NPT: Nested Page Table

from IT20.info: AMD to add new (interesting) virtualization feature support

It's interesting that up until a year ago many people were showing their
AMD tattoos claiming that Opteron was king of the hill and Intel was going nuts.
Nowadays all these people seem to wear very nice shirts that hide these tattoos
as there seems to be a consensus now that Intel, backed by their immense R&D
capabilities and more than immense marketing funds, have returned to be king of
the hill again leaving the AMD Opteron (and even their own Itanium processor) in
the dust. This is mainly due to two big achievements:

[Read all...]

Are you syncronized?

One of the most important thing in an enterprise infrastructure is being syncronized with the res of the world. For this we use ntp servers (Network time protocol). With ESX we syncronize the physical hosts and then, we flag the "syncronize with host" check box inside VmWare Tools window.
Let's have a deeper look into ESX configuration with external ntp source. We can use as sources the three pools that vmware give us as an example in the knowledge base article.
The three NTP servers are the following (it's a best practice to edit /etc/hosts and insert the three enties):
194.185.27.180 0.vmware.pool.ntp.org
88.33.54.219 1.vmware.pool.ntp.org
212.97.63.99 2.vmware.pool.ntp.org

As often happens (and it's desiderable), ESX host are behind a firewall; so let's give some iptables commands in order to open UDP port number 123 to and from the Internet (pointing to vmware ntp pools):

iptables -A lan-to-internet -s Our_Host -d 212.97.63.99 -p UDP --dport 123 --sport 123 -j allowed
iptables -A lan-to-internet -s Our_Host -d 88.33.54.219 -p UDP --dport 123 --sport 123 -j allowed
iptables -A lan-to-internet -s Our_Host -d 194.185.27.180 -p UDP --dport 123 --sport 123 -j allowed
iptables -A internet-to-lan -d Our_Host -s 212.97.63.99 -p UDP --dport 123 --sport 123 -j allowed
iptables -A internet-to-lan -d Our_Host -s 88.33.54.219 -p UDP --dport 123 --sport 123 -j allowed
iptables -A internet-to-lan -d Our_Host -s 194.185.27.180 -p UDP --dport 123 --sport 123 -j allowed

Now we must edit /etc/ntp.conf file, so that it read as the following:

restrict 127.0.0.1
restrict default kod nomodify notrap
server 0.vmware.pool.ntp.org
server 1.vmware.pool.ntp.org
server 2.vmware.pool.ntp.org
driftfile /var/lib/ntp/drift

Last but not least let's start ntpd service (service ntpd start) and config with chkconfig the automatic startup for ntpd at runlevel 234.

It's not compulsory to use vmware pools and there are different thinkings about the syncronization of virtual machines: someone for example prefer to syncronize the domain controllers with external source directly instead of using the flag inside vmtools check-box

cheers
\mf

italian version of this post

I like this approach! (from Massimo Re Ferrè blog)

Very good post on Massimos' blog.
he says:

Hardware virtualization these days is a hot topic and we all know that. There are many customers looking into it for the first time and one of the problems they are facing right now is how they are going to size their new virtual infrastructure. Lately I have received lots of requests from many people in order to help them project the hardware investments (in terms of physical servers) that they need to jump onto the virtualization band wagon. In this post I'd like to try to provide you with a very quick and dirty method to do that.

I like this kind of approach and I invite to read all the post

cheers
\mf

From VmWare Site: VMware and SAP

from VMWare site:

VMware Announces Support from SAP of VMware ESX Server for Production
Environments Responding to Customer Demand, Companies Establish Global
Technology Partnership; VMware Infrastructure is Only Virtualization Platform
That Supports SAP® Solutions with Both Windows and Linux on Industry-standard
Hardware.

[read all...]

What's new in VI3.5

hi all, new and interesting post on Mike Laverick blog with free downloadable PDF guide.
The title is Free RTFM Guide: “What’s New & Different in Vi3.5"
Thanks Mike ;)
cheers
\mf

VUGIt Blog is born: long life to VUGIt!

Hello all,
about one year ago the VUGIt (Virtualization Users Group Italia) have been founded, and now we have a blog, too.
I've added it to my Blogroll but I'd like to put a strike on it adding this post: VUGIt Blog (VMCafè, for friends :) ) is full of interesting posts about virtualization for italian speaking enthusiast!

Hope you'll find it useful for your works!
If you like virtualization and you speak italian, pls, have a look!

cheers
\mf

From Mike Laverick Site

Hello all,
a very interesting article from RTFM blog.

Mike says:

Whilst I was at VMworld 2007 this year there was a session I never got round to attending or watching on the VMworld website. It subject was about the myths of virtualization/VMware. In recent months I’ve seen that as virtualization and VMware’s star has risen, there has been a rise and rise in urban myths and FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt).

[Read all...]

\mf

ESX 3.5 released

Hello all,
ESX 3.5 has been released. Check out on VmWare Web site!
Ready to download:
- ESX 3.5
- Virtual Center 2.5
- New Converter
- New VCB

What you will get:

• Storage VMotion
• Swapfiles-less VMotion
• Update manager
• Server consolidation advisor
• Lockdown Mode
• Distributed Power Management (DPM)
• Guest OS disaster recovery capability
• Provisioning across datacenters objects
• Integration with VMware Consolidate Backup (VCB) and VMware Converter 4.0
• Integration with Wyse multimedia redirection engine
• Support for VMware Server 2.0
• Support for AMD Rapid Virtualization Indexing (formerly Nested Page Tables or NPT)
• Support for Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP)
• Support for InfiniBand network cards
• Support for 10Gbit Ethernet network cards
• Support for TCP/IP Offload Engine (TOE) network cards
• Support for network load balancing algorithms
• Support for N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV)
• Support for VCB over iSCSI SANs
• Support for IPv6 in virtual networking
• Support for para-virtualized Linux guest OSes
• Support for Intel I/O Acceleration Technology (IOAT)
• Support for Jumbo Frames
• Support for Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF)
• Support for SATA storage devices
• Support for 200 hosts and 2000 virtual machines
• Support for 128GB RAM per host and for 64GB RAM per virtual machine


cheers
\mf