Eric Sloof

Next week Veeam's Ricky El-Qasem is going back into trainer mode. Some of you may know that he used to be a VMware instructor and so it was a logical move for him when invited by Veeam to develop an education services program. On 10th December He will be delivering a workshop where he will be teaching some lucky attendees of the Dutch VMUG how to use Veeam Backup’s Instant VM recovery and Exchange Item level restore features which is part of vPower engine. In some way this is Veeam’s first official classroom training course and to mark this special occasion they have a great raffle prize. So some lucky attendee of Ricky's workshop gets yes that’s right a brand new xBox 360 with kinect. Only people attending the Veeam workshop are eligible for the raffle, so register today.

http://read.virtualizeplanet.com/?p=331

With the latest release of PowerCLI (4.1.1)  VMware has introduced a real cool new commandlet.

Get-EsxTop exposes esxtop functionality. The default parameter set is CounterValues. The Counter parameter filters the specified statistics. To retrieve all available counters, use the CounterInfo parameter set. The properties of each counter are returned through the Fields property (an array) of the CounterInfo output object. You can also retrieve stats topologies using the TopogyInfo parameter set. This information contains either inventory data that does not change or a counter instance structure describing the relationship between different counter instances.

http://blogs.vmware.com/vipowershell/

The vStorage API for Array Integration (VAAI) is a new API for storage partners to leverage as a means to speed up certain functions that, when delegated to the storage array, can greatly enhance performance. This API is currently supported by several storage partners and requires these partners to release a special version of their firmware to work with this API. In the vSphere 4.1 release, this array offload capability supports three primitives:

• Full copy enables the storage arrays to make full copies of data within the array without having the ESX server read and write the data.
  
• Block zeroing enables storage arrays to zero out a large number of blocks to speed up provisioning of virtual machines.
  
• Hardware-assisted locking provides an alternative means to protect the metadata

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/VMW-Whats-New-vSphere41-Storage.pdf

With the release of vSphere 4.1, storage IO Control allows cluster-wide storage IO prioritization. This allows better workload consolidation and helps reduce extra costs associated with over-provisioning. Storage IO Control extends the constructs of shares and limits to handle storage IO resources. The amount of storage IO that is allocated to virtual machines during periods of IO congestion can be controlled, which ensures that more important virtual machines get preference over less important virtual machines for IO resource allocation.

When Storage IO Control on a datastore is enabled, ESX/ESXi begins to monitor the device latency that hosts observe when communicating with that datastore. When device latency exceeds a threshold, the datastore is considered to be congested and each virtual machine that accesses that datastore is allocated IO resources in proportion to their shares and is set per virtual machine. The number can be adjusted for each based on need. Low priority VMs can limit IO bandwidth for high priority VMs and storage allocation should be in line with VM priorities.

This feature enables pre-datastore priorities/shares for VM to improve total throughput and has Cluster level enforcement for shares for all workload accessing a datastore. Configuring Storage I/O Control is a two-step process:

1. Enable Storage I/O Control for the datastore.
2. Set the number of storage I/O shares and upper limit of I/O operations per second (IOPS) allowed for each virtual machine. By default, all virtual machine shares are set to Normal (1000) with unlimited IOPS.

Duncan Epping        : Storage IO Control, the movie
Scott Drummonds    : Storage IO Control
VirtualMiscellaneous : Storage IO Control - SIOC

In the last part of the VMworld 2010 keynote VMware’s CEO Paul Maritz was referring to a new kid on the block called Integrien. It’s a relatively small company but they got some awesome products. Integrien recently launched a new product called AliveVM. I’ve managed to capture some screenshots and a brief description but it isn’t available for download anymore. The website says: VMware has acquired Integrien. The purchasing of this product is temporarily suspended, until further notice.

AliveVM is a revolution in real-time performance management for VMware administrators, built on the industry leading, enterprise-class Integrien Alive platform. AliveVM fills the existing gap for automated performance management for VMware administrators with sophisticated learning-based analytics and an elegant and easy-to-use web-based interface. With AliveVM, VM Administrators are no longer forced to rely on classic monitoring tools and techniques that provide limited insight into the performance of their virtual infrastructure. With the introduction of AliveVM, they are provided with detailed behavioral analysis of the entire virtual environment. AliveVM also provides a real-time summary of performance Health, Workload usage, and Capacity forecasts for each and every virtual element (e.g., Virtual Machines, ESX Servers, Clusters, Storage LUNs and Network elements). Whether your virtual environment spans 50 Virtual Machines or 50,000, AliveVM will vastly simplify your performance management and virtual infrastructure optimization.


At this moment the product is being re-branded and the interface is undergoing some design changes as well, VMware will probably re-launch AliveVM in the first quarter of 2011.