White Papers

VMware Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC) enhances the scope of VMware vSphere vMotion by making VMware ESXi hosts with different CPU technologies compatible for vMotion. It does this by making available a common CPU feature set through the use of a baseline. With a baseline in place for older processors, application performance becomes important. Do the applications running in the virtual machines with an older CPU presented perform as well as they do on virtual machines that have access to feature sets available in newer generation processors? In this paper, VMware will quantify the performance impact of EVC mode on a diverse set of applications.

VMware has studied workloads from database, Java, multimedia, and encryption categories and report the results. Test results show that almost all workloads perform well even when the virtual machine presents an EVC mode that corresponds to an older processor generation. The EVC mode setting had varying impact on workload performance based on the ESXi hosts’ CPU instruction set features made available and their relevance to the workloads. One workload, AES-Encryption, didn’t fare as well due to a dependence on special-purpose instruction sets only available in younger processor generations.

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/VMware-vSphere-EVC-Perf.pdf

VMware vCloud Director enables users to build a private cloud–based infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering within their organization. By providing a secure, on-demand ability for end users to deploy workloads, companies can realize a level of agility previously thought impossible.

Resource design for vCloud Director involves examining requirements to determine how best to partition and organize resources. With the commoditization of infrastructure resources, the ability to scale them becomes increasingly important. When designing for vCloud Director, keep in mind that the ultimate consumers of the product are the end users of the system.

Taking a top-down approach to vCloud Director design necessitates an understanding of the new abstractions introduced in the vCloud API and how they map to traditional VMware vSphere® objects. This paper was developed to provide additional insight and information as to how vCloud Director allocation models relate to vSphere resource management. The paper written by Frank Denneman and Chris Colotti reviews and discusses various design considerations and operational procedures.

Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 5.1, provides performance tips that cover the most performance-critical areas of VMware vSphere 5.1. It is not intended as a comprehensive guide for planning and configuring your deployments.

• Chapter 1, “Hardware for Use with VMware vSphere,” provides guidance on selecting hardware for use with vSphere.
• Chapter 2, “ESXi and Virtual Machines,” provides guidance regarding VMware ESXi software and the virtual machines that run in it.
• Chapter 3, “Guest Operating Systems,” provides guidance regarding the guest operating systems running in vSphere virtual machines.
• Chapter 4, “Virtual Infrastructure Management,” provides guidance regarding infrastructure management best practices.

This book is intended for system administrators who are planning a VMware vSphere 5.1 deployment and want to maximize its performance. The book assumes the reader is already familiar with VMware vSphere concepts and terminology.

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/Perf_Best_Practices_vSphere5.1.pdf

This technical note describes how to install, upgrade, and uninstall vCenter Server and related components by using the Windows command‐line interface. The command‐line installation requires you to log on to the local machine.

The command‐line installation process includes downloading the vCenter Server installer, gathering the required data, and using the command parameters and samples in this technical note to install the products according to your specifications.

vCenter Server 5.1 with vCenter Single Sign On 

vSphere 5.1 introduces the vCenter Single Sign On service as part of the vCenter Server management infrastructure. This change affects vCenter Server installation, upgrading, and operation. As part of this change, vCenter Inventory Service is now installed separately from vCenter Server.

When you install or upgrade vCenter Server 5.1, you must install vCenter Single Sign On and install or upgrade vCenter Inventory Service, in that order, before you install or upgrade vCenter Server.

IMPORTANT VMware does not support command‐line installation and upgrade methods for vCenter Server. However, if the installation or upgrade succeeds, VMware supports the installed or upgraded product.

VMware vSphere 5.1 vMotion presents a unified migration architecture that migrates live virtual machines, including their memory and storage, between vSphere hosts without any requirement for shared storage. This shared-nothing live migration feature offers administrators significantly more simplicity and flexibility in managing and moving virtual machines across their virtual infrastructures compared to the traditional vMotion and Storage vMotion migration solutions.

A series of tests were conducted at VMware Performance labs to investigate and compare the performance implications of vSphere 5.1 vMotion over the proven vMotion and Storage vMotion technologies in various scenarios including the migration of a database server and an in-memory application. In addition, live migration tests were performed over metro area network scenarios. Test results show the following:

• During storage migration, vSphere 5.1 vMotion maintains the same performance as Storage vMotion, even when using the network to migrate, due to the optimizations added to the vSphere 5.1 vMotion network data path.
• During memory migration, vSphere 5.1 vMotion maintains nearly identical performance as the traditional vMotion, due to the optimizations added to the vSphere 5.1 vMotion memory copy path.
• vSphere 5.1 vMotion retains the proven reliability, performance, and atomicity of the traditional vMotion and Storage vMotion technologies, even at metro area network distances.

VMware vSphere has provided the ability to migrate a running virtual machine across vSphere hosts from the earliest vSphere versions. VMware vMotion was the first live migration solution that provided the ability to migrate a running virtual machine from one vSphere host to another host, with no perceivable impact to the end user. vMotion brought enormous benefits to administrators—it reduced server downtime and facilitated automatic load-balancing. Because vMotion moved only the memory and device state of a virtual machine, it limited the live migration to hosts with shared storage.

Later versions of vSphere featured Storage vMotion technology that provided the ability to live migrate the virtual disks belonging to a virtual machine across storage elements on the same host. Storage vMotion brought additional valuable benefits to administrators—it prevented storage downtime and facilitated automatic storage load-balancing.

Together, vMotion and Storage vMotion technologies provided the ability to migrate the entire state of the virtual machine, including its memory and storage, across vSphere hosts. However, this live-migration solution was limited to the hosts that shared a common set of datastores. In addition, migration of an entire virtual machine required two separate operations, for instance vMotion followed by Storage vMotion, or vice versa.

vSphere 5.1 vMotion presents an integrated migration solution enabling live migration of an entire virtual machine across vSphere hosts without any requirement for shared storage. This live migration feature simplifies the management and movement of virtual machines across virtual infrastructures compared to the traditional vMotion and Storage vMotion migration solutions. More importantly, the new vMotion architecture retains the proven reliability, performance and atomicity of current vMotion and Storage vMotion technologies, even at metro area network distances.

vSphere encrypts session information using standard digital certificates. Using the default certificates that vSphere creates might not comply with the security policy of your organization. If you require a certificate from a trusted certificate authority, you can replace the default certificate.

Certificate checking is enabled by default and SSL certificates are used to encrypt network traffic. However, ESXi uses automatically generated certificates that are created as part of the installation process and stored on the server system. These certificates are unique and make it possible to begin using the server, but they are not verifiable and are not signed by a trusted, well-known certificate authority (CA). These default certificates are vulnerable to possible man-in-the-middle attacks.

To receive the full benefit of certificate checking, especially if you intend to use encrypted remote connections externally, install new certificates that are signed by a valid internal certificate authority or public key

infrastructure (PKI) service. Alternatively, purchase a certificate from a trusted security authority.