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evol262
Nov 30, 2010
#!/usr/bin/perl

adorai posted:

Well, I am not surprised really. I knew that openstack was not the preferred platform for what I already run, I just wanted to try to play with it some. Oh well.

yum -y install vdsm-plugin-nestedvt vdsm-plugin-macspoof

Reboot your compute hosts. Enjoy your nested virt. Install and play with openstack inside ovirt.

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Pile Of Garbage
May 28, 2007



This a bit of a specific question but has anyone worked with vSphere PowerCLI and the Microsoft Failover Clusters PowerShell cmdlets? If so, how did you workaround the function name overlap with the "Get-Cluster" cmdlet? This function is defined in both the Microsoft "FailoverClusters" PS module and the "VMware.VimAutomation.Core" snap-in and it seems that whatever is loaded last will overwrite the previously loaded function. For example:

code:
PS C:\> Import-Module -Name FailoverClusters
PS C:\> (Get-Cluster -Domain $Domain).Count
17
PS C:\> Add-PSSnapin -Name VMware.VimAutomation.Core
PS C:\> (Get-Cluster -Domain $Domain).Count
Get-Cluster : A parameter cannot be found that matches parameter name 'Domain'.
At line:1 char:14
+ (Get-Cluster -Domain $Domain).Count
+              ~~~~~~~
    + CategoryInfo          : InvalidArgument: (:) [Get-Cluster], ParameterBindingException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : NamedParameterNotFound,VMware.VimAutomation.ViCore.Cmdlets.Commands.GetCluster
I've managed to work-around it by just unloading the module/snap-in after processing but I want to do more complicated stuff which requires both to be loaded into the session (e.g. gracefully failing-over cluster groups prior to placing the host that the cluster nodes are on into maintenance mode).

vanity slug
Jul 20, 2010

cheese-cube posted:

This a bit of a specific question but has anyone worked with vSphere PowerCLI and the Microsoft Failover Clusters PowerShell cmdlets? If so, how did you workaround the function name overlap with the "Get-Cluster" cmdlet? This function is defined in both the Microsoft "FailoverClusters" PS module and the "VMware.VimAutomation.Core" snap-in and it seems that whatever is loaded last will overwrite the previously loaded function. For example:

code:
PS C:\> Import-Module -Name FailoverClusters
PS C:\> (Get-Cluster -Domain $Domain).Count
17
PS C:\> Add-PSSnapin -Name VMware.VimAutomation.Core
PS C:\> (Get-Cluster -Domain $Domain).Count
Get-Cluster : A parameter cannot be found that matches parameter name 'Domain'.
At line:1 char:14
+ (Get-Cluster -Domain $Domain).Count
+              ~~~~~~~
    + CategoryInfo          : InvalidArgument: (:) [Get-Cluster], ParameterBindingException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : NamedParameterNotFound,VMware.VimAutomation.ViCore.Cmdlets.Commands.GetCluster
I've managed to work-around it by just unloading the module/snap-in after processing but I want to do more complicated stuff which requires both to be loaded into the session (e.g. gracefully failing-over cluster groups prior to placing the host that the cluster nodes are on into maintenance mode).

You can import the module with a prefix like this:

Import-Module Hyper-V -Prefix MS

Then you'd just run Get-MSCluster (test it with Get-Command Get-*Cluster).

Pile Of Garbage
May 28, 2007



Jeoh posted:

You can import the module with a prefix like this:

Import-Module Hyper-V -Prefix MS

Then you'd just run Get-MSCluster (test it with Get-Command Get-*Cluster).

Brilliant that works perfectly! I really should have checked the help for Import-Module before posting I guess. Many thanks Jeoh!

Rhymenoserous
May 23, 2008

Gothmog1065 posted:

I'm installing ESXi inside a Virtualbox machine.

No.

Gothmog1065
May 14, 2009

Relax, it's in VMPlayer now. I know I'm a terrible human being for not having my own machine for ESXi, but I don't have the money for it right now.

Maneki Neko
Oct 27, 2000

Not sure if this is a better storage or virtualization thread question, but anyone running Simplivity that would be willing to share their thoughts?

YOLOsubmarine
Oct 19, 2004

When asked which Pokemon he evolved into, Kamara pauses.

"Motherfucking, what's that big dragon shit? That orange motherfucker. Charizard."

Maneki Neko posted:

Not sure if this is a better storage or virtualization thread question, but anyone running Simplivity that would be willing to share their thoughts?

Probably a better question for the storage thread. What are your questions? It's hyperconverged with the usual pro's and con's of hyperconverged. It's doesn't have a large presence so there's not a ton of information out there. We're looking at partnering with them, but haven't gotten any demo equipment yet unfortunately. Our Nutanix demo didn't go very well.

Moey
Oct 22, 2010

I LIKE TO MOVE IT

NippleFloss posted:

Our Nutanix demo didn't go very well.

Care to expand upon this?

YOLOsubmarine
Oct 19, 2004

When asked which Pokemon he evolved into, Kamara pauses.

"Motherfucking, what's that big dragon shit? That orange motherfucker. Charizard."

Moey posted:

Care to expand upon this?

It was before my time, but the guys here doing our testing saw really poor performance in benchmarks. An order of magnitude lower than expected, and than other similar hybrid products. Apparently they spent a lot of time working with Nutanix support on it trying to figure out why it was doing so poorly, but could never get it to perform as expected. It was a poor enough experience that we don't partner with them.

sharktamer
Oct 30, 2011

Shark tamer ridiculous
I'm using virtualbox on my work laptop, which seems to have a dog slow disk. Cygwin just generally runs slowly, but virtualbox through vagrant is snappy apart from the occasional stall that seems to be connected to the VM saving its state periodically. Is there any way to have a VM stay in memory longer and only write its state occasionally? Would I be making a huge mistake in doing this? Am I even understanding how VirtualBox saves state of VMs onto disk?

Maneki Neko
Oct 27, 2000

NippleFloss posted:

Probably a better question for the storage thread. What are your questions? It's hyperconverged with the usual pro's and con's of hyperconverged. It's doesn't have a large presence so there's not a ton of information out there. We're looking at partnering with them, but haven't gotten any demo equipment yet unfortunately. Our Nutanix demo didn't go very well.

Mainly just the standard "is this a giant pile of horseshit" questions and curious if people are happy with it (your Nutanix example seems apt).

thebigcow
Jan 3, 2001

Bully!

sharktamer posted:

I'm using virtualbox on my work laptop, which seems to have a dog slow disk. Cygwin just generally runs slowly, but virtualbox through vagrant is snappy apart from the occasional stall that seems to be connected to the VM saving its state periodically. Is there any way to have a VM stay in memory longer and only write its state occasionally? Would I be making a huge mistake in doing this? Am I even understanding how VirtualBox saves state of VMs onto disk?

Windows will do whatever it wants with memory, the answer to your problem is a solid state drive.

evol262
Nov 30, 2010
#!/usr/bin/perl

sharktamer posted:

I'm using virtualbox on my work laptop, which seems to have a dog slow disk. Cygwin just generally runs slowly, but virtualbox through vagrant is snappy apart from the occasional stall that seems to be connected to the VM saving its state periodically. Is there any way to have a VM stay in memory longer and only write its state occasionally? Would I be making a huge mistake in doing this? Am I even understanding how VirtualBox saves state of VMs onto disk?

I'm not sure why you think the VM is saving its state at all unless you've configured it to do this. If there's disk activity, it passes through a emulated controller into writes into a file (probably a sparse file) using the normal I/O scheduler. If you're asking if there's a way to keep these writes in memory longer, you can write your own controller or tweak the code for the accelerated host driver (assuming Virtualbox has one -- I'm pretty sure it does, but it's been a long, long time how I've used Virtualbox on Windows)

It's far more likely that the occasional stall is swapping, whether because you haven't used it in a while and Windows thinks it's idle, terrible Windows memory management, or memory pressure I can't say, though.

Unless you mean something totally different by "saves state", but you'd have to clarify.

Wicaeed
Feb 8, 2005
Talking licensing with our rep:

When you purchase a Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter license, do the virtualization rights for unlimited VM's apply ONLY when using Hyper-V as the underlying hypervisor, or can you use VMware/KVM as your virtualization solution and buy a single Datacenter license for the for the physical host and still be obtain those same VM rights?

Thanks Ants
May 21, 2004

#essereFerrari


http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/about-licensing/briefs/win2008-virtual.aspx

It's licensed per pair of sockets, hypervisor doesn't matter.

Wicaeed
Feb 8, 2005
So if a host is running vSphere Std and has 25 Windows Server 2012 VMs on it, you need only to purchase a single 2012 R2 Datacenter license for that single host to run those 25 VMs?

Neat, if I'm understanding that right.

Moey
Oct 22, 2010

I LIKE TO MOVE IT
Datacenter is sold as licensed for 2 sockets. So if you have one dual socket host, buying one datacenter license would cover you.

goobernoodles
May 28, 2011

Wayne Leonard Kirby.

Orioles Magician.
What do you guys use for test environments for testing software upgrades, etc? I was wondering if I can import virtual machines from a vSphere into workstation for the purpose of testing things from both the server and client side using clones of our existing servers in production.

e: On a side note, anyone see a problem with virtualizing a server 2012 r2 RDS server on a stand-alone, physical, server 2012 r2 domain controller for a small environment?

goobernoodles fucked around with this message at 17:29 on Jan 29, 2015

skipdogg
Nov 29, 2004
Resident SRT-4 Expert

Wicaeed posted:

So if a host is running vSphere Std and has 25 Windows Server 2012 VMs on it, you need only to purchase a single 2012 R2 Datacenter license for that single host to run those 25 VMs?

Neat, if I'm understanding that right.

This is correct. Blew my mind when I found out about it as well. We have 20 dual socket VMware hosts and have 20 Server Datacenter edition licenses and we're good. We can fire up as many Windows Server VM's as our hardware allows.

Nephzinho
Jan 25, 2008





skipdogg posted:

This is correct. Blew my mind when I found out about it as well. We have 20 dual socket VMware hosts and have 20 Server Datacenter edition licenses and we're good. We can fire up as many Windows Server VM's as our hardware allows.

The problem comes when you start using Host Affinity to limit where a VM runs and saying you only need to license those ones (for Oracle, at least).

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

How did SCSI become the default emulated disc controller? I understand when this started off years ago SCSI was the enterprise standard but nowadays you can enable Hyper-V on the windows desktop as a baked-in feature, is SATA harder to emulate, or does SCSI just have that much staying power?

evol262
Nov 30, 2010
#!/usr/bin/perl

Hadlock posted:

How did SCSI become the default emulated disc controller? I understand when this started off years ago SCSI was the enterprise standard but nowadays you can enable Hyper-V on the windows desktop as a baked-in feature, is SATA harder to emulate, or does SCSI just have that much staying power?

ATA is a terrible, finicky command set to re-implement

SCSI is still actively developed (SAS and FC both use the SCSI command set, plus iscsi). It's not even remotely dead, and it's more versatile

mattisacomputer
Jul 13, 2007

Philadelphia Sports: Classy and Sophisticated.

Anyone here using the NVidia GRID K1 or K2 in production? We're starting research now but the idea is to buy two hosts with K2 cards to be VDI hosts for a computer lab and use the SGA option. Just curious what you guys have seen with them and if they make a difference for basic workstation uses that benefit from hardware acceleration, like Flash, etc, and more advanced stuff like Google Earth.

parid
Mar 18, 2004

mattisacomputer posted:

Anyone here using the NVidia GRID K1 or K2 in production? We're starting research now but the idea is to buy two hosts with K2 cards to be VDI hosts for a computer lab and use the SGA option. Just curious what you guys have seen with them and if they make a difference for basic workstation uses that benefit from hardware acceleration, like Flash, etc, and more advanced stuff like Google Earth.

I did a long eval (two terms) with production use. We had 3 hosts, but essentially just as you described above. We didn't have any major technical issues implementing or supporting the environment. For very basic desktop use (office, email, forms) it didn't make much of a difference. For anything else (YouTube, google earth, adobe, ESRI, etc) there was significant reduction in CPU use, and significant increase in performance (frame rates and user "feel" was all we really evaluated).

The only gotcha I found was with the consolidation ratio. Each client takes a piece of memory from the graphics adapter. It dosent share that memory. I didn't find it to be an issue for our use, but you need to be careful with tuning that allocation. We did find uses that struggle if we didn't give it enough ram. We also found you needed to give each virtual desktop at least 2 cpus and 4gb of ram for it be able to make use of the SGA.

I didn't get the support to take it campus wide, for political reasons.

parid fucked around with this message at 18:17 on Feb 1, 2015

mattisacomputer
Jul 13, 2007

Philadelphia Sports: Classy and Sophisticated.

Awesome, I appreciate the feedback. Was that with the K1 or K2 card? Also what brand of severs did you use?

parid
Mar 18, 2004
K1 with Cisco C240 M3. It was about a year ago.

bobmarleysghost
Mar 7, 2006



I've been searching on Google but I swear every source is different.
I'm trying to figure out the licencing for a 3-host ESX cluster.

Do you guys know where I can find info on that?

Docjowles
Apr 9, 2009

bobmarleysghost posted:

I've been searching on Google but I swear every source is different.
I'm trying to figure out the licencing for a 3-host ESX cluster.

Do you guys know where I can find info on that?

You probably want these two links:
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/products/vsphere/VMware-vSphere-Pricing-Whitepaper.pdf
http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/pricing

Depending on the features you need, and if you ever expect to add more hosts, you might be able to get away with the Essentials Plus bundle which is a really good deal. However it is limited to 3 hosts. To go further you need to upgrade to Standard pricing which is a bit spendier.

You should also cultivate a relationship with a local VAR or other reseller (even if that's just CDW or Dell etc) who may be able to get you discounts on the list price. Or at least walk you through the licensing minefield.

bobmarleysghost
Mar 7, 2006



Docjowles posted:

You probably want these two links:
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/products/vsphere/VMware-vSphere-Pricing-Whitepaper.pdf
http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/pricing

Depending on the features you need, and if you ever expect to add more hosts, you might be able to get away with the Essentials Plus bundle which is a really good deal. However it is limited to 3 hosts. To go further you need to upgrade to Standard pricing which is a bit spendier.

You should also cultivate a relationship with a local VAR or other reseller (even if that's just CDW or Dell etc) who may be able to get you discounts on the list price. Or at least walk you through the licensing minefield.

Perfect, thank you!

Thanks Ants
May 21, 2004

#essereFerrari


There's also the remote office branch office packs which aren't limited on the amount of hosts but have a hard limit on the number of VMs you can run. For most use cases I'd have thought an Essentials Plus kit is the way to go.

Gyshall
Feb 24, 2009

Had a couple of drinks.
Saw a couple of things.
Essentials is great if you never have plans to expand out of a 3 host cluster.

If you have any plans on adding more hosts in the near future (ie. 4 years) you have to re-buy/upgrade out of the Essentials kit, basically repurchasing vCenter and the existing 3 host licenses.

That is to say, Essentials licenses can't be used in a non-essentials vCenter.

I do think they have an upgrade path now out of Essentials, but I'm not 100% sure.

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Gyshall posted:

Essentials is great if you never have plans to expand out of a 3 host cluster.

If you have any plans on adding more hosts in the near future (ie. 4 years) you have to re-buy/upgrade out of the Essentials kit, basically repurchasing vCenter and the existing 3 host licenses.

That is to say, Essentials licenses can't be used in a non-essentials vCenter.

I do think they have an upgrade path now out of Essentials, but I'm not 100% sure.
For whatever it's worth, I've never had an issue getting resellers to discount me the price of the initial Essentials Plus buy on an upgrade to Enterprise. Landing the renewal agreement usually means they'll discount the initial buy into the red if you push them hard enough.

Thanks Ants
May 21, 2004

#essereFerrari


Gyshall posted:

Essentials is great if you never have plans to expand out of a 3 host cluster.

If you have any plans on adding more hosts in the near future (ie. 4 years) you have to re-buy/upgrade out of the Essentials kit, basically repurchasing vCenter and the existing 3 host licenses.

That is to say, Essentials licenses can't be used in a non-essentials vCenter.

I do think they have an upgrade path now out of Essentials, but I'm not 100% sure.

Oh yeah definitely, but it's a great way to get started on VMware. The Term licenses especially.

Also what Misogynist said.

bobmarleysghost
Mar 7, 2006



This is good news.

A follow up - Is vCenter Essentials (the vCenter that is included in the Essentials + kit) crippled in any way compared to vCenter Standard?

TeMpLaR
Jan 13, 2001

"Not A Crook"
Anyone ever heard of a place that uses NFS for all VM Guest OS's but uses software iscsi inside the guest for all additional drives?

I've seen that done for Exchange before, but not for everything. Any ideas why anywhere would do this and not convert everything over to NFS that isn't a cluster?

I am finding lots of examples of how to stop doing it, saying that it is antiquated. Maybe this is just a status quo kind of thing.

http://www.virtuallanger.com/2014/03/04/converting-in-guest-iscsi-volumes-to-native-vmdks/

TeMpLaR fucked around with this message at 00:13 on Feb 11, 2015

Number19
May 14, 2003

HOCKEY OWNS
FUCK YEAH


TeMpLaR posted:

Anyone ever heard of a place that uses NFS for all VM Guest OS's but uses software iscsi inside the guest for all additional drives?

I've seen that done for Exchange before, but not for everything. Any ideas why anywhere would do this and not convert everything over to NFS that isn't a cluster?

I am finding lots of examples of how to stop doing it, saying that it is antiquated. Maybe this is just a status quo kind of thing.

http://www.virtuallanger.com/2014/03/04/converting-in-guest-iscsi-volumes-to-native-vmdks/

I use in-guest iSCSI when the storage vendor requires it. NetApp's SnapManager for Exchange is a good example. Otherwise it's either stored on an NFS or iSCSI datastore, depending on the guest application.

Cidrick
Jun 10, 2001

Praise the siamese

TeMpLaR posted:

Anyone ever heard of a place that uses NFS for all VM Guest OS's but uses software iscsi inside the guest for all additional drives?

I've seen that done for Exchange before, but not for everything. Any ideas why anywhere would do this and not convert everything over to NFS that isn't a cluster?

I am finding lots of examples of how to stop doing it, saying that it is antiquated. Maybe this is just a status quo kind of thing.

I recently started in a shop and inherited this kind of mess. Most of our Microsoft infrastructure is running on NFS-backed datastores, but our company DFS infrastructure for home drives and shared drives and whatnot are all connected to the same NetApp via iSCSI. I believe it was done for control reasons - really, political reasons - because the team that owned the Microsoft stuff at the time wanted to be able to control their own vfiler, so they were given their own aggr and vfiler on the netapp and given the keys to do whatever they needed to with it, and the storage team got to be hands-off on supporting that slice of the NetApp.

There's not really any technical reason I can think of why you'd want to do that, though. Not that I can think of, anyway.

YOLOsubmarine
Oct 19, 2004

When asked which Pokemon he evolved into, Kamara pauses.

"Motherfucking, what's that big dragon shit? That orange motherfucker. Charizard."

TeMpLaR posted:

Anyone ever heard of a place that uses NFS for all VM Guest OS's but uses software iscsi inside the guest for all additional drives?

I've seen that done for Exchange before, but not for everything. Any ideas why anywhere would do this and not convert everything over to NFS that isn't a cluster?

I am finding lots of examples of how to stop doing it, saying that it is antiquated. Maybe this is just a status quo kind of thing.

http://www.virtuallanger.com/2014/03/04/converting-in-guest-iscsi-volumes-to-native-vmdks/

Lots of reasons, most having to due with using array snapshots for application level backup and cloning. If I have a particular set of data that I want to clone (test/dev data refresh, file level restore from snapshot) then it's easier to deal with that data if it lives on a LUN attached to a host than if it's in a VMDK in a datastore.

Cidrick posted:

I recently started in a shop and inherited this kind of mess. Most of our Microsoft infrastructure is running on NFS-backed datastores, but our company DFS infrastructure for home drives and shared drives and whatnot are all connected to the same NetApp via iSCSI. I believe it was done for control reasons - really, political reasons - because the team that owned the Microsoft stuff at the time wanted to be able to control their own vfiler, so they were given their own aggr and vfiler on the netapp and given the keys to do whatever they needed to with it, and the storage team got to be hands-off on supporting that slice of the NetApp.

There's not really any technical reason I can think of why you'd want to do that, though. Not that I can think of, anyway.

The technical reason for doing it would be to streamline the restore workflow if you're using storage snapshots to recover that data. If you're attempting to restore data from the LUN (users home directory deleted accidentally) you would clone the LUN, map it to the host, rescan disks, and mount it on a mountpoint, then you can copy off whatever you want. Snapdrive can do all of this for you from a simple GUI. If the data is in a VMDK you have to clone the datastore, mount the cloned datastore to the ESX host/cluster, go to the ESX cli and use vmkfstools to modify the UUID of the cloned disk so it doesn't conflict with the active disk, select attach disk in the guest settings, browse to the cloned VMDK and select it, then go to the guest and rescan disks, and mount the disk. The cleanup process for both has a similar number of steps. The process when the data is on a LUN is cleaner and simpler, as well as being easier to script. It also doesn't require logging in to VCenter and modifying guest properties so it doesn't require administrative rights to VCenter, which is useful when you want to allow the data owner to perform restores without giving them VCenter access and the ability to edit settings on their VMs.

YOLOsubmarine fucked around with this message at 01:28 on Feb 11, 2015

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adorai
Nov 2, 2002

10/27/04 Never forget
Grimey Drawer

TeMpLaR posted:

Anyone ever heard of a place that uses NFS for all VM Guest OS's but uses software iscsi inside the guest for all additional drives?

I've seen that done for Exchange before, but not for everything. Any ideas why anywhere would do this and not convert everything over to NFS that isn't a cluster?

I am finding lots of examples of how to stop doing it, saying that it is antiquated. Maybe this is just a status quo kind of thing.

http://www.virtuallanger.com/2014/03/04/converting-in-guest-iscsi-volumes-to-native-vmdks/

We did it when we were all netapp. We still use guest iscsi but we have iscsi datastores as well on Nimble. Honestly, it works really well, and I'm not sure why you think it's so weird. iscsi allows you to clone just that one lun and attach it to another guest (or the same one for that matter) without all the steps you need for nfs. As an added benefit, you can get multipathing that you can't get with NFS, for a higher throughput.

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