Interesting announcement from Cisco and VMware during the VMworld 2011 which was regarding the VXLAN capability. Both company had invited a group of product principle together to submit the VXLAN to IETF for approval as a standard for future.

Let’s talk a little bit more about what is VXLAN and why do we need that. As of today, DR solution are commonly deploy by every enterprise environment. Did you realize 1 of the biggest challenge which always happen on the DNS record, hard coded IP segment, subnet and VLAN which always require human interaction to manually change it, to allow a success fail over of the DR scenario? Well, I think this is just 1 of the major issue commonly face. With Cisco Nexus 7000 come with OTV (Overlay Transport Virtualization) which allow you to stretch the Layer 2 traffic over Layer 3, with minimal bandwidth requirement. Cisco had done a great job to the enterprise to address this, which now you can have both side learning the same VLAN, Subnet and ip address. A DNS and ip changes is no longer require as both end are transparent with similar VLAN.

What about Cloud? I always think the major challenges on cloud are Network. VXLAN created are mainly to address to concerns of the public cloud provider. That was mainly due to the limitation on the current VLAN architecture, which only allow 4000++ VLAN to be created in the single manage environment. Imagine you as the public cloud provider, you will easily hit the maximum number and you do not want to build another new infrastructure due to this limit too. According to the Cisco Expert during VMworld, the additional header is been added to the bit and byte to enhance the additional number of VLAN could be deploy in the single environment. At the same time, it deliver the similarity of OTV from private to public cloud, which bring the Hybrid Cloud to the reality of tomorrow.

I will try to find out more technical information about this area with my counterpart back to Malaysia, and share again in details with another post. From the intention of both Cisco and VMware, they are pushing hard for VXLAN on this and I do believe this is 1 of the key area need to be addressed before the hybrid cloud environment could continue scale especially on the public cloud provider perspectives.

You can view the full details of the IETF submission from Cisco and VMware from HERE.

Basically my VMware Data Recovery configuration are mounted on Linux Samba network share at “\\xx.xx.xx.44\oper” and “\\xx.xx.xx.44\share” as you can see below.

Without future changes make on VDR appliance box, I can easily login with default userID: root and followed by standard Linux command: mount and I can found network share password display on the screen which mean password disclose here.

Personally I do not think this is the best way due to security reason and I would suggest VMware engineer make according changes on it. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

Here, I would like to share how to change virtual machine virtual network adapter manually. In fact, you may know you can add a new virtual adapter and choose the adapter type from drop down menu.

Here you go:

1. Login to VMware ESX server
2. Type vmware-cmd -l and look for virtual machine (vmx = vm config file) which require change virtual network adapter
3. You may check VMware KB Article: 1001805 for available network adapters details.

# VMXNET — The VMXNET virtual network adapter has no physical counterpart. VMXNET is optimized for performance in a virtual machine. Because operating system vendors do not provide built-in drivers for this card, you must install VMware Tools to have a driver for the VMXNET network adapter available.

# Flexible — The Flexible network adapter identifies itself as a Vlance adapter when a virtual machine boots, but initializes itself and functions as either a Vlance or a VMXNET adapter, depending on which driver initializes it. With VMware Tools installed, the VMXNET driver changes the Vlance adapter to the higher performance VMXNET adapter.

# E1000 — An emulated version of the Intel 82545EM Gigabit Ethernet NIC, with drivers available in most newer guest operating systems, including Windows XP and later and Linux versions 2.4.19 and later.

# VMXNET 2 (Enhanced) — The VMXNET 2 adapter is based on the VMXNET adapter but provides some high-performance features commonly used on modern networks, such as jumbo frames and hardware offloads. This virtual network adapter is available only for some guest operating systems on ESX/ESXi 3.5 and later.

4. Edit Virtual Machine vmx file and choose virtual network adapter as show below:

Flexible
Nothing have to add into vmx file.

VMXNET 3
ethernetX.virtualDev = “vmxnet3″

Note: ethernetX = number of ethernet card.

5. Save the VMX file and power on your virtual machine.
6. Power on your virtual machine using virtual center or type # vmware-cmd your_virtualmachine.vmx start

Enjoy!

1. Higher consolidation ratio in virtualization with the latest CPU, memory and servers performance
2. Higher capacity disk drive which significant reduce the number of storage expansion require
3. Virtual I/O which allow the higher utilization of the available bandwidth in data center
4. UCS to provide consolidation and higher capacity of bandwidth to support network and storage utilization in the data center

I may had not included all the facts here, but these should be good enough to point out the changing happening to the current market. I had been impressed with the IBM 3950 M2 previously but now, the Unisys alliances with VMware is another choice which provide similar features for the large environment which contains large number of machines running. The unisys Enterprise Server ES7000 could be the ideal machine in this case. 16 physical cpu sockets which contain 6 core each from Intel Xeon 7400 series of processor, and maximum of 1TB of memory with 8GB memory module in a single server. If we do a calculation, you should able to have 96 cores of CPUs in a single server. This will allow more virtual machine to be consolidated into it.

You can view here for more information about the hardware details.

So, with all the technology available, we should able to have our data center running with less number of server racks for servers, storage and networks. This had significant reduce the space require to run a data center, and allow the users to expand the life cycle of the data center in a longer term. If I have to choose to invest 1 Million on DC expansion VS 1 Million of Virtualization, servers and storage, I will definitely choose the 2nd option which provide additional capacity and reduce the space require by a data center. In a longer term, the real estate cost, power & cooling always cost us a big sum of dollars to keep the data center running.

In the near future, there will be 8 cores and 12 cores CPU in the future market. When it come to the time for us to refresh the current ESX servers which run on quad cores or 6 cores base server, the new servers capacity may be double the current servers that we using, and for sure it will allow more machine to be consolidated.

Before the approach on Xsigo, I am actually working on the new design plan to improve the performance and capabilities of the existing virtual infrastructure for the large scale virtualization in our environment. I am actually think about the Cisco director switch on Fiber channel and the network switches of 6509 with 10Gb module, but the cost of doing this, is really going to kill us for the current economy down turn. Suddenly, I been introduce by my buddy with this brand new products which I setup the POC now and I found that is more make sense to look in this product to unlock the under utilize bandwidth in our DC include both Network and Fiber Channel.

Advantages:

1. HCA is cheaper than HBA as we may need 2 HBA per server for redundancy purpose, which only provide 8Gb bandwidth, the HCA will provide 20Gb per HCA, which will be powerful enough for virtualization purpose.
2. HCA will combine both network and fiber channel capabilities, reduce cabling requirement and improve bandwidth utilization.
3. With Vnic and Vhba, we will able to create and utilize existing available bandwidth by reduce the number of FC and Network switches in the Data Center.
4. I will able to reduce the cabling from 18 to 2 HCA connection per ESX in my environment

I am currently stress test the performance on the Xsigo chassis on our ESX, interesting that it will not sacrifice the performance as it able to perform as same as the previous configuration we done. Now, it provide the opportunity for me to utilize the FC ports in my Data Center without increase the number of FC switches, which is currently 95% utilize. Imagine, with 4Gb FC for HBA, except the high performance database server, we will not able to utilize the storage bandwidth on each FC ports. Same time, the gigabit network, will not be consume for more than 10% most of time, will provide more resources for the system which require extra bandwidth in the data center. Xsigo has the intelligent to manage the bandwidth and assign as needed.

A short summarize, it does looks similar to VMware itself as it provide better utilization with your existing infrastructure which is idle or low utilization most of the time. Again, 10Gb network and FCoE are still kinda expensive and Xsigo does provide an alternative solution for most of the customer needs.

Said for example, I have a SuSE Linux VM template sitting on ESX 1 which is only using “VMNetwork1″ network setting. Whenever I clone or deploy this template to ESX 2 which is only using “VMNetwork2″ network setting, I’m sure you will getting annoying error when power on the virtual machine.

You can’t change using “Edit Settings”.

How to solve this problem?
- SSH into VMware ESX host

- Run vmware-cmd command to list down the VM configuration file

[root@myesx05 root]# vmware-cmd -l
/vmfs/volumes/231c7f90-cbf17123-d735-0015273a436a/
SLES10SP2/SLES10SP2.vmx

Note: Virtual machine configurations are stored as files with a .vmx extension.The VMX file is just a text file with specific fields that define the virtual machine’s configuration.

- Edit configuration file

[root@myesx05 root]# vi
/vmfs/volumes/231c7f90-cbf17123-d735-0015273a436a/
SLES10SP2/SLES10SP2.vmx

- Look for network setting
ethernet0.networkName = “VMNetwork1″

- Change “VMNetwork1″ to “VMNetwork2″ and save it

- Restart the VM machine and the network problem should be solve.

Enjoy!