Eric Sloof

Android tablets now have an awesome view, VMware View

Tedd Fox of VMware demonstrates VMware View Client for Android. Available on the Android Market and Cisco AppHQ, the VMware free Android client enables you to access your virtual Windows desktops, applications and data from anywhere. Addition information can be found on the VMware End-User Computing blog at: this link and the bits are available for download at this link.

In vSphere 5.0, VMware has released a new storage appliance called VSA. VSA is an acronym for “vSphere Storage Appliance”. This appliance is aimed at our SMB (Small-Medium Business) customers who may not be in a position to purchase a SAN or NAS array for their virtual infrastructure, and therefore do not have shared storage. Without access to a SAN or NAS array, SMB customers are unable to implement many of vSphere’s core technologies, such as vSphere HA & vMotion. Customers who decide to deploy a VSA can now benefit from many additional vSphere features without having to purchase a SAN or NAS device to provide them with shared storage.

Each ESXi server has a VSA deployed to it as a Virtual Machine.The appliances use the available space on the local disk(s) of the ESXi servers & present one replicated NFS volume per ESXi server. This replication of storage makes the VSA very resilient to failures. The NFS datastores exported from the VSA can now be used as shared storage on all of the ESXi servers in the same datacenter. The VSA creates shared storage out of local storage for use by a specific set of hosts. This means that vSphere HA & vMotion can now be made available on low-end (SMB) configurations, without external SAN or NAS servers.

There is a CAPEX saving achieved by SMB customers as there is no longer a need to purchase a dedicated SAN or NAS devices to achieve shared storage.There is also an OPEX saving as the management of the VSA may be done by the vSphere Administrator and there is no need for dedicated SAN skills to manage the appliances. The installation & configuration is also much simpler than that of a physical storage array or other storage appliances.

Link to the VSA Installation Demo

This feature delivers the DRS benefits of resource aggregation, automated initial placement, and bottleneck avoidance to storage. You can group and manage similar datastores as a single load-balanced storage resource called a datastore cluster. Storage DRS makes VMDK placement and migration recommendations to avoid I/O and space utilization bottlenecks on the datastores in the cluster. Storage DRS takes care of the initial placement of virtual machines and VMDK files. This placement is based on Space and I/O capacity. Storage DRS will select the best datastore to place this virtual machine or virtual disk in the selected Datastore Cluster. When Storage DRS is set to fully automatic, it will do automated load balancing actions. Of course this can be configured as manual as well and that is actually the default today. Load balancing again is based on space and I/O capacity. If and when required Storage DRS will make recommendations based space and I/O capacity. It will however only do this when a specific threshold is reached.

A datastore cluster is a collection of datastores aggregated into a single unit of consumption for an administrators. When a datastore cluster is created, Storage DRS can manage the storage resources comparable to how DRS manages compute resources in a cluster. As with a cluster of hosts, a datastore clusters is used to aggregate storage resources, enabling smart and rapid placement of new virtual machines and virtual disk drives and load balancing of existing workloads. When you create a VM you will be able to select a Datastore Cluster as opposed to individual datastores. Storage DRS provides initial placement recommendations to datastores in a Storage DRS-enabled datastore cluster based on I/O and space capacity.

During the provisioning of a virtual machine, a datastore cluster can be selected as the target destination for this virtual machine or virtual machine disk after which a recommendation for initial placement is done based on I/O and space capacity. Initial Placement in a manual provisioning process has proven to be very complex in most environments and as such important provisioning factors like current I/O load or space utilization are often ignored. Storage DRS ensures initial placement recommendations are made in accordance with space constraints and with respect to the goals of space and I/O load balancing. Although people are really excited about automated load balancing, it is Initial Placement where most people will start off with and where most people will benefit from the most as it will reduce operational overhead associated with the provisioning of virtual machines.

Ongoing balancing recommendations are made when one or more datastores in a datastore cluster exceeds the user-configurable space utilization or I/O latency thresholds. These thresholds are typically defined during the configuration of the datastore cluster. Storage DRS utilizes vCenter Server’s datastore utilization reporting mechanism to make recommendations whenever the configured utilized space threshold is exceeded. I/O load is evaluated by default every 8 hours currently with a default latency threshold of 15ms. Only when this I/O latency threshold is exceeded Storage DRS will calculate all possible moves to balance the load accordingly while considering the cost and the benefit of the migration. If the benefit doesn’t last for at least 24 hours, Storage DRS will not make the recommendation.

I’ve recorded a short interview with Duncan Epping and Frank Denneman. They have released their new book “VMware vSphere 5.0 Clustering Technical Deepdive”. This book is available at Amazon in full colour and e-reader format. Frank and Duncan have written “vSphere 5.0 Clustering Technical Deepdive” to give you a better understanding of all the new clustering features vSphere 5.0 offers and how these integrate with each other.



VMware vSphere 5.0 Clustering Technical Deepdive zooms in on three key components of every VMware based infrastructure and is by no means a "how to" guide. It covers the basic steps needed to create a vSphere HA and vSphere DRS cluster and to implement vSphere Storage DRS. Even more important, it explains the concepts and mechanisms behind HA, DRS and Storage DRS which will enable you to make well educated decisions. This book will take you in to the trenches of HA, DRS and Storage DRS and will give you the tools to understand and implement e.g. HA admission control policies, DRS resource pools, Datastore Clusters and resource allocation settings. On top of that each section contains basic design principles that can be used for designing, implementing or improving VMware infrastructures and fundamental supporting features like (Storage) vMotion, Storage I/O Control and much more are described in detail for the very first time.

This book is also the ultimate guide to be prepared for any HA, DRS or Storage DRS related question or case study that might be presented during VMware VCDX, VCP and or VCAP exams.

Coverage includes

HA node types
HA isolation detection and response
HA admission control
VM Monitoring
HA and DRS integration
DRS imbalance algorithm
Resource Pools
Impact of reservations and limits
CPU Resource Scheduling
Memory Scheduler
DPM
Datastore Clusters
Storage DRS algorithm
Influencing SDRS recommendations

Be prepared to dive deep!

For the EMEA folks comcol.nl offered to distribute it again, paper black & white can be found here, and full color here. For more information about the paperback, please visit this link.

vCenter Site Recovery Manager builds on the core properties of VMware vSphere that already provide basic protection of applications. Site Recovery Manager is a product that simplifies and automates disaster recovery. Site Recovery Manager helps organizations to directly address the challenges of disaster recovery that were mentioned earlier:  meeting RTO requirements, reducing cost, and reducing risk Site Recovery Manager is a separate product from VMware vSphere.

With vCenter Site Recovery Manager, VMware has leveraged the disaster recovery features and capabilities of the VMware vSphere platform with a product developed specifically for disaster recovery.  This product simplifies and automates the key elements of disaster recovery:  setting up disaster recovery plans, testing those plans, executing failover when a datacenter disaster occurs, and failing back to the primary datacenter.

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager makes it possible for customers to provide faster, more reliable, and more affordable disaster recovery protection than previously possible.  Although not a part of VMware vSphere, Site Recovery Manager works closely with VMware vSphere to manage and automate disaster recovery for virtual environments.

Summary of SRM v5.0 New Features

- New user interface
- Planned migration – with replication update
- Failback
- vSphere Replication
- Faster IP customization
- Shadow VM icons
- In guest scripts
- VM dependency

This paperback written by John Hales, Brian Eiler and Steve Jones has not been released yet. You may pre-order it now and it will be delivered to you when it has been released. VMware vSphere, is VMware's first cloud operating system, able to manage large pools of virtualized computing infrastructure, including software and hardware. Building on the power of VMware Infrastructure, VMware vSphere dramatically reduces capital and operating costs, and increases control over IT infrastructures while preserving the flexibility to choose any OS, application and hardware. This book provides vSphere administrators with essential guidance in implementing and managing VMware's vSphere product suite. This guidance has been battle tested in virtual environments big and small. It also provides actionable advice for the day to day operational maintenance and common pitfalls to avoid for first time vSphere administrators. Best of all, the companion DVD contains an introductory version of Train Signal's vSphere training DVD that provides additional hours of vSphere training.

http://www.amazon.com/Professional-vSphere-5-Implementation-Management/dp/1435456548

pfSense is a free, open source customized distribution of FreeBSD tailored for use as a firewall and router. In addition to being a powerful, flexible firewalling and routing platform, it includes a long list of related features and a package system allowing further expandability without adding bloat and potential security vulnerabilities to the base distribution. pfSense is a popular project with more than 1 million downloads since its inception, and proven in countless installations ranging from small home networks protecting a PC and an Xbox to large corporations, universities and other organizations protecting thousands of network devices.

A VMware Appliance is available here: http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/VMwareAppliance
I’ve also created a vSphere compatible OVA file which is available here: http://www.screencast.com/users/esloof/folders/pfSense

We all know Carter from the days he brought PowerCLI  to the market. After the successful launch of this new automation product, Carter moved over to Spring, where he’s working as a product manager of one of the most secret Spring projects. For these secret projects he was looking for a tool or appliance which could be used to introduce low network bandwidth, latency and packet loss in order to test his cool WebApps. After some searching and tweeting around he has decided to build an appliance on his own.  WANatronic uses Ubuntu 8.04 JEOS, RC tools and IP tables. I’ve recorded a short video about what you can do with it and how it works. If you’re interested in giving it a try and you’re using vSphere, I’ve created a VMware vSphere WANatronic 10001 appliance OVF file which can be downloaded from this location.

When you want to test services like DNS, RDP or PCoIP on another host just use the following command line and put in your own addresses: route ADD 8.8.8.8 MASK 255.255.255.255 192.168.178.225 In this example DNS requests for 8.8.8.8 just like in Carter’s example are routed trough 192.168.178.225 (the IP address of my WANatronic).

Last week I’ve been interviewed by Edmond Varwijk, he works as a journalist for the well know Dutch ICT-News website - Webwereld. Edmond has asked me what the impact of the vSphere 5 ESXi only hypervisor will be on customers who are still using ESX.

Eric Sloof, in het dagelijks leven VMware-consultant en bekend van de NTPRO.NL-weblog, begrijpt keuze van VMware. "VMware wil een mean and lean hypervisor en die hebben ze met ESXi in handen." Volgens Eric Sloof is de impact van het verlies van de Service Console ook voor beheerders die nog een ESX-omgeving managen, bescheiden.

Uit ervaring weet hij dat het meeste in het dagelijks beheer nu al vanuit de vCenter-managementomgeving gebeurt. Bovendien heeft VMware de VMware Management Assistant (vMA) ontwikkeld. "Daarin is een vSphere Command Line (vCLI) beschikbaar die je in staat stelt om door middel van vicfg-commando's specifieke taken uit te voeren."

The article is in Dutch and you can get it here.

 http://webwereld.nl/nieuws/107172/gedwongen-afscheid-nemen-van-esx.html

Raising the Bar, Part V

Date: Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Time: 9:00 AM (PT) | 12:00 PM (ET) | 18:00 Amsterdam 

Please join VMware executives Paul Maritz, CEO and Steve Herrod, CTO for the unveiling of the next major step forward in Cloud infrastructure. Paul & Steve’s 45 minute live webcast will be followed by additional online sessions where you can learn more about the industry’s most trusted virtualization and cloud infrastructure products and services. Join VMware and experience how the virtualization journey is helping transform IT and ushering in the era of Cloud Computing.

To register, please go to: http://bit.ly/ihnk4P