like this export as a documentation tool and benchmarking mechanism.

I will find myself running this command as part of my server documentation (kept locally in the \home\adminprofiles path or copied elsewhere), benchmarking, and baseline configuration information. I’ll also find this file beneficial for comparisons among systems within VMI.

Details Galore

Surely this is mainly as support tool for VMware, but there is really good information in here. I’ve taken out lines for simplicity, check out the following snippets of the output:

Network Configuration

\==+NetworkInfoImpl :
|—-Name…………………………………..vswif0
|—-Enabled………………………………..true
|—-Ip Address……………………………..172.16.25.117
|—-Ip Netmask……………………………..255.255.252.0
|—-Ip Broadcast……………………………172.16.26.255
|—-DHCP…………………………………..false
|—-MAC Address…………………………….00:50:56:4e:a3:0b
\==+DnsConfig :
|—-Hostname…………………………………….esxlive03
|—-Domain………………………………………rixco.net
|—-Primary Name Server…………………………..172.16.25.2
|—-Secondary Name Server…………………………172.16.25.3

Virtual Machine Guest Information\==+Virtual Machines:
|—-Config File……………………./vmfs/volumes/4713cb68-adaa0b06-f0fc-0015173ebba9/S-VMAPP001/S-VMAPP001.vmx
|—-UUID…………………………..50 01 42 0b e6 a9 6d fb-37 54 e9 b1 42 c2 3e ce
|—-Num Vcpus………………………2
\==+Memory Client Stats :
|—-Touched……………………..51.20 MB
|—-Current Size…………………512.00 MB
|—-Target Size………………….372.36 MB
\==+Memory Allocation :
|—-Valid……………………….true
|—-Minimum……………………..131072
|—-Min Limit……………………131072
|—-Maximum……………………..393216
|—-Shares………………………384
\==+CPU Allocation :
|—-Valid……………………….true
|—-Minimum……………………..100
|—-Min Limit……………………100
|—-Maximum……………………..1000
|—-Shares………………………875

Check out the tool on your ESX systems. How have you used some of the other esxcfg-… commands?

Populating VMWare Server 2.0 with Existing Virtual Machines

As you may know, VMWare Server 2.0 Beta has been released for public (and still free!) beta. TechTarget covered the release, and I had a chance this week to install VMWare 2.0 on my CentOS Linux system. I chose to install on Linux without an X window manager not as an exercise in futility, but to really make a purpose built system that I can run the test virtual machines. With the new version of VMWare Server 2.0, I wanted to run my virtual machines there to see how they performed. My previous VMWare Server 1.03 system was running on Windows, and then I posed the question of how to get the virtual machine files there.

Depending on how you access your filesystem in Linux, there are many ways to get the files over. I choose to run Samba (smbd) on this Linux box as my means of getting the files to the system and with my particular version of CentOS, after VMWare installed based on my parameters, I could not access the path via the existing Samba share.

Here is what happened, after the installation I added a datastore in VMWare Server. The datastore, for those like me who are used to the Windows world, is the path in which the virtual machines are kept on the filesystem. For my own ease, I chose the path /home/rick/vms which resembles the \My Documents\My Virtual Machines format that I am used to when using the Windows version of VMWare Server. This path was also my home directory for my username. After the datastore was added, I could not access the path via the samba connection while using correct credentials. After some poking around I determined the following command will allow you to restore the user’s access to the path that contained the VMWare Server datastore as root:

chmod 777 /home/rick/vms

This changed the permissions for the this path for the rick username in the home path, to all users read, write, and execute. In my situation, there is only root and rick users configured on the system - so you may want to run the man chmod command to set a more appropriate set of permissions on the path. Once that was set, I restarted the Samba service and I was able to access the path to populate with my existing virtual machines and upgrade them for the VMWare Server 2.0 Beta.