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Anyone a VMUG Advantage member? http://www.vmug.com/p/cm/ld/fid=10 The discounts on classes, tests, VMworld, and software are easy to see the value in if you plan on using them. Unfortunately for us, the budget isn't there this year for most of that. I was curious as to how useful the eLearning courses are and if they are worth the cost alone?
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Feb 24, 2012 17:40
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And here our ESX guys are wanting to drop PHD because their support is apparently horrible as well. Fun!
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Mar 13, 2012 00:00
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Is there any reason to not look at AMD for a home lab? I just started lazily poking around the other day, but it looks like you can get an 8 core AMD FX-8120 plus a motherboard for less than the price of any of the 4 core hyperthreaded Intel CPUs alone...
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Sep 18, 2012 18:59
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Misogynist posted:It really depends on what you're using, though. For VMware I'd have a really hard time justifying the licensing cost if there's no quantifiable cost savings from consolidation, especially with the performance hit. With KVM or whatever, not so much. As a XenServer and ESXi admin it isn't often that I recommend XenServer, but licensing costs are where it shines. I don't use free XenServer, but assuming all the hardware is the same in this case it may be a good option. The big advantage with XenServer free is you still get XenMotion Live Migration to move a VM live between phsycial hosts: http://www.citrix.com/products/xenserver/features/editions.html
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Nov 21, 2012 16:08
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It looks like we are going to evaluate 2012 Hyper-V as a possible/probable replacement for our XenServer workloads in a month or two. Are there any good "Hyper-V for a vSphere/XenServer admin" type materials out there? Any recommendations on RSS feeds or whatnot? I've been out of the Windows Server admin world for a few years now, but the good news is I have been trying to keep my Powershell fairly sharp - this ought to be fun 
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Dec 21, 2012 16:11
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Thanks for the links. As for server core, I've never managed one beyond fiddling with in a VM from time to time. My past life was about 80% automated workstation deployment and software packaging, 20% Windows server admin to support those desktops (file servers, wsus, stuff like that) so command line, scripting, and GPOs are something I'm quite familiar with, albeit rusty I'm sure. Assuming license costs don't come into the picture (University with a site-wide MS license - part of the push here), is a server core installation worth the added hurdles on the management end? cheese-cube posted:Also out of interest what workloads are your XenServer hosts handling at the moment (Just curious as there's very little XenServer talk in this thread)? Right now it is entirely XenApp and XenDesktop and really the only reason why we have it is because it came free with the licensing deal (but only for Citrix products). Since it doesn't really matter what hypervisor XA/XD are running on, we have a push to evaluate the "free" Hyper-V option, and the whole "Microsoft only really supports their poo poo on hardware or Hyper-V" situation (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/897615) it likely means unless we run into serious issues that we will probably sunset our XenServer support so we don't have to run 3 hypervisors and ride with vSphere and Hyper-V. To be honest, XenServer has enough stupid quirks that I'm cautiously optimistic about the change. Mostly likely I'll just get to start bitching about stupid Microsoft quirks instead tho 
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Dec 21, 2012 18:43
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cheese-cube posted:Server Core has a lot less overhead compared to a normal Windows Server install so ideally your HyperV hosts should be running Server Core. Management wise there is really no difference. All you really have to do is configure the hosts for remote management and then you can just use RSAT. Makes sense and really doesn't sound too bad. Is SCVMM worthwhile? It looks like Server 2012 support is only available in the SP1 beta. Will this be the start of my bitching about Microsoft's quirks?  cheese-cube posted:AFAIK Server Core isn't licensed any differently than Windows Server Standard/Datacentre. I just assumed you were talking about the free standalone Hyper-V server since it is a core-only install.
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Dec 21, 2012 19:30
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XenServer really isn't bad - especially when you get Enterprise for free with your XD license. The problem is when you are working with both vCenter and XenCenter side by side every day it is really hard not to notice where XenServer is lacking. It is getting better and with Storage XenMotion in 6.1, I'd say most functionality is covered. We really haven't had any major issues with our 13 XS hosts - no outages that weren't caused by hardware. What we have seen the most of is just stupid piddly quirks, usually compounded by where we separate duties. My team only supports the storage, hardware, and hypervisor. We provision VMs for the admins, but they do everything else themselves. A great example of an annoying quirk that I've run across (and has been happening since we started with XS 5.6 FP1 all the way to 6.1) is that apparently XenApp has a tenancy to hang when the VM is rebooted. If the VM admin told it to reboot from within XenCenter and then after noticing that it is hung attempts a forced reboot it will queue up the force reboot and wait until the graceful reboot request times out (1 hour) before moving forward with it. If the VM admin tries to cancel the graceful reboot in the GUI, it won't actually cancel. They end up contacting us and we have to drop to the XS console and do a force cancel on the hung shutdown task that doesn't actually cancel about half the time. If it doesn't cancel the next step is to do a "xe-toolstack-restart" on the pool master that will drop all XenCenter connections and cancel all pending tasks. Now about 1 in 10 times that doesn't even work and we end up having to manually kill the VM domain to get it to freaking shutdown. We have tried to educate our VM admins to never never never do a "Shutdown" from XenCenter - just do it from within the OS and then fallback to the forced shutdown option if it hangs and that has largely stopped us from hearing about this problem. Note that other VMs running on the host are just fine while we do what we need to do to to cancel the task and actually get the hung VM to reboot, but it is hard to believe that it still happens after so much time. I'd say in environments where you don't have the separation to duties that we do that stuff like this would be less of an issue (after you see it once and know what to do), although still annoying. Get used to that xe-toolstack-restart command as it seems that is pretty much the first line of defense to anything that doesn't look like it is working correctly. If you are interested in XenServer, the XenServer Master Classes are a good thing to check out. The hosts wander around a bit and tend to repeat subjects between the webinars, but overall there is some good information for someone unfamiliar with the product. I've been using XS for about 2 years now and still log on to listen in while doing something else. I don't tend to get all that much out of it these days, but they also have a live chat going on that is worth reading to see what other people are asking and having issues with that I just copy to read later. Here is a link to past recordings (unfortunately I don't believe you get the q/a chat with it tho) http://www.citrix.com/events/xenserver-master-class.html If you have any specific questions, I'd be happy to help if I can.
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Dec 22, 2012 05:52
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Is there a clustered Hyper-V backup solution out there that can just backup the OS drive of VMs in the cluster? Preferably one where we can set the rules up to backup all VMs except ones with a particular naming scheme (or some other way to exclude like a custom field)? We provide hypervisor support to various departments on a charge-back model and are evaluating Hyper-V as an option. We currently have specific guidelines for our DR backups (OS drive only and only if less than a certain size). Any backups beyond that (data drives, etc) are something the VM administrators need to configure within their OS. I'm trying to figure out if this is even doable with a Hyper-V backend instead of vSphere like we normally use.
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Jun 1, 2013 05:42
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If you are also running SCVMM, this might be worth looking at: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg610577.aspx Disclaimer: Our Hyper-V footprint is so small that while we do run SCVMM 2012 SP1 we haven't even thought about trying the bare metal deployment stuff in it. It is likely half-assed like about 50% of SCVMM seems to be...
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Feb 20, 2014 22:57
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TeMpLaR posted:How many of you are using the vCenter appliance? It's time to go from 5.1 to 5.5 and we are debating if we should make the switch to it (and just keep a Windows box around for VUM). We are at 5.0 U3 right now and are going to be moving to 5.5 U1 in ~2 weeks. 80 hosts/3500VMs. Part of this is changing out our old Oracle db-backed Windows 2008 vCenter for the vCSA. Since it is Oracle, we can upgrade vCenter, power it down, bring up a fresh vCSA, point it to the existing DB, and supposedly all just *works*. Went seamlessly in test and VMware says it should be good. That said, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a bit worried... I guess ask me how life is in 3 weeks
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Jul 14, 2014 21:15
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No no serious posted:The ultimate goal is to allow me to swap primary desktops as often I want, but not having to spend half a day recreating a host environment for all the other VMs (this includes getting Virtual Box to work with the guests). Or even have those other VMs down while I install a new desktop. I'd rather have the primary desktop(s) be guests of a really lightweight bare metal hypervisor os, just like the other VMs. Could he use ESXi (or anything other hypervisor with this ability) and use VMDirectPath I/O passthrough to give a standalone video card to the "desktop" guest? Plug the monitor to the video card and it should work I think. Everything else should work like a normal guest. Switching out the "desktop" would be as simple as shutting down the guest, removing the video card, then assigning it to another guest - this would even allow you to flip back and forth with (relative) ease. I've never personally done it, it would be a giant kludge, and you would need mobo support for VT-d... but I *think* it should theoretically work. edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQZONW09zbo Looks like someone doing something similar here. I'm guessing you would also need to passthrough your USB KB/Mouse for input. Also think about sound There is a big ol thread linked in the video that I can't be arsed to read. Good luck and let us know how it goes if you try it
Fancy_Lad fucked around with this message at 05:10 on Aug 6, 2014 |
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Aug 6, 2014 05:03
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vCSA, vCOPS, vCO, and vCAC (so every VMware appliance we run) all tested positive to the test string in this article: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/24/bash_shell_vuln/ The VMTurbo virtual appliance is also vulnerable. *sigh*
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Sep 26, 2014 13:55
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AtomD posted:Oh yeah, since we're deploying 2012R2 as guest OSes the hosts are all licensed for Datacenter on EA. I wouldn't have given it a thought otherwise. From what I can tell getting vSphere-like DRS would mean we'd need SCVMM as well, which means we wouldn't save that much on licensing. I'm the only guy really doing day to day on vSphere, or Hyper-V for that matter, but I'd love to change that. Most of the guys here are basically only Windows admins. If someone with experience with both SCVMM and vSphere, I'd love to know what's been easier to manage. If memory serves, to get DRS-type ability with Hyper-V, you need both SCVMM and SCOM... We are a good-sized VMware shop - ~3500 VMs, 83 nodes, 2 datacenters. My team is hypervisor only and we have roughly different 300 admin groups as our customers. We are also licensed for Windows Datacenter on all our physical hosts. I was tasked with doing a POC for a lower tier service since Datacenter Hyper-V is "free" to us with our licensing. The core Hyper-V and Failover Clustering seemed really solid (and not all that hard to setup if you have some Windows and Windows clustering experience). There isn't a lot of built in reporting or monitoring, mostly just what you could setup for regular Windows servers. I'll preface this by acknowledging that we were trying to do something SCVMM isn't designed for (unique permissions on a per-VM basis) and that this was all Windows 2012 and SCVMM 2012 sp1 so things might be better now, but SCVMM was a mess in my opinion. Really complicated to setup properly, somewhat flaky with its view sometimes going stale vs the reality of the environment, an inability to see all other users running tasks, basic reporting and performance monitoring stuff I'm spoiled with from a vCenter world just missing (the answer for much of that is SCOM), some genuine "wtf? Did anyone actually use this?" moments like noticing that physical hosts in maintenance mode don't even have a different display icon (something that older versions of SCVMM did do, apparently) or that a host that you pull the power on is "Needs attention" with, again, no "HEY SOMETHING IS WRONG" icon change. I wasn't impressed. I was particularly annoyed with how you could do some things in SCVMM, some in Failover Cluster Manager, and some in Hyper-V manager, but none of the tools could do everything. An example: Renaming a running VM meant jumping to Hyper-V manager to rename the VM, jumping to FCM to rename the clustered VM role, then going to SCVMM and performing a refresh on the VM so you can see the new name. We ended up scrapping the project because after needed license acquisitions (namely System Center and a more configurable backup solution than DPM), the price ended up being close enough to a wash to not warrant even considering the retraining that would be needed. I think if you can get away with not needing SCVMM, that it seems pretty solid although you will have to do something to deal with the lack of monitoring (SCOM). This is basically smaller, integrated shops with a good amount of Windows expertise imho. There are a few things you couldn't do at the time in Hyper-V, like adding storage to a SCSI drive with the VM running, but nothing that can't be worked around with a little effort or some well-designed PowerShell scripts. Oh, if you go Hyper-V I highly recommend your team have at least a working knowledge of PowerShell... I mean, it is a really good skill to have for vSphere too, but you *will* be in it with Hyper-V.
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Sep 26, 2014 19:32
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FISHMANPET posted:We're chomping at the bit for vGPU, since we have a 20 host GPU backed Citrix cluster. I haven't had time to play with it and a quick Google search doesn't answer my question... Does vGPU allow you to live vMotion VMs to a different host? If so, I might be making 6.0 a priority as well. vDGA is such a management pain for us, mostly centered around having to coordinate downtime with our GPU customers...
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Mar 23, 2015 21:00
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FISHMANPET posted:I'm not 100% sure it does but I'm like 99% sure, since our virt guy was talking about and how it meant we no longer had to pin our GPU backed VMs to the specific host. I asked our BCS rep, and he confirmed that live vMotion should be a reality with vGPU. Now to figure out where that sits with vRA, NSX, and all the other projects we are in the process of evaluating/implementing... evol262 posted:You'll still have to set policies to prevent migration to hosts without vGPU unless you're ok with falling back to software rendering (and that may not work either, I haven't tried it), but you're not pinned to specific hosts anymore since it's abstracted out a bit more. Yeah, we already separate the GPU nodes into their own cluster because they are running on rackmounts instead of the blades everything else is. With vDGA we have been trying to pound into the heads of our Citrix team that they need to handle N+1 inside the application and make sure that their images are spread across the available nodes to handle one of them going down. It will be a whole lot easier if vGPU works out like vSGA does, only with better performance.
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Mar 24, 2015 16:06
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DevNull posted:No, vMotion doesn't work with vGPU (GRID) it only works with vSGA. evol262 posted:Ok, so now vGPU is split out, passed-through GRID like SR-IOV? Or is that vDGA? I thought vGPU was abstracting access to the actual GRID GPUs through the hypervisor, with a native nvidia/amd driver living in vmkernel, and it wasn't passthrough like vDGA. Why can't that be migrated? FWIW, before vSphere 6 was released, I heard conflicting reports from two different VMware reps on if this was/will be possible... And one vendor expert said it was in the works. My impression was vGPU vMotion would either be a release feature with 6 or a 6u1/6.1 release. Ugh. I'm going to have to find some hardware and lab this poo poo out, aren't I? DevNull posted:p.s. I hate the drat marketing names that VMware uses for all this crap. The pass-through/mediated pass-through stuff can't vMotion. Only the vSGA (virtualized by VMware) stuff can be vMotioned. Oh, and the virtualized graphics was called vgpu years ago before marketing decided to make it a thing. Not confusing at all. evol262 posted:And vSGA uses an older guest-level driver VMware driver instead of the native nvidia/amd driver? What the hell is software 3D called now? Super confusing. Story of my goddamn life ever since this "small" project was thought up.
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Mar 24, 2015 17:19
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Potato Salad posted:Implement affinities and you'll find it more quickly after a crash. In vSphere 5.5 and earlier, HA will ignore should DRS rules. Must DRS are honored but potentially dangerous here because if your only valid targets are down, then the VM(s) won't power back on. Note that vSphere 6 allows you to set HA to honor should rules. Some more detail If you run a virtualized vCenter (we do, and it is rarely an issue), you should absolutely use should DRS rules to keep it on a couple of known physical systems to make it easier to track down if it has problems - just know the limitations
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Jul 17, 2015 22:00
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Our team doesn't admin the majority of the guest OSes running in our environment, but we do give snapshot ability out to dozens of teams that do. One of the biggest quality of life improvements we have made is a powershell script that finds VMs with snaps older than X days or Y GB in size and emails a nag to the owner to deal with it with a link to the best practices kb where VMware recommends to keep snaps no longer than 1-3 days. Once those hit a certain threshold, it will instead send off a ticket to us with wording about possible VM downtime if they don't address it. We then follow up to make sure it gets taken care of. Most of the time it was honestly just forgotten about and the nag alone is enough... It is fairly rare we see a ticket these days and when we do it is almost always immediately responded to, even before we get a chance to inquire about it.
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Apr 7, 2016 19:07
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