VirtualizationAdmin.com Monthly Newsletter of November 2008 Sponsored by: SpamTitanWelcome to the VirtualizationAdmin.com newsletter by David Davis, VCP, CCIE. Each month we will bring you interesting and helpful information on the world of Virtualization. We want to know what all *you* are interested in hearing about. Please send your suggestions for future newsletter content to: ddavis@VirtualizationAdmin.com Have you experienced the benefits of a VMware Ready Virtual Appliance?
Download the SpamTitan's whitepaper - "Virtual v's Physical Appliances" in PDF. 1. How will VMware's vLockstep / Fault Tolerance change High Availability?Thank you for reading issue #6 of our VirtualizationAdmin.com newsletter! Last month we covered the new Hyper-V standalone hypervisor and a free VMware ESX Performance Management tool. This month, we will cover an upcoming feature expected to be available in the next version of VMware ESX & the Virtual Infrastructure Suite. This new high availability feature has been called VMware Fault Tolerance (FT) and vLockStep is a critical piece of it. As these features are still in beta and no official release has been made, I admit to you that these features may be renamed or completely changed in the next version of VMware ESX / VI. Still, I have seen FT and vLockstep both in person at VMworld and in videos posted, by VMware and others, on the Internet. To me, vLockstep is a very exciting new feature of the next version of ESX / VI (whatever that release is called) and I know that it will offer some huge benefits for VMware ESX shops. If I did not think it was really amazing, I would not be wasting your time talking about a feature that is not released yet :) So what is VMware's FT/vLockstep? Essentially, if you are familiar with VMware's current high availability feature (VMHA), FT/vLockstep is like VMHA but the guest VMs never go down, never have to be rebooted, and the end users are never affected, for even a second, when an ESX server OS crashes or the server hardware fails. How this works is that the vLockstep piece is what keeps a shadow copy of the VM memory on a shadow VM, running on another ESX host. If the primary VM dies, the Fault Tolerance (FT) feature is what causes the VM guest to immediately begin functioning on the backup ESX host that had the shadow VM already in place. The storage for the VM never moves and stays on the SAN. Again, this is much better than VMHA because the VMs never go down and end users never even see that, let us say, an ESX host went down. This is also better than, let us say, Microsoft Clustering because it is completely application independent - no "services" have to be brought up. Among other possible features of the next version of ESX, this is one of the features I am most excited about. What I will be even more excited about and will likely be in the next version after this next version of ESX is the ability for ESX to run FT/vLockstep over a WAN, in conjunction with a sort-of continuous SVMotion, keeping the storage up to date. Then, combine that with SRM and you have a fully-automated DR & HA solution, regardless of the underlying SAN features. Of course, even though VMware Fault Tolerance has not been released yet, producers of VMware HA products already have voiced that FT has inadequacies (read Marathon and VMware FT). To me, a video is worth more than a thousand words so here are three videos:
As always, if you have Virtualization questions, ideas for articles, or issues to cover in the newsletter, please feel free to write to me at ddavis@VirtualizationAdmin.com Thank you, 2. Train Signal VMware ESX Server Video Training
Have you experienced the benefits of a VMware Ready Virtual Appliance?
Download the SpamTitan's whitepaper - "Virtual v's Physical Appliances" in PDF. 3. VirtualizationAdmin.com Articles of Interest
4. KB Articles of the Month
5. Virtualization Admin Tip of the MonthTo be succinct in this tip, I recommend you use VMware's DPM (distributed power manager). However, to elaborate, VMware's power management uses VMware's distributed resource scheduler (or DRS). If you are not familiar with it, DRS is load-balancing for VMware Virtual Infrastructure. So with DRS, you can balance the load of your VM Guests but why not take it a step further and shut down any ESX hosts that are not needed? Thus, let us say that in the middle of the night, all VMs were migrated to just a few ESX hosts. The remaining ESX hosts could be shutdown to save power. In the morning, when the load picks up, those shut down ESX hosts would be powered back up and the VM load would be spread out again. I mean, you turn off the light when you go home, right? Why not shut down servers if there is no effect to end users? To see VMware's DPM in action, checkout the video in my blog post: VMware's Distributed Power Management (DPM) - it really works. Have you experienced the benefits of a VMware Ready Virtual Appliance?
Download the SpamTitan's whitepaper - "Virtual v's Physical Appliances" in PDF. 6. Helpful Links
7. Ask David DavisQuestion What is Hyper9 and how can it help me? Answer Hyper9 is a startup company focusing on Virtualization Management. However, they have a very cool and unique approach. To put it quickly in a way that everyone will instantly understand - Hyper9 is like "Google for your Virtual Infrastructure". Thus, yes, you can search like crazy and do advanced searching on all the objects and their characteristics in the virtual infrastructure. Even better, once you find what you are looking for, you can modify it. To truly understand Hyper9 and to get a one of the exclusive invitations to their Beta program, please see my article: Get an *exclusive* Hyper9 Beta invite from VMwareVideos.com Got a question for David Davis? Send it to ddavis@VirtualizationAdmin.com Have you experienced the benefits of a VMware Ready Virtual Appliance?
Download the SpamTitan's whitepaper - "Virtual v's Physical Appliances" in PDF. TechGenix Sites
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