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Community stories of VMware & Apple OS X in Production: Part 5

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Company: Artwork Systems Nordic A/S (AWSN)
Software: VMware vSphere
Hardware: Apple Mac Pro

[William] - Hi Mads, thank you for taking some time this morning to share with the community your past experiences managing a VMware and Apple OS X environment. Before we get started, can you introduce yourself and what you currently do?

[Mads] - My name is Mads Fog Albrechtslund, and I currently work as a vSphere Consultant for Businessman A/S Denmark. The reason for my current employment, is primarily a Mac based vSphere project I did at my former employer, Artwork Systems Nordic A/S also in Denmark. Before I became a vSphere Consultant, my primary job function was as a Mac Consultant, in which I have several Apple related certifications.

[William] - Could you describe what your vSphere project was about?

[Mads] - The vSphere Project, was that of virtualizing and consolidating the infrastructure of Artwork Systems Nordic A/S (AWSN). AWSN is a reseller of hardware and software to the graphical industry, thereby running a lot of Apple systems and software that require Mac OS X underneath.

When I started at the company in early 2009, there were around 8-10 servers, and only 9 employees. Every server was just a desktop Mac or PC, running multiple services at once, trying to use the hardware at best. I started by consolidating and somewhat standardizing all these machines, into a Rack cabinet.

But I still wanted to make it better, more flexible and faster to deploy new OS'es when they are needed. I also wanted to move away from running multiple services on a single OS. I started looking into virtualization around late 2010, before VMware even made vSphere compatible with the Mac's. And we started working with a competitor of VMware, which at the time was about to release a bare-metal hypervisor that was compatible with Mac hardware.

We invested time, money and hardware in that initial project, only to around 6 month later to find out that the vendor would drop that bare-metal software again.

[William] - Ouch! I guess that is one of the risks when working with a new company/startup. So what did you end up doing after the company dropped support for bare-metal support?

[Mads] - So when VMware release vSphere 5.0 which was compatible with Apple hardware, I asked my boss to try again. He said "Sure, go ahead…. but we don't have a lot of money to do this with". So I needed to make this project as cheap as possible.

What I ended up with was 3 Mac Pro's (2x 2008 and 1x 2009), which I got almost free from a customer, extra RAM (32GB in each Mac Pro), extra NIC's (4 NIC's in each Mac Pro), a Synology RS812+ NAS and VMware vSphere Essentials bundle.

Here is a picture of the 3 Mac Pros:

awsn-mac-pro
[William] - I too remember when VMware announced support for Apple Hardware with vSphere 5.0, that was a huge deal for many customers. Were there any performance or availability requirements that you had to take into considerations while designing this solution? Did all Virtual Machines run off of the NAS system or was it a mix between local and remote storage?

[Mads] - All VM's ran off the NAS over iSCSI. I did consider the availability of that design, but given the constraints of the money of the project, there was not much of a choice. I did not want to run the VM's on the local disks inside each Mac Pro, considering that if one Mac Pro died, I would not easily have the possibility to power-on that VM on another Mac Pro.

The performance of the NAS was not great, but good enough. After I left, the NAS was upgraded to a Synology DS1813+, and then using the old Synology RS812+ as a backup destination. The load on the VM's was light, as there only was 10 employees in the company, and most of the VM's was only for testing or designing solutions for the customers.

[William] - What type of Virtual Machines and applications were you running on the Mac Pros?

[Mads] - The 3 Mac Pro's are running around 20 VM's, where most of them are either OS X based or Linux Virtual Appliance's. My plan was to do one service per OS, to keep it as simple as possible. Almost all the OS X based VMs are running OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. Some of them are just plain Client installations, but most of them have the Server app installed, to run Open Directory, DNS or File Server.

The Client installations are running specific software that the company sells, like graphical processing software from Enfocus or FTP software from Rumpus. There is also an older OS X based VM, running Mac OS X Server 10.6, which runs a special graphical procession software called Odystar from a company called Esko. This software only exist on Mac OS X, and it also requires a HASP USB dongle for its license. Most of the VM's are configured as low as possible, which for most is 1 vCPU and 2GB ram.

The Mail server for the company, is based on Kerio Connect software, which is also something that the company is a reseller of for its smaller graphical customers. That software exist either as a virtual appliance, a Windows install or a Mac based install. We ended up with choosing a Mac based installation, because we knew it better.

[William] - How did you go about monitoring the Virtual Machines as well as the underlying hardware? Any particular tools that you found worked well for your organization?

[Mads ] - We did not do much of monitoring, of neither the VMs or the hardware. I was onsite, and sitting almost beside the rack most of the time, so if there was any trouble either physically or virtual, I could fix it fast. I had configured email reporting in all the solutions that gave the option (vCenter Server, Synology NAS and some of the applications).

[William] - I know you had started this project back in 2010 and there was definitely a limited amount of hardware options to run Apple OS X VMs. Today, there are a few more options and if you were to do it again, would you have done anything differently? Would you still consider the Mac Pro (Tower) or look at potentially the newer Mac Pro (Black) or even the Mac Mini’s?

[Mads] - We did start out by looking at the Mac Mini's, but considering that we could only run 3 hosts because of the vSphere Essential license, we needed to get more RAM in each host, than the Mac Mini's could provide. The Tower based Mac Pro is still the best option for this installation, given that it is available for a reasonable price, runs more than 16GB ram and you can get 2x CPU sockets in each host.

The new black version of the Mac Pro, is especially not a good fit, primarily because of the price and because of the dual GPU's and only 1 CPU. I would love a Mac Mini with 32GB ram, that would properly fit perfectly, considering the advances in CPU technology over the 2008/2009 CPU's in the Mac Pro's currently running the environment.

[William] - Mads, thank you very much for spending your morning and sharing with us your experiences with running vSphere on the Mac Pros. You have provided a lot of good information that I know will surely help the VMware and Apple community. One final question before I let you go. Is there any tips/tricks you would recommend for someone looking to start a similar project? Any particular resources you would recommend people check out?

[Mads] - First of a big thanks to yourself, for provide great content on http://www.virtuallyghetto.com. I have also provided my own experiences both on my personal blog www.hazenet.dk and on businessman's company blog bmspeak.businessmann.dk

On my own blog, I have written about issues with screensavers in Mac OS X VM's and I have also written a long blog post about how make a never booted Mac OS X template VM, which don't have any UUID's set.

If you are interested in sharing your story with the community (can be completely anonymous) on how you use VMware and Mac OS X in Production, you can reach out to me here.

 

Community stories of VMware & Apple OS X in Production: Part 3

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In this third post of the community stories, I had the pleasure to interview with Blake Garner who shares with us how he leverages VMware and Apple Technologies in his production environment.

Company: Adobe
Product: VMware Fusion
Hardware: Apple Mac Mini & Mac Pro

[William] - Hi Blake, thanks for your comment on Twitter today, it sounds like this blog series might be useful for your organization. I understand that you have some experiences working with VMware and Apple OS X that you can share with the community? Before we get started, can you quickly introduce yourself?

[Blake] - Sure, I have been working at Adobe for 11 years in the Seattle location. Started off as a Dev/Test lab administrator focused on Macs, Printers & color management. Been working with VMware seriously starting with VMware Fusion 1.0 and Lab Manager 2.x.

[William] - Wow, a VMware old timer 🙂 So, I take it from your Tweet that you must be doing some really cool stuff with VMware and Apple OS X? Can you describe the environment and how you leverage these technologies together?

[Blake] - We provide "bare metal" Mac Mini's and Mac Pro's to our users. They are mostly developers and testers of Adobe desktop software. The process involves approvals and users requesting a Mac from our web portal.

Once users have the Mac they load VMware Fusion which is the majority of the time. We do not have a centralized command and control of VMware Fusion. A lot of the teams then hook up VMware Fusion to our testing harnesses. Things like Jenkins and a lot of custom code to manage the VM's. We looked into using ESXi/vSphere/vCloud on the Mac but due to the Apple EULA restrictions it just wasn't a good fit.

[William] - Very cool! This sounds like you’re offering Mac as a Service for your internal customers? How do you go about managing the requests of which Mac Mini or Mac Pro are leased out? Is all this custom software Adobe has built?

[Blake] - Yes we do both Mac and x86 systems (Windows & Linux) as part of our bare metal offering on our internal IT Cloud. The bare metal part is custom code. We have rolled our own deployment systems to go along with it as well. Users access one portal that currently spans vCloud, AWS & bare metal along with a few other services.

[William] - You mention that the majority of users install VMware Fusion on the “bare metal” once they get their assigned Mac Mini or Mac Pro. What is VMware Fusion being used for?

[Blake] - Lot's of automation. vmrun gets a good workout here. One team has a "Test as a Service" that can control VMware Fusion and rollback snapshots to provide a clean testing state. The consumers of the Mac's enlist them into their own existing automation systems. Often if you look at the VM's you will see Creative Cloud applications running through test cases super fast. Builds of products for Mac OS and iOS also happen.

[William] - Ah, so they are leveraging VMware Fusion as a platform to be able to run sort of a “Continuous Integration” build environment for your internal Mac OS X and iOS builds? This sounds like it could be quite challenging to manage, have the end users had any issues or have they automated everything all already?

[Blake] - In a larger software company you end up with a number of approaches. I did not get involved at the build level enough to speak on that. Adobe IT tends to focus on the common services that all the teams can use. In general there is a lot of automation herding going on..

[William] - Gotcha. So, going back to physical Mac Mini and Mac Pro, roughly how many are you managing and what type of configurations did you spec out? Any particular reasoning for choosing these configurations?

[Blake] - Our initial launch of the bare metal mac service has 50 Mac Pro's and 50 Mac Minis split equally between two sites. This service is just a couple months old and we expect it to grow fast as the engineers figure out they can get Mac's if their manager approves a monthly fee to their cost center.

We have one config for Mac Pro and Mac Mini. The Mac Mini 6,2 has 250GB SSD and i7 2.6GHz with 16GB RAM. The Mac Pro 6,1 6-Core E5 3.5 GHz with 500GB SSD, 16GB RAM and lower end GPU's as those are not used that much. We really just looked for a sweet spot that matches what Creative Cloud needs

Here is a picture of one of the Mac Pro racks courtesy of Blake:

adobemacpro
[William] - How do you monitor for hardware issues and what is the most common issues have you seen for both the Mac Mini and Mac Pro?

[Blake] - That is a real challenge with Apple hardware. With no out of band management we rely on our staff to troubleshoot via KVM or in person if needed. Pre-release software can really crash a system and that often needs a finger on the power button. I'm looking into using our remote controlled PDU to power cycle systems via the portal. If a system is truly FUBAR we just give people a new one.

In a lot of cases we can simply re-image the system via netboot and add it back to the available pool. VMware Fusion comes really in handy for developing our custom netboot environments as well. Netbooting an OS X VM's is one of my favorite features of VMware Fusion.

[William] - I can definitely see it being easier to re-image than to troubleshoot unless you are seeing a consistent issue. Curious, what version of Mac OS X and VMware Fusion are you using today? In addition to snapshot & Netbooting, any other useful features VMware Fusion provides?

[Blake] - VMware Fusion 6.0.3 is what we support today. On the hardware we encourage people to use the latest release version of OS X. In the VM's it depends on what kind of testing. Validation of pre-release OS's is a big chunk of the testing work. For OS X that happens in VMware Fusion and other x86 it's done in vCloud and some VMware Workstation. The automation capabilities of VMware Fusion are a key component. That's what gives us the upper hand in managing these virtual systems.

[William] - Hey Blake, I really appreciate you taking the time and sharing with us on how Adobe leverages VMware and Mac OS X. Before I let you go, do you have any words of advice for other customers looking to provide a similar type of environment? Any gotchas or things you would change if you could start fresh?

[Blake] - Go talk to those people who have offices crammed full of systems and find out what they are doing. You can often find the common requirements and start building against that. Don't try and dictate the whole solution to engineers. Once they are happy customers it's much easier to get them onboard with centralized services. Provide a set of functional services and engineers will pick it up quickly. Keep adding services and they will grow along with you.

Things that I would change all end up on our features roadmap. I have my eyes on providing an API to access to re-image or reserve bare metal systems and providing vagrant along with VMware Fusion for automation.

If you are interested in sharing your story with the community (can be completely anonymous) on how you use VMware and Mac OS X in Production, you can reach out to me here.

 

Quick Update – ESXi support for Apple Mac Pro 6,1

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I know many of you have been asking about ESXi support for the latest Mac Pro 6,1 that was released from Apple late last year and I just wanted to give a quick update. VMware Engineering has been hard at work on getting this new platform certified and supported with ESXi, however, there were some unforeseen challenges that is currently preventing the current version of ESXi to run on the new Mac Pro.

VMware is working closely with Apple's hardware team to resolve these issues and we expect to have a Mac Pro 6,1 supported with ESXi 5.5 in the future. In the meantime, if you wish to evaluate ESXi on the new Mac Pro (though not officially supported), you can sign up for the new vSphere Beta and run a Beta version of ESXi on the new Mac Pro.

Here is a screenshot of Mac Pro 6,1 running the Beta version of ESXi:

esxi-mac-pro-6.1-0
There are a couple of workarounds that is required for right now, which will all be resolved by GA. For more details, please refer to this VMTN thread.

Apple Mac Pro 5,1 now on VMware HCL for ESXi 5.5

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I was just informed yesterday that VMware HCL (Hardware Compatibility List) has been updated to  include the current Apple Mac Pro 5,1 as a supported platform for ESXi 5.5. The Apple Mac Pro was not originally listed and may have caused some confusion. This was a mistake on our part and luckily it has now been resolved.

The Apple Mac Pro 5,1 now supports the following versions of ESXi:

  • ESXi 5.1
  • ESXi 5.1 Update 1
  • ESXi 5.5

I know a few of you have asked about the upcoming Mac Pro (black circular one) and whether it would be certified for ESXi.

All I can say, it is something that we will look at once the new Mac Pro becomes generally available (VMware does not get early access to Apple hardware).

ESXi 5.1 Officially Certified on Apple Mac Pro

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If you are still trying to catch up with all the awesomeness that has been shared, blogged, tweeted, etc. about in the last 24hrs with the announcement of the new vCloud Suite 5.1 release, here is one additional tidbit to add to that list which you might not have heard about it. With the release of ESXi 5.1, the Apple Mac Pro is now officially supported!

I came across this little tidbit from some folks internally who have been working hard to get the Mac Pro platform certified and supported on ESXi. After the vCloud Suite went live, I did a quick search on the VMware HCL and sure enough, the Apple Mac Pro was listed with support for ESXi 5.1.

If you recall back when vSphere 5.0 was released, VMware introduced support for ESXi to run on Apple's XServe ... unfortunately, Apple had decided to announce it's EOL (End of Life) several months prior which made it difficult to purchase and rely on the XServe as a platform. The only way you could get your hands on an XServe is if you were one of the few who purchased them before the EOL date (I personally went through this) or you were willing to look on Ebay. Luckily, now with the latest release of ESXi 5.1, if you need to virtualize Mac OSX Server Virtual Machines and other guestOSes, you can do so using the Apple Mac Pro.