Entries from Eric Sloof

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.

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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

VMware vCloud Director 1.5 gives enterprise organizations the ability to build secure private clouds that dramatically increase datacenter efficiency and business agility. Coupled with VMware vSphere, vCloud Director delivers cloud computing for existing datacenters by pooling virtual infrastructure resources and delivering them to users as catalog-based services. vCloud Director 1.5 helps you build agile infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud environments that greatly accelerate the time-to-market for applications and responsiveness of IT organizations. vCloud Director 1.5 adds the following new features specific to accelerating application delivery in the cloud: • Fast Provisioning 
• vCloud Custom Guest Data • Expanded vCloud API and SDK • vCloud API Query Service • vCloud Messages • Cisco Nexus 1000v Integration • vSphere 5.0 Support • Microsoft SQL Server Support • Globalization • vShield Five Tuple Firewall Rules • Static Routing • IPSec Site-to-Site VPN This white paper addresses three areas regarding vCloud Director performance: • vCloud Director sizing guidelines and software requirements • Best practices in performance and tuning  • Performance characterization for key vCloud Director operations

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/vcloud-director-perf.pdf