This paper describes how SAP NetWeaver running in a Linux environment on VMware vSphere 4 can be protected. It provides good details on the key capabilities of SUSE Linux and VMware vSphere as it pertains to protecting a Tier 1 business critical application.
This report shows the results of the SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark on a Fujitsu Primergy RX300 S6 system, running VMware vSphere 5.0
Virtualizing Tier-1 applications such as SAP allow end users to reap the benefits of virutalization such as improved server utilization, reduced maintenance costs, easier administration, higher levels of business continuity and faster response time to changing business needs. Read this paper to understand how to virtualize SAP on IBM System x3850 X5 servers
This report provides the results of performance and scalability of the HP ProLiant DL980 server running SAP on VMware vSphere 5. The tests were done by ESG labs, which confirmed that vSphere 5 was able to effectively virtualize a CPU-intensive SAP workload and achieve scale as number of users grew.
vSphere Replication (VR) uses replication technologies included in ESX Servers with the assistance of virtual appliances to replicate virtual machines between sites. VR is provided by vSphere Replication Servers (VR Servers or VRS). VR Servers are managed by the vSphere Replication Managment Server (VRMS). Both VRMS and VR Servers are virtual appliances. VRMS provides a way to manage VR Servers across multiple hosts. If you are using VR, you must establish at least one vSphere Replication Server and exactly one VRMS at the recovery site. To enable replication in both directions, you must deploy exactly one VRMS at each site and at least one VRS at each site. You may want to create multiple VR Servers at each site if multiple servers are required to meet your load balancing needs for replication of virtual machines. Each VRMS must be registered with a corresponding vCenter Server. For example, the primary site VRMS must be registered with the primary site vCenter Servers.
Both the VRMS and VRS appliances provide a virtual appliance management interface (VAMI). These interfaces can be used to configure the VRMS database, as well as network settings, public-key certificates, and passwords for the appliances. Before using VR, you need to configure the VR infrastructure including having managed IP defined in runtime settings at both sites and having a VRMS database installed. This video provides useful guidance to help ensure you complete the installation and configuration process correctly. When installing SRM, be certain to select the VR option. If you have installed SRM and want to add VR, you can add that option by running the installer again. So, here are the steps for configure-ring vSphere SRM Replication for a Single Virtual Machine.
1. On the vSphere Client Home page, click VMs and Templates.
2. Browse the inventory to find the single virtual machine to be replicated using VR. Right-click the virtual machine and click vSphere Replication.
3. In the Replication Settings page, configure general replication settings.
These settings include the disk file location to which the virtual machine is replicated on the recovery site, how often the virtual machine is replicated, and how the guest OS is quiesced. Use the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) slider or enter a value to configure the maximum amount of data that can be lost during the recovery. The available range is from 15 minutes to 24 hours. For example, a recovery point objective of one hour seeks to ensure that the virtual machine loses no more than one hour of data during the recovery. For smaller RPOs, less data is lost in a recovery, but more network bandwidth is consumed keeping the replica synchronized.
The available quiescing types are determined by the virtual machine's operating system. Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) quiescing is supported for Windows virtual machines running Windows XP or later. Linux does not support quiescing. If no target file location is specified or if you want to override the default determined by the datastore mappings, click Browse to select a target location for the virtual machine.
Onyx is a standalone application that serves as a proxy between the vSphere Client and the vCenter Server. It monitors the network communication between them and translates it into an executable PowerShell code. Later, this code could be modified and saved into a reusable function or script.
vSphere 5.0 can be confgured to enable VMware ESXi host swapping to a solid-state disk (SSD). In the low host memory–available states (high memory usage), where guest ballooning, transparent page sharing (TPS) and memory compression have not been sufcient to reclaim the needed host memory, hypervisor swapping is used as the last resort to reclaim memory from the virtual machines. vSphere employs three methods to address limitations of hypervisor swapping to improve hypervisor swapping performance.
1. Randomly selecting the virtual machine physical pages to be swapped out. This helps mitigate the impact of VMware ESXi pathologically interacting with the guest operating system’s memory management heuristics. This has been enabled from early releases of VMware ESX.
2. Memory compression of the virtual machine pages that are targeted by VMware ESXi to be swapped out. This feature, introduced in vSphere 4.1, reduces the number of memory pages that must be swapped out to the disk, while reclaiming host memory efectively at the same time and thereby benefting application performance.
3. vSphere 5.0 now enables users to choose to confgure a swap cache on the SSD. VMware ESXi 5.0 will then use this swap cache to store the swapped-out pages instead of sending them to the regular and slower hypervisor swap fle on the disk. Upon the next access to a page in the swap cache, the page will be retrieved quickly from the cache and then removed from the swap cache to free up space. Because SSD read latencies are an order of magnitude faster than typical disk access latencies, this signifcantly reduces the swap-in latencies and greatly improves the application performance in high memory over commitment scenarios.
In this video I’ll show you how SDD storage is detected by the ESXi host after adding a new datastore. You will also learn how to configure VMware ESXi host swapping and redirecting virtual machine swap files to solid state storage.
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.
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 is the first and only official 
