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Internet Explorer posted:I don't see any way of them avoiding releasing a "free vCenter" as a virtual center appliance, unless they are planning on running web and management within ESXi itself, which I highly doubt will happen. I hope they just say gently caress it and make essentials free, that would make some ramp up some needed competition for hyper-v in the SMB. Also I hope we get some MSSQL support, vCLOUD had it why can't vCSA? I mean I guess they want to make sure people they aren't tied to MS, and the capacity of a single 5.5 vCenter is ridiculous, but come on. Also is VUM even coming to the VCSA, I really hope they don't up and go "autodeploy is the new vum" but I have a feeling they are. Dilbert As FUCK fucked around with this message at 01:32 on Dec 9, 2013 |
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Dec 9, 2013 01:25
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Dilbert As gently caress posted:Yeah 5.5 is a bit of a red headed step child at the moment, for about 98% of the things you can do with the free version of ESXi your windows client will work. Just do not upgrade the VM virtual hardware to 10. This is great up until you make a new vm and forget to set the hardware level to a previous version.
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Dec 9, 2013 20:08
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thebigcow posted:This is great up until you make a new vm and forget to set the hardware level to a previous version. Nothing that a text editor couldn't fix.
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Dec 9, 2013 20:17
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You can change your default HW version, as well.
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Dec 9, 2013 20:29
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Is there a way to configure the iSCSI initiator in a Windows 7 VM so that it is configured the next time the user logs on? These are thin clients so the system state is non-persistent (Citrix). Currently every time the user logs off and logs back on they have to go to the iSCSI initiator and re-enter the SAN address and connect to it. Seems there should be a better way.
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Dec 11, 2013 15:49
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Is there any reason why I shouldn't rely on vmkping as a troubleshooting tool? We've just moved over from 1gig to 10gig backend fabric, including our vmotion traffic, and I'm seeing some strange timeouts when certain hosts try to vmotion to other hosts - no pattern that I've found, but I'm trying to test with a vmkping from the vmotion vmk interface on host A to the vmotion vmk interface on host B and VMware is telling me that vmkping isn't always reliable. So far it seems to match up reasonably well with the reality of what I can and can't vmotion, so I'm not sure what VMware's talking about.
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Dec 11, 2013 17:28
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Mierdaan posted:Is there any reason why I shouldn't rely on vmkping as a troubleshooting tool? vMotion by default will try to use as much throughput as possible and depending on the design you may be saturating your 10g back bone. Something I would do is set up NOIC or if on vSS limit the egress traffic that vMotion is capable of sending. You also may want to check the 10G adapters and make sure the correct driver is loaded on all hosts
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Dec 11, 2013 17:55
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Mierdaan posted:Is there any reason why I shouldn't rely on vmkping as a troubleshooting tool? Are you by chance using multiple vmotion interfaces? I've seen this behavior in an environment that was set up a bit wrong: vmotion_A interfaces on all hosts in one subnet/vlan and vmotion_B interfaces in a second VLAN. It would work on all hosts where vmotion_A was vmk1 and vmotion_B was vmk2, but fail on the hosts where they were reversed. To be clear, that's not a supported setup.
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Dec 11, 2013 18:05
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I'm going to be replacing our existing 5 year old VMware 2-host cluster with a 3-host cluster next year, and the contractor that I'm working with on this is gently encouraging me to consider moving to Hyper-V. It seems very attractive cost-wise (especially considering we will also have to put in a new DR system to complement the new cluster), but I have zero experience with it and have a 2009 era opinion of it. He's told me that it has improved dramatically over the last couple years and is now pretty close to being at feature parity with VMware. Is this a fair assessment of the two products? I'm not married to VMware by any means, but it's a platform we at least have some experience running now, so I want to make sure I don't take us from a system that's been extremely stable to one that's maybe not going to be as reliable.
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Dec 12, 2013 17:23
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Thanks Dilbert and KS for the responses. I had several different things I had to run down, but KS was on the right track with multiple vmotion interfaces. Disabling vmotion on the old 1gig fabric's vmkernel interfaces was something I'd forgotten to do, so it put me in the strange spot where vmkping would fail (we'll get to that in a second) but vmotion would succeed (because it was going over the 1gig fabric). The vmkping issue was caused by a misconfigured portchannel between our two 10gig switches. We have a vmotion-enabled vmkernel interface on each host with two active vmnics - if the vmnics in use by the vmkernel interfaces on two hosts were connected to the same switch, it'd work. If they were on different switches, it wouldn't work. Simple enough once we realized what was going on, but assigning active/active vmnics to a vmk just let us assume that it would work if at least one path was valid, when in fact it pics a vmnic and sticks with it (on boot?).
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Dec 12, 2013 17:53
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geera posted:Is this a fair assessment of the two products? I'm not married to VMware by any means, but it's a platform we at least have some experience running now, so I want to make sure I don't take us from a system that's been extremely stable to one that's maybe not going to be as reliable. I think it's very fair. If you're running predominantly MS VMs and are buying datacenter licenses anyways, it's hard to go wrong with 2012 R2. It's improved a lot. I'm in the same situation workload-wise and my ELA with VMWare runs out in about 18 months. Unless something changes I can't see renewing it. Mierdaan posted:The vmkping issue was caused by a misconfigured portchannel between our two 10gig switches. We have a vmotion-enabled vmkernel interface on each host with two active vmnics - if the vmnics in use by the vmkernel interfaces on two hosts were connected to the same switch, it'd work. If they were on different switches, it wouldn't work. Simple enough once we realized what was going on, but assigning active/active vmnics to a vmk just let us assume that it would work if at least one path was valid, when in fact it pics a vmnic and sticks with it (on boot?). If you're doing LACP to the hosts, the easy fix is to create two port groups using the same VLAN and alter the bindings on the portgroup to make one adapter used and one unused on each. Then just make sure dvUplink1 is always the NIC connected to Switch A. That's also how you do iscsi MPIO with LACP.
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Dec 12, 2013 18:38
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geera posted:I'm going to be replacing our existing 5 year old VMware 2-host cluster with a 3-host cluster next year, and the contractor that I'm working with on this is gently encouraging me to consider moving to Hyper-V. It seems very attractive cost-wise (especially considering we will also have to put in a new DR system to complement the new cluster), but I have zero experience with it and have a 2009 era opinion of it. He's told me that it has improved dramatically over the last couple years and is now pretty close to being at feature parity with VMware. It's not really close to feature parity with VMware, and I'm not even sure if Microsoft is pursuing some of those features (memory samepage sharing, nested virtualization), but it works, it's cheap, and it's relatively painless as long as you don't mind the "5,000 item clustering wizard" approach Microsoft has always taken. Can't say much bad about it.
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Dec 12, 2013 18:42
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Does anyone have any experience exporting or querying vhost performance data out of vcenter to some third party database? We're interested in getting host performance metrics - host CPU utilization, datastore read/write latency, all that jazz - out of vcenter and into something like graphite which is what the rest of our environment uses. I've found some documentation about hitting the web services API to pull performance data, and I also stumbled across a post where they just query the MSSQL database directly. In terms of simplicity it seems like querying the DB is probably the way to go, but I was wondering if anyone else had tackled this already.
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Dec 12, 2013 21:40
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Cidrick posted:Does anyone have any experience exporting or querying vhost performance data out of vcenter to some third party database? We're interested in getting host performance metrics - host CPU utilization, datastore read/write latency, all that jazz - out of vcenter and into something like graphite which is what the rest of our environment uses. No. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. Relying on some vendor's schema for which you have absolutely no guarantee is inane. This is exactly the point of SNMP and using APIs. VMware makes no guarantees to you that they will not completely change the schema in an arbitrary vCenter update without any warning or notification. SNMP and APIs provide abstraction and safety.
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Dec 12, 2013 21:45
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KS posted:I think it's very fair. If you're running predominantly MS VMs and are buying datacenter licenses anyways, it's hard to go wrong with 2012 R2. It's improved a lot. I'm in the same situation workload-wise and my ELA with VMWare runs out in about 18 months. Unless something changes I can't see renewing it. evol262 posted:It's not really close to feature parity with VMware, and I'm not even sure if Microsoft is pursuing some of those features (memory samepage sharing, nested virtualization), but it works, it's cheap, and it's relatively painless as long as you don't mind the "5,000 item clustering wizard" approach Microsoft has always taken.
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Dec 12, 2013 21:55
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Cidrick posted:Does anyone have any experience exporting or querying vhost performance data out of vcenter to some third party database? We're interested in getting host performance metrics - host CPU utilization, datastore read/write latency, all that jazz - out of vcenter and into something like graphite which is what the rest of our environment uses. Don't go into the DB unless you're collecting so much performance data that it's infeasible to get it using their APIs -- like evol262 said, this is a totally unnecessary coupling of your data retrieval to their database schema. (I don't agree with evol262 about how much work it will be to fix it -- chances are, it will just be a small adjustment on your query at worst, and nothing bad will happen during the time that your collector script isn't working. But still, don't go through that work at all if you can avoid it with a supportable polling method.) For better or worse, Graphite will collapse under the stress of all that data anyway unless you're running it on half a dozen SSDs, by the way, but maybe some of the new Cassandra-based Graphite datastores will work better. Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 22:33 on Dec 12, 2013 |
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Dec 12, 2013 22:26
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Misogynist posted:I don't agree with evol262 about how much work it will be to fix it -- chances are, it will just be a small adjustment on your query at worst, and nothing bad will happen during the time that your collector script isn't working. But still, don't go through that work at all if you can avoid it with a supportable polling method I don't necessarily think it'll be a lot of work to fix it, just that you have absolutely no guarantees from VMware. Realistically, they probably won't change it out from under you wholesale, but do you want to check your queries every time you update vCenter to make sure they still work as expected?
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Dec 12, 2013 22:46
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evol262 posted:I don't necessarily think it'll be a lot of work to fix it, just that you have absolutely no guarantees from VMware. Realistically, they probably won't change it out from under you wholesale, but do you want to check your queries every time you update vCenter to make sure they still work as expected? 
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Dec 12, 2013 22:52
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Misogynist posted:Dump a freshness check in your monitoring system so it runs all the time instead of just when you update vCenter Nagios  That SQL is pretty big on math. I'd be worried about a more subtle change.
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Dec 12, 2013 23:12
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geera posted:I'm going to be replacing our existing 5 year old VMware 2-host cluster with a 3-host cluster next year, and the contractor that I'm working with on this is gently encouraging me to consider moving to Hyper-V. It seems very attractive cost-wise (especially considering we will also have to put in a new DR system to complement the new cluster), but I have zero experience with it and have a 2009 era opinion of it. He's told me that it has improved dramatically over the last couple years and is now pretty close to being at feature parity with VMware. I can't really speak to a comparison of VMWare having never used it, however I've been using a 2-node Hyper-V Cluster since 2008 R2 and am upgrading to 2012 R2 and adding a 3rd node this weekend. I've been extremely pleased with Hyper-V; you absolutely can live migrate, and as of 2012 (and R2) you can also live storage migrate, support >2TB vhdxs, live expand VHDx files, and most importantly in my mind, make use of Hyper-V replica.
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Dec 13, 2013 15:41
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Misogynist posted:Host performance data is really easy to get with PowerCLI (you can run a scheduled task right on your vCenter server) and not incredibly difficult over their other APIs. Do note that, if you want to collect performance data on your VMs too, PowerCLI is really incredibly slow because it's totally synchronous, and you should look into coding against one of the async APIs instead (or seriously narrow down which information you want to grab to minimize your response sizes). I don't really care about performance data from the VMs - our monitoring agent is running on the guest OSes already, which provides nearly all of what we would care about. PowerCLI is one approach, but our environment is almost completely Linux-based so we'd probably have to go with one of the other supported methods via the API so we don't have to use PowerCLI on a Windows box and then export it again to our Graphite hosts via some other method. Thanks for the feedback on avoiding the DB, I sort of figured bad-touching the DB directly was not a very good idea but I just thought I'd throw it out there. Misogynist posted:For better or worse, Graphite will collapse under the stress of all that data anyway unless you're running it on half a dozen SSDs, by the way, but maybe some of the new Cassandra-based Graphite datastores will work better. We have very serious monitoring infrastructure supporting Graphite and our various other tools. A large part of our metric collection is done on servers equipped with FusionIO cards to be able to keep up with all the metrics we collect from all our different environments. Our monitoring team lead is actually the brother of the guy who wrote Graphite originally
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Dec 13, 2013 15:51
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Cidrick posted:I don't really care about performance data from the VMs - our monitoring agent is running on the guest OSes already, which provides nearly all of what we would care about. PowerCLI is one approach, but our environment is almost completely Linux-based so we'd probably have to go with one of the other supported methods via the API so we don't have to use PowerCLI on a Windows box and then export it again to our Graphite hosts via some other method. Thanks for the feedback on avoiding the DB, I sort of figured bad-touching the DB directly was not a very good idea but I just thought I'd throw it out there. Cidrick posted:We have very serious monitoring infrastructure supporting Graphite and our various other tools. A large part of our metric collection is done on servers equipped with FusionIO cards to be able to keep up with all the metrics we collect from all our different environments.
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Dec 13, 2013 16:24
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evol262 posted:The perl CLI is actually pretty good. Or you can use pysphere. Or just look at pysphere's code. Or use the Web Services SDK example Java programs if you're a java shop. The .NET applications would probably run under mono (never tested). Pysphere! I had totally forgotten about that. We have some scripts for automated VM deployment that hit the API that someone wrote and then quickly forgot about. Most of our monitoring guys are python programmers, so that's should work out well. Thanks! evol262 posted:The fact that you need to collect metrics on a FusionIO backend says everything. No arguments here.
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Dec 13, 2013 16:38
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Jadus posted:I can't really speak to a comparison of VMWare having never used it, however I've been using a 2-node Hyper-V Cluster since 2008 R2 and am upgrading to 2012 R2 and adding a 3rd node this weekend. I've been extremely pleased with Hyper-V; you absolutely can live migrate, and as of 2012 (and R2) you can also live storage migrate, support >2TB vhdxs, live expand VHDx files, and most importantly in my mind, make use of Hyper-V replica.
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Dec 13, 2013 17:16
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geera posted:Awesome, thanks for the info. One thing I don't have a clear idea of is how Hyper-V handles host failures in a cluster. Does it have a HA-like feature that will automatically redistribute (and power-on) VMs to other cluster hosts when one fails? It's basically the same as Window Failover Clustering. You set up a Failover Cluster with the usual Microsoft mechanisms, flag a machine HA, and it "just works".
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Dec 13, 2013 17:27
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evol262 posted:It's basically the same as Window Failover Clustering. You set up a Failover Cluster with the usual Microsoft mechanisms, flag a machine HA, and it "just works". Yup, just like this. You can set preferred hosts for each VM (or multiple preferred hosts) and failback schedules per VM for when your downed host returns. It's still a "power-off" event for the VM when a failover occurs, just like VMware. Hyper-V doesn't have anything like Fault Tolerance to allow for zero downtime, but you can now do shared guest VHDx so that your VMs can be a cluster within the Hyper-V cluster, spread across two hosts. If one host goes down, so does one member of your application cluster but the remaining member of the application cluster purrs along just fine on the remaining Hyper-V host.
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Dec 13, 2013 18:42
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Ashex posted:Does anyone have any idea how I could detect a bridged network adapter as opposed to NAT? Have a virtual appliance that I distribute throughout the company, if someone switches their adapter from NAT to Bridged it screws with everyone elses VM. After posting the above question I got pull off to other projects. We thought we came up with a fix but due to how the Active Directory DHCP server registers DNS it doesn't work. Basically the issue is the appliance has a set hostname (which doesn't change since various applications rely on it for generating a url for the user to click), we provide it with NAT but if someone switches to Bridged (ie for a classroom to access it) and it comes on the corporate network, then a DNS record for that hostname shows up internally and when people punch it into the browser to hit their VM, it hits the bridged one instead.
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Dec 14, 2013 14:15
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Ashex posted:After posting the above question I got pull off to other projects. We thought we came up with a fix but due to how the Active Directory DHCP server registers DNS it doesn't work. Unless it's sysprepped, you can grab the SID and blackhole this.
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Dec 14, 2013 18:52
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evol262 posted:Unless it's sysprepped, you can grab the SID and blackhole this. There a whitepaper on this you can refer me to?
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Dec 14, 2013 20:47
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Ashex posted:There a whitepaper on this you can refer me to? You can unselect the "Register this adapters address in DNS" option per-adapter then distribute it or create a static hostname in DNS and deny updates (probably A 127.0.0.1), or you can schedule a job which queries DNS (itself in AD) for the SID or hostname and sets dnsTombstoned to true
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Dec 14, 2013 22:23
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Is it possible to install an instance of Windows 8.1 (or whatever, CentOS 6.4) on Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 and "boot to desktop" of the Windows 8.1 VM? Basically what I want to do is install Hyper-V server 2012 R2 (hypervisor), have it launch VM, then open up a full screen, uh I guess Microsoft calls it a "Hyper-V Virtual Machine Connection" automatically H-V Server is pretty sparse without even a proper explorer shell, so making a connection to the local VM would require impressive gymnastics to get the Hyper-V Manager etc installed locally. Corefig 1.1 doesn't offer full screen visual of the hyper-v VM, only management of it. I guess what I want is the Windows 8.1 Pro Hyper-V experience without all the extra consumer parts of Windows It sounds like Blue Pill sort of does this but it has a much different focus (malware proof of concept) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Pill_(software)
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Dec 16, 2013 03:51
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Hadlock posted:Is it possible to install an instance of Windows 8.1 (or whatever, CentOS 6.4) on Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 and "boot to desktop" of the Windows 8.1 VM? This is basically what installing the Hyper-V role already does. What are your requirements? There must be some if you're not just using RDP with a logon item.
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Dec 16, 2013 04:36
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installing 8.1 and 8.2 is possible; but not supported on 2012 Hyper-v
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Dec 16, 2013 04:40
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evol262 posted:What are your requirements? There must be some if you're not just using RDP with a logon item. I just wanted to pie-in-the-sky run a hypervisor on my laptop, live migrate my "desktop" from the "always on" fileserver, then live migrate my "desktop" to my physical desktop machine, then live migrate it to the living room, then migrate it back to the file server at night As far as I know the only way to do this is to install WS2012 R2 on all of those devices, which is $$$, while Hyper-V Server is $free. Realistically I would only need one copy of Windows 8.1 Pro Also live migration doesn't seem to work very well in workgroups (if at all) and seems aimed soley at active directory setups Alternately you could run a computer lab of zombie machines/thin clients where you boot the VM on a server and the live migrate out to the user's PC, then back to the server Dilbert As gently caress posted:installing 8.1 and 8.2 is possible; but not supported on 2012 Hyper-v 8.0 Pro and 8.1 Pro run great on Hyper V server 2012 R2, I have them running on my VM lab/file server as generation 2 VMs/vhdx'es, and I RDP in to them all the time. Hadlock fucked around with this message at 04:56 on Dec 16, 2013 |
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Dec 16, 2013 04:54
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Anyone have experience with VMware horizon? It sounds really cool but I'd like to hear a first hand account.
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Dec 16, 2013 05:11
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:Anyone have experience with VMware horizon? I HAVE EXTENSIVE EXPERIENCE. What do you want to know? feel free to pm me.
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Dec 16, 2013 05:13
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Dilbert As gently caress posted:I HAVE EXTENSIVE EXPERIENCE. I accidentally paid for the VCA-WM test a while back and I can't get a refund so I figured, gently caress it, might as well get the cert. I'm going through the videos and it sounds cool. It'd be neat if we could have every workstation be identical and have a pile of spares. That said, I'm a bit skeptical of cloud stuff. How big a pain in the rear end is it to manage?
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Dec 16, 2013 05:26
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:I'm going through the videos and it sounds cool. It'd be neat if we could have every workstation be identical and have a pile of spares. quote:That said, I'm a bit skeptical of cloud stuff. quote:How big a pain in the rear end is it to manage? not much but I don't know what you are doing or expecting.
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Dec 16, 2013 05:29
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:Anyone have experience with VMware horizon?
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Dec 16, 2013 05:38
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I'll send you a PM later with some more detailed questions. I don't need to tell the whole world about my specific IT woes. The big thing I wanted to see was if mentioning Horizon would result in a dozen "ABORT! Get out before it's too late! " responses.
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