VCAP5-DCA: Objective 1.1

Profile based storage

• Enable vm storage profiles
• Define storage profiles
• Create a vm storage profile
• Assign a capability to a datastore
• Assign a profile to a vm
• Check storage profile compliance

Enable vm storage profiles

Select the cluster and select enable

Define Storage Profiles

Create a vm storage profile

Assigning a capability to a datastore

Assigning a profile to a vm

Checking storage profile compliance

vSphere 5.5 Product New Feature Highlites...

Well I have been touting on another blog what the new version of vSphere and vCloud Suite is going to offer.

Following are some highlites;

Administrative UI (Web Client)
The 2013 Administrative UI is built around improved performance and a more native web applications feel.
• Improved usability and more search filters, along with the introduction of the 'recent object' tabs
help admins find and manager their key objects with fewer clicks.
• The new UI is built to manage larger inventories with a faster response time.
• Faster response time across the entire UI

vSphere Replication

The vSphere Replication release for 2013 adds the following new capabilities:


• Ability to deploy new appliances to allow for replication between clusters and non-shared storage deployments
• Multiple points in time support allows administrators to recover to a previous snapshot thus providing protection from logical corruptions in the application that may have been replicated.
• Storage DRS Interoperability - allows for replicated VMs to be storage vMotioned across datastores with no interruption to ongoing replication
• Simplified Management - Deeper integration into the vSphere Web Client to configure and monitor replication within the VM and vCenter management panes simplifies the management experience for replication
• VSAN interoperability to protect and recover virtual machines running on VSAN datastores
vCenter Orchestrator
With this release, vCenter Orchestrator is greatly optimized for growing clouds because of significant improvements in scalability and high availability. Workflow developers can benefit from a more simplified and efficient development experience provided by the new debugging and failure diagnostic capabilities in the vCenter Orchestrator client.




Virtual SAN 

Virtual SAN is a software-based storage solution built into the hypervisor that aggregates the hosts’ local storage devices (SSD and HDD) and makes them appear as a single pool of storage shared across all hosts.


VMware Virtual Flash (vFlash)

Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) Highlights:
This vSphere version supports > 2TB vdisks (vmdk size). Customers will be able to create vmdks upto 64TB. Large files can now be contained within a single vdisk. vSphere version 5.5 and VMFS 5 is needed to create >2TB vdisk.

vCloud Director
Enhancements in this vCloud Director 5.5 release focus on the Content Catalog, vApp provisioning and lifecycle management, improved OVF import/export functionality and added browser support to include supporting Mac OS.

vCloud Director Virtual Appliance
The vCloud Director beta includes support for the vCloud Director Virtual Appliance to help facilitate PoCs and Evals.
 vCloud Director cell is available in a virtual appliance form factor for quick-and-easy deployment and setup. With the appliance you can choose to use an internal/embedded database or an external database of your choice (Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle).
 As with prior releases, the vCD virtual appliance is available for PoC/Eval use only. For help with deploying and configuring the vCloud Director virtual appliance please see the vCloud Director 5.5 Virtual Appliance Deployment Guide available in the Beta Community.
Content Catalog
This release includes multiple enhancements to the Content Catalog.




vCloud Networking & Security
Networking Enhancements
This release contains two major networking enhancements
Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP): Provides increased bandwidth, better load balancing,
improved link level redundancy and easier operations for hypervisor uplinks connected to physical network.
• Today, vSphere5.1 supports a simplified version of LACP with support for single Link Aggregation per host and limited choice of load balancing algorithms.
• LACP in vSphere5.5 allows for a rich choice of over 22 load balancing algorithms and 32 LAGs per host and ensures the largest density of physical NICs can be aggregated.


Security Features
Distributed Firewall is a key service in the Software Defined Datacenter. It secures and isolates workloads inside the virtual environment. Key new features:
Performance: High performance stateful firewall at hypervisor of each host



vCenter Site Recovery Manager 2013 
Feature Highlights: Here are some key features supported in the beta refresh:
• Support for vSAN with vSphere Replication • SDRS / Storage vMotion interoperability • New configuration option to support vSphere Replication Multi-Point-In-Time snapshots during failover

VMware vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager (MHM) 1.1
The MHM 1.1 release adds the following new capabilities:
• Support for Microsoft Hyper-V3 hypervisor (as well as Windows 2008 R2 and 2008).

The ability to cold-migrate VMs from Hyper-V to ESX hosts. 

HP's customized ESXi 5.5 image is now available to download

With the new vSphere 5.5 is out HP released its customized ESXi 5.5 image and is ready to download.

http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/software/vmware/esxi-image.html

Software Defined Storage Technologies are here!

As you might be already aware of the news EMC's latest acquisition of ScaleIO. It is a Israeli startup which has been in stealth mode and suddenly the news breaks up that EMC has bought the company for $300 Million last week.

But before I could hear about the acquistion of ScaleIO, I was hooked onto Nutanix. Nutanix is also a SAN free solution and provides hardware appliances.

The architecture is more or less the same.

Both use the local storage of the servers and present it as a shared storage to the hypervisor.

Yesterday I had the opportunity of contacting ScaleIO and got some insight on how technology really works.

ScaleIO's ECS (Elastic Converged Storage) deploys a virtual appliance on top of VMware Hypervisor, in case of Hyper-V it provides an exe file to abstract the storage from local disks and provides as a shared pool of storage.

I was told that I need at least 3 servers with 3TB storage to run and I was also offered a trial software to try it out.

ScaleIO seems highly scalable as opposed to Nutanix has the limitation of scaling up to 50 Nodes.

A Nutanix node consists of 4 Servers in built.

I am yet to dive in to the technologies but both seems really cool concepts, and can these kill the SAN business of the big boys?

www.scaleio.com
www.nutanix.com

Points to take note of on the DCA blueprint

• 26 lab live tests.

• Live lab activities consist of multiple tasks, where each task is scored.

• The passing score for this exam is 300. The scale is from 100-500.

• Points are awarded for the successful completion of each lab task. Most items on the exam are composed of several tasks, and partial credit is awarded for those tasks that are completed successfully. Candidates can choose to complete a task using different methods, as points are awarded based on successful completion, not on the steps used to complete the task.

• The total time for this exam is 210 minutes.

• If a candidate fails an exam on the first attempt, he or she must wait 14 calendar days from their original appointment time before he or she can register to retake the exam. If a candidate fails the exam twice or more, there is a 30 calendar day period before being able to take the exam again. If a candidate passes the exam, they cannot take the exam again until a new major revision of the product and certification is released.

• The exam consists of a number of tasks that are performed using actual equipment consisting of two ESXi hosts and a vCenter Server virtual machine. A number of pre-configured virtual machines will also be present for use with certain tasks. The lab environment is based on vSphere 5.0.

• The VCAP5-DCA Exam includes troubleshooting tasks. As a result, some components may not be correctly configured, or may not have been configured at all, which is entirely intentional. In addition, some lab tasks are dependent on the successful completion of previous tasks. Every task can be completed successfully, and knowledge of how the task is completed is essential to determine what component or components must be configured or re-configured.

Visit to VMware office in Bangalore 15th May 2013

VMware office from out side.

It's sad that these folks are no more with VMware.

Can you add an ESXi 5.1 host to vCenter 5.0 update 2?

I tried to add a ESXi 5.1 host to the vCenter 5.0 update 2 and I was not successful giving the below error.

Below is the compatibility list.

So ESXi 5.1 is not officially supported and not compatible with vCenter 5.0 update 2.

The initial steps towards the VMware's Vision "Software Defined Data Center" hints emerging

There are some blog posts and official blog posts are emerging these days giving us hints that VMware is getting ready to keep the next steps towards the vision of "Software Defined Datacenter". It's worth reading those to keep ahead of the technology that VMware is trying to aim at.

So it seems VMware has worked along with the latestly acquired Nicira team to bring about the Network virtualization to the next level...

Following are some of the blogposts that I came across...

http://www.cloudmantic.com/vmware-launches-nsx-based-upon-nicira/?goback=%2Egde_51214_member_223211795

http://blogs.vmware.com/console/2013/03/vmware-nsx-network-virtualization.html

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/14/vmware_nsx_nicira_nerwork_virtualization/

http://www.networkcomputing.com/data-center/vmwares-network-virtualization-plans-cry/240150736

vSphere vMSC (Metro Storage) Cluster with HP Left Hand Storage

Last week I had the opportunity to design a vMSC cluster with HP Lefthand storage for one of the customer.

I will post some resources in the series.

This post will focus on the design aspects of the solution

·         3 dedicated IP networks will be configured:

o   Storage network

o   VM network

o   vMotion network

·         As per the best practices Round Trip Time (RTT) latencies on storage network between sites should not exceed 2 ms RTT.

·         Storage network must support a minimum of 1Gbps throughput between sites.

·         Network connectivity between the Failover Manager (FOM) and the storage nodes should be at least 100mbps and RTT should not exceed 50ms RTT.

·         ESXi hosts in both data centers must have a private network on the same IP subnet and broadcast domains.

·         Any IP’s used on vm must be accessible from both sites.

·         Sites should be connected through a redundant storage network consisting of two physical links.

·         The VMware data stores for the vm’s running in the ESXi Cluster are provisioned on Network RAID 10 volumes.

·         The maximum nodes are supported on the HA cluster is 32 and should not exceed the number.

·         VMware vSphere Enterprise license needs to be used to gain from the Metro vMotion feature.

Provisioned Size, Defined Size of a datastore explained

Last night I had to explain to Server admins as to what all the terms meant by Provisioned size, defined size and used size.

Let me first define the terms of what is Provisioned Size, Defined Size and Used Size is;

We will then better understand what is the situation right now and plus how we should calculate the growth of the disk.

Provisioned Size: Allocated space for (Defined Size at the creation of vm + Overhead + Snapshots)

Defined Size: Is the size we allocate at the creation of the virtual machine

Used Size: Actual used space from the defined space

Since the virtual machines have been defined to use as thin disks it allows us to over allocate space than the space that we have on the datastore.

In this example although we have 300GB datastore, we are able to allocate 532GB for disks using thin provisioning.

vm	Provisioned Size	Defined Size	Used Size
Vm1	102.05	100	14.43
Vm2	156.19	152	68.75
Vm3	46.05	40	16.73
Vm4	88.05	80	63.86
Vm5	84.05	80	39.36
Vm6	84.05	80	39.21
Total	560.44	532	242.34

When we are calculating the the storage we should calculate the defined size and add 25% on top of that for snapshots and overheads.

That’s VMware’s recommendation.

LUN in HP P2000 Array goes disappearing intermittently

Fortunately enough this situation was not at a customer premises it was a situation that  cropped up in house

The LUN in HP P2000 goes offline with all the vm's missing and comes back after few minutes.

The LUN was housing critical vm's where the whole branches and major operations were heavily dependent on.

I had a chat to our storage team and did not find any issues with firmware nor the diagnostics.

I did little bit of researching and found this HP advisory article.

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=c03470756&lang=en&cc=us&taskId=101&prodSeriesId=4118559&prodTypeId=12169

The scope of the document says

SCOPE

All HP MSA2000 G2 and P2000 G3 arrays are affected by this advisory. All protocols are affected.

Operating systems affected by this advisory include Linux, HP-UX, and VMware.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to You All!

Hoping to have an exciting year with VMware....

ESXi 5.0 Update 2 has been released

I have been busy downloading new updates of vSphere 5.0. Updates include for ESXi 5.0 and vCenter Server 5.0.

VMware has announced officially that vCenter 5.0 Update 2 is able to run on Windows Server 2012.

Read the release notes of VMware below. Check for the resolved issues section the number of issues that VMware has addressed with this release.

http://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere5/doc/vsp_esxi50_u2_rel_notes.html

I dont know if its just me but I am having trouble to download the iso's. Whenever I have been trying to download the vSphere 5.0 update 2 it keeps redirecting me to vSphere 5.1.

Along with this update HP has released it's custom ESXi ISO in the below URL.

https://my.vmware.com/group/vmware/details?downloadGroup=HP-ESXI-5.0.0-U2-20DEC2012&productId=229

Host resource counter on summary page not visible

On a production at one of customer sites showed blank on host resources,

The host was already added to the cluster...

To resolve the issue,

• Enabled the SSH service on the host.
• Connected through a putty session.
• Restarted the management services using "services.sh restart" command.

Host automatically got disconnected. Connected the host back again and voila! there it was with all the counters visible.

OVM to VMware migration project lessons learnt

I am involved in an ongoing migration of OVM 2.1.5 to VMware vSphere 5 project.

It involved having a mediate server beefed up with enough memory and storage to host all the vm's.

Most of these vm's were in production environment, and the necessary network settings had to be created on the VMware virtual infrastructure.

Mediate server mediated to test the vm's in their own VLAN's and also used Starwind's free iSCSI software which was an awesome find for us to quickly migrate the vm's from mediate server to the blade servers.

On my next post I will try and do a tutorial on how to install an Starwind iSCSI software to setup a Software  iSCSI storage.

Leave comments if you want a detailed tutorial on this.

VMware vCenter is capable of managing 3rd party hypervisors.

VMware announced its capabiltiy of managing third party hypevisors. For now Hyper-V on Windows 2008 and Windows 2008 R2 is supported.

The relevant software can be obtained from the following link, (Scroll to the very bottom of the page.)
https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/details?downloadGroup=VCL-VSP510-VC-510A-EN&productId=285&rPId=3144


Before installing, ensure that these prerequisites are met:

• You have an account with administrator privileges on the vCenter Server system.
• The Windows Remote Management service is running and configured on the vCenter Server machine and on the machine where you install the vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager server.
• Your user account has sufficient rights to install the Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable Package. The vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager installer initiates the installation of the Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable Package.
• (If you want to use a custom certificate for vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager) You have all the necessary certification authorities in the Trusted Root Certification Authority on the system where you want to install the vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager server.

Following KBTV videos show how the vCenter Multi Hypervisor Manager Server and vCenter Multi Hypervisor Manager Client is installed.

Interoperability and Software Requirements

Supported Hypervisors

• Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008
• Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2

http://www.vmware.com/support/mhm/doc/vcenter-multi-hypervisor-manager-10-release-notes.html#interop

End of availability of ESX 4.x and vMA versions 1 and 4

VMware will not provide any binaries or license keys for vSphere ESX hypervisor 4.x or vMA versions 1 and 4 after August 15, 2013.

VMware has announced the end of availability (“EOA”) of VMware vSphere ESX hypervisor 4.x and VMware Management Assistant (“vMA”) versions 1 and 4, effective August 15, 2013. As of this date VMware vSphere ESX hypervisor 4.x and vMA versions 1 and 4 will no longer be available for download from VMware and customers will no longer have the ability to download or generate license keys for use with these products.


Read more:
https://www.vmware.com/support/product-support/esx/?rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&ved=0CDsQFjAC&url=http://www.vmware.com/go/esx-end-of-availability&ei=2J64UKK9MMHYrQeEg4GYBQ&usg=AFQjCNEGpGkmM8MnizAfUSkSzL5wDJjnzA

Only for VMware vExperts, VMware Certified Professionals (VCP) and VMware Certified Instructors (VCI)

VEEAM is giving away free 12 month valid NFR license to VCP's, VCI's and vExperts.

Grab yours now at http://www.veeam.com/nfr/free-nfr-license?utm_source=lettertobloggers&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nfr6.5&mkt_tok=3RkMMJWWfF9wsRokvajPde%2FhmjTEU5z16OQsWqGygokz2EFye%2BLIHETpodcMTsVlM7rYEhcSI4JkxgVAR%2FaQeYFN