Dailytech Virtualization Article

Seriously?  A dark side to virtualization?  If virtualization technology is phased in by someone that has a clue this cannot be an issue.  Take something like Exchange 2007 – will the performance be worse virtualized?  Yep.  But what kind of horsepower do you really need for 100?  Or 1,000?  A modern server on the VMware HCL that is configured reasonably should be able to take 30 to 40 servers, which means that many SMB’s could get away with a two node cluster.

Virutalization allows for enormous flexibility.  Even if you run the most basic version of VMware ESX, you’ll get fully encapsulated virtual servers that you can back up cheaply with a product like vRanger from Vizioncore for complete, bare metal backups.  You could run two or three servers per host and see incredible DR and utilization benefits very cheaply.

If the issue for SMB’s is that they are going to be dumb and deploy a technology in a way that dreadfully increases risk that’s a not a technology problem.  That’s a stupid person problem.

It really sounds like the analyst wanted to say something to stir it up.  Congrats, man, but you just sound ignorant.

–Nat

I’ve gotten really spoiled recently (say, for the last two years) on setting NTP on ESX servers.  I found a nifty script that would take an answer file, do all the necessary firewall and startup tweaking and that was that.

Unfortunately, it only worked if I used a certain version of winscp and my Dell 620.  For whatever reason, any other combination broke the script (confirmed by other admins here).   Well, the 620 died a couple months ago, just after my cube migration.   I didn’t bother fixing the script because recent (as in published in 2008 or newer) versions of ESX added NTP configuration to the GUI and that has worked fine.

Now, I am installing 3.02 again and NTP configuration looks like this:

(1) update /etc/ntp.conf

restrict 127.0.0.1

restrict default kod nomodify notrap

server xxxx

driftfile /var/lib/ntp/drift

(2) update /etc/ntp/step-tickers

xxxx

(3) update /etc/hosts (if using hostname)

(4) using putty or similar to goto the console, login as root and run the following command. This opens the appropriate ports and enables the NTP daemon to talk with the external server.

root@esxhost# esxcfg-firewall –enableService ntpClient

(5) Restart the NTP service.

root@esxhost# service ntpd restart

(7) Now you can set the local hardware clock to the NTP synchronized local system time. Run:

root@esxhost# hwclock –systohc

Sheesh.   Props to the VMware Forums for coughing up that bit of goodness.

–Nat