VM /ETC - Go Ugly Green! - Latest Comments

Re: Real Thin Provsioning And Over Allocation – The VI Admin

Abe12345 — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:05:54 -0000

They had me. I *used* to be a network engineer, but because I was someone who made the foolish mistake of rogering up to this 'new-fangled virtualization' stuff, I've now found myself here. We had three instructors who doubled as admins when the work was out of my reach - we're centered around a training environment, specifically information system security, so we're always tearing down and putting up new targets. When folks figured out how easy it was to do that in VI, the product portfolio grew. Then somebody got the wise idea of doing malware research. I wasn't about to let that happen on my production lab, so that turned into a development cluster, which then went production, and now we've got a 3rd cluster for development with a 4th in the works - and hopefully a new slot for a VI admin. I don't know how I'm going to be able to handle 4... :)

Most of my day is spent researching targets and trying to prevent VM sprawl. Busy is definitely in my vocabulary. Tools like VESI and PowerCLI are god-sends to me (and the work of Alan Renouf - thanks man). If I didn't have those, I don't know how I'd handle the proper care and feeding of these labs.

- abe

Re: Real Thin Provsioning And Over Allocation – The VI Admin

william bishop — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:53:35 -0000

I should clarify, only 2 of us actually administer the environment to any degree, 5 members in the team build servers on the clusters (server admin team).

Re: Real Thin Provsioning And Over Allocation – The VI Admin

william bishop — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:52:28 -0000

5 of us. over 3000 guests, 113 hosts. 20 clusters

Re: Real Thin Provsioning And Over Allocation – The VI Admin

rbrambley — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:56:01 -0000

Abe,

I believe you are a very busy VI Administrator ... WOW! Just curious, but did your company have a team of server admins before virtualizing?

Re: Real Thin Provsioning And Over Allocation – The VI Admin

Abe12345 — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:34:23 -0000

Heh.

Here to screw up your stats - and I kid you not.

1 Admin - me. 3 clusters. 19 Servers. 843 guests. And a partridge in a pear tree.

Re: Real Thin Provsioning And Over Allocation – The VI Admin

rbrambley — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 21:04:48 -0000

You guys are all Ugly Green Heroes! Thanks for the comments and stats. Ratio is avg of 90 Systems to 1 admin so far.

Re: Real Thin Provsioning And Over Allocation – The VI Admin

Josh — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 17:21:43 -0000

We are a team of 4 and are responsible for 2 vcenter servers, 200+ VMs and about 200 physical servers. We have a separte group for our storage and backups.

Re: Does VCE vBlock Really Mean Cookie Cutter Architecture For The Cloud?

ThatFridgeGuy — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:46:10 -0000

Looking forward to the reference architecture docs. I am already well on my way to building my own Vblock1 with CX4 already in house and UCS, 1000v & MDS about to be ordered. Puts us in position to look at being able to offer cloud type options to our customers down the road.

Re: Real Thin Provsioning And Over Allocation – The VI Admin

ThatFridgeGuy — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:40:06 -0000

Rich,
Great shirt and great timing. My wife just reminded me last night that I need to give her and the kids a list of what I want for Christmas. Got my "Virtually Insane" sweatshirt for Christmas from them last year.

1 primary admin (me) with 1 backup if I'm not around for 8 hosts and 125 guests in production.

Re: Real Thin Provsioning And Over Allocation – The VI Admin

twitter-1051361 — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:10:58 -0000

I'm the sole VMware Admin (and server/network/storage admin in general) in our organization, currently managing approx. 35VMs on two hosts. Combine that with 10 physical servers, one san with extended storage and the general networking for our HQ, branch offices and 22 vessels. The branch offices and vessels all have physical servers in their location as well. :)

Re: Real Thin Provsioning And Over Allocation – The VI Admin

rbrambley — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:58:25 -0000

Tom,

LOL. Actually, I De-duped the the word "provisioning" and saved an "i". Thanks for pointing it out!

Re: Real Thin Provsioning And Over Allocation – The VI Admin

Tom — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 09:24:12 -0000

BTW you thin-provisioned 'Provsioning' in the title by leaving out one letter. LOL :)

Re: Real Thin Provsioning And Over Allocation – The VI Admin

Tom — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 09:21:26 -0000

Like it :)
1 admin (moi), started with 1 host and local storage, now 3 hosts, 1 SAN, 15-20 VMs maybe by end of next year, after hopefully successful clean install of ESX 4.0 and migrate over all the ESX 3.5 VMs.
Reading/learning >> admin time since VMware is quite stable for us.
No giant VMs etc. :)

Re: Does VCE vBlock Really Mean Cookie Cutter Architecture For The Cloud?

twitter-16073861 — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 21:20:56 -0000

Yeah, I agree with you. Large scale infrastructure shops will see the most change and benefit from vBlock.

But I think it is the private enterprise data center that may be looking to move some (certainly not all) of their computing to those larger providers. It's all about reducing CapEx and OpEx. And, unless I'm misunderstanding something (yes, it happens often), it may end up on a vBlock. And that may be how my datacenter changes....

Let's compare notes in 6-12 months!

Re: Provision a Thin Provisioned Standby LUN For vSphere Thin Provisioning

rbrambley — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 11:24:54 -0000

Ray,

I am talking the same. Lab Manager, VMware View, Workstation linked clones is all the same technology. The linked clones are differencing (delta) disks from the parent template.
http://www.vmware.com/support/ws55/doc/ws_clone...

Re: Does VCE vBlock Really Mean Cookie Cutter Architecture For The Cloud?

rbrambley — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 11:10:54 -0000

I think the private enterprise data center won't change much. VI as we know it today will be the primary architecture. Those companies that truly need large scale cloud infrastructure will have the most significant change and benefit from vBlock arcitecture.

Heck, I'm not too sure. Ask me again in 6 months when it changes again! :P

Re: Provision a Thin Provisioned Standby LUN For vSphere Thin Provisioning

Ray — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 11:07:23 -0000

I mean ESX linked clones like in Lab Manager and View (I think you're talking about storage specific linked clones?)
It's a form of thin provisioning which can get you into just as much trouble if you over provision :)

Re: Provision a Thin Provisioned Standby LUN For vSphere Thin Provisioning

rbrambley — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 08:06:31 -0000

Ray,

Good question. This will probably be handled slightly differently for each storage manufacturers devices. Bottom line though is that linked clones are differencing disks and should not contain unused or white space that could be "thinned". The parent template could need to be thin provisioned but the linked clones probably are not.

But really, I need to investigate further. maybe some other VM /ETC readers will provide more insight in the meantime.

Re: Provision a Thin Provisioned Standby LUN For vSphere Thin Provisioning

rbrambley — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 08:00:51 -0000

Didier,

For storage device thin provisioning "reclaiming" already used space is an issue. I've been told that several sessions during the GestaltIT Field Day I'm attending next week will cover this topic.

Does a vmdk shrink? I don;t think so, but never tried it. You can go through a quick Storage VMotion or even clone a VM to handle this.

Your points are valid thoughts that both need to be understood as part of the recovery plan for over allocation.

Thanks for the contest vote. Now how do I get you on the VMware commitee that is voting?!!

Re: Provision a Thin Provisioned Standby LUN For vSphere Thin Provisioning

Ray — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 07:53:04 -0000

Does the storage monitoring support think provisioning using Linked Clones as well?

Re: Provision a Thin Provisioned Standby LUN For vSphere Thin Provisioning

twitter-27825765 — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 06:39:51 -0000

>dynamically shrink/grow volumes/arrays/LUNs
So far and if i'm not wrong, thindisk technology provides only dynamic growth.
Now what happens when you delete 1 year worth of IIS logs, does your thindisk dynamically shrink?

Thindisk is a must have as long Microsoft policy is to create heavy foot print OS'es...
FYI minimum disk space requirement for Windows 2008 R2 is 32GB!

Anyway very good article, I guess we have a winner for this topic at the blogging contest:)

Re: Does VCE vBlock Really Mean Cookie Cutter Architecture For The Cloud?

twitter-16073861 — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:47:33 -0000

"Now what!?" is the same reaction that I had....

But, thanks to virtualization my datacenter does not resemble what it did a year ago! The question is, what will that same datacenter look like a year from now!?

Just when you think you've figured it out...think again.

Re: Provision a Thin Provisioned Standby LUN For vSphere Thin Provisioning

rbrambley — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 11:28:33 -0000

Fojta,

We may be discussing semantics, but ESX VMs on NFS mounts have thin .vmdks by default. it's been that way since ESX 3.x. That's been the case independent of the underlying capabilities of the NFS server. For what it's worth, you've always been able to create thin .vmdks via the vmkfstools console command on any datastore before the vSphere GUI. Point is that it's a feature of ESX Server.

To be clear, I am not saying the whole data store is thin provisioned. In that case, your point is absolutely accurate.

Re: Provision a Thin Provisioned Standby LUN For vSphere Thin Provisioning

fojta — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 10:38:22 -0000

"In fact, vSphere can create thin provisioned virtual disks on the local or shared storage (VMFS or NFS) of any ESX host"
This is not really true for NFS, where the NFS server determines the allocation policy. If the NFS storage server does not support thin provisioning then thin provisioned datastore cannot be created on it.

Re: 3-D Games and Applications in Virtual Machines

puzzle games — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 21:19:34 -0000

I can gladly say that I played 80% of the games you putted on that list above. But this was a few years ago because then I switched to MMORPG type of games. I'm playing World of Warcraft for like 5 years now and the only reason I would quit it would be if my girlfriend will ask me to. But I was smarter and I knew she was a treat so I made her love this game before she would have asked me to quit it. In my opinion all of you should do the same.