VMWare Infrastructure 3.5 – A Worthy Upgrade

We’ve been using VMWare’s Infrastructure 3.0 since September 2007, with fantastic results. One of the first things I did after coming on board as IT Manager at WCCC was to start us on the path of virtualizing servers wherever it made sense, but rather than stick with the free VMWare Server product (which I’d had extensive experience with at my prior job), I decided to bite the bullet and go for the more powerful ESX server, as I wanted to get us on a path that would allow for better performance and the ability to do things that the free (while amazingly capable) VMWare Server product cannot do.

Because we’re a small shop, I decided to go with the “VMWare Infrastructure Foundation Acceleration Kit” (which should not be confused with the “VMWare Infrastructure Foundation” edition, which is the new name for the old “VMWare Starter Edition”, the most basic of the VMWare ESX server editions. Clear as mud?)

Anyway, the Infrastructure Foundation Acceleration Kit is basically a special bundle containing three licenses of VMWare Infrastructure Foundation (formerly VMWare Starter Edition) and one license of VMware VirtualCenter Foundation, which is the management server that lets you manage your ESX servers as a whole, easily migrate VMs between servers, patch and update them easily, etc. All that for around $3600 ($3000 for the Infrastructure Foundation Acceleration kit itself, and $600 for one year of their cheapest support, which is mandatory.) While that may seem like a high price, compared to the other (Standard and Enterprise) editions of VMWare Infrastructure it is a steal. With this bundle you end up with the ability to run three ESX servers and manage them with a single Virtual Center server, all for a fraction of the price you would have to pay for the more advanced editions.

All that said, the real purpose of this post is to highlight the fact that VMWare has done a very cool thing with the new version of ESX server (Virtual Infrastructure Foundation version 3.5), which we got to upgrade to for “free” because of our Gold-level support contract. What they have done is basically lift all of the limiting restrictions that existed for the old Virtual Infrastructure Starter Edition (which again, at the risk of sounding redundant, is now called VMWare Infrastructure Foundation edition.) The old VMWare Starter Edition was a good deal, but came with some serious limitations placed on it. Specifically, it was limited to 8 GB total RAM in the server, could not connect to a SAN (local and NAS storage were the only things allowed), and you could not do virtual SMP.

Guess what? ALL of those limitations are now lifted in the new 3.5 version! Virtual Infrastructure Foundation will now recognize any amount of RAM in your server, will allow SAN storage, and will do virtual SMP within VMs! And as crazy as it seems, the price did not increase over the old much-more-limited version. The bottom line is that there is now almost zero penalty for running the lowest-end edition of ESX server. In the past you had to give up a lot of features to run the “cheap” version of ESX, but those times have changed. Thank you VMWare!

Finally, we recently performed the upgrade from ESX 3.02 to 3.5 on our two servers, and both went perfectly smooth. The new version 3.5 is faster, and takes advantage of some virtualized memory tricks the latest generation of Intel processors can do. As an example, I’m running nine production VMs on a single Proliant DL360G5 server, which is a single 2GHz quad core with 10GB memory box. Only about 5 GB of physical RAM is actually in use at any given time, and total processor utilization averages around 1.7GHz (out of a pool of 8GHz total processing available). The machine can easily handle a few more VMs without breaking a sweat. The other Proliant DL380G5 box will handle our new Exchange 2007 server (virtualized, of course!) and a couple of other things. That leaves one unused license of ESX from our Foundation Acceleration Kit available for future needs.

Highly recommended if you want to step beyond the basic VMWare Server and into serious virtualization.

CrossLoop is Cool

This may be old news, but a buddy of mine recently turned me on to CrossLoop, a very cool way to remote control another machine without having to deal with installation and firewall issues that plague most other solutions (or cost $$). It’s not a solution for “corporate” remote control of machines on a LAN, but is a great solution for remote-controlling grandma’s computer (or any other friend/relative that nags you for computer help.) CrossLoop is great because anyone who can download a file will be able to get up and running, after which you can easily RC their machine and fix whatever is wrong. You can easily walk someone through downloading and running the client via the phone or email within 5 minutes.

The CrossLoop client is based on TightVNC, but it packages it in such a way that makes it brain-dead-easy for novices to install and run. The magic is mating the VNC client with the third-party VPN servers at CrossLoop to let clients see each other and connect, even when there are multiple firewalls and NATs between you and the remote machine. If you can get out via HTTP, you can connect to a remote machine. If you’ve ever tried to get Windows’ Remote Assistance working in such situations (and failed), you know how cool that is…

The simple instructions for using CrossLoop can be found here, but here is some additional information not readily distilled from them:

• The CrossLoop web site really pushes the idea of creating an account. Supposedly accounts give you more advanced features like being able to maintain lists of machines you regularly RC, the ability to “advertise” your expertise in certain areas, etc, but it is absolutely not necessary to create an account to simply use CrossLoop.
• When you run the client you are presented with a dialog that implies you must either create a new account, or log into an existing one:

• But this is not the case! If you simply close this window, you are then presented with the normal client interface and you can either connect to a remote machine or allow a remote machine to connect to you:
  

It goes without saying that CrossLoop traffic is encrypted, and that you can’t remote control someone’s machine without them being there to explicitly allow the connection. All in all this is the slickest system I’ve seen yet for quickly and easily getting a remote control session going between you and someone who needs your help. Oh yeah… you can also transfer files over the CrossLoop connection. Way cool.

xv6800 Part Deux

It’s been a few weeks since I first reviewed the Verizon xv6800 Smartphone, and in that time something miraculous has happened. In a desperate attempt to get some useful battery life out of the unit, I did a hard reset. After that the phone wouldn’t provision and I had to call Verizon, and they led me through a process that had me enter some crazy-long authentication string. After that it provisioned just fine.

The miraculous part is that my battery life (literally) overnight went from “barely making it through the day” to “can go three days without a charge!” In addition to that, whereas before if I left ActiveSync even running I wouldn’t make it until 5pm without needing to recharge, I can now leave ActiveSync in “direct push” mode and the battery life is still fantastic. Email now often arrives on my phone before I even see it in Outlook.

I have no idea why resetting the phone caused such a dramatic increase in battery life. Perhaps one of the several apps I’d installed was using CPU continuously or something? I’m now going to start adding back apps one-at-a-time, with plenty of time between each one to make sure it isn’t a battery killer, before proceeding to the next.

Got SpinRite?

If you’ve been in IT for 15-20 years, you probably remember SpinRite II, the miracle “drive recovery” program that could work wonders by low-level formatting and “re-interleaving” hard drives without losing any data in the process. Back in the day, I used it often to re-low-level-format MFM drives that I’d stick on an RLL controller, thus making them instantly 50% bigger A few years ago I stumbled back onto grc.com and was surprised to see that SprinRite was still around, now at version 6.

For those unfamiliar with SpinRite, it is a low-level drive maintenance and repair tool that works at the raw sector level, thus it cares not a whit about what file system is actually on the drive. (For example, I’ve used it to fix an ailing ReplayTV drive by putting it into a PC then running SR on it.) It uses some unique methods to bring the heads in from various positions and “angles” to approach a bad sector, in an attempt to get the bad sector to read just ONCE, and in some cases even when that isn’t possible can use heuristics to infer what the missing data should actually be. And even when the entire sector can’t be read completely, at least some of the data in that sector is almost always recovered. SpinRite’s one caveat is that it needs to boot from DOS to run, which precludes running it on non-Intel hardware without a BIOS. Anyway, I bought a new copy and used it occasionally to get a failing drive to work, but it’s never saved my rear end, until now.

The following is a paraphrase of recent events at my workplace. It all started when I came into the office one day to find the Cisco Unity Express voice mail system down…

Me: tries rebooting the Unity module (which lives in a 2800 router). Nada. I decide to go straight to the source and call Cisco support. The tech works for 90 minutes trying to get the system to boot, but nothing works. Yup, he finally confirms the Unity module’s disk has apparently crashed and there’s nothing more he can do.

Cisco: “So, I hope you have a good backup, because your entire Unity drive is gone.”

Me: “Uh…”

(At this point I need to interject that I’d only been on the job a couple of months, and the place was a mess IT-wise. For example, the Exchange server hadn’t been backed up in years… literally. So voice mail was just one more system I hadn’t yet gotten around to even looking at, let alone making sure it was backed up)

Me: “Uh… let me look through the files the prior IT guy left… aha! I see what appears to be a backup from… er… 6 months ago!”

Cisco: “Hmm.. this appears to be a backup of the system prior to upgrading to this version, so it is now incompatible with the version you’re running, and useless. You don’t have another good backup?”

Me: “NOOOOOOO!!!”

Cisco: “Ok, then we’ll overnight you a new Unity module and I’ll call you tomorrow so we can start the process of rebuilding your entire voicemail system and calling tree” [insert ominous horror movie music]

Me: “Now where did I put that cyanide?” So I go in an pull the Unity module in preparation for the next day’s hel…er… voice mail resurrection, and I notice that the drive on the tiny PC board is just a normal-looking notebook drive.

“Hmmm” I think… so I dismount the drive from the Unity motherboard and find an old Sony Vaio that looks to have a similar drive. Yep, it fits in the Sony’s drive cage! Then I fire up SpinRite 6 and it chews on the drive for nearly half the day. Eventually it finishes with a bunch of “uncorrectable” sectors in its display, but finishes all the same.

I finally pop the drive back onto the Unity board and back into the router, say a quick prayer, and fire it up… AND IT BOOTS! I am stunned, flabbergasted, ecstatic and humbled all in the same instant. I immediately dial Cisco back (this is still day one, the new part hasn’t even arrived) and get the tech back on the line…

Me: “So, I pulled the drive off the Unity module and put it in a notebook and ran this utility, see…”

Cisco: “you WHAT?!”

Me: “you know, SpinRite? It’s a disk utility, and it somehow resurrected the drive and now the system has booted so I need to make a backup NOW, but I don’t know how…” Cisco then logs into the now-perfectly-functioning voice mail system and shows me how to make my first decent backup. We make two more for good measure, and the drive fails again two hours later.

The next day the new module arrived and I was able to restore the backups within minutes, and we didn’t lose a single voice mail. There is no doubt that without SpinRite things would not have turned out so rosy. This is one tool that I will always keep in my bag of tricks! I know Steve Gibson gets a lot of flack for selling “snake oil” or often playing the role of Chicken Little in regards to computer security, but the fact is that I don’t think there is another utility out there that would have gotten this drive running like it did, just long enough to retrieve the data.

Oh yeah… The Cisco guy was so jazzed that he supposedly told the entire support team he works with the story

Sometimes there is a happy ending.

Brad Delp

It’s been a year since Brad Delp, former lead singer of Boston (among other bands) took his own life. Brad had what I consider to be one of the best rock voices ever, and Boston songs have always held a special place in my heart since buying that first 45 back in ’76. To this day More Than a Feeling is my all-time favorite rock song.

Rockin Away is one of the last things Brad recorded, with ex-Boston guitar player Barry Goudreau. It is a biographical piece about Brad’s musical career that is now even more poignant and sad.