In a series of blog posts, I'm going to be covering some of the basics that people just happen to overlook. Let's forget about cloud and look back to the real reason why we started virtualizing in the first place, the virtual machine. The virtual machine is key component to cloud, but having machines that are lean and clean allow greater density and better performance.

We all began a journey with Physical to Virtual (P2V) migrations. Converging infrastructure to run multiple virtual machines on top of beefy physical hardware. Along with this comes what I call The P2V Dilemma.

A physical server needs drivers to talk to it's hardware. A virtualized server, in essence, does the same thing. VMware presents new hardware to allow the virtual machine to talk to it's hypervisor. Think of the driver issue in a P2V migration like removing a video card and installing a new one. The drivers and hidden hardware are still there just in case you feel like popping the video card back in. A P2V will still have all of the old hardware in the virtual machine. Don't forget about services that physical servers used, namely HP server management services.

Solarwinds is looking for beta testers for a new product they are launching. Read Below.

Solarwinds is preparing to enter the App-Server Management market with the launch of Orion APM in early Q1 2011. Over the next few weeks, SolarWinds is offering the opportunity to preview the product, before it is available to everyone else. They're looking for a few good sys admins and IT managers to review the new Orion Application Performance Monitor... pre-launch. The process is pretty simple… There are few qualifications that folks need to meet, but if you get yourself an invite the company will give you some free software, a flip cam, and would just ask you to talk honestly about your experience trying out the product.  You can get more info here…

In a series of blog posts, I'm going to be covering some of the basics that people just happen to overlook. Let's forget about cloud and look back to the real reason why we started virtualizing in the first place, the virtual machine. The virtual machine is key component to cloud, but having machines that are lean and clean allow greater density and better performance.

I've gone into plenty of environments and every single VM is configured with 2vCPUs or more. Why is this such a problem? It all comes down to CPU cycles and ready time.

We as VMware admins have a virtualize first policy, but even more so, we should have a 1 vCPU first policy. Setting new virtual machines to 1 vCPU will result in an environment that won't be fighting for CPU cycles. A 2 socket server with quad core processors will give 8 cores of CPU on a host. A VM running on 1vCPU can use any one of those 8 cores whenever it's available. The "whenever it's available" is referred to as CPU Ready Time and can be viewed in ESXTOP. The ready time of a virtual machine, which is measured in milliseconds, is best described as the VM was ready to execute but had to wait for CPU resources. There in lies the problem with 2vCPU, 4vCPU and up VMs.

• 1 vCPU VM - can execute it's CPU cycle when any 1 of the 8 cores
• 2 vCPU VM - can only execute CPU cycle when 2 of the 8 cores are available
• 4 vCPU VM - can only execute CPU cycle when 4 of the 8 cores are available
• 8 vCPU VM - can only execute CPU cycle when all 8 cores are available

Usually, the load of LinkedIn emails seem to head right to the trash. But I saw a Merry Christmas from Veeam for all VCPs, vExperts, and VMware Instructors. Veeam is giving away 2 socket licenses of Veeam Backup and Replication along with Reporter for NFR use.

Early Merry Christmas. Thanks Veeam!

As I was sifting around, I came across some good public content from Cisco that many can benefit from. Alot of this content is really basic 101 level stuff, maybe even some 102 level, but if you need to get the basics down on virtualization, storage, networking, etc. this is a great place to start. To watch these videos, you must have a brighttalk.com account.

Is the ride over yet? NEVER! Xangati has posted a quick 5 minute youtube video of David Davis and myself from our VMworld presentation on the Top 10 Free Tools for vSphere Management. There is more to be said about the product than what's in the video so go check it out!

On my flight home from Boston, I started reading some of my VCAP Landing Page materials and found some cool things I never knew existed. Everything listed can be found in the ESX Configuration Guide and ESXi Configuration Guide for vSphere 4.1. These are all features that revolve about the security of vSphere hosts. The features don't have to be enabled, but they are all iinnherent to the operating system, giving vSphere an enhanced security profile.

Memory Hardening - The ESX/ESXi kernel, user-mode applications, and executable components such as drivers and libraries are located at random, non-predictable memory addresses. Combined with the non-executable memory protections made available by microprocessors, this provides protection that makes it difficult for malicious code to use memory exploits to take advantage of vulnerabilities.

Kernel Module Integrity - Digital signing ensures the integrity and authenticity of modules, drivers and applications as they are loaded by the VMkernel. Module signing allows ESXi to identify the providers of modules, drivers, or applications and whether they are VMware-certified.

Yesterday the twitterverse was filled with Vblock talk from some of the top people in the industry. That coupled with me getting out of Vblock week is what really sparked this post.

Vblock week was a gathering of #Team04, which included a handful of new vSpecialists but a majority crowd of vArchitects. The week was filled with talks from our fearless leader, Trey Layton, a lot of UCS cramming from Scott Lowe, getting our hands on UIM, getting more familiar with VMware View, knowing the offerings from RSA, and deep diving into Symmetrix and VMAX from David Robertson. This post isn’t geared at the technical offerings, the goal is to make you see the “true value” in Vblock.

A Vblock is a best of breed technologies union that enables a consumption of resources which we call cloud. If you are the techie person that wants to pick apart a Vblock and get into RAID levels or UCS blade configs, that’s awesome, but that’s not what Vblock is about.  Picture the Vblock as a whole, not a combination of products, but a single SKU that can provide a cloud solution. Are you getting the picture yet? Let’s dive a bit deeper.