High End Video Cards, IBM servers and Virtulization.

Today I found this announcement of new products for the dx360 M4

Now I normally don't use this model of computer, but just decided to look at it.  So I looked at the specs of the server then saw the specs of two of the cards, the NVIDIA Tesla K20, and the NVIDIA VGX K1 / K2

The server can handle 2 half length full height cards, with 2 servers in a 2 u space, so that is 4 GPUs in 2U.
The K20 was just a number cruncher, nothing exciting there, could be used for mathematics, or large scale models or something like that.  but the VGX K1 was interesting.  It was a video card that is supposed to be used for virtualized workloads.  From their website:

"VGX boards feature NVIDIA Kepler-based GPUs that, for the first time, allow hardware virtualization of the GPU. This means multiple users can share a single GPU, improving user density while providing true PC performance and compatibility."

Now that is interesting.  What struck me as more interesting is this.  The GPU is supported right now under the following OS's

• XenDesktop with HDX 3D Pro
• XenServer

 And is coming for these platforms:

• XenDesktop with HDX
• XenServer with NVIDIA VGX Hypervisor
• RemoteFX
• Windows Server 2012
• VMware View with vSGA
• ESX

 And I see that the dx360 M4 supporting these OS's

• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2
• Microsoft Windows Server 2008, Datacenter x64 Edition
• Microsoft Windows HPC Server 2008
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Server with Xen x64 Edition
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Server x64 Edition
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 x64 Edition
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 with Xen x64 Edition
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 x64 Edition
• VMware ESX 4.1, ESXi 4.1, and 5.0

 So if I look and see what both card and Server OS support, right now, there is nothing.  Now knowing IBM and what the officially support on their products, I don't see XenServer being a platform that they will add.  And I don't see any development of support of the VGX on RedHat which would say it would be supported by KVM.  I can see This server being supported by Windows 2012 when things get rolling, and that leaves one thing in the wings...

..VMware.  I am guessing that there might be an upgrade on the hypervisor's part for it to better handle virtual GPUs.  For vSphere and for View.  I don't think IBM would work on and develop a > $3500 video card for a server that no platform will support.

I guess we will have to wait and see.

Cracking the contents of the VMware VMU vibs files

I was patching my ESXi server today with the VMware Host Update Utility and was thinking about a couple of things.  First when I do an update the VMU first downloads a bunch of data to my C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware VI Update\vmw, about 1.2GB of data.

I was thinking that if I wanted to switch back to using a scripting tool then I would have to re-download all of the patches again manually and then script it up.  So I wanted the shortcut to see if I really needed to download it again. Inside the MetaData directory, there are four zip files; 4.0 ESX and ESXi, and 4.1 ESX and ESXi. and then in the vibs directory there are a bunch of vibs files ranging from 60 to 130 MB.  Those had to be the patches.

Any search on how to open a VIBS file came up empty so I then looked at the Metadata zips again and opened them all up.  Inside there is a file called Packages.  Once I looked into it I noticed that it was all names of the patches, but was was most interesting was the filename was a .deb file.

So I renamed one of the .vibs file to a .deb copied it over to my Linux server and ran the command ar vx something.deb, and viola, it opened up and showed its contents. 

Unfortunately for me, it looks like the contents inside the .deb / .vibs file is not easily compatible the downloaded manual patches, but I learned a little more on how the VMware VMU architecture works.

What I found very interesting was that even though it was for ESXi, these are debian patch packages, so still somewhere in that tiny ESXi Hypervisor, there is some Linux, however small.

Thanks to http://www.g-loaded.eu/2008/01/28/how-to-extract-rpm-or-deb-packages/ on how to extract DEB packages

Getting VMware Patch Notices Automatically

Hello all.

I found this extremely interesting and surprised that no one has told you about this. VMware has a ListServ for it's patch releases. Great for getting automatic notices of vulnerabilities of your vmware products.

Here is the link to get onto the ListServ
http://lists.vmware.com/mailman/listinfo/security-announce

Here is the archive of their archives:
http://lists.vmware.com/pipermail/security-announce/

Sign up right now

Re-installation of VMware tools for Ubunutu

I needed this procedure for when I upgraded my ESX server from 3i to 4i

Do the following commands to remove the VMware tools that are already there:

cd /usr/bin
sudo .vmware-uninstall-tools.pl


Use Ubuntu community documents for installation: VMware Tools

Getting a cheap FC card into ESXi server

I am looking to see if I can add a cheap Fiber Channel (FC) to my ESX server.

Stumbled across this when looking for a StorageWorks on Ebay - FCA2404

• Found it on the VMware ESX hcl. looks like it works for ESX3i, but not 4i
• Found a HP web site for documentation: FCA2404 documentation
  
• Found the drivers for it: FCA2404 Drivers
  
• Works with windows 2000, 2003, and 2008 so believe the HP is continuing support for it
• Only a 2GB FC card, but do you need more for a home test sever
  

About this Blog

Hello, Hello, Hello

Ok, sometimes I get curious and want to try things. Some times I succeed, and some times I do not, but most of all, I like to document my attempts to solve problems.

Now while I have many interests and solutions, this will focus on a certain subset of them. First of all Virtualization. There might be some Linux, Windows, and Scripting, but almost all of it will center around accomplishments related to a virtualization and computers.

Some of my recent endeavors that I plan to document later are as follows:

• Setting up and working with Nagios
• Getting Microsoft Cluster services to work with ESX 3i
• FreeNAS as a file share repository
• Using iSCSI with ESX

I hope that more than myself find these topics interesting.