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Fun end of the year facts on virtuallyGhetto

12.22.2014 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

I woke up at 6am this past Sunday for no apparent reason. Perhaps my body is preparing me for parenthood? In any case, I could not go back to sleep and started to think about some of the blogs I have written this past year on virtuallyGhetto (finishing its 5th year). With the year almost ending, I thought it would be cool to check out some of the statistics on virtuallyGhetto for this past year and share some of the fun facts with my readers. The data below is gathered by a WordPress plugin called Jetpack which is a must have for any bloggers using WordPress and the WP Statistics Plugin.

I would also like to take this moment and say thank you to all my sponsors for supporting virtuallyGhetto and most importantly I would like to say thank you to my readers. Thank you for your engagement whether that is a comment on my blog, a discussion on Twitter, an email describing a problem or just saying hi at a conference. Thank you to everyone who has shared interesting stories, challenges and unique use cases on how you use VMware products and continuing to help us improve our products. 2014 has been an amazing year and I look forward to all the exciting things coming in 2015 as well as continuing to share and contribute back to the community through my blog. If there are any topics that you would like to see me explore further or continue to explore next year, feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I wish you a Happy Holidays tand have a fun and safe Happy New Years, see you all in 2015!

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Community stories of VMware & Apple OS X in Production: Part 10

12.19.2014 by William Lam // 2 Comments

Company: Fitstar
Software: VMware vSphere
Hardware: Apple Mac Mini

[William] - Hi Clay, thanks for taking some time out of your schedule this afternoon to talk with us regarding one of the projects are you are currently working on. Before we get started, can you quickly introduce yourself and your current role within VMware?

[Clay] - Good morning and thanks for having me! My name is Clay Alvord, and I am a Senior Prototype Engineer, here at VMware. I work with hardware vendors as they develop new equipment, and get it in the hands of the developers here. It allows our engineers to get early access to pre-release gear, in the hope that as the equipment comes to market, it's on our HCL at the same time. It also allows us to help debug the hardware as its developed, so we don't hit any critical surprises after release.

[William] - Thanks Clay, very cool role! So, I hear you have been working closely with a new startup who has built a really interesting design involving VMware & Mac Mini’s? Could you provide us some more details around the design and the type of application/workload the customer has planned for this infrastructure?

[Clay] - Thats exactly right. FitStar deals with a lot of high resolution video, so their storage requirements are above average for a company their size. Most of their servers live in Amazon's EC2 cloud, and so they are already heavy users of Amazon's services. Amazon has a product called Amazon Storage Gateway (ASG). ASG allows for local storage to be mirrored to EC2, or have the your most commonly access EC2 files cached locally.

What I have designed is a local storage array, with a an Apple Mac Mini running ESXi 5.5 and Amazon's Gateway (local) storage. This gives the users the speed of local storage, with the safety-net of having their data in EC2 at the same time.

[William] - How many Mac Mini’s are they currently running on-premises and what hardware configuration did the customer choose for their specific application requirements? Were there any constraints that you had faced due to the limited resources the Mac Mini’s provided?

[Clay] - They have 1 Mac Mini, and 1 Dell Poweredge. The Mac was a hard requirement, because the original design required us to run OSX server.

We opted for the Mac Mini as it fit the budget better, when compared to a Mac Pro. The Mac Mini is a Late 2012 and has a 3Ghz cpu, with 16GB of ram. Our biggest constraint is the memory in the system. We run 2 storage gateway VM's on the dell. Each one requiring 8GB of memory. We could not have it all on the Mac Mini as the Mini only supports 16GB in total and does not have room for future growth.

The Mac Mini has 3 Mac OS X VMs. 2 of them are OS X 10.10, each running OS X Server. One for dedicated Xcode buildbot, and app caching. The other for Time Machine services. The 3rd VM is running Mac OS X 10.9 Server and is purely for file sharing.

Here is a picture of Fitstar's setup:

Here are some additional physical and logical diagrams of the setup:

[William] - How much storage is currently being managed today and how is that presented to the VMs? Do they have plans on increasing either the storage or compute platforms as they grow?

[Clay] - The storage array has 2 RAID-6 luns, serving a total of 20TB to the Dell host over iSCSI. The host then breaks up the storage into 1TB disks that are then attached the two ASG VMs. The VMs, mirror the data to Amazon and then present new iSCSI targets to the Mac Mini host. From there we use Raw Device Mappings to attach the file server and backup server.

[William] - This looks like a really cool solution that you’ve architected with the customer. For a startup, I was kind of surprised to hear they went with vSphere versus going down an open source route and potentially using some type of Cloud Services? Do you know what the motivation was that lead the customer to choose vSphere and running an on-premise solution?

[Clay] - The motivation of going ESXi over an alternative solution had several factors. The first was Fitstar's familiarity with VMware, as well as my own. The second was this solution is the backbone of their company and they needed a world class solution that has not only a strong support system, but a HUGE community behind it. Lastly, it was the hard requirement to use ASG. Using ASG allows for the volumes to be directly mounted in a EC2 instance in case of an emergency. Amazon also states that the ASG vm's are optimized for ESX and Hyper V.

[William] - That is great to hear that even for startups, having an enterprise and highly available platform such as vSphere is critical to their business. Were there any challenges while designing and deploying this infrastructure, either from a deployment or operational point of view?

[Clay] - Definitely. This project was originally designed with just file services in mind. The original POC was a local storage array, and the Mac Mini. The Mini would run a ASG and 1 OS X VM.

When it was decided that we needed Xcode, Caching and Time Machine services, we opted for a dedicated VM for each of theses. The reason is that if there were issues or heavy load with any of them, it would not affect the others.

Some of the other challenges we had was getting iSCSI to play well with Mac OS X. We were planning on having the iSCSI connections go directly to the VMs, and bypass ESXi, but 3rd party drivers don't work with Amazon's version of iSCSI. As a result, we now connect to the hypervisor, and use raw mappings to the VMs. We opted for raw mappings so that if we mount a volume in EC2, it sees a HFS+ disk, not a VMFS one with HFS inside.

We also had trouble getting the OS X server services to work on virtualized hardware. ultimately we adjusted the vm parameters to expose the hardware ID's to the vm, and so OS X thinks it running on physical hardware.

We are still working on plenty of tweaks to the system. I have seen a OS X panic, and kernel logs point at VMware Tools as the culprit. We have filed a bug for this. We also have an issue that the nics in the Mac Mini are e1000, not e1000e. This occasionally leads to a PSOD. The work around we plan on introducing is Thunderbolt to ethernet adapters.

The last ESXi related hurdle is that in order for the VMs on the Mac Mini to auto start, the Dell and AGS VMs must be online, and the Mini has to have already scanned its storage adapters. So in the event of a power outage, when everything powers up, you must rescan storage on the mini, after the Dell is online, then power up the Mini's VM's. We have installed a battery backup unit, and are in the middle of automating the scan and power up of the Mini's VMs.

[William] - Clay, thank you very much for taking the time and sharing with us some of the innovative things our customers are doing with Apple and our vSphere platform. I really enjoy hearing about how our customers push our software to its limits and find new use cases that we had never thought about. Thanks again for sharing. Finally, before I let you go, do you have any words of advice or tips for other customers having similar requirements, especially those coming from a Startup? Any particular resources you recommend them checking out before getting started?

[Clay] - It was my pleasure. virtuallyGhetto has been a great resource for me in standing up the project. I have some tips and tricks related to this and some other things on my site www.geeksnthings.com as well.

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 install ESXi 5.5 Patch03 on the new Mac Pro 6,1?

10.31.2014 by William Lam // 23 Comments

I have received several questions from customers asking how to go about installing the latest ESXi 5.5 Update 2 Patch03 on the Apple Mac Pro 6,1. Luckily, I was able to borrow one of the Apple Mac Pro 6,1 we had within VMware Engineering for a couple of days to document the process.

Step 1 - A prerequisite that must be met prior to installing ESXi is to have the Apple boot ROM update on the Mac Pro 6,1 running on MP61.0116.B05 or higher. This great piece of tidbit came from Josh who discovered issues while trying to install ESXi and found out this was a requirement after opening a case with Apple Engineering. It turns out that there is not an EFI update and the ONLY way to update the boot ROM was to install Yosemite (OS X 10.10) as it contains an update which can be applied to the Mac Pro. Thanks Josh for sharing this tip with us!

You can check the boot ROM by either following this Apple KB here or by running system info with an OS X image on a bootable USB device which is what I did to verify as seen in the screenshot below.

Step 2 - Once you have met the prerequisite, you will need to download the offline bundle for ESXi 5.5 Update 2 Patch03 which contains the Mac Pro 6,1 enablement along with other bug fixes. You can do so by going to VMware Patche portal and under ESXi, you should find ESXi550-201410001.zip at the very top.

Step 3 - Next you need to convert this offline bundle into an ISO image that you can load onto a USB device, this is the simplest way to install ESXi. To do so, you will need a Windows system as it uses a tool called VMware Image Builder which is only available for Windows. Image Builder is part of the PowerCLI toolkit which can be downloaded here.

Step 4 - Once PowerCLI has been installed go ahead and launch the it and we are ready to start authoring our ISO image

Step 5 - Add ESXi offline bundle that we download by running the following command:

Add-EsxSoftwareDepot ESXi550-201410001.zip

Step 6 - You will need to select the particular ESXi Image Profile to create your ISO image from, you can view the four Image Profiles by running the following command:

Get-EsxImageProfile | format-wide

Step 7 - You will want to select the one that contains the all patches including security and VMware Tools called ESXi-5.5.0-20141004001-standard by running the following command:

New-EsxImageProfile -CloneProfile "ESXi-5.5.0-20141004001-standard" -name "ESXi55u2-p03" -Vendor virtuallyGhetto

Step 8 - We now need to export the Image Profile we have selected to an ISO by running the following command:

Export-EsxImageProfile -ImageProfile "ESXi55u2-p03" -ExportToISO -filepath C:\VMware-ESXi-5.5u2p03-Mac-Pro-6-1.iso

Step 9 - Once the ISO has been created, you can now create a bootable USB containing your ESXi installation. I like to use Unetbootin but there are several other tools you can use, select whichever one you are comfortable with.

Step 10 - Plug the USB device into your Mac Pro and make sure to hold down the "ALT" key so you can select the device to boot from and you can start your ESXi installation as you would normally.

Here is a screenshot of the Mac Pro running the latest ESXi 5.5 Update 2 Patch03 release:

Thunderbolt Ethernet Adapter Support

I know there were a couple of questions from folks asking whether the Thunderbolt Ethernet Adapter would be recognized by ESXi on the new Mac Pro 6,1 and I can confirm, it does as shown in the screenshot below:

The Mac Pro 6,1 has two on-board Ethernet ports and comes with 6 x Thunderbolt connections, so you can connect quite a bit of networks if you need to.

GPU Passthru Support

I know a couple of you have asked whether the two Radeon 7870 GPU's could be passthru into a guest OS such as Mac OS X or Windows and it looks like they can from the ESXi point of view, however this is not officially supported by VMware, so YMMV on whether the guestOS can actually make use of the GPU.

For Windows it looks like it was able to properly detect the GPU (as shown in the screenshot) below and for Mac OS X it does not look like it's properly detecting the GPU. I will see if I can investigate this further but there is a good chance that passthru for Mac OS X guest will not work.

If you have made it this far and realize you rather not go through that long process (which is quite short actually), then I you will be quite happy to see that I have done the hard work for you and have created an ESXi 5.5 Update 2 Patch03 ISO which you can download here. Hope you enjoy your new Mac Pro and running ESXi on top of it!