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As many companies have moved toward virtualization in the last 24 months, virtual machine (VM) sprawl is becoming a common issue that needs to be addressed. As the technology gets easier to implement, it seems that virtual machines are deployed faster than an IT department can manage them. And as a result, uncontrollable growth of virtual machines grow faster than plankton in the water. In order to manage VM sprawl effectively, it is important to analyze your entire infrastructure, enforce policies, and create a centralized point of management.

In order to effectively manage VM sprawl, analyze your infrastructure to determine how many virtual machines you are running. Many people call this a compliance audit, and it usually sends the IT administrators into a panic. This type of audit can be done via third-party software or by a manual check of how many virtual machines are running. Once this number is determined, you can begin to create policies to keep VM sprawl from getting out of control.

If you don’t control sprawl, you might use up all your host resources before you know it and also create bottlenecks that might reduce the performance of all your VMs. Tight control of your virtual environment is the key to limiting the growth of virtual machines.

How are you handling VM sprawl?

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A virtual machine is simply a set of relative files that contain the computer’s pertinent information. These files can be moved from computer to computer and will open up and work fine. This is a great feature because if you have a computer catastrophe, a simple backup will give you the entire computer back again if you are working from within a virtual machine. The virtual machine is made up of the files in Table 1.

Table1. Anatomy of a virtual machine

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Microsoft released Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel v2.0.11, a utility for Windows XP/Vista that allows you to create a virtual CD-ROM drive on your computer. This is especially helpful if you have a library of ISO images.

Let’s begin by downloading the software to a Windows computer of your choice. Next, extract the files to your %systemroot%system32drivers folder and double-click the VcdControlTool.exe and click Driver Control. Click the Install Driver button, navigate to the %systemroot%system32drivers folder, choose VcdRom.sys, and click Open and Start and OK.

You are now ready to click Add Drive in order to add a virtual drive letter. After you click Add Drive, the drive letter appears. Choose Mount to mount your ISO image to the virtual drive letter. You can now use the drive letter as if it were a physical CD-ROM device. When you are finished with the ISO image, choose Eject |Remove Drive | Driver Control | Stop | Remove Driver | OK.

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Included with VMware Workstation is a command line with switches that will enable you to do a host of things. The syntax for using VMware Workstation from the command line is as follows:

Vmware [-x] [-X] [-q] [-s <variablename>=<value>] 

[-m] [-v] [/<path_to_config>/<config>.virtual machine]

[X toolkit options]

Table 1: Command-Line Switches

For example, you can create a batch file that automatically opens VMware and runs a particular virtual machine. The syntax is as follows:

“c:program filesvmwarevmware workstationvmware.exe” -x “D:My Virtual MachinesWindows Server 2003 Enterprise Editionwinnetenterprise.vmx”

Figure A illustrates the command line in action. You can continue playing around with the command line until you create the applicable configurations for your environment.

• Mini-Glossary: Virtualization terms you should know

Attached is also a funny comic on virtualization I found.

www.zoitz.com 

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It dawned on me today that major vendors such as VMware, Microsoft, Citrix, etc. have all created hypervisors that are free. VMware has ESX3i, Microsoft has Hyper-V, and Citrix has Xen. Each company puts out tons of reasons why its hypervisor is better. What does all this mean? The leader in the market doesn’t care anymore about the hypervisor. Hypervisor Management is where it is at.

Data centers are popping out virtual machines faster than I can type this blog post. These days cloned images take minutes to deploy. Many companies take on virtualization projects only to give up server sprawl for virtual machine sprawl. If you do not have the proper management, the vm phenomenon can get out of hand. How are you going to control the vm’s being deployed? How can you stop rogue virtual machines?

There is a really great niche growing, and it is hypervisor management. Being able to manage your virtual machines all in one place with a single tool is where the true leader will emerge. If you can add virtual machine network discovery and the ability for this management software to support the major hypervisors available today with the advanced functionality of live migration and vmotion, you will have a clear leader in the market.

A universal virtual machine management tool that supports all the major hypervisors would allow you to have many different flavors of virtualization, which may even include open source software. It wouldn’t matter what you used, because your vm management tool would find your virtualization platform of choice and allow you to manage it.

What do you think of a universal hypervisor management tool? Do you think hypervisor management is where it is at?

You can download BgInfo today. Once it is downloaded, place the BgInfo.exe in your startup folder to ensure that your system information is updated each time you boot your computer.

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XenServer is really helping to make virtualization popular on the Linux platform. VMware and Microsoft (formerly Connectix) have really made virtualization popular on the Windows end with products such as VMware Workstation and Virtual PC. You also have VirtualBox getting a piece of the pie on the desktop front. Microsoft buys Kidaro for their desktop virtualizaton.

Enterprise products such as VMware Server (formerly GSX Server) and Microsoft’s Virtual Server have recently been declared FREE to feud the ongoing fight to keep or gain market share, respectively. VMware delivers ESX3i, a free hypervisor. Microsoft responds with a free hypervisor of their own called Hyper-V server.

It is a war, and it will be interesting to see who the top contenders are. Currently, XenSource, Virtuozzo, and Virtual Iron are trying to become the top contender on the Linux and Windows platform. Clearly, VMware with their ESX server product is the 800-pound gorilla, but Microsoft would like to change that with the release of its Hyper-V hypervisor. Oracle is even becoming a major player in the virtualization world; it’s crazy out there. Gartner released a chart, shown in Figure A, that shows the fierce competition for your business.

Figure A

Competition

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Please take my poll on which virtualization vendor will win your business.

If you use twitter, you can follow me by clicking the graphic.

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It is easy to begin monitoring virtual machines with the VMware Workstation  Performance Monitor. Let’s go over the counters that are installed with VMware Workstation. The counters are described in Table 1.

Table 1

Counters 

You can begin to monitor by using the performance management console in Windows. This is a great way to begin monitoring your system for issues or errors.

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Over a period of time, your virtual disk will grow and performance will degrade. To prevent this, you can defragment the virtual disk. Prior to performing this task, the virtual machine in question must be powered off. Next, highlight the virtual machine you want to defragment and select Edit Virtual Machine Settings (see Figure A).

Figure A

Select Edit Virtual Machine Settings.

On the Hardware tab, highlight the virtual Hard Disk | Utilities and click the Defragment button (see Figure B).

Figure B

Defragment a virtual machine.

Figure C displays a progress bar as the virtual hard drive is defragmented. A disk defragmentation complete message will appear when the process is complete. Now we’ll move on to shrinking a virtual disk drive.

Figure C

Check the status on the Defrag Progress Bar.

Note: Defragmenting a disk is a time-consuming process, depending on the size of your virtual disk. It is best to do it when you are not working with other virtual machines.

Shrinking a virtual disk requires all snapshots for that disk to be removed. Prior to shrinking the disk, make a backup copy of the virtual drive and archive for safekeeping. You can delete your snapshots by highlighting the applicable virtual machine and selecting VM | Snapshot | Snapshot Manager and deleting all snapshots.

Next, double-click the VMware Tools icon in the system tray, as shown in Figure D. On the VMware Tools Properties window, select the Shrink tab and choose which partition you want to shrink, as shown in Figure E.

Figure D

Open VMware Tools.

Figure E

Choose the partition you want to shrink.

Click the Prepare to Shrink button, and a progress bar will show the preparation of the disk (see Figure F). At the end of this process, you are asked whether to shrink (see Figure G) the disk now. Click Yes to shrink the disk. A progress bar will show you when the process is complete. Click OK.

Figure F

Prepare to shrink your disk.

Figure G

Choose to shrink your disk.