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Moey posted:Interesting. Since VMDK cannot do > 2TB disks, I never really been concerned about having a datastore larger than that. As long as you're okay with a 1:1 VMDK:VMFS ratio, that's fine. Some people want/need more VMDKs crammed into a VMFS datastore though, if for no other reason than ease of management. Filling up your 2TB VMFS with a 2TB VMDK isn't a good idea anyways (go ahead and snapshot that VM and report back how that goes for you). Additionally, you can get larger volumes in-guest with dynamic disks combining multiple VMDKs, so it'd make sense to have them in their own VMFS volume.
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Jul 24, 2012 00:02
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I'm YOTJ:ing in less than a month, for a position where i said "I've heard the name Xen but that's about it". They were willing to give me training but i fear i'm to stupid to learn anything if i cannot try my way through it first. What can i do to get more familiar with it? Words that were used in the interview was "xen" "xenapp" and "citrix", versions unknown. I figure i could atleast install XenServer on some kind of hardware i have at home, the bad thing is that most of my stuff is old crap, a couple of laptops with centrino or core2duo cpus, the only really good machine is my htpc that has an i3. Will i even be able to install xenserver on the i3? I could sacrifice movie-night for a week or so if it means i can fiddle around with the technology i'll be working with. Shared storage? I have an old consumer nas (dlink dns 323) is it at all possible to rig that up for the simplest/cheapest possible storage? What i HAVE used is hyper-v on single servers, no san anywhere, esxi5 on a single server just to see how it works, virtualbox for non-critical stuff and a vmware workstation at home running freebsd for the last five years.
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Jul 24, 2012 07:43
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underlig posted:I'm YOTJ:ing in less than a month, for a position where i said "I've heard the name Xen but that's about it". http://www.amazon.com/Citrix-XenSer...itrix+XenServer I am looking into this book, I do not how good(or bad) it is, but might be worth a shot. If you have concerns about HW support fire up virtualbox or vmware player and install it in there, that way you can get a feel for it. Virtual NAS's are good openfiler is great for iscsi/nfs.
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Jul 24, 2012 13:19
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Citrix has some really nice stuff once you get it configured and working, but it can be a pain to get to that point. Their stuff is always full of weird bugs and things where you have to hold your tongue just right to get it to work. I have been using their products for quite a while, and have experience with XenServer / XenApp / XenDesktop and a lot of their supporting products and technologies. I can probably answer at least some of your questions. I think for VDI, they have the better solution over VMware. The biggest gotchas I have seen when dealing with XenApp or XenDesktop seem to be profile management and printing. If you do a lot of soft-client VoIP or video conferencing, that could also cause some stress.
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Jul 24, 2012 14:22
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http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/07/vmware-buys-nicira/ Looks like VMWare's buying a company that develops virtual networks. I've noticed that network engineering and virtualization have been moving together for some time, at least in most of the job postings I've looked at. For routing decisions this might be great, but I still can't help but wonder how software switching is going to be faster or more efficient than switching through an ASIC.
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Jul 24, 2012 15:32
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Mierdaan posted:As long as you're okay with a 1:1 VMDK:VMFS ratio, that's fine. Some people want/need more VMDKs crammed into a VMFS datastore though, if for no other reason than ease of management. Filling up your 2TB VMFS with a 2TB VMDK isn't a good idea anyways (go ahead and snapshot that VM and report back how that goes for you). We are not to the point where single virtual disks are near 2TB yet, but when rebuilding our vSphere environment, I did come across some gems of 1TB disks on 1TB LUNs (a lot of them were only using like 90% of their space too) that my old boss left behind. Mierdaan posted:Additionally, you can get larger volumes in-guest with dynamic disks combining multiple VMDKs, so it'd make sense to have them in their own VMFS volume. I brought that up with a teammate the other week for once we do come across the need for > 2TB disks. I wasn't sure if combining multiple VMDKs within the guest OS was a "best practice". I am sure going to try and avoid RDMs (old boss left behind a handful of those as well, for no apparent reason either).
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Jul 24, 2012 15:34
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Getting into my first Hyper-V real world experience, and the guy who was showing me around a bit today was showing me where to set CPUs and was saying he likes to use 4 cores, and while I know best practice on VMware is "use 1 unless you know why not to use 1", I didn't want to say anything and be wrong. But for my own reference going forward, with Hyper-V am I still looking to use as few cores as possible?
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Jul 25, 2012 06:32
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It's got dumber scheduling than ESXi IIRC, so that would mean yes.
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Jul 25, 2012 09:34
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MC Fruit Stripe posted:Getting into my first Hyper-V real world experience, and the guy who was showing me around a bit today was showing me where to set CPUs and was saying he likes to use 4 cores, and while I know best practice on VMware is "use 1 unless you know why not to use 1", I didn't want to say anything and be wrong. But for my own reference going forward, with Hyper-V am I still looking to use as few cores as possible? Hyper-V doesn't suffer the same penalty that VMware does with multiple vCPUs. This is discussed here but I'm having trouble finding a Microsoft sourced reference at the moment.
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Jul 25, 2012 14:23
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I'm having a hard time finding what I would guess would be a product that exists. We're a small company with low performance requirements, file serving and a few machines to do development on. Currently we're running two hosts and ~ 10 VM's but I don't want to manage the infrastructure anymore. Is there a company that will give us access to vCenter and take our VMDK's and run this stuff on their own hardware? And allow us to spin up new machines as we need; using our own licensing?
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Jul 25, 2012 15:10
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My company is looking into starting a service like that up. PM me or email me at if you are interested
Dilbert As FUCK fucked around with this message at 17:34 on Nov 1, 2012 |
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Jul 25, 2012 16:26
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Jadus posted:Hyper-V doesn't suffer the same penalty that VMware does with multiple vCPUs. This is discussed here but I'm having trouble finding a Microsoft sourced reference at the moment.
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Jul 25, 2012 16:39
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CSParsons posted:I'm having a hard time finding what I would guess would be a product that exists. There are tons. You have basically 2 choices: You can sign up directly with the hosting provider. Most of the time these guys will be running a vcloud infrastructure and you can import your vmdk's directly to it and nail up your VPNs (not necessarily in that order) and be done with it. You will be responsible for complete management at that point. Your other choice is to sign up with an MSP who resells the hosting providers service. This will usually cost more but the MSP will usually extend their management past the cloud and in to your environment. Hit google or ask for reccomendations around here and you will get some names.
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Jul 25, 2012 17:00
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CSParsons posted:I'm having a hard time finding what I would guess would be a product that exists. Probably not with your own licensing. I know there's limitations with some licenses that prevent that stuff.
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Jul 25, 2012 17:03
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The way the licensing works is that you have to own the hardware your licenses run on. Either the MSP or whoever is using their SPLA license and they own the hardware, or you are using your regular licenses and you own the hardware. A lot of companies will do some shady leasing stuff to change "ownership" (like the MSP leases the hardware to you for $1 but retains control) but that gets into muddy waters.
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Jul 25, 2012 17:21
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madsushi posted:The way the licensing works is that you have to own the hardware your licenses run on. Either the MSP or whoever is using their SPLA license and they own the hardware, or you are using your regular licenses and you own the hardware. A lot of companies will do some shady leasing stuff to change "ownership" (like the MSP leases the hardware to you for $1 but retains control) but that gets into muddy waters. That's not entirely true, if you have a volume license with software assurance, and are working with an authorized provider, you can leverage this for some things: http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/software-assurance/license-mobility.aspx OS is still provided by the provider though, but that's fairly cheap via SPLA.
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Jul 25, 2012 18:53
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CSParsons posted:I'm having a hard time finding what I would guess would be a product that exists. http://www.layeredtech.com/ Those guys can offer pretty much the full gamut; run your VM's on their fully managed cloud infrastructure, stick your VM hardware in a rack and they will manage everything, stick your VM hardware in a rack and do everything yourself. The middle option is the one that's fairly unique and it's what we use. Don't have to share metal with anyone nor keep SAN/VM admins staffed 24/7.
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Jul 25, 2012 19:59
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Maneki Neko posted:That's not entirely true, if you have a volume license with software assurance, and are working with an authorized provider, you can leverage this for some things: The licensing might be a big sticking point; we do most of ours through MSDN. During this move I'm thinking of moving Operational roles like File / AD out to Azure so the machines we'd be hosting would be purely for development. Syano, I assume the hosters you're talking about would be someone like Rackspace?
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Jul 25, 2012 20:28
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Anyone playing around with hyper-v 2012 server? It seems pretty nice to be honest, come a long way since 2008
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Jul 26, 2012 02:42
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I just got access to our companies "training cloud" to mess around with for ...training and such. My total experience with with virtualizing anything was just firing up like 3 W2k8 servers in player/workstation for labs while going to school for networking. Now I have: To play with, our training lab for the employees. I'm still in I guess a newbie phase and kinda just poking this thing with a stick to see what happens. My only real game plan at the moment is to like try and set up .. poo poo like the labs I did in school.. IE run like 4 servers set up Active Directory / Exchange and just keep poking it till it breaks and then try to figure out what I did and how to fix it. I gave the OP a read over and was thinking of picking up the Mastering vSphere book to start giving it a read. Just wondering if anyone has any general advice of where to go from the ground up? Does the book have any lab-like material? I have the "super special" VSP / VTSP stuff so not totally ignorant just this is still a new area for me. Wanting to get super familiar with all this stuff as I currently work in support and our Network / Cloud engineer people have been hinting that they are looking to snatch a couple people up here in the new future.
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Jul 26, 2012 05:21
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The mastering vpshere has a good amount of labs in it or if you like textbook style labs http://www.amazon.com/Administering...words=vsphere+5 is also a good read PM or email me I might be able to give you an inside look at the second book
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Jul 26, 2012 17:52
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Corvettefisher posted:Anyone playing around with hyper-v 2012 server? It seems pretty nice to be honest, come a long way since 2008 We have a HP server in our lab running 2012. We're an all Microsoft shop and it's a huge upgrade. So far we have about 5 2012 VMs running on it no problem. We were going to use it to demo a VDI solution but ran into driver issues for the GPU.
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Jul 26, 2012 22:17
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Corvettefisher posted:Anyone playing around with hyper-v 2012 server? It seems pretty nice to be honest, come a long way since 2008 I use hyper-v 2012 both at home and at work, so I might be able to answer your questions.
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Jul 27, 2012 08:41
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How many of you all use the Oracles DB oppose to MS SQL for your vmware databases? So far most clients are MS SQL haven't and I seen any oracle DB's.
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Jul 27, 2012 15:56
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Looking to add a new VMware host. Our current hosts have Xeon X5660s at 2.8GHz. The Sandy Bridge Xeons available in Dell's 12th gen servers seem to overall have slower clock speeds than the Nehalems. It seems like virtualization is one place where clock speed still matters, and I should shoot for something at or over 2.8GHz, right?
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Jul 27, 2012 16:45
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Corvettefisher posted:How many of you all use the Oracles DB oppose to MS SQL for your vmware databases? So far most clients are MS SQL haven't and I seen any oracle DB's. I would assume only people that are really heavy Oracle dependent before adopting VMware.
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Jul 27, 2012 16:48
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If you look at the reviews against the sandy bridge stuff, they're about a 15% improvement at equals clocks if I remember right.
evil_bunnY fucked around with this message at 16:58 on Jul 27, 2012 |
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Jul 27, 2012 16:48
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Erwin posted:Looking to add a new VMware host. Our current hosts have Xeon X5660s at 2.8GHz. The Sandy Bridge Xeons available in Dell's 12th gen servers seem to overall have slower clock speeds than the Nehalems. It seems like virtualization is one place where clock speed still matters, and I should shoot for something at or over 2.8GHz, right? I wouldn't worry about clock too much as oppose to running EVC or similar CPU family. My environment has cpu's ranging from 3.1 to 2.1 DRS really smooths out what machines need what. That said don't look at 1.6ghz and say oh it will work flawlessly. Anandtech is a good one to look at for Server CPU performance Dilbert As FUCK fucked around with this message at 16:52 on Jul 27, 2012 |
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Jul 27, 2012 16:49
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DagPenge posted:I use hyper-v 2012 both at home and at work, so I might be able to answer your questions.
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Jul 27, 2012 17:08
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DagPenge posted:I use hyper-v 2012 both at home and at work, so I might be able to answer your questions. I am trying to P2V a server which has 1 physical disk and 2 partitions. The partition sizes are 30 and 200gb. I am using disk2vhd. If I do one partition at a time, I end up with two 230gb drives - one with a 30gb system and 200gb unallocated, and the other with 30gb unallocated and 200gb of data. If I do both at once, it gives me a could not find boot disk error. What's the right way to do this?
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Jul 27, 2012 17:25
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To anyone studying, VMware press is going to be releasing a good number of VMware study books this month http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=vmware+press Everything from datacenter setup to the official VCP5 study guide
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Jul 27, 2012 17:34
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Erwin posted:Looking to add a new VMware host. Our current hosts have Xeon X5660s at 2.8GHz. The Sandy Bridge Xeons available in Dell's 12th gen servers seem to overall have slower clock speeds than the Nehalems. It seems like virtualization is one place where clock speed still matters, and I should shoot for something at or over 2.8GHz, right?
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Jul 27, 2012 18:33
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Misogynist posted:Are you bottlenecking on CPU speed? It's by far the least utilized resource in our environment. We average about 20-25% across the cluster. Great point. All our VMWare clusters run at 10 to 15% CPU but 50 to 80% RAM utilization. We're definitively RAM limited and I would imagine people are as well.
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Jul 27, 2012 19:34
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Misogynist posted:Are you bottlenecking on CPU speed? It's by far the least utilized resource in our environment. We average about 20-25% across the cluster.
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Jul 27, 2012 19:37
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evil_bunnY posted:Another little gold nugget right there. In most environments, even with TPS and all the other crap, you'll still run into IO/RAM contention rather than CPU. That is why it still pisses me off the vSphere 5 has the vRAM limit. Right now we are running ESXi 4.1 licensed for Standard, but each of our dual socket hosts has 96gb memory. I will lose out on memory until we upgrade to enterprise.
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Jul 27, 2012 19:47
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Yeah with how cheap ram is I wish they would have scaled it up a bit. Seriously 128G per socket is pretty cheap. I know they want to keep the ratio and make sure people scale properly but come on.
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Jul 27, 2012 19:50
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Plus, IBM and Dell both have 2U boxes that go up to 1.5 TB of RAM now. Is anyone really going to be buying 16 Enterprise Plus licenses for the same box?
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Jul 27, 2012 20:02
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Misogynist posted:Are you bottlenecking on CPU speed? It's by far the least utilized resource in our environment. We average about 20-25% across the cluster. Not at all, no. We're about the same, but my understanding was that if you have two identical processors, save for the speed (eg X5650 and X5660), that a VM with 1 vCPU will run faster (if it's maxing) on the faster processor, regardless of the free resources on the cluster. I know that CPU speed alone is not the determining factor with non-virtualized environments, but I wasn't sure if a single VM with a single vCPU would be negatively impacted by a slower clock speed on a newer processor. We do have some Matlab build VMs that are CPU (vCPU) bound when working.
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Jul 27, 2012 20:07
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Moey posted:That is why it still pisses me off the vSphere 5 has the vRAM limit. Right now we are running ESXi 4.1 licensed for Standard, but each of our dual socket hosts has 96gb memory. I will lose out on memory until we upgrade to enterprise. Yeah. Our vhost blades have 192GB of memory with two sockets, and it's annoying to have to pay for enterprise plus licenses even though we don't use any the other fancy enterprise plus features.
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Jul 27, 2012 20:22
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VMware clearly knew what they are doing. At least when we upgrade I get to play with some new fancy features! Downfall is when we do a hardware refresh next, my boss cannot wrap his head around the idea of scaling out vs up. He keeps mentioning quad socket Dell servers and tons of local storage. It has been a 1 year battle of trying to convince him what a more ideal setup is. I even proved a point when I rebuilt our vSphere setup to yank all of the current local disks and have ESXi boot from a thumb drive, I just don't think he understands. When I told him that I will be enabling DRS to our environment after we finish our big DR test this weekend, he seemed appauled that anyone would trust VMware's software to manage host resources. He seems to hold a big grudge against VMware.
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Jul 27, 2012 20:29
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