Windows 8 Consumer Preview
Hello All,
I write this to you through the new Windows 8 Consumer Preview!
So far, things seem to be working fine, but as with any new version of software that could change in an instant.
File Copy
The first thing I want to cover is the much debated "no time estimate" issue with file copy. It seems that they have not removed it completely as all the fuss would have you believe. You simply need to hit the down arrow (for more details) and it shows the estimated time remaining, as well as a neat little graph showing the current speed of the file transfer. There's also the ability to pause a transfer in progress. I didn't try to pause during a large single file transfer, but I would assume that it pauses after the current file has been written (as opposed to mid-stream in a single file).
In the example pictures, I'm copying a large directory from a 3-drive RAID-0 disk (an image of my old win7 installation) to my shiny new OCZ Vertex 3 120GB SATA-III drive running the Windows 8 Preview 
The new "Start Menu"
At first, I didn't really like the new start menu at all. I know it's designed to be more user friendly for tablets and other touch based devices, but having used the traditional start menu since it's inception, it was a bit of a mindset change.
Using the link to the "Desktop" brings you back to familiar territory, looking and behaving almost exactly as a Windows 7 desktop (with the obvious omission of the start menu).
I've had an iPad for sometime now, so the concept of using the "Windows Key" like Apple's home button for the Start Menu became familiar relatively quickly.
After installing a bunch of software, the menu becomes cluttered really fast. Thankfully, the pin/unpin option is only a right-mouse click away. After removing the unwanted items from sight, and dragging the remaining items into a more preferable view, I've come to like the new way the start menu works.
But what if you've removed something by accident and want to put it back?
Thankfully the "Apps" search is initiated once you start typing on the keyboard. If you hit the "x" to remove the text from the search, all items appear as they would have been in the traditional start menu (assuming the application installed a start menu shortcut).
Adding an item back is as easy as a right-click (to bring up the context bar) and clicking the "Pin/Unpin from Start" option. The "Pin/Unpin from Taskbar" is also available through this menu, if you prefer to add them to your desktop taskbar (as you can with Windows 7).
Drivers and Devices
So far I haven't had any issues with my connected devices. Most things installed by default with the installation so I didn't have to bother with much. It seems that Windows 7 based drivers are rather stable. The only things I've had to update so far were my nVidia display drivers (which were ok with the default installed ones, but i decided to update anyway) and my Logitech G13 gaming controller (which needs special software anyways).
More to come...
Since this install is just a few hours old, I'm sure I'll have some issues later on to comment on. I'll update this post as I go.
For now, things seem rather good and I like the changes.
-Paul
ESX Home Server
People often ask me what I'm running as a test environment at home. Usually I try and borrow a Lab on-site at whichever client I may be working at, but sometimes you just need to test something quick or build a template without that sort of access.
Over the last while, I've put together some generic PC parts (read: cheap) for a home ESX server.
Currently at home, I also run a Windows Home Server for my personal photos, video and PC/Laptop backups. The WHS server runs on an Acer H340 (dual core ATOM CPU) which seems a little sluggish at times for transcoding streaming video at 1080p to my PS3 (using Java PS3 Media Server), so eventually I'll be migrating that to a VM on this ESX box. It's not likely that I'll be watching something while I'm using the ESX box for work, so I can always suspend that VM while it's not in use, or tag it as "Low Priority" so it won't affect my other workloads.
Current Specs:
- ASUS H67 Motherboard (intel H67 chipset)
- Intel i5-2400 3.10Ghz, 6MB Cache Quad-Core CPU
- 8GB Patriot DDR3 PC-12800 (1600Mhz) Memory (2x4GB)
- ANTEC 430W Power Supply
- 6x 2.0TB Western Digital WD20EARS Hard Drives (64MB Cache)
- 2x Intel PRO/1000 GT Network Interface Cards (*See attempt 1)
ESX doesn't support HostRAID style RAID adapters, so the onboard intel ICH RAID was not going to work. I figured I'd try to use a FreeNAS VM and present the storage using software RAID-z and NFS.
If you're looking to see what whitebox hardware works with ESX, there is an excellent "HCL" put together for common PC equipment that works with ESX (obviously you won't get support on this hardware). You can find the whitebox HCL here: http://www.vm-help.com/esx40i/esx40_whitebox_HCL.php
Attempt #1: ESXi 4.1U1 with FreeNAS VM for NFS storage
The idea here was to install ESXi 4.1 update 1, run ESX from a 1GB USB key, use a FreeNAS VM (attaching all 6 drives via RDM) and combine all storage into a single RAID-Z and present back to ESX via NFS.
ESX installed and ran fine from the USB key, but there were some issues with this setup:
1) ESXi 4 didn't recognize the onboard RealTek NIC (*So i went out and got 2 Intel NICs, teaming is good anyway)
2) Presenting the SATA disks as RDMs to the VM had to be done manually and via the console using vmkfstools. I was able to use David Wurburton's approach (Found here: http://blog.davidwarburton.net/2010/10/25/rdm-mapping-of-local-sata-storage-for-esxi/)
3) FreeNAS doesn't support "vmxnet3", so I'll use "vmxnet2 (enhanced)"
4) NFS performance back to ESX was terrible. I was able to use the FreeNAS VM as storage from external machines with decent performance, but when when trying to use the NFS back to the ESX host on the same hardware, performance was terrible.
Ok, this performance is just too bad to use. Using a dd test from the FreeNAS console, the disk performance seems to be fine, but when presenting through to ESX over NFS and using esxtop to view a dd performed via ESX, i get about 9-10MB/s per drive tops. Time to try something else.
Attempt #2: ESXi 5.0 with FreeNAS VM for NFS
Ok, on to version 5. Same approach as before, but lets use ESXi 5.0 and a local disk for ESX instead of the USB key. There really wasn't any reason to not use the USB key aside from my fears that it was an older key and may not stand the test of time. It was more of a proof of concept anyway (just to try it out) and it worked.
Some findings here:
1) ESXi 5.0 recognizes my RealTek onboard NIC (Yay!, now I have 3x1Gbps to work with)
2) NFS performance is still terrible (I wasn't expecting much here, but it was worth a shot)
3) After reading several other blogs, it seems that iSCSI with FreeNAS is the way to go for ESX.
A nice thing with ESXi 5.0 is that you can gain SSH console access by a simple modification to the security profile through the GUI. All you need to do is Login via the vSphere client and:
- Click the "Configuration" tab on the ESX host
- Select the "Security Profile" configuration
- For the "Services" section click the "Properties..." Link
- Select "SSH" and clink the "Options..." button
- In the service commands section, click the start button.
The SSH service will remain active until you go back and click the "Stop" button, or restart the ESXi 5.0 host. I would recommend stopping the service once you are done with any SSH sessions.
Results:
"esxtop" during a "dd if=/dev/zero of=test.dd bs=1M count=2048" through the service console.
vmhba32 through vmhba36 are my 5 2.0TB WD drives. I stopped the dd after a few minutes and less then 112MB were written.
"esxtop" during the same dd command run through the FreeNAS VM console. 2GB took 22sec, resulting in about 96MB/swrite speed. I can live with that, so why is it so bad through ESX.
And another "esxtop" session while using a CIFS transfer from my desktop to the same location (same 2GB test file copied to, then from my desktop). Not the greatest through CIFS either, but that could be due to the network and/or the speed of my desktop. 60MB/s write isn't terrible for a home server, but I should be seeing much better performance from the box internally.
Attempt #3: ESXi 5.0 with FreeNAS iSCSI
The iSCSI implementation on FreeNAS for RAID-z is a bit different. You need to setup a "volume dataset" on an existing RAID-z volume and present that as an iSCSI target. I was hoping to just present the whole RAID-z as a target, but it appears that isn't possible in the current version of FreeNAS (v8.0.1). This seems like a lot of hoops if something were to ever go wrong with the setup ... but it's worth trying out for proof of concept.
"esxtop" during a dd write test on the ESX Service Console to the iSCSI volume. vmhba37 is the software iSCSI HBA.
The implementation of iSCSI with RAID-z on FreeNAS works, and the performance is a little better, but not as good as you would expect from a 5 drive RAID-z array. This time it seemed to be on par with the performance of the CIFS transfer above.
Clearly there is something wrong with the NFS implementation either in FreeNAS 8.0.1 itself, or something to do with my unique setup. Even though the performance is decent with iSCSI (50MB/s), it's still not near the capable 90+MB/s we see from the FreeNAS VM console directly to the same disks. I attempted to add a 2nd NIC to the iSCSI group, but teaming isn't allowed for ESXi software iSCSI. It shouldn't make a difference though, since the network traffic should be all internal to the ESX host. There's even a way to trick the iSCSI software HBA into not even having a physical NIC attached (ie, remove the physical NIC after setting it up).
The vmxnet2 driver for FreeNAS doesn't support mtu adjustment, but I did try an intel 1000PRO virtual NIC with jumbo frames (set to mtu 9000) . The results were similar, no magic pill here.
Summary
From the FreeNAS VM console, I get 90+MB/s writes and excellent read MB/s while testing performance to the disk. Unfortunealtey this performance doesn't translate well when presenting the same storage back to the ESX host running on the same physical hardware.
I see things top out at about 50MB/s while using this setup for iSCSI, while using NFS presented back to ESX seems completely unusable.
While disk performance may be acceptable using the iSCSI method to run some VMs, I don't like the idea of taking a 50% performance cut by going with a software solution for RAID. There is also the complexity of this setup in the event that a failure does occur. While it's not too bad to replace a disk in the FreeNAS VM, RAID-z setup, it's a lot easier in a hardware RAID solution to just swap the disk and let the hardware rebuild itself.
It's unfortunate that the ICH RAID provided on the intel chipset isn't usable by ESX, but I think i'll be looking for a hardware RAID-5 solution regardless. I need something I can trust my personal data with in addition to providing a test box for VM testing and template creation. I was hoping to avoid the extra cost by going with a software RAID solution, but it appears that either ESX or FreeNAS doesn't handle this setup very well when combined on the same box.
-Paul
vSphere Client on the iPad
After installing the vCenter Appliance and ESXi 5.0 trial, I decided it was time to try out using the iPad vSphere Client.
I installed the iPad vSphere Client from the integrated iTunes App Store and started it up. Immediately I was asked for the server address to my vCMA server.
What's a vCMA server you might ask? As it turns out, you need an additional appliance to interface between mobile device clients and vSphere. vCMA stands for "vCenter Mobile Access". After a quick Google search, I was able to locate and download the 274MB OVF appliance from VMware Labs (http://labs.vmware.com/flings/vcma).
Being small, it imported and powered on quickly. I had a console to the appliance open and noticed a couple failed service starts during the boot (Linux based VM), but it didn't seem to affect any of the operations of the appliance. After boot up, I was able to quickly assign all IP Address settings using the text based interface provided in the console. There is a web based interface for the appliance as well (by pointing a web browser at the IP Address of the appliance using HTTPS at port 5480). The web based interface only has options to change the IP settings and to shutdown/restart the appliance.
Ok, now that I have a vCMA server, back to the iPad vSphere Client. Plug in the IP address of my vCMA host, leave the "Ignore Certificate Warning" to "ON" and click "Done".
Finally, the vSphere login prompt. It looks similar to the Windows Client prompt, so I'm in familiar territory... or so I thought.
After logging in, I was quickly disappointed. There seem to only be a few options available.
You can do the following in the iPad version of the client:
- View performance of a specific VM/ESX host
- Perform Power Options on a VM (Suspend, Stop and Restart)
- Ping and Traceroute to the VM (which seems to source from the vCMA appliance)
- View the latest events
- View a list of current snapshots of the VM
All these features are great and work well, however the largest lacking option is the ability to view the console. Even a screenshot/thumbnail of the current console updated every minute or so would be better than nothing.
The screen shots below show absolutely everything you can do with the iPad Client. There are no hidden screens or other options.
Hopefully there will be more features in the future. In the meantime, I'm going to stick with iTap RDP on my iPad and just remote into a Windows box with a proper vSphere Client to manage my VMs remotely....
- Paul
VMware vSphere vCenter 5.0 Appliance – Installation/First Impressions
After downloading the separate .ovf and 2 .vmdks for the appliance (why not just a single .ova package?), installation to my ESXi 5.0 trial host was as easy as deploying any regular VM appliance from OVF/OVA.
My first download of the 4GB system disk didn't make it intact (of course it was the largest of the files...), so let that be a lesson to check the MD5/SHA1 hashes prior to trying to deploy (DOH!). I use the hashcheck shell extension (found here: http://code.kliu.org/hashcheck/) on a regular basis to verify and create hashes. This simple tool may save you some time.
Once the OVF import process was complete, the Novel SLES 11, 64-bit based appliance booted with ease to a simple text-based menu where I set my static IP (DHCP active by default) and hostname. There were simple quickstart instructions on how to configure using a web browser pointed at the server using HTTPS at port 5480.
First snag: There is a default password that isn't mentioned in the quickstart or from a quick look through the documentation. A quick google search reveiled a password for another Linux based appliance that I will be looking at shortly (vCMA) and it just so happened that the login default was the same "root/vmware". Disaster avoided.
Off to a good start... or so I thought.
After accepting the EULA I noticed the VM Appliance restart/start some services and then all of the sudden, I was presented with a popup error, followed by another popup of the same error, over and over until I had about 20 of them on the screen. It was the vSphere client I had open to my ESXi 5.0 test host. This isn't the first time i've seen this since the ESXi installation, and the only way I've found out is to rapidly press "alt-f4" to close the popups and the vSphere 5 client before more popups show up (they show up at about 1 per second, so you can eventually get ahead of it by pressing alt-f4 faster). Ok, time to reopen the vSphere client and resume .... right ... EULA accepted.
Database setup: Since I'm just running this on a testbed, the embedded DB is good enough for me. Selected from a simple dropdown menu in the web interface (the only other option being Oracle), it tested without issue. Settings saved.
Starting vCenter Service: The vCenter service isn't started by default (or when the database settings are saved). A quick click on the status button in the web interface reveals that the service is stopped and two convenient buttons are made available to start and stop the service. Button clicked, service started in about 1min (seemed to take a bit longer then a windows based service restart, however it was the first time the service was started, so it was probably setting up the DB).
After changing the timezone, it's time to open the vSphere Client.
Ok, things look good. Datacenter, Cluster created and ESXi host added as usual.
Summary:
A couple of issues getting things going, but no real showstoppers for a trial of the appliance. The only issue preventing production use would be the ESXi/vSphere client error i experienced, but that wasn't a fault of the appliance (I'll need to look into this). Once the appliance was setup, things are as usual from a vCenter user perspective. I like the fact that you are no longer tied to a Microsoft license if you don't want to run vCenter under windows. Hopefully I'll get a chance to looks at some of the 5.0 features in detail soon.
-Paul
Update:
I've since re-installed ESXi 5.0 on this server using an internal drive instead of a USB key and the "Internal Error" issue seems to have disappeared. Maybe there was something wrong with the install or the USB key or if it still is a bug it may be specific to using a USB key to run ESXi.
Welcome
Hi Everybody,
I figured it was time to revamp the site again.
I've decided to give WordPress a shot to see if it's easy enough to keep me organized.
So far, what I've seen of the plugins and usability looks pretty good. I'll probably design my own theme eventually, but in the meantime this should do nicely. I'll be using this site across many devices (PC, iPad, iPhone), so we'll see how it goes.
As a consultant for virtualization and cloud technologies, this blog will mostly be focused on that using VMWare and other industry leading products. I'll post my findings through experience and hopefully bring some value to others as well as quick reference for myself.
I also firmly believe that one day devices like smart phones and tablets will replace the PC as a main work and communications platform, so I will try and put my experience in moving towards that end here as well.
-Paul
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- Windows 8 Consumer Preview
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