Eric Sloof - NTPRO.NL

VMware has launched a new website with all the ports and protocols of their products. The URL for this new website is https://ports.vmware.com/ 

The port of the following products are listed:

• vSphere
• vSAN
• NSX Data Center for vSphere
• vRealize Network Insight
• vRealize Operations Manager
• vRealize Automation
• vCloud Availability
• vCloud Usage Meter
• VMware HCX
• Horizon 7
• Workspace ONE Access

VMware vCenter Server provides a centralized way to control and monitor the virtual infrastructure. It has been widely deployed in a remote offices and branch offices (ROBO) environment to manage ESXi hosts that are distributed over large geographical distances over a wide range of networks with different network characteristics, including low/high bandwidth, network latency, and packet error rates.

In this paper, VMware performs a comprehensive study of vCenter Server performance with a ROBO use case for the VMware vCenter 6.7 release.

They demonstrate that vCenter Server performs well in the ROBO environment for both network bandwidth use, as well as virtual machine and ESXi host task execution times. Instead of a bandwidth restriction, they observed that network latency has a bigger impact on the overall performance.

As the network latency between vCenter Server and ESXi hosts increases, the average operation latency also increases. The experimental results also show how efficiently vCenter Server executes VM operations in high-latency networks: The average VM operation execution time increases much more slowly when network latency increases by several times.

The vCenter Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) enables customers to easily create event-driven automation based on vCenter Server Events. For example, VEBA can drive basic workflows like automatically attaching a vSphere tag when a virtual machine (VM) is created.

Even more powerful integrations between datacenter-internal enterprise services and cloud services, for example, Slack and Pager Duty, can be created with VEBA out of the box.

The Virtual Machine Compute Optimizer (VMCO) is a Powershell script that uses the PowerCLI module to capture information about the hosts and VMS running in your vSphere environment, and reports back on whether the VMs are configured optimally based on the Host CPU and memory.

It will flag a VM as “YES” if it is optimized and “NO” if it is not. For non-optimized VMs, a recommendation is made that will keep the same number of vCPUs currently configured, with the optimal number of virtual cores and sockets.

Version 2.0.0

• The priority of the findings are captured
• Details on the findings are included
• Cluster information is captured to determine if Host HW is not consistent across the cluster
• Report if a VM spanning pNUMA nodes actually has the pNUMA exposed to the guest OS
• Report if advanced settings have been changed on the VM or host level to expose pNUMA to the guest OS
• Reports if the number of vCPUs for a VM exceeds the physical cores of the host (using hyperthreads as vCPUs)
• Ability to use the stand-alone “Get-OptimalvCPU” function for more flexibility