thinking sysadmin

Scott Lowe recently linked to a VMware KB article entitled Storing swap files on VMFS when running virtual machines from NFS. The article (from 3/31/2008) is perhaps the latest word from VMware in the frustrating back-and-forth on whether placing an ESX VM’s swap on NFS is acceptable or not.
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On the ESX console, do the following:

• Read the documentation for each patch.
• Group patches that can be installed together into a directory, possibly an NFS mount available on all your ESX hosts.
• Cd into the patch directory and untar the patches:

  for i in `ls *.tgz`; do
tar -xvzf $i
done

• Install the patches:

  for i in `ls`; do
if [ -d $i ]; then
cd $i
esxupdate --noreboot update
cd ..
fi
done

• Reboot.

Am I the only one that hates VMware’s patch download site and its corresponding applet? (Maybe – I couldn’t find anyone complaining about it looking quickly on VMware’s message boards, which I found most odd.) I’ve never been able to get it to launch under Firefox, only under IE (even on the same machine with the same JVM). And when it does launch, it is slow as molasses.
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I missed this: Apparently the OpenSolaris 2008.05 AMI on EC2 has reached a capacity limit. So, while I got Sun’s approval this morning for their OpenSolaris/SXCE.79 on EC2 beta, I don’t get to use OpenSolaris until they add more capacity; SXCE.79 is a nice consolation prize, though.

VMware has just released a paper entitled Comparison of Storage Protocol Performance (seen at Scale the Mind and blog.scottlowe.org); maybe this will help deflate some of the too-often repeated speculation that NFS is too slow for VMware ESX.
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So, you recognize that FreeBSD isn’t officially supported on VMware ESX, but you want to give it a try anyway? Here’s what I did to get it installed, with VMware Tools and using e1000 Ethernet drivers:

Installation was for the most part straightforward – I chose “Other” for the operating system type, and allocated resources like I would for pretty much any other operating system. The install from an NFS-mounted ISO image worked fine; I’ve only run into two issues so far: Installing VMware Tools and changing the Ethernet drivers from the default Lance drivers.
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Given my last post, it’s pretty ironic that I’m right now in the middle of a VMware ESX deployment at work. VMware seems to have this reality distortion field around it that makes tech management think that – despite its substantial overhead – it’s the only “real” virtualization product out there: The rest are just hacks, so we bought VMware. Now that I’m knee-deep in working with it, a few other thoughts:
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While I use VMware’s free products – VMware Server and Player – on a daily basis, I’m very much given to wondering whether VMware has a future. As a company, they seem to be surrounded on all sides – Xen and Microsoft’s Viridian are closing in fast on one flank (well, at least Xen is – but I’m sure Microsoft isn’t going to let this opportunity pass by), and I wonder if Solaris Containers, Virtuozzo/OpenVZ and technology like FreeBSD Jails have escaped their blind spot on the other side.
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