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VMworld vBrownBag Tech Talk : Nested Virtualization & Dev/Test/Home Lab Panel

08.12.2014 by William Lam // 4 Comments

VMworld is only a couple of weeks away and I can not believe this will be my 7th VMworld! My, how time has flown by so quickly. I have been pretty busy these last couple of months finishing up some internal projects as well as starting up a couple of new ones. I had been thinking about submitting a vBrownBag Tech Talk as I have done in past years, but there has just been too much going on. Giving it some more thought, I thought it would be cool to put together a panel of community folks to discuss some of my favorite topics like Nested Virtualization as well as Development/Test and Home Labs.

I am please to announce the VMworld vBrownBag Tech Talk : Nested Virtualization & Dev/Test/Home Lab Panel which will include Sean Crookston, Doug Baer, Nick Marshall and myself as the panelists. I was originally hoping to have a few more folks from the community, but due to the late submission, we ran into scheduling conflicts. I am very excited for this session which will take place on Wednesday, August 27th from 11:45am to 12:15pm (30minutes). I wanted to give a huge shout out to Sean Massey who was originally scheduled to present right after ours but decided to offer us his time slot as 15minutes was going to be tough for a panel discussion. Much appreciated Sean!

Due to the short amount of time, we really want to make the most out of this session and most importantly, make this as interactive as possible with the audience. We would like to collect any questions or topics that folks might be interested and we will pick a couple for the panelists to answer or discuss. We will also have topics that we may raise but it would be much more interesting to hear from you! Please leave a comment if you wish to ask a question and perhaps those that get selected, may even win a prize?

We hope to see you at the Tech Talk and lastly, this is going to be a MUST attend session ... that's all I can really say 🙂

BTW - I also would like to give a shout out to Doug Baer who will be running a VMware Knowledge Expert discussion related to the HOL Lab Environment on Tuesday, August 26 at 1pm PST. Though his focus will primarily be HOL, but as many of you know the underlying technology is Nested Virtualization. A couple of us will also be attending that session, so if there are any questions you would like to ask but did not get a chance to during the Tech Talk, you can also find us there.

Community stories of VMware & Apple OS X in Production: Part 3

08.11.2014 by William Lam // 2 Comments

In this third post of the community stories, I had the pleasure to interview with Blake Garner who shares with us how he leverages VMware and Apple Technologies in his production environment.

Company: Adobe
Product: VMware Fusion
Hardware: Apple Mac Mini & Mac Pro

[William] - Hi Blake, thanks for your comment on Twitter today, it sounds like this blog series might be useful for your organization. I understand that you have some experiences working with VMware and Apple OS X that you can share with the community? Before we get started, can you quickly introduce yourself?

[Blake] - Sure, I have been working at Adobe for 11 years in the Seattle location. Started off as a Dev/Test lab administrator focused on Macs, Printers & color management. Been working with VMware seriously starting with VMware Fusion 1.0 and Lab Manager 2.x.

[William] - Wow, a VMware old timer 🙂 So, I take it from your Tweet that you must be doing some really cool stuff with VMware and Apple OS X? Can you describe the environment and how you leverage these technologies together?

[Blake] - We provide "bare metal" Mac Mini's and Mac Pro's to our users. They are mostly developers and testers of Adobe desktop software. The process involves approvals and users requesting a Mac from our web portal.

Once users have the Mac they load VMware Fusion which is the majority of the time. We do not have a centralized command and control of VMware Fusion. A lot of the teams then hook up VMware Fusion to our testing harnesses. Things like Jenkins and a lot of custom code to manage the VM's. We looked into using ESXi/vSphere/vCloud on the Mac but due to the Apple EULA restrictions it just wasn't a good fit.

[William] - Very cool! This sounds like you’re offering Mac as a Service for your internal customers? How do you go about managing the requests of which Mac Mini or Mac Pro are leased out? Is all this custom software Adobe has built?

[Blake] - Yes we do both Mac and x86 systems (Windows & Linux) as part of our bare metal offering on our internal IT Cloud. The bare metal part is custom code. We have rolled our own deployment systems to go along with it as well. Users access one portal that currently spans vCloud, AWS & bare metal along with a few other services.

[William] - You mention that the majority of users install VMware Fusion on the “bare metal” once they get their assigned Mac Mini or Mac Pro. What is VMware Fusion being used for?

[Blake] - Lot's of automation. vmrun gets a good workout here. One team has a "Test as a Service" that can control VMware Fusion and rollback snapshots to provide a clean testing state. The consumers of the Mac's enlist them into their own existing automation systems. Often if you look at the VM's you will see Creative Cloud applications running through test cases super fast. Builds of products for Mac OS and iOS also happen.

[William] - Ah, so they are leveraging VMware Fusion as a platform to be able to run sort of a “Continuous Integration” build environment for your internal Mac OS X and iOS builds? This sounds like it could be quite challenging to manage, have the end users had any issues or have they automated everything all already?

[Blake] - In a larger software company you end up with a number of approaches. I did not get involved at the build level enough to speak on that. Adobe IT tends to focus on the common services that all the teams can use. In general there is a lot of automation herding going on..

[William] - Gotcha. So, going back to physical Mac Mini and Mac Pro, roughly how many are you managing and what type of configurations did you spec out? Any particular reasoning for choosing these configurations?

[Blake] - Our initial launch of the bare metal mac service has 50 Mac Pro's and 50 Mac Minis split equally between two sites. This service is just a couple months old and we expect it to grow fast as the engineers figure out they can get Mac's if their manager approves a monthly fee to their cost center.

We have one config for Mac Pro and Mac Mini. The Mac Mini 6,2 has 250GB SSD and i7 2.6GHz with 16GB RAM. The Mac Pro 6,1 6-Core E5 3.5 GHz with 500GB SSD, 16GB RAM and lower end GPU's as those are not used that much. We really just looked for a sweet spot that matches what Creative Cloud needs

Here is a picture of one of the Mac Pro racks courtesy of Blake:

[William] - How do you monitor for hardware issues and what is the most common issues have you seen for both the Mac Mini and Mac Pro?

[Blake] - That is a real challenge with Apple hardware. With no out of band management we rely on our staff to troubleshoot via KVM or in person if needed. Pre-release software can really crash a system and that often needs a finger on the power button. I'm looking into using our remote controlled PDU to power cycle systems via the portal. If a system is truly FUBAR we just give people a new one.

In a lot of cases we can simply re-image the system via netboot and add it back to the available pool. VMware Fusion comes really in handy for developing our custom netboot environments as well. Netbooting an OS X VM's is one of my favorite features of VMware Fusion.

[William] - I can definitely see it being easier to re-image than to troubleshoot unless you are seeing a consistent issue. Curious, what version of Mac OS X and VMware Fusion are you using today? In addition to snapshot & Netbooting, any other useful features VMware Fusion provides?

[Blake] - VMware Fusion 6.0.3 is what we support today. On the hardware we encourage people to use the latest release version of OS X. In the VM's it depends on what kind of testing. Validation of pre-release OS's is a big chunk of the testing work. For OS X that happens in VMware Fusion and other x86 it's done in vCloud and some VMware Workstation. The automation capabilities of VMware Fusion are a key component. That's what gives us the upper hand in managing these virtual systems.

[William] - Hey Blake, I really appreciate you taking the time and sharing with us on how Adobe leverages VMware and Mac OS X. Before I let you go, do you have any words of advice for other customers looking to provide a similar type of environment? Any gotchas or things you would change if you could start fresh?

[Blake] - Go talk to those people who have offices crammed full of systems and find out what they are doing. You can often find the common requirements and start building against that. Don't try and dictate the whole solution to engineers. Once they are happy customers it's much easier to get them onboard with centralized services. Provide a set of functional services and engineers will pick it up quickly. Keep adding services and they will grow along with you.

Things that I would change all end up on our features roadmap. I have my eyes on providing an API to access to re-image or reserve bare metal systems and providing vagrant along with VMware Fusion for automation.

If you are interested in sharing your story with the community (can be completely anonymous) on how you use VMware and Mac OS X in Production, you can reach out to me here.

How to run Nested Mac OS X guest on ESXi VM on top VMware Fusion?

08.08.2014 by William Lam // 1 Comment

You might be asking, why would anyone want to do this? Well, luckily this is not a "because you can" type of answer but was it was an interesting solution that one of our VMware Engineers (Darius) had shared with me after helping out on this VMTN Community forum thread.

The user was running VMware Fusion on his physical Mac OS X system and wanted to be able to test OS X Mavericks under ESXi. Not having a physical ESXi host to test with, the next best thing was to run a ESXi VM under VMware Fusion and then run the Mavericks guest on top of that.

Here is a quick diagram of the user setup:

The issue with just simply doing this is that for a Mac OS X guest to properly run on ESXi, the underlying hardware must be Apple Hardware. The reason for this is not a technical challenges, but rather a legal one per Apple's EULA. The way in which ESXi detects that the underlying hardware is Apple is by checking whether Apple's SMC (System Management Controller) is available.

In the scenario above, the Nested ESXi VM is not automatically passing through the SMC from the physical Mac OS X system and hence the Mac OS X VM at the very top of the stack will not properly function. The solution that Darius found was to add the following two Advanced VM Settings (VMX) entries to the ESXi VM:

smc.present = "TRUE"
smbios.reflectHost = "TRUE"

This will allow the passing of the underlying SMC up into the Nested ESXi VM which will then allow Mac OS X guest VMs to properly function. We can also confirm this by check the Nested ESXi MOB by pointing a browser to the following URL: https://[ESXI-IP]/mob/?moid=ha-host&doPath=hardware

If you did not add the two entries above, then the smcPresent property would show up as false. In our case, we did add the following two entries and we now run our Mac OS X Guest. Here are a couple of screenshots of performing this on my iMac at home running the same exact configuration:

Thanks Darius for sharing this with me and the community! I am sure this will come in handy for anyone wanting to test Mac OS X guests under ESXi but do not have a physical ESXi host and can easily substitute using VMware Fusion.