Furoris News

The Steering Committee are pleased to announce the next UK London VMware User Group meeting, kindly sponsored by Xsigo is to be held on Thursday 28th October 2010. We hope to see you at the meeting, and afterwards for a drink or two, courtesy of VMware. Our meeting will be held at the Thames Suite, [...]

I’m not a security expert (I’ll leave that to Ed or the Hoff), but if there’s a security company out there to keep your eyes on it is, in my opinion, HyTrust. Since releasing their security appliance in April of 2009, HyTrust has continued to expand their reach. Last week at VMworld 2010 in San Francisco, HyTrust made a few announcements to note:

• On August 30, HyTrust announced HyTrust Cloud Control and out-of-the-box integration between the HyTrust Appliance and VMware vCloud Director. This combination brings HyTrust’s strong authentication, role-based access control, and visibility to vCloud Director environments. Other specific capabilities enabled by HyTrust Cloud Control include persistent zoning for multi-tenancy; detailed audit logging for compliance; and hardening and monitoring of the cloud services platform.
• On August 31, HyTrust announced integration with RSA enVision (disclaimer: I work for EMC, RSA’s parent company). This means that HyTrust’s detailed logging and auditing information is passed to enVision for security information and event management purposes. The HyTrust Appliance offers granular role-based access controls, strong authentication, directory services integration, and command authorization, and with this integration passes all of its detailed logging information over to enVision to be rolled up into a broader set of logs that also include information from the VMware ESX/ESXi hosts, VMware vCenter Server, and VMware View connection servers for a holistic view of the entire virtualized environment. You can read the full press release here.
• On September 1, HyTrust announced an update to the HyTrust Appliance that added new functionality. Significant new features in the update include support for smart card two-factor authentication; support for complex, multi-domain directories; single sign-on via Windows passthrough authentication; improvements to audit logs and new vCenter event archiving; application-level high availability for the HyTrust Appliance; support for VMware vSphere 4.1; and support for command-line management of the Cisco Nexus 1000V. This last item is particularly important; it enables the HyTrust Appliance to perform authorization of Nexus 1000V command line statements on a very granular basis. This functionality actually extends to the entire Nexus family, although the focus at this point is on the Nexus 1000V.

All in all, it looks to me like a pretty impressive set of updates. Based on a conversation between Eric Chiu (CEO of HyTrust), well-known analyst Chris Wolf, and me, I’d say that HyTrust has other impressive updates on the roadmap. Based on what they’ve delivered so far, I’m of the opinion that this is a company to watch. Keep up the great work, Eric and team!

This article was originally posted on blog.scottlowe.org. Visit the site for more information on virtualization, servers, storage, and other enterprise technologies.

Keep Your Eyes on HyTrust

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Well, before I begin I should explain that I shouldn’t have been the compare for this open QA-Panel comprising Adam Carter (HP/Lefthand), Eric Schot (DELL), Chad Sakac (EMC)  and Vaughn Stewart (NetApp). The session was originally proposed this year by Tom Howarth. Sadly, for reasons beyond his control, Tom was unable to attend. At some [...]

I’d collected a long list of vSphere 4.1-related links as part of the process of revising Mastering VMware vSphere 4, a project that has since been shelved. Rather than just delete the links now that the book is no longer being revised, I thought I’d post them here (in no particular order) just in case someone else might find them useful.

vSphere 4.1 – The First Bug found (and how to resolve it) « Itzikr’s Blog
VMware KB: ESX/ESXi installations on HP systems require the HP NMI driver
VIDEO: New vSphere 4.1 Windows Active Directory Authentication
What’s New in vSphere 4.1
vSphere 4.1 Storage Networking Updates « Wikibon Blog
VMware Communities: VMware In SMB: ESXi Scripted Installation Via PXE and Kickstart!
Support Insider: Useful vSphere 4.1 Knowledgebase Articles
VMware: VMTN Blog: vSphere 4.1 and more
VMware: VMware vSphere Blog: vSphere 4.1 is Here! Tell Me Something About the Release I May Not Know
Welcome to vSphere-land! » Tidbits on the new vSphere 4.1 release
vSphere 4.1, VMware HA New maximums and DRS integration will make our life easier
VMware KB: Setting the number of cores per CPU in a virtual machine
VMware KB: Changes to Fault Tolerance in vSphere 4.1
A Few Gotchas With vSphere 4.1! | Daily Hypervisor
VMware: Uptime (VMware and Business Continuity): VDR and vSphere 4.1 compatibility
VMware KB: Changes to VMware High Availability in vSphere 4.1
Blue Gears » Blog Archive » vSphere Upgrade: Going to 4.1
Stuff: PAM changes in ESX 4.1
Krystaltek: DRS/Fault Tolerance Placement Restrictions
Don’t add resource pools for fun, they’re dangerous - NTPRO.NL - Eric Sloof
How to use vMA 4.1 installation, configuration « GeekSilver’s Blog
Two new HA Advanced Settings » Yellow Bricks
DRS 4.1 Adaptive MaxMovesPerHost | frankdenneman.nl
vSphere 4.1 to 4.0 differences
VMware vSphere 4.1: Not the Typical .1 Release
VMware KB: VMware ESX and ESXi 4.1 Comparison
Best practices KB on how-to install ESX 4.1 and vCenter | ESX Virtualization
VMware KB: Copy and Paste option is disabled in vSphere Client 4.1

I hope that you find something useful in this list. If anyone has any other vSphere 4.1-specific links that they feel other readers might find useful, I encourage you to post them in the comments below.

This article was originally posted on blog.scottlowe.org. Visit the site for more information on virtualization, servers, storage, and other enterprise technologies.

vSphere 4.1 Links

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This is one of those posts that is as much for my own benefit as it is for others. For a few weeks now, I’ve been working on a dynamic DNS setup for my home/home office network involving BIND and the ISC DHCP daemon running on a pair of OpenBSD virtual machines. I finally got it to work (thanks in no small part to this article and this how-to post) and then found that I needed to make some manual edits to the DNS zones.

After a great deal of stumbling and fumbling, I found an obscure reference to a need to use rndc when making manual edits. After some testing, I learned that the “correct” way to make manual edits is as follows:

1. Halt changes to the dynamic DNS zone with the command rndc freeze <zone name>.
2. Make the manual edits to the zone file, being sure to increment the zone serial number.
3. Use the command named-checkzone <zone name> <zone file> to verify the syntax in the zone file.
4. Allow changes to the dynamic DNS zone with the command rndc thaw <zone name>.

If you monitor the appropriate log files (on my system I had to monitor /var/log/daemon), you’ll see zone transfers take place to any secondary name servers, a strong indicator that the change has successfully been accepted and propagated.

A very simple task, I know, but hopefully this post will help me next time I need to do this same task again and hopefully it will help someone else out there in the same situation.

This article was originally posted on blog.scottlowe.org. Visit the site for more information on virtualization, servers, storage, and other enterprise technologies.

Making Manual Edits to Dynamic DNS Zones

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This weeks RTFM draw is to win a copy of Eric Siebert’s “Maximum vSphere”. The draw closes on Monday, 13th Sept 2010 at 5pm GMT. The winner will be announced shortly after on this website… As I’m starting the draw on Monday evening I’m giving folks a whole 7 days to enter. How do you [...]

In the haze that was VMworld 2010, I didn’t get an opportunity to mention that I wrote a lengthy article about VMware’s new vCloud Director (vCD). Anyway, the piece was serialized on TechTarget’s searchcloudcomputing title. You can find each part of the article here: Part1 Part2 Part3 If you would like to listen to the [...]

The VMworld 2010 general session on Thursday, September 2, gets kicked off by pictures of the party last night and opening remarks by Rick Jackson around innovation and the definition of innovation. It was nice to see VMware “tip their hat” to IBM for the creation of virtualization.

The first guest speaker to come up and discuss innovation is Pranav Mistry, who spends some time discussing some of the various next-generation interfaces that he’s created and worked with—things like a virtual mouse, a pen that allows designers to draw on the screen, or a paper interface to computing devices. His ultimate goal is to integrate digital information into the real world. He wants to stop having different interactions with digital and physical and have only a single set of interactions. He shows off a few very interesting demonstrations of an experimental project that involves a device integrating a small projector, a camera, and devices that track hand movement to integrate digital information into the real world. It’s pretty interesting and shows off some exciting integrations that lie ahead.

The next guest is Natan Linder, an Intel fellow and member of the MIT Media Lab. He focuses his discussion around adding I/O to the real world and creating new interfaces. The key project is the LuminAR, which is a robotic lamp that provides a natural interface to the digital world. It’s a pretty interesting project that “breaks pixels free of the screen” and allows you to interact with the digital world wherever an whenever you need. The project is different from Pranav’s in that Natan’s project is focused around augmented reality; Pranav’s work focuses on removing the barriers between digital and physical.

The third and final speaker is Tan Lee, founder of Emotiv Systems, who focuses on a new remote control that uses brain waves to control digital devices. Emotiv is working on “brain computer interface technology”. After discussing what Emotiv has been working on, she invites Steve Herrod, CTO of VMware, who will help demonstrate the Emotiv technology in action. Tan walks Steve through some training actions, and then demonstrates how the system actually works. The demonstration is very impressive, and truly does look like some sort of science fiction technology. It’s quite amazing.

At the completion of Tan’s demonstration, all three speakers join Rick Jackson on the screen for a brief panel discussion.

After the panel discussion concludes, Rick Jackson finally answers the question: what do the Golden Tickets mean? Each Golden Ticket holder will receive their own Emotiv headset. Awesome!

This article was originally posted on blog.scottlowe.org. Visit the site for more information on virtualization, servers, storage, and other enterprise technologies.

VMworld 2010 General Session, Day 4

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Well, I’m here at the book store – signed some books already… But if you here come along and say hi. I’m here until 5.00pm…

This is session TA8233, titled “Prioritizing Storage Resource Allocation in ESX Based Virtual Environments Using Storage I/O Control.” The presenters are Ajay Gulati and Chethan Kumar, both of whom are R&D Engineers with VMware.

Storage I/O Control (SIOC) is intended to help even out storage resource allocation to prevent some VMs from using up storage resources and negatively impacting other workloads. SIOC implements I/O shares and I/O limits on datastore objects; reservations are not implemented currently.

To enable SIOC for a datastore, simply open the Properties dialog box for the datastore and check the Enabled setting for SIOC. Once it is enabled, you can adjust the default assignments for I/O shares and/or I/O limits on a per-virtual disk basis. When discussing shares, be sure to remember that shares assign relative priority. To help make working with SIOC easier, VMware has included columns for I/O Shares and I/O Limits on the Virtual Machines tab for a selected datastore.

The presenter next shows an example of using SIOC with IOMeter; the example shows that SIOC does actually implement the 2:1 ratio that was configured on the VMs. The next few slides reinforce this behavior as the presenters walk through examples of environments both without SIOC and with SIOC.

SIOC activates when it detects latency above a threshold for an enabled datastore. When the latency exceeds the threshold value, SIOC kicks in and begins to enforce relative priority based on share assignment. The latency is set to a default value, but it is configurable. Lower values enforce stronger isolation; higher values are better for overall throughput. VMware doesn’t use only IOPS or only bandwidth for enforcing SIOC; instead, they use the idea of an array queue slot. Some VMs will re-use slots more quickly (sequential I/Os, for example), others will re-use slots more slowly. This is an area I’m going to explore in more detail.

SIOC checks latency every 4 seconds and adjusts host queue depth accordingly. SIOC also detects when VMs are not using their array queue slots and dynamically redistributes those slots to VMs that are actively issuing I/O requests.

The session ends up with a few recommendations:

• Avoid using different settings on datastores that share the same underlying resources. (I wonder how this impacts the use of disk pools in many modern storage arrays?)
• Avoid external access for SIOC-enabled datastores. Do not share across multiple vCenter Server instances, do not access using older hosts or non-ESX hosts, and don’t share across datacenters.
• For SSDs, use 10-15 ms as the suggested congestion threshold. For FC and SAS disks, 20-30 ms is appropriate; use 30-50 ms for SATA disks. For auto-tiered datastores, use the vendor-recommended value or use the value from the slowest storage in the pool.

At this point, the session wrapped up. This was a very interesting session and SIOC is a topic that I definitely plan on exploring in much greater detail in the very near future.

This article was originally posted on blog.scottlowe.org. Visit the site for more information on virtualization, servers, storage, and other enterprise technologies.

TA8233: Prioritizing Storage Resource Allocation Using Storage I/O Control

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Latest Updates

These are the changes or updates made to VMware Compatibility Guide since it was last published:

• Added support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 Service Pack 1 for VMware on ESX 4.0 Update 2 and ESX 4.1

Check the VMware Compatibility Guide here: http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php?deviceCategory=software

 

 

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Latest Updates

These are the changes or updates made to VMware Compatibility Guide since it was last published:

• Added support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 Service Pack 1 for VMware on ESX 4.0 Update 2 and ESX 4.1

Check the VMware Compatibility Guide here: http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php?deviceCategory=software

 

 

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Latest Updates

These are the changes or updates made to VMware Compatibility Guide since it was last published:

• Added support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 Service Pack 1 for VMware on ESX 4.0 Update 2 and ESX 4.1

Check the VMware Compatibility Guide here: http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php?deviceCategory=software

 

 

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Latest Updates

These are the changes or updates made to VMware Compatibility Guide since it was last published:

• Added support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 Service Pack 1 for VMware on ESX 4.0 Update 2 and ESX 4.1

Check the VMware Compatibility Guide here: http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php?deviceCategory=software

 

 

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Latest Updates

These are the changes or updates made to VMware Compatibility Guide since it was last published:

• Added support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 Service Pack 1 for VMware on ESX 4.0 Update 2 and ESX 4.1

Check the VMware Compatibility Guide here: http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php?deviceCategory=software

 

 

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Latest Updates

These are the changes or updates made to VMware Compatibility Guide since it was last published:

• Added support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 Service Pack 1 for VMware on ESX 4.0 Update 2 and ESX 4.1

Check the VMware Compatibility Guide here: http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php?deviceCategory=software

 

 

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Latest Updates

These are the changes or updates made to VMware Compatibility Guide since it was last published:

• Added support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 Service Pack 1 for VMware on ESX 4.0 Update 2 and ESX 4.1

Check the VMware Compatibility Guide here: http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php?deviceCategory=software

 

 

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Latest Updates

These are the changes or updates made to VMware Compatibility Guide since it was last published:

• Added support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 Service Pack 1 for VMware on ESX 4.0 Update 2 and ESX 4.1

Check the VMware Compatibility Guide here: http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php?deviceCategory=software

 

 

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Latest Updates

These are the changes or updates made to VMware Compatibility Guide since it was last published:

• Added support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 Service Pack 1 for VMware on ESX 4.0 Update 2 and ESX 4.1

Check the VMware Compatibility Guide here: http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php?deviceCategory=software

 

 

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Latest Updates

These are the changes or updates made to VMware Compatibility Guide since it was last published:

• Added support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 Service Pack 1 for VMware on ESX 4.0 Update 2 and ESX 4.1

Check the VMware Compatibility Guide here: http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php?deviceCategory=software

 

 

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