The PXE environment components included with the VCVA are not configured and turned off by default. So, if you’re ready to configure your VCVA for PXE, time to roll up your sleeves, crack those knuckles, and get ready to get your hands dirty.

Before we get started, though, and little caution (and disclaimer so I can sleep better at night):

I know nothing about your environment. You are following these instructions at your own risk. This setup will impact DHCP functionality on your network. Follow these instructions at your own risk and make the appropriate adjustments to work in your environment.
Additionally, I do not know everything about everything. So, you are going to need to rely upon your sleuthing abilities to help resolve issues that may arise.

These instructions assume some knowledge of CLI-based file editing (vi). So, please research how to use it if you are unsure.

Overview

A PXE environment via the VCVA requires the following components in your environment

• DHCP server
• TFTP server
• Web Server (for kickstart scripts)
• SYSLINUX (for pxeboot.0)
• Access to an ESXi 5.0 installation CD (perhaps you created on using my Image Builder tutorial)
• vCenter Virtual Appliance deployed
• Blank server to PXE boot and install ESXi 5.0 on (aka – the client)
• ESXi 5.0 installation .ISO
• HTTP server on the network (for hosting kickstart files – customization during installation)

For this exercise:

• Network: 192.168.226.0/24
• VCVA: 192.168.226.21
• DHCP Range: 192.168.226.200 – 254
• Default Gateway: 192.168.226.1

Configuration

0 – Log into the appliance as ‘root’

1 – Configure DHCP

‘dhcpd‘ will listen to IP address requests, provide an IP to use, direct the client to the “next-server” to continue PXE booting, and which file (filename) to download from the server.

• cd /var/lib/dhcp/etc
• cp -a dhcpd.conf dhcpd.conf.orig
• vi dhcpd.conf

Once inside of the file, ensure the following exists (highlighted for your ease of identification)

ddns-update-style ad-hoc;
allow booting;
allow bootp;

#gPXE options
option space gpxe;
option gpxe-encap-opts code 175 = encapsulate gpxe;
option gpxe.bus-id code 177 = string;
class “pxeclients”{
match if substring(option vendor-class-identifier, 0, 9) = “PXEClient”;
next-server 192.168.226.21;
filename “pxelinux.0″;
}
subnet 192.168.226.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
range 192.168.226.200 192.168.226.254;
}

Save the file and exit (hint: :wq)

2 – Configure TFTP

TFTP services are provided by the ‘atftpd’ daemon

• cd /etc/sysconfig
• cp –a atftpd atftpd.orig
• vi atftpd

Once inside the file adjust the “ATFTP_OPTIONS” line to read: “–daemon –user root”. Typically, the atftpd daemon runs as ‘nobody’. However, the TFTP root (/tftpboot/) is configured as owned by the ‘root’ user.

Save and exit the file.

3 – Get the SYSLINUX packages on the server

There is one package missing to make the PXE installation process work: ‘pxelinux.0′. ‘pxelinux.0‘ is an executable that is downloaded by the client in order to properly continue the PXE process (aka – download the files, execute the installer, etc…). ‘pxelinux.0‘ is provided by the SYSLINUX package. In order for PXE to work properly with the ESXi 5.0 installation, SYSLINUX version 3.86 (or higher) is needed.

• cd /tmp
• wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/boot/syslinux/3.xx/syslinux-3.86.tar.gz
• gunzip syslinux-3.86.tar.gz
• tar xvf syslinux-3.86.tar

Note: you can use YUM or copy the files to the server another way if you’d like. Regardless, get the files there. This example will continue to use the /tmp file as the landing area for the SYSLINUX files.

Copy the pxelinux.0 file to your TFTP root

• cp /tmp/syslinux-3.86/core/pxelinux.0 /tftpboot

4 – Prep the TFTP root for PXE

The TFTP root configured on the VCVA is located at /tftpboot. We are going to need to get the directory structure built out to support PXE.

• cd /tftpboot
• mkdir esxi50

By adding a directory, we are able to organize the TFTP server and support additional versions of ESXi going forward.

5 – Get the ESXi 5.0 CD contents onto the server

Seeing as the VCVA is a virtual appliance, it is easy to get the contents of the installation media onto the server.

• Mount the installation CD to the VCVA as a CD-ROM drive using the vSphere Client.
• mount /dev/cdrom /media
• cp –a /media* /tftpboot/esxi50/
• umount /dev/cdrom

6 – Configure PXELINUX

pxelinux is the utility that enables the PXE functionality. As mentioned before, pxelinux.0 is an executable that the server downloads. The executable provides functionality to parse a menu system, load kernels, options, customizations, modules, etc…, and boot the server. Since PXE can be used by multiple physical servers for multiple images, we need to configure pxelinux for this specific image.

• cd /tftpboot
• mkdir pxelinux.cfg
• cd pxelinux.cfg

pxelinux.0 looks for configuration files in the TFTP:/pxelinux.cfg directory.

pxelinux looks for a large number of configuration files… specific to a default/generic value. This allows server administrators to define a file based on a complete MAC address, partial MAC address, or none at all to determine which image to boot from. Since this is the first configuration on the VCVA, we are going to configure a default. Do your research if you want to adjust this from the default value.

The installation media contains a file called isolinux.cfg. We can use this as the basis for our file called ‘default’. Copy it from the installation media and start customizations:

• cp –a /tftpboot/esxi50/isolinux.cfg default
• chmod a+w default
• vi default

Ensure the appropriate lines match the following lines:

DEFAULT /esxi50/menu.c32
KERNEL /esxi50/mboot.cfg
APPEND -c /esxi50/boot.cfg

Save and Exit

7 – Configure the Kickstart file

Using a kickstart file, we can configure ESXi 5.0 automatically during installation. This requires that a file be placed on a server that is available to the client.  Sadly, the HTTP areas on the VCVA are not readily available… and, they may be erased during future upgrades. So, we need to use an external HTTP server somewhere on your network. (Note: NFS and FTP are options as well).

Add the following contents:

# Accept the EULA
vmaccepteula

#Set root password
rootpw supersecretpassword

#Install on first local disk
install –firstdisk –overwritevmfs

#Config initial network settings
network –bootproto=dhcp –device=vmnic0

 

In this example, we are saving the file to:

• HTTP Server: 192.168.226.1
• Directory: ks
• File: esxi50.txt
• URL: http://192.168.226.1/ks/esxi50.txt

8 – Configure the installation files

The CD installation media for ESXi 5.0 assumes a single installation point. Thus, all the files are placed at the root of the image. However, since we want to actually organize our installation root, we added the ‘/tftpboot/esxi50‘ directory and copied the files into it. We need to adjust the installation files in /tftpboot/esxi50 to reflect the change.

• cd /tftpboot/esxi50
• cp -a boot.cfg boot.cfg.orig
• vi boot.cfg
• Using the following picture as reference, add “/esxi50” to the paths for ‘kernel’ and ‘modules’

Save and quit

9 – Restart services to load the service configurations and configure to start with server

• /etc/init.d/dhcpd restart
• /etc/init.d/atftpd restart
• chkconfig –add dhcpd
• chkconfig –add atftpd

10 – Take a break

You made it this far… great job. At this time, we have configured DHCP, TFTP, pxelinux, copied installation media to the TFTP root, and configured the installation for our organizational purposes.

11 – Start your host and install away

[BELOW] Reading the Kickstart Script. No need to enter customization info anymore.

[BELOW] Checking contents of Kickstart file. You will see errors here if errors in file.

© Bill for Gestalt IT, 2011. | vSphere 5–PXE Installation Using vCenter Virtual Appliance
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EMC FAST

EMC FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering) is actually a suite made of of two different products. the first, called FAST Cache operates by keeping a copy of “hot” blocks of data on SSD drives. In effect it acts as a very fast disk cache for data that is currently being accessed while the data itself is being stored on either 15K SAS or 7200 RPM NL-SAS (SATA) drives.

FAST Cache provides the ability to improve the performance of SATA drives, as well as to turbo charge the performance of fiber channel and SAS drives as well. In general, this kind of technology helps to divide performance from spindle count, which helps drive down the number of drives required for many workloads, thus driving down the cost of storage, and the overall TCO of storage.

The other product in the FAST suite is FAST Virtual Pool.  This is the product that most people associate with FAST since it is the one that leverages  three different disk technologies, SSD, high speed drives such as 15K RPM SAS, and slower high capacity drives such as 7200 RPM NL-SAS. By placing only data that requires high speed access on the SSD drives, data that is receiving a moderate amount of access on the 15K SAS drives, and putting the rest on the slower, high capacity disks EMC FAST is able to drive the TCO of storage downward.

NetApp FlashCache

NetApp approaches the overall issue of improved performance while simultaneously driving down the TCO of storage in a different way. NetApp believes that using fewer disks to store the same amount of data is the best way to drive down TCO. Therefore NetApp has spent a significant amount of time developing storage efficiency tools to help their customer’s store more data in less space.  For example, they developed a variant of RAID-6 called RAID-DP which provides the protection and performance of RAID-10, while utilizing significantly less space. NetApp has also developed block level de-duplication which can be utilized with primary production data.

However, as with many technologies of this type there could be a performance penalty paid for it’s utilization. Therefore, Netapp needed to develop a way to improve the performance if it’s arrays while also supporting it’s storage efficiency technology. With the advent of Flash memory, Netapp found a way to do this without any need for significant changes in the architecture of it’s arrays. Thus was born FlashCache.

FlashCahce provides a secondary read cache for hot blocks of data. This proves a way to separate performance from spindle count,  and thus not only allows workloads intended for Fiber Channel or SAS drives to potentially run on SATA drives, but it also addresses some of the performance issues with the storage efficiency technologies that NetApp developed. For example, with FlashCache utilized in a virtual desktop environment Netapp de-duplication allows many individual Windows images to be represented in a very small footprint on disk. However a problem arrises when a large numer of desktops all try to access their Windows image at once. However with the addition of FlashCache, most, if not all of the Windows image would end up being storage in Flash memory, thus avoiding the performance issue of a boot storm, virus checking storm, etc.

Conclusion

Both EMC and Netapp have developed ways to help both improve the performance, and drive the TCO of storage downward. the two vendors approached the problem is somewhat different ways, but in the end they have both solved the problem in unique and effective ways.

The NetApp technology requires that the user buy-in completely to the NetApp vision of storage efficiency. If the user ignores the advantages of de-dupication in particular, or has data or workloads  that simply don’t allow for the application of the NetApp storage efficiency technology then the TCO saving that NetApp promises will not be achieved. Utilizing FlashCache to seperate performance from spindle count is also critical in maintaining the performance of the array. This separation of performance from spindle count also in and of itself drives dwn the number ofd drives needed to support a workload, and thus also drives down the TCO.

The EMC technology requires a very good understanding of your application workloads, and careful planning and sizing of the different tiers of storage. EMC could do more to make the two sub-products work together so that a single solution could provide both the TCO and the performance improvements at the same time. However, EMC FAST is a product that provides the TCO improvement promised, and doe it with a clean and elegant solution.

Finally, a little on the future. With the cost of Flash memory coming down 50% year over year, it will soon reach the same price point that we currently see 15K HDD’s at. Once that happens one has to wonder what role 15K HHDs will fill? If 15K HDDs are, indeed, squeezed out of existence by this reduction in the price of Flash memory, what purpose will 3 tiered automated storage tiering fill? Or, will the future simply be 2 tiers of storage, one that provides bulk capacity, and one that accelerates the performance of this bult capacity? if that predication is correct, then FAST VP will have a limited life, and FAST Cache and FlashCache will be the longer surviving technology.

© Joerg Hallbauer for Gestalt IT, 2011. | EMC FAST and NetApp FlashCache a Comparison
Read more posts categorized as All, Featured, Storage, Top Story

The Tech Field Day staff have added live streaming from Tech Field Day 5 in San Jose this week.

Tech Field Day always includes innovative companies and sometimes sees launches, but it’s rare to have a company launch itself at an event like this. Nimble Storage was successful in using our 2010 Seattle event as their springboard, and remote data protection newcomer Druva followed their lead this week.

Druva is not as new a company as the “launch” nomenclature indicates. The company has spent years building a data protection product, inSync, for remote enterprise PCs and already boasts hundreds of customers. The company is profitable and successful already, but decided to come to the United States and initiate a growth effort.

The Druva staff felt that the influential delegates invited to Tech Field Day 5 would be key to achieving notice in the crowded enterprise IT market, and their February 10 presentation was the first time the company engaged with this audience.

Following the Druva presentation, W. Curtis Preston and I met with Jaspreet Singh, co-founder and CEO of Druva to discuss the product and the market.

A 30-day trial of inSync is available for download if you would like to try it out.

The entire presentation is embedded below.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2011. | Druva Launches at Tech Field Day 5
Read more posts categorized as Desktop, Exclusive, Featured, Storage, Top Story

NetEx was my first surprise when scheduling presenters for Tech Field Day 5. I saw the word “networking” on their trade show booth and mentally lumped them in with companies like Riverbed, F5, and Silver Peak. It has something to do with WAN acceleration, right?

This all changed once I started talking with the folks from NetEx. Their technology does indeed accelerate data transfer over a network, but it’s much more useful than I expected. NetEx is a data movement accelerator – hey, that’s got something to do with storage! Their HyperIP product makes what others do better, including past Field Day presenter, Veeam. They make data replication faster for iSCSI arrays, virtual machines, and enterprise storage devices. They also allow legacy data movers to work over IP. I’m really not sure how I overlooked their capabilities for so long!

Technology like this is a perfect fit for the enterprise datacenter-focused Field Day events like Tech Field Day 5. We’ll have a wide variety of delegates representing servers and virtualization, storage, networking, and more. And all of them will find something to like about NetEx, Symantec, Data Robotics, and the other Field Day presenters.

Bob MacIntyre of NetEx agreed, telling me he was excited to participate and “looking forward to a highly interactive discussion with some of the industry’s independent thought leaders, analysts and bloggers.” MacIntyre sees Tech Field Day 5 as a way to ”increase the awareness of company and our HyperIP WAN Optimization virtual appliance through an intimate and educational environment.” I’d say he’s got a clear picture of what this event is all about.

NetEx will be presenting on Friday, February 11. We’ll be streaming their presentation (and the others as well) live so everyone can tune in online. Check back at the Tech Field Day site to watch on the 10th and 11th!

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2011. | NetEx Joins the Roster of Tech Field Day Presenters
Read more posts categorized as Exclusive, Featured, Networking, Server Virtualization, Storage, Top Story

Tech Field Day has come a long way since the first event back in 2009. The hectic rush to pull together delegates, presenters, and logistics has been replaced by a steady and predictable process. A crew of professionals has been assembled to make everything happen smoothly, from contracts and paperwork to travel planning to streaming video. After selecting over 50 presentations and almost 100 delegates, we’ve gotten good at making this thing happen.

But we didn’t start the Field Day series to become event planners; we wanted to build a community of the new guard of freelance writers, bloggers, and other influential folks that included interesting companies in IT infrastructure. Measuring success can be challenging, but the surest metric is repeat visits: Most of the companies that presented in the past have asked to join us for another event, as have most of the delegates.

The two previous Data Robotics presentations are favorites among the Field Day delegates!

This is why I’m so pleased to announce our first three-time Tech Field Day presenter: Data Robotics was quick to come on board for our very first event, and returned for Tech Field Day 2. Now they will make a third presentation as part of Tech Field Day 5! Data Robotics will host the afternoon presentation at their headquarters in Santa Clara, following Symantec’s morning session on Thursday, February 10.

Data Robotics gave those first Field Day delegates an advance peak at their new Drobo S and DroboElite models, and launched their Drobo FS product at Tech Field Day 2. Will the Drobo product line continue to grow at Tech Field Day 5? I’ll definitely be paying attention! The Field Day presentations, including Data Robotics, will be streamed live on February 10 and 11!

The new Sr. Director of Product Marketing at Data Robotics, Mario Blandini, explained why he wanted to bring the company back a third time. ”Tech Field Day events are a great value for us at Data Robotics,” he told me. “There is never a shortage of productive input among the delegates, and the intimate gathering makes for fantastic technology discussions.” I couldn’t have put it better myself. We’re glad to have you back!

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2011. | Data Robotics Is First Three-Time Tech Field Day Presenter
Read more posts categorized as Events, Exclusive, Featured, Storage, Top Story

Gestalt IT is pleased to announce our next Tech Field Day event. The Field Day delegates will convene in and around San Jose, CA on February 9 and 10, 2011. There, they will engage some of the most innovative and interesting IT infrastructure companies, with leading enterprise software provider, Symantec, headlining.

Follow the news at our Tech Field Day 5 page!

The unique Field Day℠ concept brings together as equals two groups that rarely meet: Product vendors and independent thought leaders. The event includes a dozen hand-picked delegates and just five speaking slots. Both vendors and delegates are nominated and selected by an independent team of volunteers based on interest, technology and passion. The resulting discussions are packed with technical information, with feedback and questions flowing both ways across the table. To expand access, the event will also be streamed live on the Internet.

Delegates will spend two to four hours with each vendor, learning about their products, technology, and relevance to modern IT practices. The Gestalt IT Tech Field Day events have attracted some of the biggest names in information technology, and this event is no exception. Symantec will headline, bringing the delegates on-site for a half-day session. Other presenting sponsors will be announced in the coming month.

Only about a dozen hand-picked delegates will attend this Tech Field Day event. Our selection process focuses on the unique characteristics of thought leaders: Independence, open-mindedness, technical knowledge, and influence are key criteria. The global team of delegates come from a variety of backgrounds, including server virtualization, enterprise storage, networking, security, and systems administration.

Field Day alumni, Bill Hill, Scott D. Lowe, Devang Panchigar, and W. Curtis Preston will be joined by new delegates, Sean Clark, Eric Siebert, and others. Each has distinguished himself in his community, and each was selected by a team of delegates from past events.

About Gestalt IT and Tech Field Day

Complete delegate and sponsor lists are available at the Gestalt IT web site. We encourage those interested in IT infrastructure topics to follow the delegates on Gestalt IT (gestaltit.com), Twitter (bit.ly/TFD5TL), Facebook (bit.ly/TFDGFB), LinkedIn (bit.ly/TFDLI), Flickr (bit.ly/TFDpics) and Vimeo (bit.ly/TFDvids).

The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. This is the concept behind Gestalt IT – that experts in a variety of disciplines are stronger when they work together. As a group, we formed a media organization focused on promoting community among independent thought leaders in IT infrastructure topics. Our productions include the Gestalt IT web site and the series of Tech Field Day events. Gestalt IT Media LLC community organizer, Stephen Foskett, can be contacted at GestaltIT.com, sfoskett@gestaltit.com, or (508)451-9532.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Announcing Tech Field Day 5: Returning to Silicon Valley in February 2011!
Read more posts categorized as All, Events, Exclusive, Featured, Networking, Security, Server Virtualization, Storage, Top Story

A Compelling Product

At its core, Compellent is a storage software company. Their Storage Center software creates a “virtual storage array” from standard building blocks. The resulting storage product is one of the most flexible and (excuse the pun) compelling midrange storage systems on the market. Consider the following roundtable discussion from our recent Tech Field Day event in Seattle, which includes a discussion of Compellent’s products and technologies by independent voices in the industry:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 8:59 — 102.7MB)

Compellent’s Storage Center scales up, adding additional storage capacity to existing arrays without disruption and integrating this added bandwidth and capacity seamlessly. Compellent also has an impressive tiered storage and thin provisioning story, since data blocks are virtualized and can be moved between tiers dynamically. Full-featured integrated snapshot technology completes the picture, adding data protection credentials.

Compellent’s scale-out story is impressive as well, but is more about replication and virtualization than the clustering technology used by others, including Dell’s EqualLogic. Compellent’s newly-introduced Live Volume can be thought of as a volume manager for virtual servers, allowing their storage to exist simultaneously on two different storage arrays. Supporting VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Citrix XenServer, Compellent claims that Live Volume enables a “grid of Compellent arrays”, but it’s not the sort of scale-out grid one would get from EMC’s recently purchased Isilon, HP’s LeftHand, Dell’s Compellent, or NAS specialist Panasas. It’s more of an active-active mirror of storage than a true cluster. Learn more about Live Volume in the following video by Rodos:

Let’s also take a moment to consider the hardware Compellent currently uses: They deploy and sell this software on SuperMicro servers with Xyratex disk enclosures, and Seagate hard disk drives, and connect everything with QLogic, Emulex, and Brocade storage networking gear. This is all pretty much standard-issue for storage vendors: Most no longer produce their own controllers or disk enclosures, and the standard components Compellent uses can be swapped from other sources if needed.

Compellent’s Mid-Market Strategy

Compellent has not traditionally competed in the stratosphere of enterprise storage dominated by EMC’s Symmetrix V-Max, the HDS/HP USP/VSP, and (to a lesser extend) the HP 3PAR InServ. Instead, the Minneapolis-based company has been happy to sell into the fat middle of the market, and has gained a loyal following in smaller-but-still-impressive enterprises. Nowhere is this more evident than at Compellent’s annual “C-Drive” customer conference: It’s amazing, really, for a smallish storage company to have such a devoted user base!

Although they offer two NAS front-ends, Compellent is a block storage player through and through. Their “Storage Center with NAS” offering is decidedly low-end, employing Windows Storage Server 2008 on a 1U server for SMB and NFS connectivity. The newer and more-impressive zNAS is based on the OpenSolaris operating system, including ZFS a friendly interface “co-developed” with Nexenta. Neither product is an in-house Compellent design, nor are they competitive in the high-end “big data” market touted by NAS leaders EMC, NetApp, and BlueArc.

Compellent’s Fit Within Dell

Assuming the acquisition goes through, attention will turn to the fit for Compellent’s Storage Center technology and marketing within Dell. What will Dell get for three quarters of a billion dollars? What will it mean to the enterprise storage market as a whole?

Dell’s EqualLogic acquisition, though expensive, is now widely seen as a success. The Round Rock management team allowed EqualLogic the freedom to develop and compete, while bolstering their hardware and manufacturing story with commodity components. The combination has become a dominant plater in the mid-market iSCSI storage space, and Dell is likely to attempt a repeat of that strategy here. It was widely rumored that 3PAR management preferred Dell’s to HP’s offering based on a promise of similar autonomy.

We assume Dell would replace the EMC-sourced CLARiiON with Compellent in their midrange storage arsenal, replacing the SuperMicro servers. Although Compellent would likely be allowed to develop and grow within the Dell umbrella, there is substantial overlap with the existing EqualLogic line. One would expect Compellent to focus more on Fibre Channel and FCoE (which they recently delivered), though iSCSI support is unlikely to be dropped. A longer-term strategy would see EqualLogic and Compellent combining their midrange storage IP and management team within Dell.

Considering their success selling CLARiiON block storage, Dell’s acquisition would strap a rocket to Compellent’s sales. Once the Dell hardware is grafted in, profits will grow substantially as well. This is a major win for Dell, which needs the kind of margins that only in-house IP can drive. The price is right, the market is ready, and the fit is solid.

What Comes Next

Some are suggesting that this is the end of the storage acquisition parade, but many holes remain. Dell still lacks enterprise NAS, data deduplication, and cloud storage success, and companies like Oracle have only just begun to bulk up their storage strategies. Dell’s acquisitions of Ocarina and Exanet have yet to pay dividends, likely driven by the immaturity of those products. One would not be at all surprised if they continued shopping in the storage space: Panasas, BlueArc, Sepaton, FalconStor, and Overland all look ripe for purchase. Although Compellent is a win for Dell, it is not likely to be their last acquisition.

Disclosure: Compellent sponsored and presented at Gestalt IT’s Tech Field Day 3.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Thoughts On A Dell Acquisition Of Compellent
Read more posts categorized as Exclusive, Featured, Storage, Top Story

The unique Field Day℠ concept brings together as equals two groups that rarely meet: Product vendors and independent thought leaders. The event includes 11 delegates and just five speaking slots. Both vendors and delegates are nominated and selected by an independent team of volunteers based on interest, technology and passion. The resulting discussions are packed with technical information, with feedback and questions flowing both ways across the table.

Presenting Sponsors

Just seven companies will sponsor and present at Tech Field Day 4. Delegates will spend two to four hours with each vendor, learning about their products, technology, and relevance to modern IT practices. The Gestalt IT Tech Field Day events have attracted some of the biggest names in information technology, and this event is no exception.

Tech Field Day 4 begins Thursday, November 11 at the NetApp campus in Sunnyvale. We will spend the morning learning about their unified storage technology and looking into their latest product updates. After lunch, the delegates will move to the PlugandPlay Tech Center to learn about the virtual I/O products developed by Aprius. Avere Systems is up next, presenting their tiered NAS appliances.

Friday begins with data management startup, Actifio. Intel hosts the delegates next, covering converged networking and their latest Xeon server processor technology. Friday afternoon will be hosted by The Hoffman Group in San Jose. There, Field Day veterans, SolarWinds, will cover their management and monitoring software. We will conclude the event with a look at the cloud backup capabilities made possible by Asigra.

Selected Delegates

Only eleven hand-picked delegates will attend this Tech Field Day event. Our selection process focuses on the unique characteristics of thought leaders: Independence, open-mindedness, technical knowledge, and influence are key criteria. The global team of delegates come from a variety of backgrounds, including server virtualization, enterprise storage, networking, security, and systems administration.

Field Day alumni, Brandon Carroll, Matt Simmons, Derek Schauland, and Robin Harris will be joined by seven new delegates: Jon Owings, Edward Aractingi, Frank Owen, Chris Dearden, Bill Hill, Paul Miller, and Joe Onisick. Each has distinguished himself in his community, and each was selected by a team of delegates from past events.

About Gestalt IT and Tech Field Day

Complete delegate and sponsor lists are available at the Gestalt IT web site. We encourage those interested in IT infrastructure topics to follow the delegates on Gestalt IT (gestaltit.com), Twitter (bit.ly/TFD4TL and bit.ly/TFD4TS), Facebook (bit.ly/TFDGFB), LinkedIn (bit.ly/TFDLI), Flickr (bit.ly/TFDpics) and Vimeo (bit.ly/TFDvids).

For the first time, Tech Field Day will be streamed live over the Internet. Visit the special Tech Field Day 4 live stream page during the event to follow along!

The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. This is the concept behind Gestalt IT – that experts in a variety of disciplines are stronger when they work together. As a group, we formed a media organization focused on promoting community among independent thought leaders in IT infrastructure topics. Our productions include the Gestalt IT web site and the series of Tech Field Day events. Gestalt IT Media LLC community organizer, Stephen Foskett, can be contacted at http://GestaltIT.com, sfoskett@gestaltit.com, or (508)451-9532.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Announcing Tech Field Day 4: This Week in San Jose!
Read more posts categorized as All, Cloud Computing, Desktop, Events, Exclusive, Featured, Networking, Security, Server Virtualization, Storage, Tech, Top Story

A Little History of vDS

A long time ago, vSphere environments relied upon each ESX host being configured with multiple virtual switches. These switches were bound to physical NICs that bridged the virtual and the physical networks. However, as the switches needed to be defined on each host, there was room for error. vMotion relies upon the same switch names to be defined on each ESX host, or else it will fail. Additionally, it was darn near impossible to collect any networking information regarding how a VM was using a switch because the VM could be on any given switch at any time.

So, VMware saw the inefficiencies of this structure and began seeing the benefits of a more centralized virtual switching infrastructure. Enter the vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS). The vDS removes the need to create virtual switches on the ESX/ESXi host and, instead, creates the switch on the data center. So, any machine inside of the datacenter has access to the virtual switch. Now, all the administrator needs to do is assign the correct physical NICs to the correct switches, and the work is done for you.

The vDS is also the cornerstone for some of the new networking functionality that VMware is introducing (vShield products, vCloud, etc…). vDS introduces the ability to add logic and control to the switching of the virtual machines. Naming standards are applied across all hosts to ensure that machines will migrate flawlessly. Network statistics on a VM are maintained as they are running on the same switching entity, regardless of ESX host. New functions, like Network I/O Control can be introduced (ability to prioritize which VMs have network access). Again, this is the future of how VMware is going to handle vSphere networking. So, getting on the horse now is going to be beneficial as you will be more likely to be able to use new features and functions sooner in the future.

How To Reconfigure Virtual Networking While Keeping VMs Live

Now, if you are like me, all of the NICs in our vSphere environment are being consumed. This poses a problem because we need at least 1 vmnic to connect to the vDS in order for it to become useful, right?! Plus, being able to migrate the VMs without any downtime seems like a swell proposition as well. So, I have developed what I believe to be a fairly simple procedure that should allow for us to reconfigure the virtual networking while keeping the VMs live, without needing to vMotion everything off to another host… just a little repetitive and requires a little balancing. But, that just makes it more fun! The instructions are going to assume using the GUI to define the vDS.

Stage 0 – Define the Physical Network Adjustments

The underlying physical network needs to be configured properly for this to work. This may be a great opportunity to make some adjustment to the networking that you have always wanted to make. For me, I am taking the opportunity to move everything over to trunking ports, so the vDS is going to tag the VLANs as necessary. Just remember that you are going to need to make sure any pSwitch adjustments you are going to make ahead of time are not going to impact the production network. This may take some coordination with your networking team. If you, like me, are the networking team, this conversation should be nice and quick. Just make sure everyone is on the same page before starting.

Stage 1 – Define the vDS

This is super easy. You can define the vDS objects without interrupting anything. Part of the GUI setup asks if you would like to add physical interfaces now or later. Just select the option to add later and move on with the setup.

Next up, right-click on your Datacenter and select “New vNetwork Distributed Switch”

Assuming you are running vCenter 4.1 (with at least 1 ESX 4.1 host), you should have the option between version 4.0 and 4.1.

Selection version 4.1.0 is going to be the most preferable as it introduces support for the most new functions. On the down side, you need to be running ESX/ESXi 4.1 to get the functionality. For this example, we will assume you are running on ESX/ESXi 4.1.

The next step involves giving the vDS a name. Name the switch something descriptive that would allow you to know exactly which network it connects to just by the name. So, dvSwitch-DMZ would be a good name, for example. Additionally, you can define the number of dvUplinks (vmnics) will connect to the switch (per host). The default value of 4 is just fine for our environment, so select it and move on.

The next step allows you to select the vmnics from each host that meets the vDS configurations. So, if you have a single 4.1 host in your environment and your environment has 10 ESX hosts, you will only have a single host in this list. Recall that we selected vDS 4.1.0 above… and 4.1.0 requires ESX/ESXi 4.1. For the time being, we are going to select the option to “Add Later” and move on.

The final stage allows for the creation of a default port group and to finish. In this situation, we will go ahead and allow the wizard to create the port group automatically and create the vDS!

Stage 2 – Remove One vmnic From Existing vSwitch

Seeing as all of the vmnics are consumed, we need at least one vmnic available to move to the new vDS. Now… take into consideration the network changes that you may need to make for the vDS (back in Stage 0). You may need to coordinate the switch port change with the network team (or yourself). Now… as we are removing a vmnic from your production environment, you are responsible for double-checking to make sure that this should work for what you are doing. If you have a vSwitch with a single vmnic, you WILL lose connectivity when you pull the vmnic for the vDS.

Once you know which vmnic you are going to remove from the existing vSwitch for the new vDS and you have cleared it with your networking team, go ahead and remove it from the vSwitch via the vSphere Client.

Stage 3 – Add the vmnic to the new vDS

Now that you have a vmnic available to use, ensure it has been properly configured for the network (again, see Stage 0).

The next step is to add the vmnic to the vDS. Since we did not assign any ports to the vDS during creation, we need to add the ports from the ESX/ESXi host itself.

Open the host configuration tab –> Networking –> Click on the “vNetwork Distributed Switch” button

This view will show you the configuration of the vDS on the ESX/ESXi host itself.

Click the “Manage Physical Adapters” link on the top-right corner of the screen. This will load a page that displays the vmnics attached to the vDS. Select the “Click to Add NIC” link.

Locate the section labeled “Unclaimed adapters”. Inside the section, you should see the vmnic you just removed in Stage 2! Sweet!

Select the adapter and click OK.

You have been returned to the “Manage Physical Adapters” screen again. This time, you should see that the vmnic has been added. In my environment, this is vmnic2.

Stage 4 – Configure the Port Group VLAN

The Port Group is a structure inside of the vDS that handles many of the switching functions you would expect. These functions include Traffic Shaping, Failover, VLAN, etc… This is semi-analogous to the vSwitch you were used to configuring in the past.

In the event that you need the vDS to tag your network traffic with the proper VLAN, you need to edit the Port Group settings.

Locate the vDS in your vCenter structure. Click the [+] next to the vDS to get access to the Port Group (default label is “dvPortGroup”). Right-click on the Port Group and edit the settings.

Locate “VLAN” in the table on the left. Notice the “VLAN Type” defaults to “None”. Drop the box down and select “VLAN”. Then, provide the VLAN ID.

Click OK to close out the windows.

Now, your Port Group is on VLAN 30!

Stage 5 – Move A VM To vDS

Next stop is the time to test your work. Find a nice utility or low-use VM. You should be able to ping the VM continuously as you move from the old vSwitch to the vDS. So, begin pinging the VM.

Now, we need to change the network that the VM’s NIC is connected to. This is a simple operation you can perform on the fly, while the machine is online.

Edit the settings of the VM.

Select the Network Adapter of the VM

On the right-side of the window, you will see a section labeled “Network Connection”. Look for the Network Label box and drop it down. Magically, you will see your new vDS as a network label. Select the vDS

Hold your breath and click OK. See… that was not hard was it?! Pings should continue uninterrupted. Now… if you have any connectivity issues to the VM, I would suggest the following:

• Move the VM back to the original Network (select the old Network Label from the Network Connection section of the VM Settings)
• Check to ensure the proper pSwitch port has been configured correctly. Do you need a trunk? Is it configured as a trunk? Was the correct port configured (oops)?
• Check to ensure you have defined the VLAN in the Port Group correctly, if you are trunking.
• Try again once everything has been verified.

Stage 6 – Balancing Act

If you have made it this far, you know that the vDS is setup as you expected. The underlying vmnic has been configured properly to allow access to the network for the VMs.

So, the next step is going to be a balancing act. You will need to migrate your VM network adapters from the old vSwitch to the new vDS. As the load on the vDS gets higher, you will need to migrate another vmnic from the vSwitch to the vDS. Ultimately, all VMs will need to be migrated before the last vmnic is removed. Otherwise, the VMs on the vSwitch will be lost in their own network-less world until you move them over.

Rinse-Wash-Repeat

Stage 7 – vBeers

Test everything out. The networking for the VMs should not be interrupted. After the balancing act has been completed, the VMs on the host should be safely running on the new vDS! Complete the same tasks on your other ESX/ESXi hosts (again, remember that we need them to be on v4.1, right?!).

Well done. You deserve to have some vBeers for your hard work!

Notes and Considerations

• You are the master of your environment. The example above is just that… an example. You know what is best for your environment. Take everything you read here with a grain of salt.
• By all means, you can feel free to shutdown VMs to change any configuration if you feel more comfortable going that route. The same procedure applies. With less concern about the VM availability since you know it is going to be offline anyway.
• Migrating VMs to a vDS will interrupt any vMotion activities until other hosts have been configured (recall that each ESX/ESXi host needs the same Networks to be available for the migration to complete). So, while this can be performed live, selecting a maintenance window for the work would still be wise.
• If you have the capacity in your environment, you can always evacuate all VMs from a host and configure it without any VMs running as a safety measure. In that environment, you do not need to worry about a balancing act as you will not have any production load on either the vSwitch or the vDS. The same configuration principles apply.

Thanks for reading through this walkthrough on implementing a vDS on a live system! Look for future posts on migrating VMkernel interfaces to vDS configurations and how Host Profiles can help make this easier for you.

As always, please leave comments at the bottom. If you know of a way to improve the procedure, let me know!

© Bill for Gestalt IT, 2010. | vSphere–Migration to vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS)–LIVE!
Read more posts categorized as All, Featured, Networking, Server Virtualization, Top Story

Editor’s Note: This guest post was written by Greg W. Stuart, winner of the Boche.net/Gestalt IT VMworld trip contest

Finally Attending a Computer/Technology Event

I have to confess something right off the bat; I’ve never actually been to a computer/technology conference in the 10 years that I’ve been in the business. Yes, that is pitiful, being that there are so many good conferences out there such as Microsoft’s TechEd, Oracle’s Open World, Citrix’s Synergy and of course VMware’s VMworld. These are all very exciting and highly entertaining conferences. That being said, I can finally say I’ve attended a computer/technology event, VMworld 2010.

Being completely new to virtualization (introduced to VMware for the 1st time in December of 2009), I quickly gained a passion for the field and the technology involved, particularly with VMware. We have Citrix and even an instance of Hyper-V in our infrastructure but VMware grabbed my attention and I’ve been hooked ever since. In April of 2010 I achieved my VMware Certified Professional (V4) certification and have gained a lot of good experience and knowledge in a fairly short period of time. This is thanks to the amazing VMware community; i.e. blogs, twitter feeds, training, etc.

As I’m surfing through many of the great blogs on VMware I came across a blog post by Jason Boche promoting a “Get Away to VMworld” contest. Jason donated a free registration to the person who won his contest, and Gestalt IT agreed to cover the airfare. I thought, why not, I never win anyways and it only took my 2 minutes to enter, done.

Just as I’m about to fall asleep one night, I get an email on my phone and sure enough it was from Jason telling me I won his competition. I was going to VMworld, my first computer/technology conference. Needless to say I didn’t sleep much the rest of the night.

Inspired to Join the Community

Winning that contest inspired me to join the community of bloggers evangelizing VMware and find ways to give back as well. I started my own blog, vDestination.com, and quickly began writing about VMware, my experiences as well as a few contests that would help give back to the community.

In the days leading up to VMworld 2010, I ran a contest giving away a full library of books based on VMware vSphere and its tools.  Authors and vExperts, Eric Siebert, Scott Lowe and Mike Laverick all donated a book (some donated 2) as well as David Davis and Train Signal donating their vSphere training video series and even a donation of Windows 7 Ultimate by Chris Kusek. It was a huge testament to the willingness of the community to give back to those who are seeking to expand their knowledge base on VMware.

Finally the day to leave for VMworld had arrived; excitement was at its apex as I boarded the plane in Baltimore to head out to San Francisco. The first order of business upon arriving at the Moscone Center was getting my badge and my swag… I mean conference materials.  VMware provided a really nice backpack chock full of conference material, a helpful map of Moscone, a guide to all of the sessions, labs, etc. and a map of the Solutions Exchange show floor. Being my first time at VMworld the first day was very overwhelming and the guides and materials provided really helped to make it a more structured event for me.

Day One

Day one I headed over to the bloggers lounge in hopes to meet some of the bloggers whose content I read on a daily basis, and to meet some of my readers as well. The difficult part was figuring out who was who due to the fact that our avatars were not posted on our badges (note to VMware: print badges with avatar/twitter handle next year).  I plugged in my laptop and began tweeting and blogging.

No more than 2 minutes after I had tweeted that I was in the bloggers lounge, Guy Chapman sends me a tweet that said, “@gregwstuart Raise your left hand if you are here” I looked around worried that people might think I was crazy sitting in the lounge with my left hand raised so I did a quick scan and saw Guy hanging out in the corner. We met and had a nice chat for about a half hour, first networking connection made! I also met Patrick Redknap, John Troyer and Stu Miniman, Kendrick Coleman as well as the man that made my trip possible, Jason Boche.

From there I went to my first session which was about building your own home lab, the speakers included Eric Siebert and Simon Seagrave, both vExperts and authors. The sessions were really great, while I didn’t attend many; the ones I did attend were very knowledgeable and entertaining as well. You don’t always assume that a tech conference is going to be entertaining, but this was different, VMworld was fun at every turn.

The Scene

The labs were amazing. This was an area that was constantly packed and at times had a significant wait to get into. In different areas of Moscone there was what I call “chill” areas, staged with small ottoman like cubes to sit on or even, get this, giant VMworld beanbag chairs. People napped, held meetings, typed away on their laptops or just sat for a breather, it was very interesting.

There were even areas that were staged like a game room. I counted about 4 ping pong tables, a couple of air hockey tables and other areas you could hang out in that were relaxing and fun.

I didn’t expect this to be the scene at VMworld. I thought it was going to be long days of bad food, very involved sessions, waiting in lines, and having nowhere to sit. This was not the case. The food was always good and available at every turn it seemed, from hot food, food for on the go, candy, soda, water and everything in between. This is an aspect of the conference that I thought was very well put together, it made the long days easier to handle.

Day Two

Day two I was invited to attend a product launch/press release held by Xsigo at the W hotel across from the Moscone Center. This was an awesome event. I was there on behalf of Gestalt IT, and following the press release and lunch, Xsigo invited us to hold a round table discussion on their new line of Virtual I/O Directors and to discuss the relevance of virtual I/O in the field today.

It was very educational and I made some good contacts and came away with a nice blog post as well. It was nice to be the first to get the news and blog about it, a significant benefit of attending these types of events.

The Solutions Exchange

Lastly, the Solutions Exchange was my most favorite attraction at VMworld; this is where I spent the bulk of days 3 and 4. There were over 200 sponsors and exhibitors that had their offering of the latest technology to either partner with VMware or even in some instances compete with VMware, yes Citrix had a booth, 10×20 actually… which I thought was interesting.

My favorite booth was the WYSE booth. WYSE had their WYSE Pocket Cloud product on display with a number of various end points displaying its ability to reach your virtual desktop anywhere you are. They had the DroidX phone, the iPhone 4 and a couple of other handhelds on display that you could actually play with and test drive the application. Cisco, Veeam and NetApp all had really great booths and very good presentations.

The Solutions Exchange next year should really be called The Swag Depot, this is where I got 98% of my swag from all of the different vendors. My most prized piece of swag was an iPod Nano that I won, and I can’t even remember who I won it from. There was just so much stuff going on, at times it was information overload.

A Year’s Worth of Knowledge

In less than a week at VMworld, I came away with a year’s worth of knowledge it seems. I definitely came back with a ton of stuff to blog about; I think I generated at least 4 blog posts resulting from my trip to VMworld.

I also made some very good connections with others inside the VMware community that are sure to be long lasting and mutually beneficial. I was actually approached by Mike Laverick and he told me he loved my blog contest and has begun to run contests on his blog as well.

The VMware community is very involved in helping others join in the community and gain the knowledge and experience that will further their careers in the virtualization field. To be a part of this community had done more for my career than any certification or training course had done to date. Many thanks to Stephen Foskett at GestaltIT and Jason Boche for helping me get to VMworld; I wouldn’t have gone without your help.

© guest for Gestalt IT, 2010. | VMworld 2010: A Trip to Remember
Read more posts categorized as All, Exclusive, Featured, Server Virtualization, Top Story