VMware View components

The View Connection Server component (CB) has been installed on the VM piermont. The Connection Sever application is used for desktop clients connecting to View desktops as well as View administration. View Manager is now accessible from piermont's web server.

Next is the install of View Composer on VCS01 (vCenter Server). During the install, the View Composer service would not start. Some perusing found that the service needed a logon id. The dbuser id was added to the service but this needs investigation, there was no method to add this during install.

VMware View

The reinstall of vCenter went smoothly, although there is a minor error with VUM.

The real old vCenter VM has been renamed "Piermont", moved to cresskill, and will be used for the next Proof of concept process: VMware View.

Some RTFM is needed.

New vCenter Server

The time has come to re-install vCenter Server. The settings for the NY100 Data Center should all be captured in the databases on red-bank (vCenter and VUM) so the process should be to snapshot to existing image, uninstall VCS and VUM, then reinstall them, pointing at red-bank.

The rebuild was completed without incident.....

All ESXi hosts were upgraded from ESXi 4.0 Update 1 to ESXi 4.0 Update 2. ESXi version 4.1 is out but that will happen in the future.

Update on back end network speed

During one of my Storage vMotion tests, there were flashing lights on the front door 100 Mbps switch, and no flashing lights on the back door Gig-e. This signaled that the Storage vMotion operation was actually being performed on the slow network. Also, the progress was slow.

First change was to disconnect Uber's front door vNIC (100Mbps). Also, made sure that the source host (local disk on westwood) and the destination host (shared iSCSI LUN served from Uber on cresskill) had vMotion-enabled vmkernel ports on the same dvSwitch port group.

Once the migration was restarted, the stats were showing 30Mbps network throughput outbound (local-to-shared) and closer to 50Mbps inbound. More testing of the network configuration is needed to verify why vMotion defaulted to the slow network.

VMware Tools on Uber(s)

While both Uber and Uber2 now have NFS and iSCSI shared storage, a bottleneck was noticed on the network. With iSCSI configured on Uber, the initial cold Storage vMotion of a Windows Server 2008 VM (10GB partition) took the better part of 4 hours to complete.

Looking at network performance, the NIC seemed to be peaking at about 3Mbps, which calculated out correctly with the speed of the migration. At the moment, the E1000 virtual NIC is being used on Linux.

It is well documented that VMware Tools has the VMXNET network drivers that are optimized for VM's. While there is no built package for VMware Tools on Ubuntu, VMware did release an open source version, but this needs to be built.

Some searching found this procedure:

http://www.gorillapond.com/2009/03/09/install-vmware-tools-on-ubuntu-linux-reborn/

Once again, Uber2 was used for the test install of VMware Tools and then Uber was updated.

After the code install and before changing the NIC card, network throughput while copying ISO files from Uber to Uber2 improved slightly to about 3.8Mbps. Once the VMXNET 3 NIC was configured, this jumped up to 7.7Mbps.

To test this with a VMware function, another Ubuntu server VM with 16GB of thick storage was Storage vMotion'ed from shared storage (Uber on cresskill) to local ESXi host storage (local disk on westwood). This cold Storage vMotion took about 6 minutes.

Will redo (cold migration) the initial Win2k8001 test to see a real apples-to-apples test, but there was a significant improvement after VMware Tools. Also, going to look at "ethtool" which can set the link speed. The NIC cards could still be running at 10Mbps.

iSCSI on Uber

Uber, the primary Ubuntu VM housing shared storage for the NY100 Data Center is serving shared storage for ISO images and VM's via NFS on separate Datastores.

Uber2 VM was used to validate the configuration of an iSCSI target server on Ubuntu. Once the testing was completed successfully, the final process was to port the configuration to Uber.

Uber now has a 100GB image file sitting on its 200GB vHard Drive (/dev/sdc). This 100GB sparse file was configured in iSCSI as LUN0. Once the LUN was configured, iSCSI target started.

On Northvale (one ESXi host in the Towers1 cluster), a new iSCSI storage adapter was configured and the 100GB iSCSI LUN on Uber was discovered . A new Datastore was added to northvale, formatted as VMFS-3, and this Datastore will be added to all hosts in the NY100 Data Center.

The plan is to move all VM storage from:

NFS - Datastore name shared-VM-store01
to
iSCSI - Datastore name shared-iscsci-store01

Will test Cold migration first, and then live Storage vMotion.

The build ISO images on the Datastore named shared-ISO-store01 will continue to be served via NFS.

Uber2 iSCSI working

Uber2 now has a virtual 200GB partition which is being shared as an iSCSI target. iSCSI initiators on ESXi Hosts in the Towers1 Cluster can now discover the LUNs on Uber2 and connect to them.

Next will be to set this up on Uber, adding a 100GB partition, configuring the Ubuntu iSCSI initiator, and testing DRS from iSCSI. Once complete, move all Cluster aware VM's to iSCSI and only use NFS for the ISO share.

The logistics of moving cresskill VM's to thin provisioning is still on the list.