Eric Sloof

VMware vCloud Director orchestrates the provisioning of software-defined datacenter services, to deliver complete virtual datacenters for easy consumption in minutes. Software-defined datacenter services and virtual datacenters fundamentally simplify infrastructure provisioning and enable IT to move at the speed of business.

Numerous enhancements are included within vCloud Director 5.1, making it the best infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solution in the marketplace today. This document highlights some of these key enhancements and is targeted toward users who are familiar with previous vCloud Director releases.




Technical White Paper - What’s New with VMware vCloud Director 5.1.pdf

With VMware vSphere  5.1, VMware is releasing a new backup and recovery solution for virtual machines called vSphere Data Protection (VDP). This solution is fully integrated with VMware vCenter Server and provides agentless, disk-based backup of virtual machines to deduplicated storage.

Benefits of VDP include the following:

• It ensures fast, efficient protection for virtual machines even if they are powered off.
• It uses patented deduplication technology across all backup jobs, significantly reducing disk space consumption.
• VMware vSphere APIs – Data Protection (VADP) and Changed Block Training (CBT) are utilized to reduce load on the vSphere host and minimize backup windows requirements.
• It performs full virtual machine and File-Level Restore (FLR) without installing an agent in every virtual machine.
• Installation and configuration is simplified using an appliance form factor.
• Management is performed utilizing the VMware vSphere Web Client.
• The VDP appliance and its backups are protected using a checkpoint and rollback mechanism.
• Windows and Linux files can easily be restored by the end user without a Web browser.

This paper presents an overview of the architecture, deployment, configuration, and management of VDP.

A fundamental part of protecting IT is ensuring that the services provided by virtual machines are resilient, and  robust at all levels of the compute stack, from hardware through to the application. vSphere Replication is a feature introduced with VMware vSphere 5.1. It is designed to augment  the recovery capabilities of the VMware vSphere platform by providing a built-in capability to continually replicate a running virtual machine to another location.

Replication creates a copy of a virtual machine that can be stored locally within a cluster or at another site, providing a data source to rapidly restore a virtual machine within minutes. vSphere Replication augments offerings in the vSphere availability protection matrix. It provides a solution that enables recovery time better than that of restoring from backup, without introducing the complexity of a complete storage array–based replication configuration.

vSphere Replication also enables configuring replication on a per–virtual machine basis and significantly rounds out the capabilities of protection offered by vSphere. This paper will help you understand what vSphere Replication is and some of the benefits of its features. It will also discuss how it works to protect your virtual machines against failure.

Technical White Paper - Introduction to VMware vSphere Replication.pdf

VMware vSphere 5.1 provides many new features and enhancements that further extend the core capabilities of the VMware vSphere platform. Included among these are notable improvements in the areas of host security, logging, monitoring, and deployment; new VMware vSphere vMotion (vMotion) capabilities that enable virtual machines to be migrated between hosts and clusters with no shared storage; and support for the latest processors and guest operating systems (OS).

This paper provides an overview of the new features and capabilities being introduced with vSphere 5.1. This paper is organized into the following four sections:

- User Access
- Auditing
- Monitoring
- vMotion Enhancements
- Extended Guest OS and CPU Support
- Agentless Antivirus and Antimalware

Virtual Machine Enhancements

- New Virtual Machine Features
- Introducing Virtual Machine Compatibility

Auto Deploy

- Stateless Caching Mode
- Stateful Install Mode
- Remote Logging and Dump Collection
- Improved Scalability




Technical White Paper - What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1 – Platform.pdf

VMware vSphere 5.1 brings many new capabilities that extend the benefits of vSphere 5.0, including a number  of new, storage-related features. Many of these enable VMware flagship products such as VMware vCloud Director and VMware View. vSphere 5.1 storage features and enhancements also bring additional scalability, performance and troubleshooting capabilities. This paper focuses on the storage-specific features and enhancements that are available in vSphere 5.1.

Technical White Paper - What’s New in VMware vSphere Storage.pdf

Enhanced vMotion allows you to combine a vMotion and Storage vMotion into a single operation.  Effectivly enabling a “shared nothing” vMotion. Use cases can be found in large datacenters and SMB markets; Cross host and datastore vMotion allows VM migration between clusters in a large datacenters, which may not have a common set of datastores between them.

Cross host and datastore vMotion allows simpler setup and use of local disk, by removing the shared storage requirement, it lowers the barrier to entry for use of non-disruptive migrations and will be very useful for the SMB market.

Enhanced vMotion will count against the concurrent limitations of both vMotion and Storage vMotion. Today, one cannot perform more than 2 concurrent Storage vMotions per host. As a result, no more than 2 concurrent enhanced vMotions will be allowed. 

Since these count against Storage vMotion limits, running 2 concurrent Enhanced vMotions will cause all attempted SvMotions to remain queued until one of the active Enhanced vMotions complete.  Similarly, Enhanced vMotions also count against vMotion limits, at most 8 concurrent vMotions per host. If there are 2 active Enhanced vMotions, then, we will only allow at most 6 concurrent vMotions at the same time. 

If there are 8 active vMotions, any new Enhanced vMotion attempts will be queued until one of the active vMotions complete.  Enhanced vMotion will behave exactly the same as vMotion, with respect to support multi-NICs. Likewise, it will support either shared swap or unshared swap migrations just as vMotion does, with VM home directory movement becoming an unshared swap migration. 

Enhanced vMotions are more expensive and thus that must be factored in when making migration decisions. Neither DRS and SDRS leverage Enhanced vMotion technology in 5.1. Even though neither DRS nor SDRS will recommend Enhanced vMotion migrations, users will still be able to perform manual Enhanced vMotions within or across SDRS or DRS clusters.

The WSX service renders an HTML5 Web page that can connect to your Workstation hosts or ESX host, enumerates the available virtual machines, allows you to power on the virtual machines and interact with the desktop.