vSphere 5 - 2 - Eric Sloof

Friday, March 16. 2012

501 Release Notes

vSphere 5.0 U1 Release Notes

Support for new processors
Support for additional guest operating systems
New or upgraded device drivers
L3-routed NFS Storage Access

vCenter 5.0 U1 Release Notes

Guest Operating System Customization Improvements

View 5.0.1 Release Notes

PCoIP-enabled View Client for Mac OS X
Client SSL requirement

vCD 1.5.1 Release Notes

Firewall rules can be configured with CIDR blocks, IP ranges, and port ranges
Added system notification for lost connection to AMQP host
Enhanced cell management tool and log collection script
Support for AES-256 encryption for VPN tunnels
Increased the retention maximum for vCenter Chargeback history

SRM 5.0.1 Release Notes

Forced failover to allow you to recover virtual machines in cases where storage arrays fail at the protected site
Added support for IP Customization of Ubuntu
VMware VSA Support (Virtual machines that reside on the vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) can be protected by SRM 5.0.1 using vSphere Replication (VR). VSA does not require a Storage Replication Adapter (SRA) to work with SRM 5.0.1)

vShield 5.0.1 Release Notes

Enhanced reporting and export options
New REST API calls
Improved audit logs
Simplified troubleshooting
Improved vShield App policy management
vShield App High Availability enhancements
Enablement of Autodeploy (Stateless ESXi)

Configuration Manager 5.5 Release Notes

vSphere Guest Summary dashboard
Virtual Environments Change Management dashboard
Virtual Environments Compliance Posture dashboard (previously named Security Posture)
Cloud Infrastructure Suite Integration (CIS) tree

Chargeback Manager 2.0.1 Release Notes

Upgraded the Apache Tomcat server to version 6.0.35
vCenter Chargeback Manager fails to validate XML API requests
Upgrade fails with database connection error
Usage of some of the computing resources are reported as zero
Enhancements to the vCloud Director Data Collector
Enhancements to the VM Instance Cost job
Report schedule generates duplicate reports

Heartbeat 6.4 Update 1 Release Notes

Support for vCenter Server 5.0 Update 1
The ability to install vCenter Support Tools

Thursday, March 1. 2012

The Rise of Security and Compliance in the Middle Ages

Do your IT security and compliance policies seem positively medieval? Watch this painstakingly researched overview of the Rise of Security and Compliance to find out why... then be thankful that we live in a time with VMware security and compliance solutions for the Cloud.

Wednesday, February 15. 2012

IBM Launches the Distributed Virtual Switch 5000V

IBM System Networking Distributed Virtual Switch 5000V provides managed, advanced networking functionality for virtual machines in VMware vSphere 5.0 environment

IBM System Networking Distributed Virtual Switch 5000V is a highly manageable, distributed virtual switch for VMware vSphere 5.0 Enterprise Plus environment. IBM DVS 5000V provides advanced networking features and troubleshooting features, which make it ideal for deployments in large-scale Server Virtualization and Cloud environments. The IBM DVS 5000V appears as a standard network switch, which enables network administrators to configure and manage the distributed virtual switch as a regular physical switch using familiar IBM switch user interfaces.

Take advantage of the manageability, network troubleshooting, and advanced networking features of the IBM® System Networking Distributed Virtual Switch 5000V.

• Manageability - Telnet, SSH, SNMP, TACACS+, RADIUS, Industry Standard CLI

• Network troubleshooting - SPAN, ERSPAN, sFlow, Syslog, VM network statistic
• Advanced networking features - L2-L4 ACLs, Static and Dynamic port aggregation, PVLAN, QoS, EVB (IEEE 802.1Qbg)

Monday, February 13. 2012

How to format the output of ESXCLI commands

ESXCLI commands are a comprehensive set of commands for managing most aspects of vSphere. In vSphere 5.0, this command set has been unified. Eventually, ESXCLI commands will replace other commands in the vCLI set.

esxcli command

esxcli fcoe

esxcli hardware

esxcli iscsi

esxcli license

esxcli network

esxcli software

esxcli storage

esxcli system

esxcli vm

For a consistent look and feel for both local and remote CLI administration, the new “esxcli” command provides the ability to format the command output. Using the “--formatter” option, administrators can choose to have the command output formatted as XML, a key-value pair or a list of comma-separated values. The “esxcli” formatter enhances your ability to parse command output, helping to simplify scripting and improve report generation. In addition, you can specify which fields to include in the output. In the following example, we need to generate a report showing all the storage volume names with their free space. We start by running the storage filesystem list command, as follows: esxcli --formatter=csv storage filesystem list

The output gives us the information we need, but it is very verbose, requiring the user to use the scroll bar to see the data for all the volumes. Because we need only a summary showing the volume name and free space, we can refine our command using the --formatter and --format-param options, as follows: esxcli --formatter=csv --format-param=fields="Free,VolumeName" storage filesystem list

More information about the ESXCLI command can be found at this link.

Friday, February 10. 2012

Video - Create and Configure a vSphere Replication Manager (VRMS) Database

vSphere Replication is a replication engine that is part of SRM 5.0 and requires ESXi 5.0 and later, giving an alternative means of protecting and replicating virtual machines between sites. It is entirely managed within the SRM interface after initial deployment and configuration, and integrates with storage array–based replication to provide full coverage of the virtual environment.

The assumption is that there are multiple databases for vSphere Replication already configured for use, one at each site. In this evaluation guide, we will be using Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Express as a database, and using native SQL authentication for access. Workflow covered will be as follows:

1. Deploy vSphere Replication Management Servers (VRMS).

2. Configure VRMS.

When creating a database only use capitols even the username and the password need to be in capitols :-) Also use the fully qualified domain name as a database server, don't use IP-addresses. For configuring vCenter information, scroll down and notice the vCenter configuration information that is necessary. It is very important that the vCenter Server Address field is correctly populated. If you have used IP addresses for all site pairing activities, continue to use IP addresses in this location. If your SRM sites were paired with host names or fully qualified domain names, it is important that you do the same at this location as you did when pairing the sites. VRMS requires naming consistency throughout the process in order to function correctly. Enter the vCenter Server Address for the site you are currently using, which should be the protected site (Site A) vCenter. Click on Generate and Install an SSL Certificate after all the information is filled out.

When all the information is correctly filled in and the SSL Certificate is generated, click on the Save and Restart Service button. This will register the VRMS with vCenter and connect to the supplied database to run the initial configuration of vSphere Replication.

If VRMS has been successful communicating with vCenter and the database, it will return to the Configuration screen with a green message labeled Successfully saved the startup configuration. This may take a few minutes to return. Wait until a message is generated, whether it is the green success message or an error. If an error message is generated, re-examine both the database and vCenter information carefully and try again.

More information can be found in the VMware vSphere Site Recovery Manager 5 Evaluation Guide

Thursday, February 2. 2012

Video - Configure vSphere SRM Replication for a Single VM

vSphere Replication (VR) uses replication technologies included in ESX Servers with the assistance of virtual appliances to replicate virtual machines between sites. VR is provided by vSphere Replication Servers (VR Servers or VRS). VR Servers are managed by the vSphere Replication Managment Server (VRMS). Both VRMS and VR Servers are virtual appliances. VRMS provides a way to manage VR Servers across multiple hosts. If you are using VR, you must establish at least one vSphere Replication Server and exactly one VRMS at the recovery site. To enable replication in both directions, you must deploy exactly one VRMS at each site and at least one VRS at each site. You may want to create multiple VR Servers at each site if multiple servers are required to meet your load balancing needs for replication of virtual machines. Each VRMS must be registered with a corresponding vCenter Server. For example, the primary site VRMS must be registered with the primary site vCenter Servers.

Both the VRMS and VRS appliances provide a virtual appliance management interface (VAMI). These interfaces can be used to configure the VRMS database, as well as network settings, public-key certificates, and passwords for the appliances. Before using VR, you need to configure the VR infrastructure including having managed IP defined in runtime settings at both sites and having a VRMS database installed. This video provides useful guidance to help ensure you complete the installation and configuration process correctly. When installing SRM, be certain to select the VR option. If you have installed SRM and want to add VR, you can add that option by running the installer again. So, here are the steps for configure-ring vSphere SRM Replication for a Single Virtual Machine.

1. On the vSphere Client Home page, click VMs and Templates.

2. Browse the inventory to find the single virtual machine to be replicated using VR. Right-click the virtual machine and click vSphere Replication.

3. In the Replication Settings page, configure general replication settings.

These settings include the disk file location to which the virtual machine is replicated on the recovery site, how often the virtual machine is replicated, and how the guest OS is quiesced. Use the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) slider or enter a value to configure the maximum amount of data that can be lost during the recovery. The available range is from 15 minutes to 24 hours. For example, a recovery point objective of one hour seeks to ensure that the virtual machine loses no more than one hour of data during the recovery. For smaller RPOs, less data is lost in a recovery, but more network bandwidth is consumed keeping the replica synchronized.

The available quiescing types are determined by the virtual machine's operating system. Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) quiescing is supported for Windows virtual machines running Windows XP or later. Linux does not support quiescing. If no target file location is specified or if you want to override the default determined by the datastore mappings, click Browse to select a target location for the virtual machine.

Sunday, January 29. 2012

Video - Configure ESXi host swapping to a solid-state disk

vSphere 5.0 can be confgured to enable VMware ESXi host swapping to a solid-state disk (SSD). In the low host memory–available states (high memory usage), where guest ballooning, transparent page sharing (TPS) and memory compression have not been sufcient to reclaim the needed host memory, hypervisor swapping is used as the last resort to reclaim memory from the virtual machines. vSphere employs three methods to address limitations of hypervisor swapping to improve hypervisor swapping performance.

1. Randomly selecting the virtual machine physical pages to be swapped out. This helps mitigate the impact of VMware ESXi pathologically interacting with the guest operating system’s memory management heuristics. This has been enabled from early releases of VMware ESX.

2. Memory compression of the virtual machine pages that are targeted by VMware ESXi to be swapped out. This feature, introduced in vSphere 4.1, reduces the number of memory pages that must be swapped out to the disk, while reclaiming host memory efectively at the same time and thereby benefting application performance.

3. vSphere 5.0 now enables users to choose to confgure a swap cache on the SSD. VMware ESXi 5.0 will then use this swap cache to store the swapped-out pages instead of sending them to the regular and slower hypervisor swap fle on the disk. Upon the next access to a page in the swap cache, the page will be retrieved quickly from the cache and then removed from the swap cache to free up space. Because SSD read latencies are an order of magnitude faster than typical disk access latencies, this signifcantly reduces the swap-in latencies and greatly improves the application performance in high memory over commitment scenarios.

In this video I’ll show you how SDD storage is detected by the ESXi host after adding a new datastore. You will also learn how to configure VMware ESXi host swapping and redirecting virtual machine swap files to solid state storage.

Thursday, January 26. 2012

Video - Installing vCenter Server 5.0 - Quick Start

VMware vCenter Server allows you to centrally manage hosts from either a physical or virtual Windows machine, and enables the use of advanced features such as vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), vSphere High Availability (HA), vSphere vMotion, vSphere Storage vMotion, and vSphere Auto Deploy. You can install vCenter Server in a Microsoft Windows virtual machine that runs on an ESXi host. Deploying the vCenter Server system in the virtual machine has the following advantages:

- You can provide high availability for the vCenter Server system by using vSphere HA.
- You can migrate the VM containing vCenter from one host to another.
- You can create snapshots of the vCenter Server virtual machine.
- Rather than dedicating a separate server to the vCenter Server system, you can place it in a virtual machine running on the same host where your other virtual machines run.

This video will show you how to install VMware vCenter Server 5.0 in a virtual machine 13 simple steps.

Step 1 > In the software installer directory, double-click the autorun.exe file to start the installer.

Step 2 > Select vCenter Server.

Step 3 > Follow the prompts in the installation wizard to choose the installer language, agree to the end user patent and license agreements, enter your user name, organization name, and license key.If you omit the license key, vCenter Server will be in evaluation mode, which allows you to use the full feature set for a 60-day evaluation period.

Step 4 > Choose the type of database that you want to use.

Step 5 > Set the login information for vCenter Server.

Step 6 > Either accept the default destination folders or click Change to select another location.

Step 7 > Select Create a standalone VMware vCenter Server instance or Join Group.Join a Linked Mode group to enable the vSphere Client to view, search, and manage data across multiple vCenter Server systems. S

Step 8 > If you join a group, enter the fully qualified domain name and LDAP port number of any remote vCenter Server system.

Step 9 > Enter the port numbers that you want to use or accept the default port numbers.

Step 10 > Select the size of your vCenter Server inventory to allocate memory for several Java services that are used by vCenter Server. This setting determines the maximum JVM heap settings for VMware VirtualCenter Management Webservices (Tomcat), Inventory Service, and Profile-Driven Storage Service. You can adjust this setting after installation if the number of hosts in your environment changes. See the recommendations in the vCenter Server Hardware Requirements topic in System Requirements.

Step 11 > (Optional) In the Ready to Install the Program window, select Select to bump up the ephemeral port value. This option increases the number of available ephemeral ports. If your vCenter Server manages hosts on which you will power on more than 2000 virtual machines simultaneously, this option prevents the pool of available ephemeral ports from being exhausted.

Step 12 > Click Install. Installation might take several minutes. Multiple progress bars appear during the installation of the selected components.

Step 13 > Click Finish.

Monday, January 23. 2012

What happens to resource pools when vCenter goes down?

A fellow VCI who was teaching the vSphere 5 What's New training course got a question from a student asking what happens to resource pools when vCenter goes down, because with vSphere 5.0 all the setting for resource pools are "moved" to vCenter.

Andy Cary who works as a Senior Technical Trainer at VMware responded immediately with: I created a RP on my vCenter and turned off expandable reservations for memory. Placed VM1 under said resource pool and failed to power up because the VM need to reserve memory for the overhead of running the VM (had no reservations set on the RP). So next I directly connected to the host and powered on the VM with no problem at all. However when you go back to the vCenter it displays:

The Cluster with the RP is now invalid because it can see the VM has powered on. So the configuration about DRS RP is saved on the vCenter but it doesn’t stop you going directly to the host an powering on the VM. Now in vSphere 5.0 if you directly connect to a host and try and create a local resource pool it will throw up an error saying this isn’t allowed because it can see you are managed by vCenter, this is the case even if the Host isn’t a member of DRS cluster. So the creation and management of RP is done via vCenter, if vCenter goes down the rules cannot be applied so you could get admin powering on VMs by directly connecting to the hosts. So in summary all we have done is said “You can only create, modify resource pools via vCenter and not by directly connecting to the host”

Saturday, January 21. 2012

White Paper - Mobility and Disaster Recovery Solution for Virtualized Tier-1 Enterprise Applications

To meet ever growing IT infrastructure needs and to ensure business continuity in case of a site-level disaster, it is critical to have live mobility and fully automated, efficient disaster recovery (DR) processes for virtualized enterprise applications across data centers. Failure to have a robust and efficient mobility and fully automated disaster recovery solution can result in millions of dollars of lost revenue and employee productivity.

This white paper showcases a flexible solution from Cisco®, VMware®, and EMC® that allows customers to efficiently achieve live mobility and fully automated DR for virtualized enterprise applications across data centers with less than 10ms round-trip time (RTT) latency between them.

Live mobility for virtualized applications across data centers enables IT organizations to efficiently meet various operational needs, e.g., data capacity expansion, seamless migrations, disaster avoidance, etc.

Fully automated DR allows customers to protect their mission critical enterprise applications against site-level disasters and ensures business continuance. A key advantage of this solution over manual, runbook style DR process execution is "minimum downtime with lowest Recovery Time Objective (RTO)". This is extremely critical for next generation cloud solutions required to host hundreds to thousands of virtualized applications on the same shared infrastructure.

The Cisco, VMware, and EMC design presented in this white paper is very modular so that, based on customer requirements, there is flexibility to deploy both the live mobility and fully automated DR solution or deploy any one of these solutions.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/solutions/Enterprise/Data_Center/DCI/4.0/EMC/mobdisasterrecapps.html

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