The Server Guy

I recently ran across eyeOS, a web based operating system. It’s not a new idea, but it’s the first implementation I’ve seen that actually seems like it may be functional. I’ve been playing around with it a bit and I have to admit I’m pretty impressed. EyeOS doesn’t have every application you might want to use but they have quite a few different applications available already.

I suppose some of you may not be familiar with a web based OS. The idea is simple. Think of all the things your computer does and move all of that to a web page. All you need is a web browser to access it. The idea is quite intriguing. Imagine walking up to a public kiosk with Internet access. You type in a web address, log in, and all of your programs and documents are available to you… all with no need to take anything with you. I know I would love to have something like this available.

If course this whole concept relies on having web access of some form, but really where do you travel anymore that doesn’t have some sort of access available to you if you don’t have your own computer. If this concept sounds even remotely interesting to you I urge you to take a look. It really is interesting stuff.

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Today I am going to describe the procedure I am using to upgrade the VMware environment at work from ESX 2.5 to ESX 3.0 (or VMware Infrastructure 3). This upgrade has ended up being much more complicated than previous version upgrades for several reasons. The two main issues are that vmfs volumes in ESX 2.5 are only readable (not writable) by ESX 3.0, and the virtual hardware on each virtual machine needs to be upgraded as part of the update.

Before I jump into this I should describe my VMware environment. The servers we use for our host systems recently changed so we are in the middle of a hardware migration as well as the ESX upgrade. Our older ESX hosts are HP BL20p blade servers using 8GB RAM and booting from our HP EVA 8000 SAN. Our new ESX hosts are HP BL25p blades with dual core AMD CPUs and 16GB RAM, booting from the same HP EVA8000 SAN. The new servers run approximately twice as many virtual machines as the older systems do. Our ESX 2.5 systems share a set of 1TB volumes on the SAN for virtual machine storage.

Our data center has two network vlans where half of the ESX systems provide connectivity one vlan and half to the other. We also run Virtual Center and have VMotion configured. There was also an upgrade for Virtual Center to 2.0 which was done earlier which turned out to be helpful because it would have been necessary for the migration.

Since all the ESX hosts share volumes on the SAN and the ESX 3.0 upgrade requires the vmfs volumes to be upgraded I would have to schedule an outage for 2/3 of our systems simultaneously and upgrade all of the ESX hosts at once. This is not a feasible option so I have had to plan a migration path rather than a direct upgrade.

The first step in the process was to install ESX 3.0 on our development systems to test for stability and find any potential issues with migrating to the new version. The systems were very stable and there were no problems found that would prevent us from moving to ESX 3.0 in our production environment.

After testing was done I had to move VMs around so I could clear off one host system. Then I rebuilt the host with ESX 3.0 and created two new vmfs volumes on the SAN. I scheduled individual outages for all of the virtual machines on a second ESX 2.5 host and migrated them to the newly built ESX 3.0 system on the new vmfs volumes. This proceeded until the ESX 2.5 host was free of any virtual machines, at which point the procedure started over with the next system.

I am still in the process of migrating to ESX 3.0 and the only issue I see is with the migration to the new server hardware platform. There are not enough BL25p hosts to hold all of the virtual machines we currently have in production and there is no money left in the budget to purchase additional hardware for this migration. I may end up having to keep a few BL20p hosts in production.

Overall the migration process has been smooth. There haven’t been any problems converting the virtual machines to the ESX 3.0 format and performance seems comparable if not better than ESX 2.5. The only thing that would make the whole procedure easier is additional server hardware which would allow more flexibility in migrating virtual machines.

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I imagine a lot of you don’t even really know what Web 2.0 is. Don’t worry I didn’t really have a firm grasp on it either, until I looked it up. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say:

A phrase coined by O’Reilly Media in 2004^[1], refers to a supposed second generation of Internet-based services—such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies—that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users.

So, it’s just the latest bunch of web sites/services we’ve been seeing. For example, social networking sites, blogs, online tools, etc are all examples of Web 2.0. Basically any application that gains from being online or exists entirely online could be considered part of the Web 2.0 definition.

On Nov 11, 2006 John Markoff posted an article which coined the term Web 3.0. Basically the article boils Web 3.0 down to the ability to ask a question and have a computer interpret it and provide a relevant response.

For example, lets say I want to go on a vacation. There are all sorts of services online to provide for the different parts of planning the trip from booking flights to finding activities at the location of my choice. It can take significant amounts of time to search for then book everything related to the vacation with all of these separate tools though.

With Web 3.0 a person would be able to tell their computer, “I want to go on a vacation somewhere with nice beaches for less than $2500, and oh yeah, I have a four year old child I’ll be bringing,” and after a few moments the computer would produce several suggested vacation packages.

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