VMware for OCP and HardForum

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
Staff member
Joined
May 18, 1997
Messages
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Again sorry for the outages. We have figured out that we have some hardware incompatibilities with the current versions of VMware. We have now moved back to physical servers as of this afternoon for HardOCP, your DNS should be propagated in 24 hours back to the physical boxes.

We will do the same for HardForum in a couple of weeks, but till then we will see the occasional 20 minute outage, sometimes once a day, maybe once every 5. I would suspect the outages will happen 3 more times or so in the next couple weeks.

Talking to VMware about this, we will have a patch soon (they said 30 days). But we need to take care of our readers now and we have the physical hardware, just need to deploy it.
 
Thanks for the heads up!

What I don't understand is why is VMWare needed if the physical hardware is there too. Isn't VMWare only for emulating other machines to do other services when enough physical machines aren't available?
 
Virtualization. Depending on the server hardware, you can use a single hardware server to function as multiple independant servers (or workstations for that matter) through virtualization. Saves cost, power, and rackspace.
 
I would think that using VM instead of physical servers would save Kyle a shitload of cash and anything that saves cash is a good thing especially in todays climate.

Cheers for the headsup Kyle.
 
VMware, when it works, can greatly help to use today's hardware with much better efficiencies.
 
450 said:
Ah, okay. See I had a flawed idea that virtualization would just slow things down compared to spending money on extra hardware. I never realized that virtualization was powerful enough to replace whole servers.
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We recently took 5 older dual CPU Athlon servers and replaced them with a SINGLE 3.2GHz Quad Core Xeon box from Dell. Running VMware on it we had 4 virtual webservers running on the one box. Given our applications, it is almost impossible to utilize the newer hardware fully without virtualization.
 
450 said:
So is each core virtualizing a separate OS? So 4 instances of Server 08 or whatever OS you use on the same computer? And then forum/OCP hosting for each OS?

Also I'm surprised that 1 quad core box handles the load that essentially 10 CPUs did before. I never thought that newer hardware was so much more efficient over the old stuff.
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You can define what resources are dedicated to what virtual servers.

Keep in mind also that before total you had two CPUs at say 1.6GHz. 3.2GHz total cycles of processing power. Now we have four 3.2GHz cores. 12.8GHz total with better Instruction Per Clock rate. RAM and IO play a huge part in it as well.
 
Broadcom NICs not being supported as well as being problematic. We have Broadcom NICs in every server we own.
 
wow...that's a pretty big problem since Broadcom is such a large mfr of the LAN solutions out there. How the hell did vmware overlook that?!
 
nst6563 said:
wow...that's a pretty big problem since Broadcom is such a large mfr of the LAN solutions out there. How the hell did vmware overlook that?!
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Not sure. Every Dell 19XX, 29XX, and R300 we own have Broadcom NICs. It is supposed to be fixed by the end of October.
 
VMWare is amazing when it works. My current issues are with the VMTools for Solaris. I keep getting disconnects on the virtual nic. I can't even transfer files from the host to the guest with out it dying half way through. Arg.

Thanks for the hard work Kyle!
 
Well, thought we had figured some things out, but down VMware just went........
 
ESX is fun like that...

don't trust the documentation... nothing quite works as it should.... especially DRS and HA.

Did a deployment myself earlier this year, still working it out.... the several thousands of dollars i spent on training was more like a class in philosophy.
 
I've got two PE2900 servers with Broadcom NICs and they work just fine in ESXi 3.5U2. I wonder if they use different chips in the xx50 rackmount versions...
 
litkaj said:
I've got two PE2900 servers with Broadcom NICs and they work just fine in ESXi 3.5U2. I wonder if they use different chips in the xx50 rackmount versions...
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We showed no problems until we put a load on them generated by thousands of concurrent users.
 
Where could one direct virtualization questions at the hardforum, like, we have sub catagories for everything else. Just wondering because I have been playing a lot with it and need some resources for something I'd like to do.
 
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