vSphere - 21

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http://pubs.vmware.com/vsp40

Guarantee performance SLAs to the business and perform “Assured Migrations” as you measure performance both before and after virtualizing an application.  VMware vCenter AppSpeed inspects traffic flowing over the vSwitch, discovers and maps the environment, monitors performance against SLAs and enables root cause analysis.

http://www.vmware.com/products/vcenter-appspeed/

VMware vCenter™ Lab Manager 4, part of the VMware vCenter family of management products, provides on-demand access and automated management of the internal cloud for dev/test. Application Owners, Development and Test, and Support and Training teams can provision application environments in seconds and manage a library of common system configurations through a selfservice portal under IT control. Lab Manager 4 enforces policy-based access control, optimizes utilization of shared infrastructure, and avoids resource conflict in a multi-user environment, eliminating repetitive provisioning and ad-hoc management tasks for IT. Designed for enterprise scalability, best-in-class performance, and seamless integration with VMware vSphere™, Lab Manager 4 enables higher service levels, faster time to market, and simplified IT administration.

The key features provided by VMware vCenter Lab Manager 4 are:

• A Rapid Provisioning Portal – Set up, capture, and re-configure multi-VM system configurations in seconds.
• A Virtual Machine Image Library – Provide an archive of commonly used system configurations while reducing storage footprints.
• Enterprise Scalability – Support multiple teams, projects, and sites with a single installation, dedicated or shared resource pools,
customizable user roles and access rights, and advanced networking options.

Lab Manager 4 tightly integrates with VMware vSphere™ 4, providing organizations with the capabilities needed to transform their datacenters into the internal cloud for Development and Test. VMware vSphere 4 is the industry’s first cloud operating system – transforming datacenters into dramatically simplified environments to enable the next generation of flexible, reliable IT services. This paper provides a technical overview of new management capabilities built into the VMware vCenter Lab Manager 4 release, including VMware vSphere support, multiple organizations and workspaces, and host spanning private networks (a technology which enables cross-host fencing).

Kyle Ross ran into an issue with VMware Data Recovery this week that needs to be mentioned to the wider VMware community. Below is a write-up of the issue he encountered and the workaround he went through with VMware support.

I was made aware of a serious (in my opinion) bug with VDR during a call with VMware support that I haven't seen discussed anywhere. This is an internally known issue that causes snapshots to build up on VM's that are members of VDR backup jobs.

During the backup process a new snapshot is created and VDR updates the snapshot descriptor file (vm_name-000001.vmdk) to mark the snapshot as un-removable. The bug is introduced when the backup process completes, it fails to mark the snapshot as removable causing them to remain.

The tricky part of the problem is that the snapshots are not visible through the vSphere Client, nor are they listed in apps like 'RVTools' that use the VMware CLI to gather data. They could potentially be listed in the new datastore views but I didn’t think to look there before I resolved it in my environment. I ran across them by logging into the service console and running the following command to list all the delta files on the datastores attached to the server.

find /vmfs/volumes/ -name \*delta\*

In my environment I noticed numerous VM’s with multi-gigabyte delta files that I couldn’t account for via snapshots listed in the GUI. Here is the solution I was given by VMware. Via the service console, browse to the location of the VMDK files for the affected VM. Run this command to identify the descriptors that need to be corrected, replacing ‘virtual_machine_name’ with the actual name of the VM.

grep –I ddb.dele virtual_machine_name-000???.vmdk

This command will quickly identify the delta files that are marked as non-deletable. The workaround is to edit the affected VMDK descriptor files and change “ddb.deletable” from “false” to “true”. You will probably also need to edit the root VMDK file and change this field as well, otherwise you may be left with one open snapshot. Note that due to a change in how ESX 4 performs file locking, you will probably need to SSH into the host that is currently running the VM to edit these files. Once you have edited all the files, create a new snapshot for the VM either via the GUI or command line. Then issue the “Delete All” snapshots command to force ESX to combine all the files and close all the visible and hidden snapshots.

Since ESXi doesn't normally provide a service console you can simply clone the VM's as the new machines would have no open snapshots. If you are trying to avoid downtime as I was, you can use the unsupported service console on ESXi to edit the descriptor files as described above.

Update : VMware Data Recovery 1.0.1 is released via Ducan Epping at Yellow Bricks.

Data Recovery modifies virtual machines’ vmdk files’ settings so a snapshot can be created for backup purposes. In the past, after the backup has been created, the vmdk file’s settings was sometimes left configured for snapshots even after the backup was complete. This led to these virtual machines being left in snapshot mode while accumulating snapshots that were undetected by vSphere Client. This process has been redesigned so that these temporary files are no longer be left behind. In previous versions of Data Recovery, this issue can be resolved by following the process described in the knowledge base article titled “Delete ddb.delete entries and snapshots left behind by Vmware Data Recovery”.

Last Friday I took the VCP4 beta exam. This exam contains 270 questions and lasted four hours and 45 minutes. I ‘m not a native English speaker so I got some extra time. What can I say about it. Since I’m bound by the NDA, I won’t share any questions. After 270 questions you don’t remember that much questions anyway. I agree with Rick Scherer, 35% of the questions is vSphere 4 related. The other 65% can be divided in two parts. The really hard questions and the low hanging fruit. If you want to pass this exam, you won’t get away with studying some PDFs and attending the vSphere ICM course. I’ve delivered the vSphere what’s new a few times now, and prior to my exam I’ve delivered my first vSphere Install Configure and Manage course. Besides that I’m already playing with the beta for the past months. Even with his experience, the hard questions really astounded me. When these questions will stay in the VCP4 exam, becoming a VCP4 will be tough. Some study tips at last, don’t limit your view to ESX, take a look at the ESXi version to. You also have to know what other products from VMware can do with virtual machines.

VCP4 Exam Blueprint

Simon Long over at the Slog has created a VCP vSphere Practice Exam

vSphere 4 Documentation Notes from vReference