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Will Intel’s VMCS Shadowing Feature Benefit VMware’s Nested Virtualization?

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For many years now, VMware customers have been using Nested Virtualization, which is the ability to run a hypervisor such as vSphere ESXi within a virtual machine. Even though Nested Virtualization is not officially supported by VMware, customers have come to rely upon this technology for their lab environments and sometimes even production environments. VMware also heavily relies on this technology for their own internal development as well as their Hands On Lab for VMworld, which is now offered as an online SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) solution called Hands On lab Online.

Performance of Nested Virtualization has come a long way since its first introduction and it continues to get better with advancements made in hardware from both Intel and AMD. A couple of months back, I came across an article discussing a new feature from the upcoming Intel Haswell processor’s called VMCS Shadowing which aims to improve the performance of Nested Virtualization. This got me thinking about whether VMCS Shadowing could benefit VMware’s Nested Virtualization.

VMCS (Virtual Machine Control Structure) Shadowing works by reducing the frequency in which the guest VMM (virtual machine) requires assistance from the parent VMM. Its goal is to eliminate the VM-exits due to VMREAD and VMWRITE instructions executed by the guest hypervisor but this comes at a slight expense.

I reached out to one of the core engineers who helped to develop VMware’s Nested Virtualization technology, Jim Mattson, and asked whether or not we would benefit from the VMCS Shadowing feature. Well, it turns out that VMCS Shadowing can help, but we have also done some research in this area and developed some technology that would allow us to eliminate about 75% due to VMREAD and VMWRITE when running guest VMware Hypervisors using some interesting software techniques. The details of these software techniques are actually published in a research paper called Software Techniques for Avoiding Hardware Virtualization Exits on VMware’s Academic Program which is part of VMware Labs. Jim is one of the authors of the research paper and I would highly recommend you check it out if you are interested in more details.

To summarize, because of the techniques described in the paper, VMCS Shadowing will provide only a small benefit when running a VMware Hypervisor as virtual machine. However, it will greatly benefit other non-VMware Hypervisors running as a virtual machine, this is particular true for Hypervisors that perform egregious number of VMREAD and VMWRITE operations and that do not cluster well, such as VirtualBox for example.

The coolest part about the research and software techniques developed by Jim and team, is that the technology has already been incorporated into the existing VMware vSphere ESXi, Workstation and Fusion products. I often times forget that all the awesome-sauce technology that is being developed by VMware starts out in research academia and you can learn about other research topics by visiting the VMware’s Academic Program which includes publications, research papers and the popular VMware Technical Journals.

How To Pronounce Some Of VMware's Acronyms

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VMware's announcement last week on the new vCloud Hybrid Services offering generated quite a bit of buzz and excitement. One thing that I had noticed on Twitter during the announcement as well as the days following was discussions around the pronunciation of the vCloud Hybrid Services acronym (vCHS). There were couple of "ways" that folks have heard it pronounced and I thought I write this fun little post and share what the "official" ways of pronouncing some of these acronyms are (at least from my understanding working at VMware)

Disclaimer: I have no comments on us putting little v's on everything 😉

Below are the top VMware products/features that I have heard multiple acronyms for and the controversial on how to properly pronounce each of them. I have also provided a link to Google translate which provides a nice text-to-speech (lower right bottom) so you can listen to each of the official pronunciation. If there are other pronunciations that you have heard or any corrections, feel free to leave a comment.

Product Official Other
vSphere OpenStack Virtual Appliance (VOVA) vo-va (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/vo-va) N/A
VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN) v-san (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/v-san) N/A
vSphere Flash Read Cache (vFRC) v-f-r-c (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/v-f-r-c) N/A
vCloud Air (vCA) v-c-a (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/v-c-a) N/A
vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS) v-chess (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/v-chess) v-cheese v-c-h-s
vRealize Air Compliance (vRAC) N/A N/A
vRealize Operations Insight (vRI) N/A N/A
vRealize Operations (vROPs) vee-rops (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/vee-rops) N/A
vCenter Operations Manager (vC Ops) v-c-ops (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/v-c-ops) v-cops
vRealize Automation (vR / vRAuto) v-ra (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/v-ra) vr-auto (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/vr-auto) N/A
vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) v-cake (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/v-cake) v-c-a-c v-cac
vRealize Business (vRBus) N/A N/A
vRealize Log Insight (vRLI) N/A N/A
vCenter Log Insight (vC Log) v-c-log (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/v-c-log) Log Insight
vRealize Code Stream (vRCS) N/A N/A
vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) N/A N/A
vRealize Hyperic (vRH) N/A N/A
vRealize Application Services (vRAS) N/A N/A

vCloud Suite Virtual Appliances: Passwords, Databases, URLs, etc

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I recently re-organized my home lab and I got rid of a bunch of VMs for random projects that I have been working on last year. Part of this re-organization was to re-deploy a few of the virtual appliances found within the vCloud Suite. As part of the deployment, I often find myself scouring various documents looking for default credentials to the OS, VAMI interface or the application. It is not always easy to find and I often end up going to Google or the VMTN forums for the answer.

As a fun little exercise, I thought why not deploy all of the latest virtual appliance that are available in the vCloud Suite and just document the latest usernames/passwords for the application, OS, VAMI interface, database configurations, URLs, etc.? This would primarily be a reference for myself, but thought it might also benefit others as well. Duncan Epping had done this awhile back for vCloud Director and few other virtual appliance and funny enough, his site was one of the first ones I found for the default vCloud Director password.

Not only have I deployed all the virtual appliances from the vCloud Suite, which can be seen from the screenshot below,  but I also went through each appliance and validated the credentials for the application, OS or VAMI interface if applicable as well as identify all database credentials and configurations which are not all publicly documented (this took a bit of digging in the appliances, but was not too difficult if you know where to look).

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