By VSM News Staff published: Wednesday, August 03 2005
VMware User Groups (VMUGs) are proliferating as virtualization users look for a forum to share their experiences.
VSM spoke with the founders of the Phoenix, Arizona VMUG – Jason Ambrose and Joshua Wright – and Agilysys consultant Percy Gonzales about why the group was started and what they hope to achieve.
VSM: How does virtualization fit into the work you do?
JA: I’m a technical consultant for Ensynch in Tempe, AZ. I’ve used Workstation for four years, then GSX pretty extensively and now ESX with VirtualCenter and VMotion for about a year.
I am working on an Exchange consolidation on VMware. The company had 19 Exchange 5.5 servers, a legacy deployment. Their biggest bottleneck was the fixed amount of disk space on those servers.
They weren’t able to take advantage of that disk space because of the engineering requirements on the Exchange servers, and the servers had only 20% utilization. With an ESX deployment we can run two Exchange servers on each physical server and double the utilization.
The initial testing for the project took two months, and the conversion process will take about two months.
JW: Both the virtual servers are identical so there is a lot of memory sharing that ESX allows.
ESX is architected to take better advantage of the pipelining in the Opteron than Windows with Opteron architecture does.
PG: In the preliminary testing we found some of the applications would run faster on the Opteron with VMware than on the INTEL based physical server, due to the higher bandwidth for the bus that the Opteron offers.
JW: I started working with Virtual PC, the former Connectix product, about three years ago. I moved to VMware Workstation because it performed better and used it for a lot of pre-consulting labs. When I came to my current position I started working with ESX extensively and got my VCP last month.
I’m now a Agilysys Consultant LAN engineer working as the technical lead for an ESX semi-clustered solution, a whole rack of equipment that is being deployed to sites across the US. There are ESX servers and a several EMC San units with all fabric switches.
The testing has taken place over the past four months. We’re setting up a command center and then people in the field will be installing the racks. Once they have network connectivity we’ll finish the final configuration here. We’re finalizing our base images and documentation, and beginning in June we’ll be deploying 10 sites and 12 racks each month, with a goal of having the project finished by the end of the year.
PG: I came to the project as a Senior Consultant to work on the ESX deployment. It was an interesting project because of the number of racks to be located around the country to be deployed and managed remotely. Configuration and customization of several tasks to fit the deployment schema such as VMware ESX hosts are set up so they can build the images from scratch themselves from remotely located templates, because if we were to send the image over T-1 it would take too long. We were happy to see a diversity of companies from large fortune 500 companies to small single sysop operations. Josh and Jason decided to start the Phoenix VMUG. At their first meeting we were honor with about the 35 participants as well as some great VMware personnel to give us a hand with the first meeting including Frank Musacchia, Director of System Engineers for the Americas and technical lead Shakeeb Malik, both from VMware, were presenters.
JA: Josh and I had a sense of the potential of ESX and the potential snags. We each had questions, and thought it would be beneficial to have a collaborative effort with other users to discover the answers.
VSM: What kinds of things were unclear?
PG: For one thing, there weren’t many white papers referencing ESX and Exchange 5.5. That specific project required more information than we could find. We reverted to testing and coming out with our own conclusions. This is the kind of information we will share in the users group so future implementers may have a base for their conclusions.
JW: We wanted to bring together a group of people using or thinking about using VMware products. Everybody’s done it different ways, and we wanted to know what they’ve done, if it worked and if they would recommend doing it that way. We wondered how people were backing up ESX environments, how they were planning their capacity, what kinds of metrics they were using.
There’s a lot of documentation but it’s not always clear, and if it is clear there may be multiple ways to do something, and the specifics aren’t always available.
PG: We also had an issue with third party products like ESXRanger or other products that could make things easier. We wanted to see who had experience with them. VMware P2V and PlateSpin are good examples of a great product to have in certain conditions.
JA: We’ve adopted a standardized structure for our meetings. We’ll have a topic we discuss each meeting, like our national ESX deployment, and a featured product like esxRanger or PlateSpin. We hope to have a vendor come in to discuss how that product can benefit VMware users.
Each meeting has the following agenda:
- Introduction: By Josh and Jason, and from each participant to get a basic understanding of the knowledge in the room.
- Housekeeping: Detail about meetings and contacts, airing proposed meeting changes and proposing future topics.
- Primary topic presentation.
- Product vendor topic.
- Summary and wrap-up, Q&A, group picture for website.
VSM: Did the first round of discussions meet your expectations?
JW: They did. A lot of people from ASU talked about how they were deploying VMware ACE and were integral in pioneering ACE with VMware. It was interesting to see how VMware is an evolving company.
JA: There was good interaction among the group and between the group and each speaker. We did an informal happy hour afterwards, and got positive feedback from those who attended. They were glad to participate in the group and looked forward to the benefits of future discussions.
We also had a good mix of current VMware users and people looking at deploying it, looking for more information.
JW: And they mentioned that 35 participants at a first meeting was a good turnout. We have a big resource pool in the Phoenix metro area – Phoenix, Scottsdale, Tempe, Mesa.
VSM: What are your goals for the group?
JW: One of my goals is to help people get the support they need if they run into a problem they can’t solve on their own. I’d like to see them present that to the group and have us work on it as peers. We had asked Frank Musacchia about the possibility of bringing those issues to VMware support to get an answer as a group. I think we’ll be able to provide a level of support that people might not be able to get as a smaller entity.
JA: I’d like to see a detailed discussion of best practices. A lot of best practices may not have been established as formally as they need to be. Because ESX is such a foundational product, what you put on top of it defines what your best practices will be, whereas applications can have very specific best practices for a large group of users.
