Archive for the ‘Diagrams’ Category

• This is the first diagram of more ESX blueprints to come. Previously I was focused more onto the vSphere architectures as a whole, but there will be more granular diagrams on ESX itself as a hypervisor very soon.
• The colors play a major role in this diagram. I thought I should stick with the original colors used in the vCenter Server Recourse monitoring box (on the top right of the diagram) instead of reinventing the wheel. As an example, if you want to scan through the swapping memory reclamation technique, all what you need is to focus your sight on the red colors. Whether it’s in the VMs, hypervisor, esxtop or vCenter, the red color will always relate to the swapping activity, and so forth.
• In the MMU virtualization I did not put much detail (as I was hoping to) because of the diagram limited space, but I’m planning to make more detailed diagrams about this topic in the future, along with other technologies like NUMA and EPT/RVI for example.
• In the memory reclamation techniques, you might have noticed that the “idle memory tax” is not there. I intend to illustrate that in a deferent topic related to shares and resource management.
• The Memory compression and swapping to SSD are future features coming soon in the vSphere generation. This information was mentioned in the VMworld 2009 session TA2627 so it’s public.
• The most interesting part for me while creating this diagram was the ESXTOP. I have a wild idea of creating a crazy huge diagram (poster-like) and add the deferent screens and options for ESXTOP along with real-world numbers and descriptions to show the beauty of this incredible tool. I might also use Duncan’s esxtop section as a reference for the thresholds, I urge you to go there and share your experience!
• For some reason, the PDF converter kept converting the ESXTOP text box into an image and then down-sample it, which ended up not looking as sharp and clean as in the original Visio diagram. I’m trying to figure out why the Acrobat is giving me this grief, so I will probably update the PDF later on (check the version numbers).
• I’ve received a number of emails asking for some descriptions accompanying my diagrams (like the admission control calculations in the HA diagram), and I believe you are right about that, especially for the newbies entering the fascinating world of VMware. I’ll revisit these diagrams in the future with detailed descriptions and write-ups, so stay tuned.

I hope you’ll like this diagram and see the real beauty of the ESX memory management (well a glimpse of it at least). If you have any corrections or suggestions please drop a comment or email and let me know your thoughts.

Recourses:
- Book: Operating System Concepts (Part Three – Memory Management)
- Book: Modern Operating Systems 3rd Edition (Chapter 3 – Memory Management)
- Documentation: vSphere Resource Management Guide
- WP: Understanding Memory Resource Management in VMwareо ESX™ Server
- WP: Memory Resource Management in VMware ESX Server – by Carl A. Waldspurger
- VMworld2009 Session: TA2963 “esxtop for advanced users”
- VMworld2009 Session: TA2627 “Understanding “Host” and “Guest” Memory Usage and Related Memory Management Concepts”
- Blog: Arnim van Lieshout (Part-1 , Part-2, Part-3)

I updated the diagram (v1.2) to fix a small typo and adjust also a couple of shapes. Thanks to Joshua Liebster & Bert Bouwhuis for driving my attention to this.

I know everybody skips to the diagram so I’ll save you the introduction, just make sure to quickly go through the notes that follow it:

• This is not an introduction to the VMware HA, and it’s not a very advanced diagram for it either. I assume here that you have a general idea on the topic before looking into it to appreciate this incredible technology. If you are a VMware professional you may also find this useful to keep your information sharp and present about the topic at any given time. You really don’t have to re-read the documentation every time you’d like to remember a small detail about the subject.
• I’m introducing in this diagram the “Layers” feature in Visio for the first time. The diagram may look somewhat confusing at the first glance, so I thought that it might be a good idea to use these layers for you to hide/show the topics that you are going through in the diagram. I can see some other use cases for the Layers in future diagrams, so I hope you will like it.
• This is an A3 diagram, sorry I know most of you just love the traditional A4 from the feedback I get, but seriously, it’s just TMI to fit in A4.
• Everything you see in this diagram, and specifically for the admission control, is *not* fictitious. This is a real cluster I built specifically before designing this diagram. I wanted everything to be 100% accurate and more importantly: realistic. If you zoom into the middle of the vCenter shape, you will be able to see the actual screenshot of the vCenter interface showing the HA cluster I used, and its runtime information window as well.
• It’s worth mentioning that this is not all the “advanced options” that you can use for VMware HA. I just selected the ones I thought that might be more frequently used. You can always get back to the official VMware documentation for the complete list.
• The Admission Control was probably the hardest part not just to visualize it, but also to understand it in the first place! That being said, I do not expect anyone with no prior reading on this specific topic to just get it from the first glance when he/she looks into the diagram. Duncan Epping has an excellent article that I think everyone already knows about it, but it’s worth mentioning that it’s the best place you will ever find for VMware HA in general. The diagram should help you though to understand it faster and easier. You can see all the numbers/calculations in front of you in one shot, and how all these numbers are related to each other.
• This HA lab was built in nearly 5 minuets and is 100% virtual. Long live Lab Manager 4.0 ! (more details here)

That’s all folks! I hope you will find it useful!

I’m a big believer in the saying “A picture is worth a thousand words“. If you don’t believe in that, then this blog will never be the right place for you. I think there is a fair amount of my blog readers who had actually visited me in my office, and they’ve seen how I have all sorts of diagrams covering the walls, starting from the infrastructure and solutions architectures, all the way to detailed blueprints for the deferent technologies that I implement in my environment. Beside the extreme fun I have designing these diagrams, just looking at them on daily basis help me identify the areas of improvement and future developments quite easily. Why am I telling you this small story? Well, you are going to see many of this stuff coming on my blog more than any time before folks!

Introducing the “VMware vSphere In The Enterprise” diagram v1.0

Disclaimer: This is a very, very high level “visualization” of the “virtualization” architecture using VMware vSphere. Having said that, this should never be taken for granted or looked at as the perfect design for your vSphere environment. There is no such thing as a “perfect design” at the first place. There is always a customer requirement, and best practices that we follow to achieve the “perfect solution” for the customer. I can’t stress enough on this point as I know there are many VMware-newbie visitors on my blog who might be caught in this trap.

A word of appreciation: I’d like to thank Duncan Epping for his great work of choosing the (Top 5 Planet V12n blog posts), which even for me, as a good follower of that RSS feed, I always miss quite a few great posts in there. In week 29, Duncan selected this post that had an incredible list of network ports in the VMware environment, which I have used some of them in my diagram above. It’s not the complete list of course since it’s out of my diagram scope, although I do intend to do a complete “block diagram” in the future to visualize the entire list.

Printing Considerations:
In case you haven’t noticed, this is an A2 scale diagram. I’ve initially tried to fit it into A3 while designing it but I couldn’t. The amount of information and layouts were just too much to fit in the A3 scale. The diagram still prints well on A3, but you’ll have a hard time reading some parts like the port numbers. That said, I highly recommend that you print it on an A2 plotter, which will give you the real look and feel of the diagram. In my case, although we have in our GIS department many plotters for printing even larger scales like A1 and A0, I just went to the nearest Xerox center and printed it there just to make sure how it will look like in commercial printing centers, and the printout was phenomenal.