I am doing some research on VMWare VSAN because we are looking at our options for storage. I am getting mixed answers when I Google. We are building a new host in our new office and we are starting fresh. Our old setup we had a server host HP with a few drives which ESXi connected to a SAN and we used a combination of both for storage of VM's and file storage. We did not use VSAN, but with the new setup this is definitely an option. We are looking at a HP ProLiant DL380 GEN9 server that is capable of holding several drives. If I loaded this up with large drives and setup VSAN, would this be a good option for a file storage server? This host will also host several other VM's as well.
So, basically you want to do the hardware refresh and system architecture reconfiguration. Correct me if I`m wrong.
If so, then IMHO the best way gonna be to go with one of the hyper-converged solutions. Is see three options here:
Simplivity (https://www.simplivity.com/). Its really good, but it was too high cost for one of the projects that I had. Also its perfromance is mostly bottlenecked by the propritory component (FPGA), which in most of cases means lack of flexibility
VMware VSAN (I'm sure you don't need link for that :) ). According to my friend who works at VMware - it is usually considered for big deployments. so if that is your case - go for it.
StarWind Hyper-Converged Appliance (https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-hyperconverged-appliance ). That one is SMB-oriented. It combines commodity Dell hardware and bunch of software. Since everything is commodity - it is easy to handle.
I hope that makes gonna help.
P.S. I`m not sure if this is the best place to ask this Q, possible serverfault would be the better place.
Fault tolerant file storage is possible with VMware Virtual SAN but kind of expensive. Either way VMware does solve storage redundancy for running VMs but it does not solve the issue with exporting SMB 3.0 or NFS v4.1 mount points you'll need, you have to use custom VMs for that. FreeBSD / Linux with Samba for NFS and Windows / Hyper-V Server for SMB 3.0 will do the trick!
Similar discussion on REDDIT some time ago lots of good thoughts.
https://www.reddit.com/r/vmware/comments/4223ol/virtual_san_for_file_servers/
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I want to deploy 10-15 VMWare hosts to cloudstack. This is my first time working with any type of cloud. I was doing research on installation and architecture, I was stuck on a point that for using VMWare hosts i have to install VCenter server, but i can't do that as it's paid. So, please guide me that is there a way of deploying these VMWare hosts on cloudstack without buying any licensed software.
Unfortunately, CloudStack does not support vSphere/ESXi without vCenter. There were several requests to support vSphere/ESXi without vCenter - however, keep in mind that many features vCenter provides must be implemented in CloudStack and it not an easy task.
If you want to remain open source and or/free, consider using Xen with XenCenter or just go pure KVM. I use to use VMware for most of my career and recently transitions to KVM - it was an easy switch and with no regrets.
CloudStack mailing lists are best to answering any setup questions you might have.
All best
-ilya
By design, vCenter is must for CloudStack to manage & build cloud over VMware ESXi hosts. It would be huge exercise to extend the support to ESXi host management without vCenter, which could be limited in features like live migration, VMware distributed virtual switches, DRS etc.
You might consider switching to XenServer which is free and very well supported seamlessly by CloudStack. Feel free discuss your deployment configuration and planning at users#cloudstack.apache.org or dev#cloudstack.apache.org.
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Can anyone give me a simple comparison of those two? It is hard to get the idea from their web site.
VM Player runs a virtual instance, but can't create the vm. [Edit: Now it can.] Workstation allows for the creation and administration of virtual machines. If you have a second machine, you can create the vm on one and run it with the player the other machine. I bought Workstation and I use it setup testing vms that the player runs. Hope this explains it for you.
Edit: According to the FAQ:
VMware Workstation is much more advanced and comes with powerful features including snapshots, cloning, remote connections to vSphere, sharing VMs, advanced Virtual Machines settings and much more. Workstation is designed to be used by technical professionals such as developers, quality assurance engineers, systems engineers, IT administrators, technical support representatives, trainers, etc.
VMWare Player can be seen as a free, closed-source competitor to Virtualbox.
Initially VMWare Player (up to version 2.5) was intended to operate on fixed virtual operating systems (e.g. play back pre-created virtual disks).
Many advanced features such as vsphere are probably not required by most users, and VMWare Player will provide the same core technologies and 3D acceleration as the ESX Workstation solution.
From my experience VMWare Player 5 is faster than Virtualbox 4.2 RC3 and has better SMP performance. Both are great however, each with its own unique advantages. Both are somewhat lacking in 2D rendering performance.
See the official FAQ, and a feature comparison table.
from http://www.vmware.com/products/player/faqs.html:
How does VMware Player compare to VMware Workstation? VMware Player
enables you to quickly and easily create and run virtual machines.
However, VMware Player lacks many powerful features, remote
connections to vSphere, drag and drop upload to vSphere, multiple
Snapshots and Clones, and much more.
Not being able to revert snapshots it's a big no for me.
One main reason we went with Workstation over Player at my job is because we need to run VMs that use a physical disk as their hard drive instead of a virtual disk. Workstation supports using physical disks while Player does not.
Workstation has some features that Player lacks, such as teams (groups of VMs connected by private LAN segments) and multi-level snapshot trees. It's aimed at power users and developers; they even have some hooks for using a debugger on the host to debug code in the VM (including kernel-level stuff). The core technology is the same, though.
re: VMware Workstation support for physical disks vs virtual disks.
I run Player with the VM Disk files on their own dedicated fast hard drive, independent from the OS hard drive.
This allows both the OS and Player to simultaneously independently read/write to their own drives, the performance difference is noticeable, and a second WD Black or Raptor or SSD is cheap.
Placing the VM disk file on a second drive also works with Microsoft Virtual PC.
We're thinking of running our TFS 2010 application tier on a virtual machine using VMWare.
We are a tiny shop (4 devs) and like the ability to upsize the power later. Data would probably reside on a real server.
Hive mind: Please, tell me if this is a moronic idea.
I'm not sure what the Microsoft recommendation is going to be here (although, I'm sure they'd suggest Hyper-V over VMWare at the very least).
That being said, I run TFS2010 in a lab environment with both TFS 2010 and the database within a VirtualPC instance (under Windows Server 2003). It works, and for the type of work that I'm doing, it works pretty well.
Given what you're asking, I think a VM for the application tier should be fine. I'm generally not a fan of virtualizing database servers, so I would stick with a separate machine that can be used for your data tier.
If you do wind up virtualizing the data tier, I would still strongly recommend tying it to a physical disk instead of a virtual HD.
Our development shop actually runs TFS 2010 on a VMWare. Database and everything. So far we have not encountered any problems, though I have read that it is possible to have some problems with SQL server on a VM. However, this is not our long term solution as well. This was done so we could get up and running without delay. As long as you are backing up your data I think this is a good short term solution.
Just do it, data and everything.
For low-performance stuff, I even run [OMG] Oracle on VMs.
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I currently work in an organization that forces all software development to be done inside a VM. This is for a variety of risk/governance/security/compliance reasons.
The standard setup is something like:
VMWare image given to devs with tools installed
VM is customized to suit project/stream needs
VM sits in a network & domain that is isolated from the live/production network
SCM connectivity is only possible through dev/test network
Email and office tools need to be on live network so this means having two separate desktops going at once
Heavyweight dev tools in use on VMs so they are very resource hungry
Some problems that people complain about are:
Development environment runs slower than normal (host OS is windows XP so memory is limited)
Switching between DEV machine and Email/Office machine is a pain, simple things like cut and paste are made harder. This is less efficient from a usability perspective.
Mouse in particular doesn't seem to work properly using VMWare player or RDP.
Need a separate login to Dev/Test network/domain
Has anyone seen or worked in other (hopefully better) setups to this that have similar constraints (as mentioned at the top)?
In particular are there viable options that would remove the need for running stuff in a VM altogether?
In particular are there viable options
that would remove the need for running
stuff in a VM altogether?
Given that you said there are unspecified risk/governance/security/compliance reasons for your organization's use of VMs, I doubt any option we could provide could negate those. Ultimately it sounds like they just need their development team as sandboxed as possible.
(And even so, the question/answers would probably be better off at serverfault since it's more networking/security oriented.)
It sounds like a big problem is not having enough horsepower on the host OS. WinXP should be fine, but you need to have adequate hardware. i.e. at least 3 GB RAM, dual core CPU, and hardware that supports virtualization. Clipboard sync should be working with the VM.
I am not currently doing this, but I've thought about it, and we're kind of kicking this idea around with the idea of making it easier to standardize the dev environment, and to avoid wasting a day when you get a new PC. I'm dismayed to hear that it's not the utopia that I had dreamed...
I've been using VMs as a development environment for a long time. There's nothing inherently wrong with it, and it presents lots of benefits.
Ensuring a consistent environment
Separating file systems for different backup scenarios
Added security
Potentially gives developers access to more raw computing power.
There is a lot of innovation in the VM world, as evidenced by the growing popularity of VM farms, hardware support for virtualization, and controlled "turnkey" solutions, like MS's VirtualPC images for testing browser compatibility and the TurnKey set of appliances.
As others have said, your issues are probably due to insufficient hardware or sub-optimal configurations.
Development environment runs slower than normal (host OS is windows XP so memory is limited)
This should not be noticeable. XP vs. Windows Vista or Win7 is a marginal comparison. I would check the amount of physical RAM allocated to the VM.
Switching between DEV machine and Email/Office machine is a pain, simple things like cut and paste are made harder. This is less efficient from a usability perspective.
There are VM-specific optimizations/configurations that can make these tasks seamless. I would consult your VM maintenance staff.
Mouse in particular doesn't seem to work properly using VMWare player or RDP.
Again, should be seamless, but consult VM staff.
Need a separate login to Dev/Test network/domain
I would see this as a business decision: your company could obviously set up virtual machines with the same domain poicies as your own personal workstation, but may have other (big brother?) purposes for forcing you to login separately.
As far as using VM's as an agent of control, I think there are better solutions, like well-designed authorization controls around the production machines. There's nothing like paper trails to make people behave themselves.
I wondered if anyone uses virtualized desktop PCs (running WinXP Pro or older) to have some old applications that are seldom used available for some ongoing tasks.
Say you have a really old project that every once in a while needs a document update in a database system or something like that. The database application is running on a virtualized desktop that is only started when needed.
I think we could save energy, hardware and space if we would virtualize some of those old boxes. Any setups in your company?
edit Licensing could be of concern, but I guess you have a valid license for the old desktop box. Maybe the license isn't valid in a VM environment, I'd definitly check that before.
Sure enough, if the application is performance critic, virtualization could hurt. But I'm thinking about some kind of outdated application that is still used to perform, say a calculation every 12 weeks for a certain customer/service.
I use virtualized desktops for:
Support that requires VPN software I do not want on my own desktop. This also lets a whole team share the support computer for a specific customer.
A legacy system which we use several different versions of (depending on customer's version) and they're not really compatible so its good to have a virtualized desktop for each version.
We use virtualisation to test on a variety of Operating Systems - the server application runs under linux, and we have a production (real) server, and a couple of test servers, which are all VMs.
The client runs under Windows, which, being an OS X user I have to run in a VM, and the other developer I work with runs an XP VM on his 8-core Vista box.
(I also have a seperate VM for running CAD software, but that's not really programming)
It depends on the requirements of the legacy systems. Very often if a system is relient on a certain clock frequency, then it better and morereliable to keep the older OS systems running as Virtulized OS' can do funy things to performance.
If the legacy systems aren't that critical, then go for it! One piece of advice I would give is to ensure that the system works FULLY before chucking out your old 3.11 systems as I have been stung before! To fully perform the testing can cost more money then you might save, but its up to anyone who make the decisions to ensure that is considered.
We use virtualisation for testing out applications on Vista. Or rather customers do the testing and we use virtualisation to reproduce the bugs they complain about.
I guess the thing that would stop me from using lots of virtual instances of my favourite proprietary OS would be licencing. I presume Microsoft would want me to have a licence for every installation, virtual or otherwise?
We use VMWare with a virtual windows XP here at work to run some old development tools with very expensive licenses that don't run at all on Vista. So VMWare saved us about $5000 in licenses.
Since my last machine upgrade I have been running virtualised OS's for a number of tasks. For example I use a different set of Visual Studio plugins for managed and c++ unmanaged development. Some things I found:
Run your vmware setup on a machine with plenty of resources. I'll repeat...plenty of resources! A fast quad and 8GB of memory is what my current machine is running and it runs sweet (warning you need a 64bit OS for the 8GB!).
I wouldn't worry about app performance if your current physical hardware is old (2+ years). With a decent machine I find the virtualized apps run faster than on the legacy hardware!
When upgrading to a new workstation, p2v your old workstation. No need to worry about synergy or a KVM in the transition period any more!
I've used virtualisation so I could take my development environment around with me while travelling. As long as I could install MS Virtual PC, (and the PC/laptop had generous enough RAM) then I could access all my tools, VPN, Remote desktop links, SQL databases etc...
Worked fairly well, just a little slower than I like. I could have carted a laptop around, but found a small portable harddrive to be lighter/easier and just as effective.
However, consulting for several clients - all with different VPN requirements/passwords/databases/versions of frameworks & tools etc, I've found that having a Virtualised support environment for each is well worth it. Then multiple users have access to what is needed when supporting each client - they just need to either remote desktop (or run directly) the virtualised instance.
I've used VMs to handle work-related tasks that I didn't want / couldn't do on the company-issued laptop. Specifically, I needed to have several editions of the JRE running at the same time, which Java doesn't really like.
To get around this, I built several VMs that each ran the one tool I needed in trimmed-down XP instances.
Another thing to consider is that if you have a 5-yr-old server running some app, it's probably going to run just fine on a VM on new hardware. So, if you have a rack of old devices, buying one or two "real" servers, installing something like ESX (I'm most familiar with that tool, though Xen and others exist), then use a physical-to-virtual conversion tool to get those old devices switched to VMs so you can reduce your electricity consumption, management headaches, and worries about a critical device failing and not being able to find hardware for it.
We use VM for legacy apps, and have retired old machines that served up those apps. It eliminated the concern of matching drivers from NT to Win2k3. From a disaster recovery perspective this also helped as we couldn't find boxes to support the old apps at the DR data center.
The likes of VMWare are invaluable tools for browser testing of web applications. You can pretty easily test many combinations of OS and browser without having rank upon rank of physical machines running that software.