Day 2 of HP Blades Day took place in a new location – the Customer Experience Centre.  This was due to issues with Wifi on day 1, now resolved in our new location.  Order of the day was:

• Review of the previous day’s presentations with a quick question & answer session
• Presentation on Client Virtualisation
• Factory tour

Client Virtualisation

Joseph George presented to the bloggers on client (aka desktop) virtualisation.  Whilst HP seem to have a story in this area, I’m skeptical about the whole process of virtualising desktops at this stage, other than in certain use cases.  I can see benefits for the following:

• High availability environments such as financial traders, where loss of a desktop translates to financial loss.
• Large scale desktop deployments where functionality is generic.  A good example of this is call centres; desks only require access to limited features (so don’t need high powered devices) and physical desktops may be used by multiple users.

Environments not suitable for desktop virtualisation will include mobile users and anyone running bespoke hardware or software with hardware dependencies.

HP pretty much accepted that hardware savings are not the main reason for virtualising.  This means a more intelligent model on TCO for desktops needs to be established, encompassing consequential loss through hardware downtime, processes cost for technology deployment and replacement and so on.  I think some of the thinking around security is a red herring as laptops are unlikely to be candidates for virtualisation and desktop data can be secured safely today.  I’ll be writing more on this topic over the coming weeks.

Factory Tour

We next moved on to a tour of the HP factory; this isn’t a manufacturing plant but rather purely an assembly line for server and storage components.  I’ve been on factory tours before and these days they pretty much leave me cold.  However HP had some interesting innovations to discuss.

• Customisation.  All HP server and storage builds are based on customer requests and so fully customised, including placing of kit into racks for shipping.  This means every configuration shipped is exactly as the customer ordered – and more;  HP also pre-cable the racks as the equipment is being installed.  Customers ordering multiple configurations can preview one rack of their order before the remainder are built.
• Testing.  Once servers are built, customers are provided the ability to VPN into their equipment while it is sitting on the factory floor.  They can perform load and performance testing before the equipment ships, saving valuable deployment time once the equipment arrives.
• POD (performance optimised datacentre).  This is HPs term for a datacentre in a container – which is exactly what they are.  Plug in power and cooling and you’ve a data centre on the move.  Except these devices aren’t really built to be picked up and moved around.  Rather they are aimed at providing temporary data centre facilities in scenarios where traditional data centres wouldn’t be possible – extension of existing facilities or perhaps creation of a data centre without planning permission were two good examples.

After the tour, we wrapped up at a local restaurant.

Overall the two days have been extremely informative and given me many subjects to blog about.  Look forward to more over the coming weeks!

© Chris for Gestalt IT, 2010. | HP Blades Tech Day 2
Read more posts categorized as Desktop, Server Virtualization

It’s been a long, strange trip for Overland Storage (NASDAQ: OVRL). Best known in recent years for the tape backup libraries it sold through Hewlett-Packard, Overland is in the midst of an iSCSI-focused renovation at the hands of former Snap Appliance and Data Robotics execs. Could this reboot breathe new life into Overland as well as the SMB storage market it is focused on?

Snap and Overland – Hot Potato on a Sinking Ship?

The future of Overland is tied to Snap Appliance, makers of entry-level network-attached storage (NAS) systems. Current Overland CEO, Eric Kelly, snapped up the company in 2002 for just $10 million, quickly flipping it to Adaptec for $100 million. But the storage system market wasn’t right for the controller maker, so Kelly stepped up and directed Overland to repurchase Snap in 2008.

With Overland running a reported 70% of its business through Hewlett-Packard, that company’s decision to switch suppliers represented a potentially life-threatening challenge. Losses rang up and the company’s stock was pummeled. Shares of OVRL traded over $20 in 2006, but had slipped below $3 in 2008. Earnings declined, slipping into the red in the fourth quarter of 2005. The company hasn’t reported a profit since 2006 and the 2009 balance sheet shows a net negative total equity.

Control-Alt-Delete

The situation at Overland apparently does not appear quite as bleak to insiders. Eric Kelly stepped up to the helm as CEO in January of 2009 and quickly set about assembling a new management team. He brought in former Snap and Data Robotics marketing whiz Jillian Mansolf in July, presumably to focus on the Snap Appliance storage systems.

Overland NEO 4000E

Now Overland has taken another step, appointing BlueArc and Data Robotics founder Geoff Barrall as CTO and VP of Engineering. Kelly, Barrall, and Mansolf are a formidable team, lending the company the credibility it needs to steer Overland out of trouble.

Overland is in the process of expanding its Snap operations and moving it from Milpitas to San Jose. This month, the company revamped its NEO tape libraries and launched a new line of Snap appliances featuring enhanced support for VMware and Hyper-V. Overland also outsourced product manufacturing to Foxconn, improving gross product profitability.

On the financial front, Overland shored up its finances with $12 million in private equity funding on February 22.

Overland REO 9100 VTL

A Full-Line Storage Company?

Although known primarily for its NEO line of tape libraries, Overland has a much broader product portfolio. The company sells a line of virtual tape libraries that once used IBM’s Diligent deduplication technology but this relationship is long over.

The Snap line has expanded into both NAS and iSCSI SAN primary storage arrays as well. Although the low-end 2-drive SnapServer 110 might not look like much, the rack-mount SnapServer 600 series can be expanded over 100 TB. This is accomplished by adding storage expansion chassis behind the slim 1U SnapServer head, but we suspect I/O capacity and reliability will be limited when daisy chaining seven expansion units on a single SAS port.

Overland Snap Server 210

Overland’s storage lineup puts it squarely into the exploding small- and medium-sized business storage market. With server virtualization and database applications demanding ever more capacity and performance, many smaller IT operations are looking to add networked storage. But even the entry-level products of storage titans like EMC and NetApp are out of reach for these small shops, leaving a hole in the market. Companies like Overland are rushing to take advantage of this market with devices like the SnapServer, Data Robotics’ Drobo Elite, and EMC’s Iomega ix4 line. Those that offer low cost, ease of use, and integration with Windows and VMware are likely to be very successful over the next few years.

Overland may just surprise us all with a serious resurgence. CEO Kelly has lined up a great management team, brought in extra cash, and refocused the company on a nascent market opportunity. Not bad for a company many had long written off!

Listen to Overland CEO Eric Kelly on the InfoSmack podcast

© Stephen for Gestalt IT, 2010. | The Rebirth of Overland Storage
Read more posts categorized as Exclusive, Featured, Server Virtualization, Storage, Top Story

HP Blades Tech Day 1 is now over and what a whirlwind of a day it was.  Here’s a summary of the day’s activities:

• Overview of ISB (Infrastructure Software and Blades) from Gary Thome
• Partner Presentation from Mark Gonzalez
• Overview of Virtual Connect from Mike Kendall
• BladeSystem lab (hands on overview of the hardware) from Gary Thome
• BladeSystem Matrix & Insight Software demo from John Schmitz & Bryan Jacquot
• Competitive discussion (hardware) with Gary Thome
• Face-to-face discussion on strategy with Paul Perez (CTO for StorageWorks)

I can honestly say that there wasn’t a bad presentation all day.  We were given access to some senior technical people (for instance Gary is Chief Architect for ISB) and that showed – as we were all able to ask probing questions and get immediate answers.  For me, a number of things stood out for further investigation.

• The blade chassis themselves have a huge amount of engineering in them.  I’ve taken a lot of video of the lab presentation which talks about the power supplies, fans, physical layout and so on.  It will take time for me to review and digest but expect some posts on the engineering that has gone into the blade products.
• Power Management – this subject deserves a post in its own right as there’s some clever thinking here.
• Virtual Connect – virtualisation of the I/O infrastructure in any blade system is a key requirement and VC had some interesting features.  I’ll be looking to compare VC to other solutions in the marketplace.
• Software and Storage – I don’t think storage has been fully exploited in the current solutions.  Rather it is seen as a static configuration achieved separately and doesn’t form part of the workflow in the dynamic deployment of infrastructure.  Look out for a post discussing this whole issue.
• Futures.  Although Paul Perez didn’t explicitly provide futures information, he hinted at the direction HP may take for the storage products.  Expect to see a post on memristors and the future direction of hard drives.

In summary, day 1 was a great introduction (for me at least) to HP blade technology.  HP were open and willing to discuss their technology and I can say I learned a lot, with  plenty of research required.  Now onto day 2….

Disclosure: HP have funded my flight and accommodation for this trip. Everything else is self funded. I am under no obligation to write about what I see during the Tech Day and HP have no editorial rights over the content I produce.

© Chris for Gestalt IT, 2010. | HP Blades Tech Day 1
Read more posts categorized as Networking, Server Virtualization

HP recently commissioned Tolly Group to benchmark their BladeSystem c7000 against the Cisco UCS 5100. The short report focuses on two results, and reads like so many competitive benchmarks in the IT industry: Tolly focuses on metrics that highlight the strength of HP’s solution and the weaknesses of Cisco’s. I do not dispute the accuracy of these results, and HP and Tolly are doing exactly what tech companies do. But what’s the real value of pinpoint maximum-performance benchmarks like this?

0-100-0

Automotive media like Car and Driver and Top Gear frequently test the maximum performance of cars, racing to 100 mph or beyond, sliding around a skidpad, and slamming on the brakes. These tests can be enlightening when it comes to high-performance cars, and the punishing 0-100-0 test is especially impressive. But what’s the point of hammering an economy car or pickup truck like this? Maximal acceleration and cornering are entirely irrelevant to buyers of commuter cars and work vehicles.

Even though a given test can be conducted, it may not be enlightening. The Tolly report demonstrates two key findings:

1. Although 4-blade configurations perform the same under maximum stress, Cisco UCS performance declines with 6 blades while HP’s remains steady.
2. When using a shared blade uplink, Cisco UCS performance fell by half.

These are not startling results. Cisco blades sometimes need to share one I/O channel, and this can’t match the performance of an HP blade with dedicated I/O. Would it shock you to learn that a one-gallon bucket requires twice as many trips to the well as one that holds two gallons? Does it shock anyone to learn that a V6-powered Toyota RAV4 accelerates quicker than a four cylinder Honda CR-V? HP’s c7000 is bigger than Cisco’s UCS and offers more I/O channels, so HP beats Cisco whenever larger configurations with more I/O are tested.

Innocent Benchmarks

Greta examines the marks on an 18th century cooper’s bench

I’ll leave the deeper commentary on blade performance to experts like Kevin Houston and Martin Macleod, but these maximum-utilization benchmarks are only half the story. I’m much more interested in how the different approaches to I/O impact everyday (20%-40% load) performance and how oversubscription impacts performance as more blades are installed and workloads are moved around. In automotive terms, I’d like to know how well a car handles in the snow or how economical it is with three or four passengers. These real-world scenarios are much more telling than a test of a few blades under 100% load!

Clearly, HP wanted to call attention to specific shortcomings of a competitor’s product, and it was wise to do so with objective numbers instead of mudslinging and name-calling. I hope that future tests and releases include real-world workloads and logical configurations, not the extreme situation used in this report. The same lesson applies to all tech companies: Simple, objective tests of maximum performance are welcome, but customers need many more metrics!

Note: Along with 9 other independent bloggers, I attended HP’s Blades Tech Day in Houston on February 25 and 26. Most of my travel and living expenses were paid for by HP, and the company provided a small gift bag (pictured here).

© Stephen for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Innocence, Fairness, and Technology Benchmarks
Read more posts categorized as Networking, Server Virtualization

I’ve recently been implementing a vSphere deployment and have been looking at the new features introduced as part of Virtual Machine Hardware 7.  Obviously one of the major new components is the new Para Virtualised SCSI (PVSCSI) adapter which I wrote about way back in May 2009.  When it first came out there were a number of posts regarding the much improved I/O Performance and latency reduction this new adapter delivered, such as Chad Sakac’s I/O vSphere performance test post.

So the other day I stumbled across a tweet from Scott Drummond who works in the VMware Performance Engineering team. Following a little reading and a bit of digging around it appears that the use of PVSCSI comes with a small caveat.  It would appear that if you use the PVSCSI adapter with low I/O workloads you can actually get higher latency than you get with the LSI Logic SCSI adapter (see the quote below)

The test results show that PVSCSI is better than LSI Logic, except under one condition–the virtual machine is performing less than 2,000 IOPS and issuing greater than 4 outstanding I/Os.

This particular caveat has come to light following some more in-depth testing of the PVSCSI adapter performance.  The full whitepaper can be found at the following link.

PVSCSI whitepaper – http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsp_4_pvscsi_perf.pdf

For those who don’t want to read the technical whitepaper, a summary of the issue can be found in the following VMware KB article.

VMware KB 1017652 – http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/1017652

So basically, as opposed to just using the PVSCSI adapter as default with VMs running version 7 of the virtual hardware have a think about it’s I/O profile and whether the PVSCSI or LSI logic adapter would be best.

© Craig for Gestalt IT, 2010. | VMware PVSCSI Adapter performance and low I/O Workloads
Read more posts categorized as Server Virtualization, Storage

There’s a lot of talk about Dynamic Data Centres, Dynamic Infrastructures; mostly in a cloudy context and mostly as some over-arching architectural vendor-focused vision. At times, I wonder if when a vendor talks about a ‘Dynamic Infrastructure’; if they actually mean, you can use as much of OUR infrastructure as you like? You can flex up and down on OUR infrastructure.

This is rather limiting from an end-user IT consumer’s point of view because you still find yourselves locked into a vendor or a group of vendors. So it’s only dynamic with constraints; actually, I think Amazon got it right in their naming, it’s Elastic but not truly Dynamic.

So as a good architect/designer/bodge-it-and-scarper-type person, you should be asking this question every time; if I do this, can I get out? What is my exit plan? Can I change any key component of the stack without major process/capability impact? Is the lock-in which comes with any unique feature worth it?

And when I say any component, I mean all the way up to the application. So as part of the non-functional requirements of any application, there should be:

1. Data Export/Import
2. Archival

standards defined and actually implemented. This goes for any off-the-shelf application as well.

For Cloud to truly change the way IT is done and delivered; this has to be done..otherwise the only way is vertically integrated stacks, which ultimately lead to long-term lock-in. There are still mainframes in existence, not only because they are the right platform for some workloads but also because people are struggling to unpick the complex interdependencies which exist.

© Martin for Gestalt IT, 2010. | What is Dynamic?
Read more posts categorized as Cloud Computing, Server Virtualization

It has been nearly a year since Cisco shook up the IT infrastructure world with their unified computing system (UCS) server line. Predictably, although the introduction set the world buzzing, customer uptake has been somewhat slower. Although evaluations are reported to be widespread, production use has lagged. The high-end corporate environments that use devices like these simply don’t turn on a dime. Regardless, UCS is an important infrastructure element and deserves the continuing attention it has received.

Cisco recently reached out to a number of us in the IT infrastructure space, asking for our opinion on UCS as it stands today. Gestalt IT author, Greg Ferro, posted a number of keen thoughts over at his Ethereal Mind blog, and we (Bas Raayman and Stephen Foskett) put our heads together to come up with some additional thoughts. Although clearly directed at Cisco, we look forward to responses from other parties as well!

1. How successful has UCS been in production deployment? What were the expectations of early adopters and have these been met? What do Gestalt IT readers think?
2. What feedback has Cisco received from customers from customers regarding Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)? What do our readers think of FCoE at this point?
3. Many customers do not require a fully built-up stack, and instead need only a few blades. Are these smaller customers responding to UCS or is the product’s target market exclusively at the high end?
4. Will Cisco introduce a UCS model with multiple blade chassis?
5. What is the added value to a customer comparing a full width UCS blade to a regular 1U server?
6. What is the strategy if a customer needs extra I/O for an individual server within the UCS stack? Are any I/O extensions or upgrades planned?
7. Scalability is one of the key issues. What is the target scale for UCS and what is the biggest UCS deployment currently in use?

The VCE data center partnership resulted in taking the UCS computing system as a basis and integrated a storage unit and VMware to the solution stack. This is a solution that is sold as a “plug and play” virtualization building block and helped to establish UCS as a strategic platform. The Ionix part of the vBlock solution has “overall management” written over it, directed to allow management of all components from a central interface. More questions come to mind regarding VCE and UCS:

1. Are there any plans to provide the option to upgrade to a vBlock solution from a purchased UCS stack? If I currently have a UCS setup, can I add the missing components and have my setup validated so that I can add a storage array and the Ionix management to create my own vBlock?
2. I am putting “all of my eggs in one basket” by solely implementing the UCS solution. Of course I need to plan growth, but what happens if Cisco encounters issues in delivering new hardware? Small and medium enterprise sized companies usually need to have multiple suppliers to avoid such problems, but how does Cisco handle this?
3. How well do the UCS components work with other hardware beyond VCE, and is Cisco also offering a unified management solution for a heterogeneous environment? If not, what interfaces are they offering to implement central management?

We look forward to the response from Cisco and our readers!

© Gestalt for Gestalt IT, 2010. | One Year Later: Questioning Cisco UCS
Read more posts categorized as Exclusive, Featured, Networking, Server Virtualization, Storage, Top Story

Today HP will announce two new storage arrays.  Although taken from different product families, the hardware will be branded in a consistent manner, demonstrating HPs desire to bring together a range of storage technologies they’ve purchased over the last few years.

P2000 G3 MSA (Modular Smart Array) System

I’ve not been a particular fan of the MSA devices, as I’ve worked mainly in large organisations where scalability isn’t delivered by point solutions.  However for SMEs, the new P2000 MSA seems to offer a lot of features for a small price point.  The new device provides 8Gb Fibre Channel, 1Gb iSCSI, up to 64 snapshots plus the option to replicate to another similar P2000 array.  Both 2.5″ and 3.5″ drives are supported, by Small Form Factor and Large Form Factor models respectively.  Arrays can scale up to 57.6TB with SAS drives and 192TB with SATA.

Surely I could replace my existing storage arrays with this kind of scalability I hear you say!  Well yes and no; low cost may appear to mean high value, however it depends on whether this kind of array provides the specific features you require.  Whilst the P2000 offers hardware RAID, and component redundancy, the additional features of the P4000 may be more appropriate. features you care about, for example, component redundancy, RAID, automated drive sparing, multi-pathing and so on. If these options aren’t high on your list, then the P2000 could be for you.

P4000 G2 SAN Solutions

The P4000 devices are rebranded LeftHand networks hardware, technology acquired by HP in October 2008.  Probably the most interesting feature of this release is something called Network RAID.  Rather than offer simply RAID within the controller, multiple controllers can be connected together and offer continuous access in the event of a single device loss.  While this isn’t a new feature, the difference in this release is a move on from simply offering RAID-1 protection to another device to providing RAID-5 availability.  This means if you’ve planned a sensible configuration, loss of a single array wouldn’t be an issue.  However you’ll need to purchase 5 arrays to get you started.

Clearly the P4000 is a step up from the P2000 MSA array, by offering RAID protection and component redundancy.  You get what you pay for in this world, so the P4000 comes in at a higher price point than the MSA device.

It’s good to see some standardisation of the technology HP have acquired over recent years.  Key to this though, is the ability to offer consistent management and where possible keep terminology consistent too.  For those customers purchasing one or two similar devices from the range, then consistent management may not be an issue, however if you’re looking to deploy multiple tiers of storage across your organisation, even the ability to report consistently across all devices is a must.

I look forward to getting a chance to see this technology close-up and to provide more in-depth reviews if possible.

** Note this post has been amended after it was highlighted that the P2000 does in fact offer redundancy and RAID protection as standard.  Thanks to HP and others who pointed this out **

© Chris for Gestalt IT, 2010. | New HP P2000 and P4000 Storage Arrays
Read more posts categorized as Featured, Server Virtualization, Storage

What a week in Las Vegas at VMware Partner Exchange 2010! For all those that complained just 4 months ago that VMworld 2009 was disappointing because the announcements were few and far between, all I can say is, based on what I watched, experienced, and touched this week at PEX 2010, VMware should grab your attention again soon! Unfortunately, so much of what was discussed falls under the VMware Partner NDA that I’ll have to ask VM /ETC readers to wait for the technology to become public. We’ll have plenty to discuss when it does.

For now I’ll quickly wrap up my week and drop some hints about VMware’s future direction based on my understanding about what I saw during the PTAB meetings, the Keynotes, and the Hands On and Self Paced Labs. I’m also linking to some reactions from others to support my impressions.

The official VMware News Release for Partner Exchange can be found at this link:

VMware Partner Exchange 2010 Kicks Off With Record-breaking 2,600+ Attendees, 55 Sponsors and 45 Countries Represented

PTAB: Cloud Infrastructure and Virtual Desktops

I knew what was on the Partner Technical Advisory Board meeting agenda before I arrived, but I have to admit I was still pleasantly surprised. In short, the two day meeting was split by topics. We talked about virtual servers on Day 1 and virtual desktops on Day 2.

The server discussions included everything from possible future enhancements to the vStorage API to details about Project Redwood architecture. Discussions included a mix of vSphere roadmap possibilities and potential directions of VMware in the private and hosted cloud. VMware is serious about Platform as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service, and Software as a Service, and the slides presented to the PTAB committee revealed a considerable strategy to make it happen. I’ll just say it is a lot clearer to me where exactly Zimbra and SpringSource fit into VMware’s future plans.

Switching to the second day and to the topic of virtual desktops, if you are like me you would assume it to be a different day of independent content. Surprisingly, the paths of servers and desktops seemingly are going to collide in the VMware virtual cloud. I would suggest that you get ready to rethink what a VMware Virtual Infrastructure actually means. The boundaries will be changing as to where VMware’s technology actually begins and ends.

Among the 32 other PTAB members with me was Brian Knudtson. Brian has been providing his own coverage of the VMware PEX 2010 on his Knudt Blog. Check out his posts as well – Partner Exchange Day 1 – Sunday (PTAB Day 1) and Partner Exchange Day 2 – Monday (PTAB Day 2).

Keynotes: VMware Gets Aggressive About The Cloud and SMBs

EVP of Worldwide Field Operations Carl Eschenbach opened the official first day of the conference with his Keynote on Tuesday morning. Eschenbach later called on stage Rick Jackson, VMware’s Chief Marketing Officer, they established that 2010 would be an aggressive year for VMware. The two also emphasized VMware’s intent to secure existing and future business in the SMB market. The day 1 Keynote concluded with the promise that special discounts would soon be available for the vSphere Essentials bundles.

On Wednesday morning, VMware’s CTO Steve Herrod took the stage. Herrod’s Keynotes usually provide the product demos and are therefore always the most anticipated for me. The PEX 2010 Keynote 2 definitely did not disappoint! With the help of a few VMware product managers, Herrod demonstrated a technical preview of the Redwood Cloud UI as well as a future virtual desktop environment with application virtualization integration. A key point to the demos was that the Cloud is a series of “layers of abstraction” above the physical hardware. I thought Herrod and company did a great job illustrating this by providing example scenarios where screen shots of both the user’s perspective and the system administrator’s tool set were provided.

Keynote reactions from others

VMware employee Duncan Epping echoes my amazement about what was previewed on Wednesday:

“I was impressed with all the insights Steve gave in terms of upcoming products, brand new projects and even a couple tech previews. I am looking forward to the upcoming version of VMware View and a new project which I can’t disclose as the VMware NDA Police would again kill me.”

Responsible for all things VMware at EMC, Chad Sakac says the following on his PEX wrap up post:

“Steve Herrod did some big unveiling.   Project “Redwood” (end user self-service portal targeted for Private and Public cloud uses) was public outed for the first time, as well as the next version of VMware View (loads of stuff in here, more to come soon).  He also talked about the scaling and feature goals of the next generation of the vSphere generation.”

Chad’s post is really about 10 blog posts on Partner Exchange and EMC’s doings in Las Vegas shoved into one title. He covers lots of topics. Check it out.

Hands On and Self Paced Labs – The VMware View Buzz

Previously mentioned for posts about PTAB above, vExpert Brian Knudtson comments:

“… I attended the Advanced View 4 Lab, which ended up actually being a Tech Preview of the next version of View. This next version introduces many new features and some considerable changes to the interface and scalability of the product. According to the lab instructors, they didn’t even get their hands on the code until three days before the conference and had to learn it while building the lab. I have to say that I was very impressed with the product, the improvements they made and the stability of a product still in the Alpha stage. This release has more features than View 4.0 had and is everything that View 4.0 should have been. It will truly be a game changer.”

I too attended the VMware View lab, and got a first hand glimpse of what everyone was excited about. View dot next, the only version name or number VMware employees would commit to, is amazing.

I also used the self paced labs to explore configuration of The Nexus 1000v virtual switch as well as using the REST client to connect to the vCloud API. PEX 2010 was actually the first time I’ve used the self paced labs. The customized lab interface that allows an attendee to select a lab at their terminal coupled with the monitoring screen visible to all lab takers is really cool. During my few hours in the self paced labs on Wednesday I noticed average activity of over 300 VMs on the monitor.

It was good to see Randy Keever again. Randy’s GETO team built and managed all the conference lab infrastructure, and Keever was actually sitting at the administrator’s table during my VMware View lab. The set up was mostly the same from VMworld 2009 in September. Early reports from attendees on Monday said they experienced some congestion when simultaneously starting installation processes in a lab, but Randy’s team identified the issue as a too aggressive vSphere host oversubscription strategy and were quickly able to add additional blade servers as vSphere hosts. For those that see this as an opportunity to knock ESX oversubscription, realize that conference labs are a unique scenario. How often will administrators experience an environment where nested ESX hosts are created, started, and reset on an hourly basis. My labs started on Tuesday. I can tell you I had no issues.

Looking Ahead

2010 should another great year for VMware virtualization. I’m hoping I can fill in the blanks for VM /ETC readers between now and VMworld 2010!

© Rich for Gestalt IT, 2010. | VMware PEX 2010: My Wrap Up
Read more posts categorized as Cloud Computing, Events, Server Virtualization

I am in the process of planning for a large infrastructure upgrade from ESX3.5 to vSphere 4. As part of the planning I’ve been looking at Virtual Machine Virtual Hardware Versions. Currently all VM’s are running Version 4, but as we migrate to ESX4 we will have the option to upgrade to Version 7.

Instead of just upgrading all VM’s no questions asked, I decided to try and answer these following questions;

• Exactly what does Version 7 offer?
• What is the upgrade process?
• Will upgrading introduce any downtime?
• Could there be any issues after the upgrade which may cause the VM to not function correctly?

Here is what I’ve found

Exactly what does Version 7 offer that Version 4 doesn’t?

Virtual Hardware Version 7 offers five new features.

• Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) virtual devices — Provides support for running Windows Server 2008 Failover Clustering configurations.
• IDE virtual device — Ideal for supporting older operating systems that lack SCSI drivers.
• Hot Plug support — For virtual devices and hot add support for memory and virtual CPUs – List of supported Operating Systems
• VMDirectPath for Virtual Machines — VMDirectPath I/O device access enhances CPU efficiency in handling workloads that require constant and frequent access to I/O devices by allowing virtual machines to directly access the physical hardware devices. Read More >>
• Change Block Tracking — Use to increase Backup and Recovery times.
• VMXNET Generation 3 — See the feature below
  • MSI/MSI-X support (subject to guest operating system kernel support)
  • Receive Side Scaling
  • IPv6 checksum and TCP Segmentation Offloading (TSO) over IPv6
  • VLAN off-loading
  • Large TX/RX ring sizes
  • IPv6 Support

What is the upgrade process?

VMware Tools must be upgraded before you try to upgrade the Virtual Hardware

The upgrade process is very simple. It can either be done manually or you can automate it using VMware Upgrade Manager.

• Multiple Virtual Machine Upgrade Process

There are also things that need to be considered before upgrading;

• When you upgrade from virtual hardware version 3 to version 7, the upgrade is irreversible, even if you take a virtual machine backup or snapshot before performing the upgrade.
• Upgraded virtual machines cannot be powered on by an ESX 2.x host, even if relocated to a VMFS2 datastore.

Will upgrading introduce any downtime?

There will always be downtime when upgrading the Virtual Hardware regardless of the Operating System. The VM needs to be Powered Off when initiating the upgrade. Once turned on the OS will detect the new devices and then prompts for a reboot. Failing to reboot will result in the new devices not working correctly.

There will not be any downtime to vCenter or any of your ESX Hosts.

Could there be any issues after the upgrade which may cause the VM to not function correctly?

Doing a quick search on the VMware Knowledgebase and the VMTN Communities returns a few issues that have been found.

Using Snapshots give you the option to revert back if there is an issue. You could also run a test. Clone the VM that you wish to upgrade and upgrade the Clone first to see if there are any issues. If there are you can find a resolution for when you upgrade the proper VM.

Summary

As always the answer is “It Depends“.

The question you need to ask yourself is: Will the VM make use of the new features offered by Version 7?

• If the answer is Yes, then upgrade. But allow for downtime and the small chance of issues after the upgrade.
• If the answer is No, then don’t upgrade. If it’s not broken why fix it? Don’t make extra work for yourself.

Sources

• http://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere4/doc/vsp_40_new_feat.html
• www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r40/vsp_40_upgrade_guide.pdf
• http://kb.vmware.com
• http://communities.vmware.com

© Simon for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Do I Upgrade to VMware Virtual Hardware Version 7?
Read more posts categorized as Server Virtualization