Entries from Eric Sloof

vSphere High Availability greatly simplifes virtual machine provisioning, resource allocation, load balancing and  migration while also providing an easy-to-use, cost-efective high-availability and failover solution for applications running in virtual machines. Using VMware vSphere 5.0 and VMware HA helps eliminate single points of failure in the deployment of business-critical applications in virtual machines. It also enables you to maintain other inherent virtualization benefts such as higher system utilization; closer alignment of IT resources with business goals and priorities; and more streamlined, simplifed and automated administration of larger infrastructure installations and systems.

Download VSphere HA 5 Best Practices Guide

Ernst Cozijnsen over at Capgemini has found a way to install ESXi 4.1 unattended to SD-CARD / USB. Here are his findings: For a few weeks it was bugging me heavily that the ESXi 4.1 installer didn’t want to install to the internal SD-Card of our newly bought systems. Together with Max Daneri (creator of the PXE Manager) http://labs.vmware.com/flings/pxe-manager we searched for a possible cause because the debug installer was telling us “well I can’t install because somebody said I’m not allowed”.

With this in the back of my mind the urge to solve it grew by the minute and it almost became an obsession to find a working solution. A few days ago we cracked it! And it works like a charm.

In a nutshell:

- USB targets are not supported by default (we fixed this by disabling the check for it)
- The minimal target size should be 5.1GB (we scaled it down to 3.7GB so SD-Cards are supported)
- The SCRATH partition of 4GB (also scaled that one down to 2 GB)
- VMFS grow partition (VMFS of USB?? Neah….. isn’t going to fly so we removed it completely)

Replace you ienviron.vgz with this file (http://www.screencast.com/t/pusv1KGq3) and happy installing. If your to curious and want to know the exact modification: Unpack the file and search/grep on “ernst” in /usr/lib/vmware/weasel/* and /usr/lib/vmware/weasel/scripted/

If  you are using the “PXE manager”, modify the “kickstart” part so that you don’t use Local or Remote but instead use device driver.  As device driver you enter usb-storage. Oh…. just one more thing:  VMware support urged me to say that this hack is not supported by VMware! So this is a non-supported but very welcome hack. :-)

User-defined network resource pools in vSphere 5.0 provide an ability to add new traffic types beyond the standard system traffic types that are used for I/O scheduling. This video shows an example of a user-defined resource pool with shares, limits and IEEE 802.1p tag parameters. When customers are deploying critical applications on virtual infrastructure, they can utilize this advanced feature to reserve I/O resources for the important, business-critical application traffic and provide SLA guarantees. Service providers who are deploying public clouds and serving multiple tenants can now define and provision I/O resources per tenant, based on each tenant’s need.

The new resource pools can be defined at the Distributed Switch level by selecting the resource allocation tab and clicking on new network resource pools. After a new network resource pool is defined with shares and limits parameters, that resource pool can be associated with a port group. This association of a network resource pool with a port group enables customers to allocate I/O resources to a group of virtual machines or workloads.

 

NetFlow is a general networking tool with multiple uses, including network monitoring and profiling, billing, intrusion detection and prevention, networking forensics, and SOX compliance. NetFlow sends aggregated networking flow data to a third‐party collector (an appliance or server). The collector and analyzer report on various information such as the current top flows consuming the most bandwidth in a particular virtual switch, which IP addresses are behaving irregularly, and the number of bytes a particular virtual machine has sent and received in the past 24 hours. NetFlow is a mature technology, developed by Cisco, that is widely supported by third‐party collectors. NetFlow enables visibility into virtual machine traffic in a virtualized datacenter.

ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer is a web-based bandwidth monitoring tool that collects NetFlow data exported from routing devices, and uses it to analyze and report on IP traffic across the network. With instant reports on top applications, protocols, conversations, and hosts, NetFlow Analyzer gives you valuable insight into bandwidth usage in your enterprise without the complexity and expense involved in a traditional WAN analysis setup.  

Port mirroring is the capability on a network switch to send a copy of network packets seen on a switch port to a network monitoring device connected to another switch port. Port mirroring is also referred to as Switch Port Analyzer (SPAN) on Cisco switches. In VMware vSphere 5.0, a Distributed Switch provides a similar port mirroring capability to that available on a physical network switch. After a port mirror session is configured with a destination—a virtual machine, a vmknic or an uplink port—the Distributed Switch copies packets to the destination. Port mirroring provides visibility into:

• Intrahost virtual machine traffic (virtual machine–to–virtual machine traffic on the same host)
• Interhost virtual machine traffic (virtual machine–to–virtual machine traffic on different hosts)

The port mirroring capability on a Distributed Switch is a valuable tool that helps network administrators in debugging network issues in a virtual infrastructure. The granular control over monitoring ingress, egress or all traffic of a port helps administrators fine-tune what traffic is sent for analysis.

Port mirror configuration can be done at the Distributed Switch level, where a network administrator can create a port mirror session by identifying the traffic source that needs monitoring and the traffic destination where the traffic will be mirrored. The traffic source can be any port with ingress, egress or all traffic selected. The traffic destination can be any virtual machine, vmknic or uplink port.

Watch this video for a overview of the vSphere Storage Appliance and how it works. Learn about "Shared Storage for Everyone"

VMware Director of Enterprise Cloud Product Marketing, discusses what's new in VMware vCloud Director. Learn about building an Enterprise Hybrid Cloud with the VMware vCloud Solution.

A recap of VMware vSphere 5 and vCenter Heartbeat 6.4.

VMware Product Mgr for Security Products, Ravi Kumar, introduces and discusses VMware vShield 5.0 for security and compliance.

Storage DRS is an I/O and space load balancing mechanism that determines the best place for a given virtual machine's data to live when it is created and then used over time. For more information click here.