VMdamentals.com

Archive for September, 2009

No rocket science here. esxtop has always been there. Yet a lot of people miss out on some of its great features. Hopefully this blogpost will get you interested in looking at esxtop (again?) in detail!

Yesterday I attended a very interesting breakout session about esxtop and its advanced features in vSphere. Old news you might say, but there is SO much you can do with esxtop. For example, you can export data from esxtop and import them in Windows perfmon. And if you did know that, then for example, did you know you can now actually see which physic NIC is being used by a certain VM?

Other neat little features were shown. The best one being that the “swcur” field is actually NOT about the current swapping activity of a VM, but swapping that occured in the past (yes, I too would have called it differently…). How many of you knew that one? Finally, a very interesting field in the storage screen (yes for those who did not know that one, esxtop is not just about CPU, but also memory, storage, and new in vSphere… Interrupts) ). This field is called “DAVG” and this shows the actual latency seen by ESX to your storage (and also KAVG for kernel latency and GAVG for the total latency the guest sees).

There were also a few examples of misbehaving VMs which was very interesting to see. Numbers which seemed not possible, yet explained perfectly. I would like to vote this very last presentation at VMworld 2009 the best technical presentation I witnessed there!

I hope I got you (re)interested in esxtop. I am more of a graphical guy, so I like the performance monitor embedded within the VI client. But some things just aren’t there. So esxtop is definitely worth a(nother) look. If you’re using ESXi, make sure to download the vMA appliance (here) which has resxtop included (which looks a lot like esxtop on ESX).

During the VMworld 2009 party, one of the very amusing attractions was the ice sculpting by the ICE team:

The ICE team at work

The ICE team building their guitar

You can see all the photographs here !

Hi all,

Took some photos at the VMworld 2009 party of the Foreigner Concert.

Foreigner overview

Foreigner!

You can view all photos here: Foreigner at VMworld 2009

So what do you get when you mix VMware ESX and some dirt, and then a you add a little enthousiasm? Exactly, you get a paludarium.

The word paludarium comes from the word “palus” basically meaning mud, and it is kind of a cross between an aquarium and a terrarium. I have been building my own little world inside this glass box for the past months. Very moist, very green. Being a VMware fan I just had to combine these two hobbies. Why? Well that one is obvious, because you *can*!

VM controlled paludarium

So now my tiny little jungle is fully controlled by a virtual machine. Lighting, rain, fog, even thunder! Just when everyone thought it wasn’t possible, VMware just got greener!

See my paludarium site at http://paluweb.nl for some live stats!

Today was announced that long distance vmotion is now officially supported by VMware up to a distance of 200 kilometers. A team-up from Cisco, VMware and EMC did some tests, proving the posiblities. Long distance vmotion is basically the vmotioning between two remote datacenters, enabling follow the sun, follow the moon, or evacuating a datacenter anticipating on a soon-to-be-disaster (“the tornado is coming”).

Of course some limitations apply.  Things like maximum latency of 5ms round trip and minimum bandwidth of 622 Mbits/sec apply, but still! Long distance vmotion is a fact, and I guess will soon be accepted as an enterprise solution just like normal vmotion has.

Today at VMworld 2009 is joined a breakout session presented by PHD Virtual about their latest version of esXpress (3.6). Great stuff once again! Apart from the fact that esXpress is now fully functional on vSphere (still no ESXi support though), they also managed to use the vStorage API for “changed block reporting”. Basically what this means, is that when you are using vSphere and doing delta or deduped backups, you no longer need to read all the blocks of a VM and then decide is that block was changed or not. PHD managed to get esXpress so far that it reads only the changed blocks directly by using this “cheat sheet” that VMware was so nice to make available though the vStorage API.

What this means is, that backup speeds will be way higher when you do delta or deduped backups.

When you also use their dedup targt, with the dedup action going on on the SOURCE, you get tremendous backup speeds and as an added bonus you can use smaller WAN links when you are sending these backups offsite. Wonderfull guys, you did it again!

Yesterday on VMworld 2009 I went to a breakout session on VMware ThinApp. To my surprise we saw a demo on a new ThinApp feature. This feature is basically, that you can automagically rebuild your ThinApps! In the demo five Windows XP VMs were used, and all “setup.exe” files resides on some share. When the repacker was kicked off, the VMs were snapshotted. Then, ThinApp got kicked off inside each VM. After the ThinApps were regenerated, they were automagically copied off the VM, after which the snapshot was reverted.  This process repeated itself on all available VMs until all ThinApps were rebuilt.

Magical!

I am not (yet?) the kind of blogger to throw on everything I see around me on my blog just because it is “new”; I think blogging should be more about things you have tested or measured.

Yet today on VMworld 2009 I make an exception: I just got my VMware VCP4 certification. Yeah!