Tag Archives: virtualization

Technology, VMWare

ESXi Free Version Limitations

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I thought that after my previous post about ESXi really being free, I would write a post with the limitations I’ve noticed when you don’t have vCenter Server.  Having never used ESXi before and always having had vCenter I didn’t really know what to expect.

This is surely not an exhaustive list, but just things I’ve noticed so far.  Some of the items on these lists  really go into the differences of the licensed versions of the product, and I haven’t noted that here. (Standard, Enterprise, Enterprise Plus)

In no particular order….

* No cloning of virtual machines (Instead I just copy a machine directly on the data store and ‘add to inventory’)

* No templates (same as above)

* No Virtual Consolidated Backup (VCB) (With the free version you do not have access to download it at all)

* No Virtual Data Recovery (VDR) (same as above)

* No Clustering

* No vMotion

* Performance charts only display ‘Real Time’ statistics

* No Alert features

* No console on the host.  Management is ONLY through VIC

* Symantec’s VMWare agent will not work

* Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS)

* Power Management features

* Dynamically adding CPU and RAM to a running Guest

[UPDATE] * vStorage APIs (why Symantec’s AVVI will not work)

 

Things I was surprised to see…

* AD Integration for security in the Virtual Infrastructure Client (VIC)

* Resource groups

* Performance statistics of any kind

* Guest automatic startup/shutdown features

 

 

For now this is all I can think of.  I will try and keep this list in mind and update it as I notice other things.

Post a comment if there is something you have noticed!

Technology, VMWare

ESXi Really Is Free!

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Now that I’m past my first month at the new gig I have learned quite a bit.  I’ve gotten a handle on the environment and layout here, and I’m still finding things every day.  There are a few things that have been quite an adjustment to get used to.

One of the things I miss the most is VirtualCenter and shared storage.  When I first got here there was no virtualization and when we started discussing it the folks around here were pretty set that we would use Hyper-V.  The primary reason for this is that my new company is on a program for start-up companies called BizSpark which allows you access to any Microsoft product with deferred payment, so Hyper-V was essentially no cost for a while.   I recall hearing that ESXi is a free license when your just installing it on a single server, so I started poking around.  Without shared storage though, you cant do anything more with Hyper-V than you can with ESXi.  It turns out that ESXi is indeed available free of cost, and if you go onto VMWare’s website you can register, download, and get a license code for it in just a few minutes!

I installed ESXi 4.1 onto our new Dell server, setup my local storage, networking and authentication, and started setting up new guests just as I would have if we did have shared storage and VirtualCenter.  There are limitations, but many of them are management and monitoring/alerting features. Without VirtualCenter your not going to be able to VMotion, DRS, and several other advance features, but without shared storage you cant anyway!  As far as core functionality and usability the product really is complete and usable.

One of the notable limitations I’ve experienced is the lack of performance monitoring.  You only get the ‘RealTime’ reports of performance on your Host and Guests.  To relieve some of this I’ve downloaded Veeam’s (also free) Monitoring software.  It has more enhanced monitoring of the environment, although it also is limited and only allows for historical reports back 1 week.

All in all, with some known limitations, but a greatly improved price tag, you CAN run VMWare for free.

Backup Exec, Disaster Recovery, Technology, VMWare

DR Test Results

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Recently we performed our annual Disaster Recovery test.  We have learned something very valuable every year and tried to adjust our recovery plans accordingly, with this year being no different.  Even with all the new technology, DR still seems to be a tricky undertaking.

The first year we tested our plan we found that we really, really, REALLY, don’t want to restore Active Directory onto unlike hardware.  The following year we had gotten a node onto our MPLS cloud which allowed us to have a replicated AD server at the DR site.  This greatly reduced the problem of restoring AD.  The year after that we tested our phone system portion of the DR plan and discovered that working with the telco in a DR situation will be challenging at the very least.  In the two years since that second test there have been some major changes that removed our ability to have replicated AD, so we were back to square one on that front.

This year we thought we would do a restore of our two year old VMWare environment.  We had decided to keep the scope to restoring only “Tier 0” service.  This included VMWare ESX , Symantec BackupExec, vSphere, and AD.  Time permitting we planned to restore as many servers as possible beyond the Tier 0 that were the bare minimum.

In the last year we had made the choice to purchase Symantec’s BackupExec Agent for VMware Virtual Infrastructure (AVVI).  This is a BackupExec agent that allows you to backup VMWare Guest OS files directly through the ESX server and/or SAN.  The idea is that we would have our virtualized servers backed up to tape at the VMWare file level and that this would allow us to restore directly back to ESX. Continue reading DR Test Results →

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Backup Exec, Disaster Recovery, Networking, Technology, VMWare

Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity

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A large part of our PCI and SAS70 compliance is to maintain, and test, a comprehensive and viable Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity plan.  As part of this we will be conducting our annual test of the Technology Availability Plan of our DR plan this coming Friday.  A co-worker and I will be flying to Scottsdale, Arizona where our contracted Disaster Recovery Vendor has it’s data-center that is stipulated for us.

For this test we will be testing VMWare and our ability to recover our vSphere environment.  We will have 3 servers in the test.  The first will be a Windows machine that we will use to install our backup environment and restore data from tape.  The other two machines will be ESX servers that we will setup and configure as our VM hosts.  We will then restore vCenter Server from tape as well as several other critical servers that we call “Tier 0”.

Tier 0 for our DR Plan consists of critical servers that are required to bring the rest of our environment back online in a disaster.  These include, Active Directory, Backup, and a few other infrastructure services that are needed before anything else can be restored.

We hope to have a successful test, and also hope to uncover roadblocks before they become issues in a real world scenario.

Backup Exec, Technology, VMWare

Registry Hive Recovered?!

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We’re experiencing a weird pop-up message on our BackupExec 2010 server.  Every morning (after backups have run) we get a string of errors from Windows indicating that there was an error with the Registry Hive.  The error reads like this:

“Registry hive (file:) C:\WINDOWS\vmware-SYSTEM\vixmntapiXX was corrupted and it has been recovered.  Some data might have been lost.”

This error message is there every morning, and there will be anywhere from 10-20 of them that we have to click through. The only thing that changes is the XX is a number that increments.  As near as I can tell there is nothing wrong with the system and there are no symptoms of trouble other than the messages.

Going off the error message itself, and the fact that BE was running without this error until I turned on VMWare backups, I suspect that this is an error with the Agent for VMware Virtual Infrastructure (AVVI) otherwise know as the VMWare Agent.  I’ve tried some Googling and haven’t come up with much relating to this error specifically.  At this point its really just an annoyance as we have not see anything that would indicate an issue.  I’m just crossing my fingers that restores of data from AVVI will actually work!

We’re doing our Disaster Recovery Test this Friday so we’ll know pretty quick if these VMWare backups will work or not!  I guess we’ll find out.