www.run-virtual.com Everything you always wanted to know about Virtualization

VMjuggler: 5 Days of TechED, 10.000 vMotions later….

The last 5 days I attended Microsoft TechED in Barcelona answering questions to the 5.000 attendees on the VMware booth. We really wanted to show the Microsoft minded crowd that running Microsoft Windows applications in (VMware) virtual machines works fast, stable and manageable. For the show I created a Windows 2003 64 bit virtual machine and installed Microsoft SQL 2005 in it. This virtual machine was placed together with some 100 other virtual machines on our 6 server ESX environment. I then hit the SQL server with DBhammer to simulate on average 150 sql clients accessing the database, doing around 1.200 queries a second.

We wanted to show the audience that a Server like this, can be moved around physical boxes (using VMotion), without any downtime of the SQL server, so I wrote a small application called the VMjuggler. This application would initiate a live migration of my Virtual SQL server every 10 seconds to another physical server. The VMotion process itself took around 10 seconds, then waited 10 seconds to be moved again. After the 5 days the SQL virtual machine hopped server more then 10.000 times, with out issues what so ever… well at least not on the VMware software side of things. As I am still a non professional developer myself, my VMjuggler application sometimes died on me, but SQL was still up and running, VirtualCenter has zero complains and DBhammer was still happily doing fake credit card transactions into my test database.

Running this demo really allowed us to explain to our visitors that VMware is more then just a hypervisor company, actually most of the software we develop is about solving ordinary IT problems like data protection, resource management, availability, security, provisioning, etc, we just like to use the virtualized architecture to create these solutions.

Funnily enough a few people asked if they can buy/get the VMjuggler application. Not sure why someone wants to use this in the real world, unless they needed to proof to their own bosses that virtual machines really can be load balanced around many physical server without any problems. So I will fix some small bugs in the application this coming week and will make the application available to you all. Let’s see who can get the first 1 million vmotions on a virtual machine 

Thanks to all the people visiting the VMware booth, I enjoyed having lots of nice conversations and discussions with you all.