Posts Tagged ‘vcenter’

• 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)

This is most definitely one of the fastest evaluations I've ever done for any VMware product so far…This is what happened yesterday in order (mapped to my local time zone):

07:00am: The product was announced officially by VMware, and the bits were available for download.
08:00am: I was in my office checking the VMW's website to download Lab Manager 4.0, and then I thought why not, let's do the AppSpeed as well.
08:30am: I fired up the VMworld Europe 2009 AP12 session to refresh my memory about the AppSpeed.
09:00am: I was blown away by the presentation, so I decided to forget about the LM4.0 for a bit and give the AppSpeed a spin.
09:15am: the AppSpeed was up & running on my physical lab.
10:00am: I started deploying it on one of my production ESX clusters for tier-2 and dev apps.
11:00am: when the AppSpeed started to do its thing and show some statistics I was utterly stunned!
08:00pm: I created this video at home on my virtual ESX labs for publishing the next day.

If you want to get to the meat and potatoes of the AppSpeed installation and configuration, you can just view this video to get you started. If you want to see how it might look like in real production, and how it personally saved my day, jump to the next section.

Note: As you saw in the video, my lab doesn't have yet any real applications workload, so there is actually no traffic to be metered.

The AppSpeed saved my day!
I recently designed two SharePoint farms running on VI3 as per VMware & Microsoft recommendations and guidelines, each farm consisted of 2 WFE VMs with NLB, 1 Indexing VM server, with 2 Active/Passive physical SQL nodes for the backend database. The SP farms worked perfectly well most of the time, however, sometimes we used to get some strange delay in page loads, and it was happening randomly across deferent pages and not in any particular time. I kept looking and looking for any reason that would be causing these delays from the virtual environment, but nothing. Yesterday when I deployed the AppSpeed in my production, I was able to see that one of my VMs running the Microsoft SCOM was producing a hell of SQL transactions to the SQL cluster. Since the SCOM is not that critical in our environment, where we heavily depend on other monitoring software like the ManageEngine Application Monitor & OpManager, I stopped the SCOM and I instantly saw a noticeable drop down in the Mem & CPU utilization on the SQL cluster. From that moment till the time of writing these words, the SharePoint farms are performing perfectly well. Our DBAs were able to identify that our physical SQL cluster needs an urgent memory upgrade, and in fact considering virtualizing it completely on our new vSphere installation.

Are you a VMware expert?
The AppSpeed is not meant to replace any of your existing monitoring tools that you are happy with. It’s another great visibility tool for doing that, not to mention the SLA part and the integration with the vCloud technologies. I just wanted to tell you that you still need this even if you are a VMware expert who knows how to use the traditional tools for performance analysis. Let me give you a very practical example:
In the SharePoint scenario that I’ve described above, I could still identify the problem as follows:

• I can use the ManageEngine Application Monitor to identify that there is a high memory utilization on the SQL nodes.
• I can use the NetFlow protocol on VMware ESX 3.5 (as demonstrated here) to identify that the SCOM VM is having a high traffic on the vSwitch out to the SQL cluster.
• I can use esxtop to record, play or analyze in high details that the ESX servers and the SharePoint VMs are either ideal or performing perfectly normal all the time.

Now, ask yourself this: why do I need to do all that if there is a tool that can just give me the complete picture? How much time and effort do I need in order to go through this entire cycle?

To conclude all the above, in the AppSpeed presentation there was a part saying this: "AppSpeed reduces finger pointing and allows IT to focus on solving root cause of issues". This is not marketing words, it's a fact I literally experienced yesterday in my production environment.

I really, really wanted to share some screenshots, but since it's running in my production I couldn't do that here. Even with graphics editing, I've never been a fan of doing something like that. I do promise though that I will put some application workloads in my lab and return back with more videos or screenshots.

I extracted some screenshots from the VMworld session I mentioned at the beginning of my post, just to give you a real feel of what you see. It's still not comparable to what you will experience in your own environment. I do encourage you to do that, whether you are on vSphere or still on VI3 like me.

At the time of submitting this post, the press release from VMware should be out. It's July 13^th, 12 midnight NY time, and VMware is announcing a bunch of vCenter products including the much awaited Lab Manager 4.0.

Unfortunately I was not in the beta program of LM4.0 to have an early hands-on experience, but I've been briefed about it, and I must say that I'm quite happy with the new features of the product. I'm exceptionally interested in this product now more than any time before, for three main reasons:
1) I need to implement LM in a wide scale for our development department. Currently our developers are working independently everyone in his/her own island, using things like VMware server or workstation! No effective collaboration or automation whatsoever.

2) I need to implement LM for our infrastructure team to simulate our entire production environment. Again, I need something that can scale out easily (typically on blades), yet with flexible and fenced network configurations.

3) Lastly, I need to build my own labs for my "virtual private cloud" project, which will typically require building multiple vESX clusters, not to mention the importance of having the templates and libraries for deploying these clusters whenever I need to test something new that would require significant changes (e.g. Nexus1000v for networking, or Reflex vTrust for security)

As soon as I wake up from sleep (yes, technically I'm sleeping now, this is a scheduled post) I will download the bits and start playing with it. I will come back with more details later, but between now and then, here are some highlights on the new features of LM4.0 along with two screenshots from the product team:

- Lab Manager 4.0 now fully supports VMware vSphere 4
- Support for the VMware ESX(i) Form Factor (was not supported in previous versions).
- LM is integrated now with VMware vCenter Stage Manager.
- Host Spanning Private Networks: Host Spanning Private Networks, a new technology in Lab Manager 4, creates isolated private networks without the need for setting up VLANs. This new feature requires the Distributed Switch capability of VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus edition.
- Multiple Workspaces: VMware vCenter Lab Manager 4 introduces the concept of multiple workspaces within organizations.
- Archive to Library: Lab Manager 4 provides the ability to keep a particular configuration together with its change history for record within the library.
- Configuration History: Lab Manager 4 mow provides a new configuration history tab for all configurations. The history of a configuration displays the list of the events related to this configuration.

For the complete and detailed list of new features, you can check out this WP from VMware: http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/VMW_09Q2_WP_vCenter_LabManager4_10_R1.pdf

Screenshot (1): VMware vCenter Lab Manager 4 streamlines application releases from development to production. The self-service interface provides on-demand access to virtualized application environments while IT remains in administrative control.

Screenshot (2): Advanced networking capabilities in Lab Manager 4 allow application teams to create realistic, production-like test environments for complex system and network configurations.

This is the third video in our vSphere journey. We'll do the following tasks in order:

• Add our Licenses in vCenter Server.
• Register our first ESX server in vCenter.
• Configure the VMkernel on the ESX server along with enabling the vMotion & FT.
• Configure the iSCSI software initiator and discover the shared LUNs on the SAN.
• Create an HA/DRS enabled Cluster.
• Add our three ESX servers to it.
• Import a Virtual Appliance to the cluster for testing.
• Test vMotion to ensure that the VMkernel is functioning properly.

And by that we set the stage for Fault Tolerance in the next video. I have it already recorded and I will do my best to produce it by tomorrow since it's a weekend over here.

One last thing to note: please bare with the interesting music that plays along with the video, I can't find my flash loops collection, so until I do, you may either mute the music or dance with it. It's really boring watching silent videos, besides, it's almost impossible not to fall asleep from them.

This is the second video in the vSphere4 series, we’ll install the complete set of the vCenter4 components and use a remote SQL server for hosting the vCenter Server & Update Manager DBs. The installation is fairly easy and straight forward, but it has a couple of interesting new features/enhancements.

Happy viewing!