Category: VMWare

What does Storage have to do with Virtual Machines and why?

Paul

"A Thought Experiment" by Manupriyam Dubey, University of Lausanne
A thought Experiment

“As an administrator, you are given a single host server configured with four six-core processors, 256 GB of memory, and 1 TB of storage to deploy a number of virtual web servers. You have been told that each virtual machine will require 8 GB of memory, one processor, and 100 GB of disk storage. How many virtual machines will you able to deploy? What is the limiting factor?” Portnoy, Matthew. Virtualization Essentials

This is a good little question in a text book.  I thought it would be good to at least talk about this and hear what people have to say about this.   Each person is different and will have different answers but I will at least talk about this and the best practices for virtualization and hopefully we will come to the same reason.    If anything it will teach me and maybe even you the right answer and it will allow us to learn even more about virtualization.

Best Practices

The best practices for virtual machines depends on a lot of math and understanding of what will the virtual machine be used for.  We’ll come to that in a little bit.   The question right now is how many can you deploy on a single server.   On any given server the best practice is to do a 1:1 with cores.  So in this thought experiment, there are 24 cores, so we should be able to do 24 VM at the minimum.  According to Nakivo.com here’s the Virtual Machines cores and best practices:

  • 1:1 (optimal)
  • 2.1 (Normal)
  • 3:1 (Not optimal)
  • 4:1 (Maybe)
  • 5:1 (Problematic)
  • 6:1 (Probably not going to work)

I Found an excellent article about this and thought we should at least talk about some of these facts.   I agree with what they said.  The more VM’s you add to a core will make it more unstable and that isn’t even the main thing we need to consider.

Hardware

The Next thing we need to consider is the hardware.   We should always plan around capacity, growth, and business alignment.  When I say this I am talk about the size of memory and the total amount of disk space we will have per VM.  We can easily deploy up to 10 VM if they use 100 GB of space maybe it would be more like 9.   Since we only have 1 TB drive that would limit us to how many VM we could deploy at this time.    We need to consider that if we actually use the 100 GB right now the Virtual Machines we could deploy only 9 VM’s but if we dropped the requirement of 100 GB and made it expandable when it is needed than we could probably get away with the 24 virtual machines.  We could without a doubt do 24 VM comfortably with the amount of ram we had available.  It would leave use with enough overhead for more VM’s later on if we need to.  We could easily go up to 30 VM if we had to but I wouldn’t push it past that limit unless we install more memory down the road.  You will always need to determine your workload when it comes to how many VM’s you can install at one time on a server.

Type of Virtual Machines

Depending on what you intend to use this for such as databases or even web servers.  You will need to consider just how much of an impact the VM will have on other VM on the same system.  The utilization of the speed of the server will always be an indication of to much or not enough.  We will also have to consider the implications of ballooning or the impact of spikes in the server on a day to day routine.

These are just a few thoughts on this question.   I thought I would share with you what I have learned and maybe learn even more from my users.

Finally, the virtual machine is a powerful tool the enterprise and also small business in hand.  We can see that it can be used in many different ways and create even more uses

The Important Windows patches Released Today

Paul

As many of you know we talked about the Non-critical patches that Microsoft will release today.  IF you want to read those please go and check it out.   I’ll be talking about the REALLY important ones that Microsoft has kept tight until now.    These are the more important ones but I will list the ones that I previous talked about to better help people recognize the non-important ones:

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  • KB955839

  • KB957388

  • KB890830

  • KB905866

    • These are just the tip of the iceberg. although this list are not A lot.  I’d wanted to let people know about what people coin “Exploit Wednesday“.  I really don’t know if this is a Myth or actually does exist but I’d figure we discuss the problems associated with installing the critical updates and try to tell you which ones should be installed As soon as possible.  Though people have in the past used a Virtual Machine to see if there is any problem, that should be your first step if you don’t want to have any problems with these updates.  I don’t suggest testing it more than a couple days.  Here are some good Virtual Machine software to try out yourself:

    Here is the list of updates that are critical that Microsoft released today.   Each one of these are quite important and should be considered installed when you get a chance.

    [ad#ad2-left]Microsoft Security Bulletin MS08-073 – Critical
    Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer (KB958215)

    This security update resolves four privately reported vulnerabilities. The vulnerabilities could allow remote code execution if a user views a specially crafted Web page using Internet Explorer. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights.

    Microsoft Security Bulletin MS08-071 – Critical
    Vulnerabilities in GDI Could Allow Remote Code Execution (KB956802)

    This security update resolves two privately reported vulnerabilities in GDI. Exploitation of either of these vulnerabilities could allow remote code execution if a user opens a specially crafted WMF image file. An attacker who successfully exploited these vulnerabilities could take complete control of an affected system. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights.

    [ad#ad2-right]Microsoft Security Bulletin MS08-075 – Critical
    Vulnerabilities in Windows Search Could Allow Remote Code Execution (KB959349)

    This security update resolves two privately reported vulnerabilities in Windows Search. These vulnerabilities could allow remote code execution if a user opens and saves a specially crafted saved-search file within Windows Explorer or if a user clicks a specially crafted search URL. An attacker who successfully exploited these vulnerabilities could take complete control of an affected system. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights.

    KB952069
    (not quite sure what this one is, when I go do a Google search this is what pops up. It was in German but Google translated it for me)

    In the Windows Media Runtime to the default in Windows XP SP3 contains Windows Media Player (WMP) 9 were discovered vulnerabilities that could allow an attacker to compromise your Windows-based system and gain control over it. See Security Bulletin MS08-076 ( englisch bzw. deutsch ) See Security Bulletin MS08-076 (English or German)

    These are just ones that I found and wanted to let you know, the others have been explained on the other article.  So check them all out and I suggest installing them quickly as possible.

    Boost Virtual Machine Performance On Ubuntu, Fedora, PCLinuxOS And Debian

    Paul

    This document explains how to set up the VMware Tools in the following guest operating systems: Ubuntu 7.04, Fedora 7, PCLinuxOS 2007 and Debian Etch. Installing VMware Tools in your guest operating systems will help maximize performance, provide mouse synchronization and copy & paste functionality. This article also shows a way of making VMware Tools start automatically when you start a guest operating system.
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    I used the VMware Tools v1.0.3-44356 provided by VMware Server v1.03.

    A very good article and I might have to try it out on my Vista OS, to see how fast of an improvement it does on the LINUX side of it.