Detect Virtual Hardware Version From Within the Guest

By stu | June 25, 2009

Like most enterprises, we wrap up VMware tools with our own logic and install transforms… y’know, stuff like setting the video hardware acceleration level in the VM before running the tools installer so you don’t get pop-ups, not installing the hgfs driver, etc etc.

The problem when a new version of tools comes out (ie along with an ESX patch, update or major new version) is that you need to do some kind of host level detection to ensure you don’t install a higher level tools into a VM that is running on a downlevel host, as it’s not supported. Of course, running downlevel tools on higher level hosts is supported for the most part (within the same major version at least). Often this problem exists for only a short period while your fleet is upgaded – once that is complete, you can blat out the correct tools version for your estate wholesale.

But unfortunately there is no surefire way of determining what version of ESX a guest is running on from within a guest that doesn’t have VMware tools installed. Even with tools installed, there’s no way I know of but there could be some kind of undocumented backdoor way of finding out – who knows.

So with the introduction of ESX 4, I thought the best bet would be to check whether a guest was running on Virtual Hardware 7 (HW 7) or not. Sure, it’s possible to create version 4 (HW 4) guests on ESX 4, but at least if you found HW 7 you could be absolutely certain that the ESX 4 version of tools should be installed. And besides, I will be mandating that any new machines created on vSphere will have HW 7 so the only things on HW 4 will be migrated machines.
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VMware Studio 2.0 – Public Beta Out Next Monday!

By stu | June 24, 2009

The latest installment of the VMware Coffee Talk Webinars was today, covering off the soon to be released VMware Studio 2.0. But the amount of change and feature enhancements that have gone into this new version, it could seriously skip a few numbers and go straight to 6.0 or something – it’s a _massive_ release, and I’m simply astounded at the amount of excellent thought and work that has gone into the product. All while remaining completely free of charge.

But rather than me write about it here, you really should go view the webex yourselves (pdf’s available now, webex recording available soon) – it really will be worth your while. My fears of a developer focused Eclipse interface have been destroyed – anyone with a modicum of intelligence (ie anyone reading this :-) will find their way around it easily.

One thing I will mention here though, is an amusing fail by my distinguished VMware SE, Rob. I was taunting him about the abundance of donuts in the office today via private chat, however Rob replied to ‘All Participants’ instead of just to me. In case the transcript of the webex doesn’t make it online, here are the entries in all their glory:

June 24, 2009 9:34:02 AM from Rob Upham
to All Participants: Stop. You’re making me hungry.

June 24, 2009 9:34:17 AM from Rob Upham
to All Participants: Donuts are made from animals, ya know!

June 24, 2009 9:34:43 AM from Pablo Roesch
to All Participants: what kind of donuts are we talking about here ?

June 24, 2009 9:34:54 AM from Rob Upham
to All Participants: Sorry everyone – that should’ve been private(!)

June 24, 2009 9:35:06 AM from Stuart Radnidge
to All Participants: busted!

June 24, 2009 9:35:16 AM from Stuart Radnidge
to All Participants: but to answer your question, krispy kreme of course :D

June 24, 2009 9:35:20 AM from Pablo Roesch
to All Participants: private donuts are cool

Sorry Rob, but I really did think that was funny :)

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Why Are So Many Orchestration Tools Developer Focused?

By stu | June 22, 2009

This is something that has quietly been boiling away in the depths of the cavern of my mind for a while now – why is it that all the big name orchestration tools on the market (currently) target developers? You need to know Javascript if you want to do anything interesting with VMware vCenter Orchestrator, C# for Citrix Workflow Studio (and most other Windows Workflow Foundation derivatives), and Java for tools like Enigmatec.

Requiring developers for infrastructure automation is kinda useless – if you want to get anywhere fast, you need an admin who can write a spec properly (yeh right) or a developer who has knowledge of operational process and infrastructure (equally improbable). Or some kind of hybrid engineer who can do both but neither very well, and those guys are expensive. Not to mention stubborn and temperamental. Why not just build the tool for the people who run the infrastructure in the first place? Isn’t orchestration supposed to be making their lives easier?

I’m bringing this up now because a new plugin announcement popped up on Eclipse Plugin Central today, for VMware Studio 2.0. If you don’t know what Eclipse is, you’re proving my point about tools like this being developer focused nicely. That’s not to say VMware Studio 2.0 will be more developer focused than admin focused, but choosing Eclipse has developer written all over it.

Having said that, I think it’s a good move by VMware to standardise on something like Eclipse for tools like this. The workflow development environment in the Orchestrator client is _very_ cool indeed, but I can’t help thinking that a lot of effort must go into that side of the tool. Effort that could be minimised if it also used Eclipse, as you’d have at least 2 products using a common platform. Other tools like LifeCycle Manager could potentially follow suit.

A special VMware Studio 2.0 Coffee Talk webinar is planned for June 24th. As one of the aforementioned developery infrastructure engineer types, I’m quite looking forward to learning where VMware are going with Studio. But I’m not sure the general population of VI admins will be so keen. My advice is for all to tune into the webinar and decide for yourselves as to how useful an Eclipse based VMware Studio will be. My personal hope is that I can use it to remaster ESXi. Ooo did I say that out loud? ;-)

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Rethinking the Guest

By stu | May 24, 2009

With the arrival of vSphere 4.0, it’s a good time to revisit your guest standards. Not just what virtual hardware and resource allocations you use by default, but also what standard software you deploy into the guest. Virtualisation has been labelled a game changing technology, but when most people talk of this, they refer to it on levels outside of the guest. There is however just as much potential for changing the game within the guest. It’s time to start thinking about how you might externalise some of the stuff you would normally run within the guest, because doing so will allow you to have a much more dynamic infrastructure as well as better prepare for the inevitable day when “your” (and I use that term very loosely) infrastructure is hosted in someone else’s cloud.
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Yeehhh Iii, Oohhh, I’m Still Alive…

By stu | May 23, 2009

And so is my PC, after suffering a fatal power supply failure a few days ago. Hence I couldn’t put up the obligatory “vSphere 4 GA” post on the 21st :( . Oh well. I’ll try and make up for the lack of content of late with a return to the Sunday Afternoon Architecture and Philosophy (SAAAP!) series tomorrow.

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Lookout London – ILIO is in Town, May 20th

By stu | May 18, 2009

Anyone who has joined the VMware communities roundtable over the past few weeks has probably heard me mention ILIO a few times, not to mention ppl like Brian Madden calling it out as a potential ‘game changer’. If Atlantis deliver, it most certainly will be (and I have no reason to doubt they will deliver).

If you’re in London this Wednesday (May 20th) you can come see why for yourself – Atlantis Computing will be holding a half day ‘Lunch n Learn’ at the Marriott Regents Park. Agenda is as follows:

12-1pm Lunch
1-1:30pm Virtualization Landscape and ILIO
1:30-2:30pm Demo
2:30-3:00pm Q&A
3:00-4:00pm Networking & Follow-up

If you can make it, let Rajiv Pimplaskar (VP of Sales) know by emailing him on rajiv [at] atlantiscomputing.com.

See y’all there!

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FUD Me??? No, FUD You!!!

By stu | May 12, 2009

I hereby declare this will be the very last time I _ever_ post about the virtualisation FUD wars that are going on right now. What humours me the most is that Microsoft are acting as if they are equal to VMware both in product maturity and feature set, while declaring to be orders of magnitudes cheaper.

The simple fact is that the 2 platforms cannot be compared on a class level – at best they can only be compared as objects of the same class. The same way a Fiat 500 and a Ferrari F430 Spider are both cars, yet no one would be stupid enough to compare the 2 and argue that one was “better” than the other. Which one you may choose is entirely dependent on the use case and the budget. If you live in Inglewood and need a car to get to work in Compton and have to park on the street at both places, would you buy a Ferrari? No. If you live in Portofino and need something to get you to the office in Milan quickly a couple of times a month, will you buy the Fiat? Not if you had an office in Milan could afford to live in Portofino…

But moreso, if Fiat did take a swipe at Ferrari do you think Ferrari would actually respond? Of course not. The relationship of Microsoft and VMware should be somewhat like this. Hyper-V will surely be good enough for some use cases, even if it is merely to point out to your boss how much better ESX is, which is probably what 749 999 of the 750 000 downloads were used for (ooo, burn! But that would also explain why they hardly got any support calls, no?). ESX will clearly be more suitable for others, such as running production applications in enterprise datacenters. OK Hyper-V could do that too, but only if your app had massive redundancy built into it in the application layer, like Microsoft.com does. How many enterprise applications have the same kind of architecture?

When it comes down to it, our job is to determine what the use cases for any given piece of infrastructure are, and make an objective technical recommendation as to what to use where. Our employers pay us, our allegiances are to them – not software companies. There is no unfounded bias to one vendor or another, we make our choices based on sound research and higher intelligence. FUD me if anyone is going to make decisions like that based on marketing.

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