Eric Sloof - NTPRO.NL

This is the first and only official guide to VMware's new VCP510 (VCP 5) exam. Organized to follow VMware's newest exam blueprint, it's also designed from the ground up to be both engaging and enjoyable. Author Bill Ferguson acts like a "study buddy," encouraging virtualization professionals, anticipating their questions, and helping them gain both mastery and confidence. Throughout, he provides many illustrations, tables, figures, screenshots, and realistic sample test questions - all designed to help readers learn more, learn faster, and remember more of what they learn. Coverage includes: * Understanding how virtualization can best be integrated into today's real-world IT environments * Recognizing what to change, and what to leave alone * Planning, installing, configuring, and upgrading vCenter Server and VMware ESXi * Planning and configuring vSphere networking and storage * Deploying and Administering Virtual Machines and vApps * Establishing and Maintaining Service Levels * Performing basic troubleshooting * Monitoring vSphere implementations * Managing vCenter Server alarms * Preparing for the future of VMware virtualization.

VMware vCenter Infrastructure Navigator is an application awareness plug-in to vCenter Server, and provides continuous dependency mapping of applications. Infrastructure Navigator offers application context to the virtual infrastructure administrators to monitor and manage the virtual infrastructure inventory objects and actions. Administrators can use Infrastructure Navigator to understand the impact of the change on the virtual environment in their application infrastructure.

Infrastructure Navigator helps virtual infrastructure administrators perform the following tasks:
- Make accurate first-level triage to help either eliminate the problem or associate the problem with the virtual infrastructure when business service users report problems.
- Assess change impact, manage, and communicate virtual infrastructure issues for critical applications.
- Understand the application and business impact of changes to the virtual infrastructure on applications.
- Infrastructure Navigator is supported on vCenter Server 5.0 with the vSphere Web Client.

- Simplifies and automates the deployment and the discovery process and keeps manages Application Component Knowledge Base (KB) current Eliminates physical switch spanning or credential based discovery.
- Discovers and maps the application components and dependencies using KBs and presents this knowledge through maps or search for relevant use cases.

- Provide Infrastructure Navigator data for vCenter Server and related solutions Ensures that the application and dependency data is available to the rest of the vCenter Server entities and its various solutions through the vCenter extensibility APIs.
- Supports SRM integration to set up more focused and accurate site recovery and backup plans.

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.

Join Hemant Gaidhani in a video walkthrough of the installation and configuration of the VMware vCenter Operations Manager, a component of the vCenter Operations Management Suite.

Join Kit Colbert in a walkthrough oveview of the VMware vCenter Operations Manager, a component of the vCenter Operations Management Suite. These are the new Features of VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite Editions.

New Operations Management Dashboard provides comprehensive views into health, risk and efficiency scores of your cloud infrastructure. Quickly drill down to see what’s causing current workload conditions, pinpoint potential problems in the future and identify areas with inefficient use of resources.

New Correlation of Performance and Change Events inside the guest operating system enable administrators to quickly understand and remediate performance issues arising from configuration changes.

New Compliance Checking of vSphere Hosts allow administrators to maintain a compliant infrastructure and automated the hardening of vSphere hosts with pre-built security and compliance guidelines.

New Smart Alerts provide pro-active notifications of building health, performance and capacity issues in the environment. Automated root cause analysis identifies the offending metric across all layers of the infrastructure.

New Capacity Planning, Reporting and Optimization views help administrators optimize VM density; identify areas of reclaimable waste and chronic capacity shortfalls. Configurable alerts notify of changing capacity conditions in production and non-production areas.

New Integrated Cost Metering and Reporting capabilities provide visibility into the financial value of consumed resources and enable administrators to optimize provisioned capacity for lowest cost without sacrificing performance.

New Discovery and Visualization of Application and Infrastructure Dependencies bring application-level awareness to infrastructure and operations teams to ensure service levels and disaster recovery protection for all critical application services. Application components and version numbers are named automatically and updated continuously.

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”

This quick start video provides a simplified, step-by-step set of instructions for creating a new virtual machine on the StratoGen vCloud platform. The StratoGen vCloud platform is built upon VMware vCloud Director 1.5. This video is a supplement to the vCloud director 1.5 user manual which provides comprehensive information about the platform.

Step 1 > Log in - Using a supported browser (Internet Explorer 7 or above, or Mozilla Firefox 3 or above) connect to the URL as provided by StratoGen. A typical URL is of the format https://mycloud.stratogen.com/cloud/org/your-organisation. Enter the username and password supplied to login to your account.

Step 2 > Select the ‘My Cloud’ tab - The initial homepage for your cloud is displayed. Now click on the ‘My Cloud’ tab. In the following steps I will take you through the steps required to create a new virtual machine in your cloud. All virtual machines must reside in a vApp (a vApp is a container that holds 1 or more virtual machines).

Step 3 > Click the ‘+’ symbol to create a new vApp from a catalog. You will now create a new vApp by clicking on the + icon

Step 4 > Select Catalog - You can upload your own virtual machine templates or ISO installation media into your organization’s catalog, but in this example we will be using one of the pre-built templates supplied by StratoGen. Click on the catalog drop down list and select ‘Public catalogs’.

Step 5 > Select vApp Template - Select the required operating system from the list of vApp Templates. In this example we will be creating a virtual machine with CentOS 5.5 installed, so we select the CentOS 5.5 vApp. This will create a vApp which contains a single CentOS 5.5 virtual machine.

Step 6 > Name your vApp - Enter a name for your new vApp, and a short description if required.

Step 7 > Configure virtual machine - Enter a computer name for your new virtual machine and then click on the ‘Network’ drop down list to select a network to attach it to. In this instance we will select a ‘Direct Internet Connection’. Always leave the IP assignment as ‘Static – IP Pool’. We are now ready to create our vApp and virtual machine. Click ‘Finish’.

Step 8 > vApp creation - That’s it. Your new vApp and virtual machine will now be created. Your virtual machine’s network settings will be configured automatically and a new root/administrator password will be automatically generated and assigned. We will also review our new virtual machine and note our new password.

Step 9 > vApp display - Once the creation of your vApp has completed, ‘Stopped’ will be displayed as the status. Select the vApp, and then click on the name. A visual depiction of the vApp is displayed. Now click the ‘Virtual Machines’ tab.

Step 10 > Virtual machine properties - This tab shows us the virtual machines in the vApp. In our case this is a single virtual machine called CentOS 5.5. Right click on your virtual machine and select properties. We can now view the properties of our virtual machine. To find the newly assigned root/administrator password for your VM select the ‘Guest OS Customization’ tab. Your new password is displayed after the ‘Auto generate password’ text.

Logging in vSphere 5.0 has been significantly enhanced. You now have fine-grained control over system logs, the location where logs are sent, and, for each log, default size and rotation policy. You can set up logging with the vSphere Client or with the esxcli system syslog command and the PowerCLI VMHostSysLogServer Commandlets. You can also set up logging behaviour for a host by using the Host Profiles interface in the vSphere Client and can then import that host profile into other hosts.

VMware vSphere ESXi 5.0 hosts run a syslog service (vmsyslogd) which provides a standard mechanism for logging messages from the VMkernel and other system components. By default in ESXi, these logs are placed on a local scratch volume or a ram disk. To preserve the logs further, ESXi can be configured to place these logs to an alternate storage location on disk, and to send the logs across the network to a syslog server.

You have to install the vSphere Syslog Collector to enable ESXi system logs to be directed to a server on the network, rather than to a local disk. It’s possible install the Syslog Collector on the same machine as the associated vCenter Server, or on a different machine that has network connection to the vCenter Server. The Syslog Collector service binds to an IPv4 address for communication with vCenter Server, and does not support IPv6. The vCenter Server can be on a host machine in an IPv4-only, IPv4/IPv6 mixed-mode, or IPv6-only network environment, but the machine that connects to the vCenter Server through the vSphere Client must have an IPv4 address for the Syslog Collector service to work.

In the ESXi Software panel there's an Advanced Setting called Syslog.global.LogHost, the value of this setting presents the remote host to which syslog messages are forwarded and port on which the remote host receives syslog messages. You can include the protocol and the port, for example, ssl://hostName1:514. UDP (default), TCP, and SSL are supported. The remote host must have syslog installed and correctly configured to receive the forwarded syslog messages. Checkout the video how the syslog service is installed on the vCenter host.

You can also set up ESXi Syslog from the Host Profiles Interface. Hosts provisioned with Auto Deploy usually do not have sufficient local storage to save system logs. You can specify a remote syslog server for those hosts by setting up a reference host, saving the host profile, and applying that host profile to other hosts as needed. Best practice is to set up the syslog server on the reference host with the vSphere Client or the esxcli system syslog command and save the host profile. In some situations, setting up syslog from the Host Profiles interface is an alternative.

The Rough Cuts service from Safari Books Online gives you exclusive access to an evolving manuscript that you can read online or download as a PDF and print. A Rough Cuts book is not fully edited or completely formatted, but you'll get access to new versions as they are created.



vSphere Storage is the essential component that glues the vSphere environment together. Most of the enterprise, as well as basic features, in vSphere require some sort of storage, be it local, remote, dedicated, or shared. The larger the environment, the more complex the storage design and choices. The author's approach is two-fold. He will first demystify the “black-box” called storage in the vSphere environment. He will then provide illustrated step-by-step procedures for doing common tasks that will gradually introduce more complex tasks. Based on the vSphere 5 release.

Storage Design and Implementation in vSphere 5.0 by Mostafa Khalil Published Jan 10, 2012 by VMware Press. Part of the VMware Press series.

Table of Contents Part 1: Storage

1. Storage Types
2. Protocols and Standards
3. Storage Connectivity and Media
4. VMware Pluggable Storage Architecture (PSA)
5. 3rd party Multipathing Plug-ins
6. Storage Virtualization Devices (SVDs)
7. LUN Sizing Design Decisions and Best Practices
8. Performance Optimization Monitoring

Part 2: File Systems

9. VMFS
10. NFS
11. VisorFS

Part 3: Storage Virtual Appliances (SVAs)

12. Concept and Architecture
13. Design Decisions for using SVAs

Part 4: Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery (BC/DR)

14. Virtual Machines and Applications Clustering
15. Metro Clusters and Stretch Clusters
16. Standby Servers (Blades)
17. Disaster Recovery Design

Deploy a Corporate Profile on Employee-owned Devices

Enforce security and compliance policies. With VMware MVP, a personal profile and a corporate profile can securely and simultaneously run on the same device in isolated containers. Corporate applications and data are securely isolated from an employee’s personal profile.

Ease Mobility Management

Remotely provision, manage and update corporate profiles in a streamlined manner, irrespective of the mobile device. With VMware MVP, employees can connect their own mobile devices to the corporate network from a corporate profile that is provisioned and managed by the corporate IT group. IT administrator can manage mobile end-points and desktop from a single interface.

Check-out LG Android VMware Horizon Mobile hands-on for more details

The new and improved VMware vMotion in VMware vSphere 5.0 incorporates a number of enhancements that leverage the power of the solid state drive and 10 gigabit Ethernet technologies that are increasingly adopted in today's datacenters. These enhancements vastly improve both the usability and performance of vMotion. Testing in VMware performance labs shows it is easier than ever to use vMotion to manage even large virtual machines running heavy-duty, enterprise-class applications with minimal overhead. This session will describe the vMotion architecture and the new and enhanced features of vMotion in vSphere 5.0. Performance implications with data from a wide variety of tier 1 application workloads will also be discussed. We will share common pitfalls as well as best practices that enable you to get the maximum benefit from the new and improved vMotion technology.

Video - Metro vMotion in vSphere 5.0

Video - Running vMotion on multiple–network adaptors

White Paper - vMotion Architecture, Performance, and Best Practices in VMware vSphere 5 

The majority of business-critical applications such as Web applications, database servers, and enterprise messaging systems have been successfully virtualized, proving the benefits of virtualization for reducing cost and streamlining IT management. However, the adoption of virtualization in the area of latency-sensitive applications has been slow partly due to unsubstantiated performance concerns. By taking VoIP service as an example, this paper demonstrates that vSphere 5 brings the same virtualization benefits to latency-sensitive applications, and vSphere 5 does this while driving good performance. In particular, vSphere 5 delivers excellent out-of-the-box performance in terms of voice quality when running VoIP service. VoIP applications are characterized by latency-sensitivity that dictates audio data be delivered at regular intervals to achieve good voice quality. Irregular delivery may lead to packet drops, severely deteriorating user experience. Therefore, timely processing and delivery of audio data is critically important to VoIP service. In the virtualized environment, however, meeting this requirement for VoIP applications is more challenging due to the additional layer of scheduling virtual machines (VMs) and processing network packets. Despite such challenges, vSphere 5 is able to achieve great performance for VoIP applications thanks to the following reasons. First, vSphere 5 facilitates the highly optimized networking stack and paravirtualized device drivers to minimize virtualization overhead, adding little variance in packet delivery1. The overhead is usually in the order of tens of microseconds that are negligible, especially to VoIP applications, where packets need to be delivered at intervals of tens of milliseconds. Second, vSphere 5 gives each VM a fair share of CPU2, ensuring the predictable processing of audio data even under high CPU contention when running multiple VMs. Finally, the Network I/O Control (NetIOC) feature allows VoIP traffic to be isolated by partitioning physical network bandwidth. This helps to achieve the intended voice quality when VoIP traffic competes for shared network resources. This paper illustrates that: • Excellent out-of-the-box VoIP performance is achieved with a large number of users served by a commercial VoIP media server hosted on vSphere 5. • vSphere 5 is able to maintain great VoIP performance when running a large number of instances of VoIP server; results showed that vSphere 5 provided good performance even when running 12 instances configured with a total of 48 vCPUs on a system with 8 cores, utilizing more than 90% of the physical CPUs. • With Network I/O Control (NetIOC), vSphere 5 is able to preserve voice quality under high contention for network resources.

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/voip-perf-vsphere5.pdf