vSphere - 3

Operations Management disciplines are converging in the cloud. Performance, capacity and configuration management are becoming inseparable due to the dynamic nature of converged infrastructure. Traditional tools and processes designed for silo-ed, static physical infrastructures don’t provide the automation and control needed to effectively manage highly virtualized and private cloud environments.  This guide will walk you through some key use cases for VMware vCenter Operations Standard to help you conduct a successful product evaluation. The content includes an overview, installation and configuration, and key use cases of VMware vCenter Operations Standard to demonstrate how to diagnose and correct performance problems in the virtual infrastructure.

http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/10178 (via @VMwareStorage)

Stephane Lalonde has been a Senior SE at VMware for 4 years. In previous roles he has worked for Citrix for over 4 years and have done extensive work on their SSL VPN solution. Stephane has also worked at one of Cisco's largest VARs where he implemented various solutions.

Stephane has created a presentation called "Networking From Physical to Virtual", the goal of this presentation is to cover networking in a VMware environment and showing the transition from a fully physical datacenter to a virtualized datacenter from a networking perspective.  The talking points are all in the speakers notes and all slides are screen captures or images to help describe the networking environment.

Mind mapping is a powerful technique that allows you to make the most of your brainpower by creating maps that use colour, lines, and images to capture and organize your ideas, information, and tasks.

VMware’s support team has created two new mind maps which will help you solving Management and Network issues. In order to use these minmaps, you have to use a recent version (9) of Adobe Acrobat.

Mindmap – vSphere Troubleshooting Network Issues

Mindmap – vSphere Troubleshooting Management Issues

When implementing virtualization technology, organizations must ensure that they can continue to maintain a secure environment and meet their compliance obligations. To do so, you will have to evaluate risks that might affect protected information and mitigate those risks through risk-appropriate standards, processes, and best practices.

This set of documents provides guidance on how to securely deploy VMware vSphere 4.1 (“vSphere”) in a production environment. The focus is on initial configuration of the virtualization infrastructure layer, which covers the following:

• The virtualization hosts (both VMware ESX® 4 and VMware ESXi™ 4)
  Configuration of the virtual machine container (NOT hardening of the guest operating system (OS) or any applications running within)
• Configuration of the virtual networking infrastructure, including the management and storage networks as well as the virtual switch (but NOT security of the virtual machine’s network)
• VMware vCenter™ Server, its database and client components
  VMware Update Manager (included because the regular update and patching of the ESX/ESXi hosts and the virtual machine containers are essential to maintaining the security of the environment)
  

 Download vSphere 4.1 Hardening Guide

This evening I had a cool GoToMeeting with Tintri’s David Friedlander and VP of Engineering Pratik Wadher. They showed me their new Tintri VMstore, it’s the first VM aware storage system. The VMstore T440 is an 8.5 TB hardware appliance that is designed from the ground up for hosting virtual machines through 10 GigE NFS.

Tintri uses virtual machine abstractions. VMs and virtual disks in place of conventional abstractions such as volumes, LUNs or files. This allows the VMstore to measure and control I/O performance individually for each virtual disk in the system. In effect, the only layer of abstraction in a Tintri device is the virtual disk itself. Other solutions rely on storage abstractions that create a fundamental mismatch between the storage and VM layers.

I’m very impressed by their appliance, hundreds of VMs in 4U - An intelligent hybrid flash and disk architecture provides enterprise flash performance at disk prices.

http://www.tintri.com/

Using Private VLANs doesn’t consolidate the number of VLANs used or does it? If you want to add security between virtual machines on the same subnet without exhausting VLAN number space, VMware advises to use Private VLANs. Private VLANs are an excellent way to provide layer 2 network isolation between servers in the same subnet. In this video you will learn that using Community Private VLANS doesn’t consolidate the number of VLANs used. On the other hand, when using Isolated Private VLANs you won’t exhaust the number of available VLAN IDs.

VMware’s Nathan Small who works as a Staff Engineer at Global Support Services has put together a great presentation about Advanced Root Cause Analysis. The presentation was designed to give you more insight into how a VMware Technical Support Engineer reviews logs, gathers data and performs in-depth analysis. Nathan is hoping to show you the skills they’re using every day to help determine the root cause for an issue in your environment. With this core knowledge, you will become more self-sufficient within your own environment and be able to diagnose an issue as it occurs rather than after the damage has been done.

VMware has released a new technical paper regarding the performance of Multiple Java Applications in a VMware vSphere 4.1 Virtual Machine. This paper shows the results of tests that investigate the performance impact of running applications on multiple JVMs in a single virtual machine. These tests were conducted using the Olio application running in VMware vFabric tc Server 2.0 on VMware vSphere 4.1 Update 1. The intent of the investigation is to provide insight into the impact of sizing decisions when selecting the number of JVMs to deploy in a single VM.

Technical Paper - Performance of Multiple Java Applications in a VMware vSphere 4.1 Virtual Machine

This week was awesome and it isn’t even over yet. We had two new product launches and can expect some more fireworks in the coming days. Last Tuesday VMware has released vCenter Operations Standard, it’s a great new product which enables you to diagnose and analyse vSphere performance metrics. I’ve already blogged about it and also recorded a short demo video immediately after the release. VMware's Kit Colbert, lead engineer on vCenter Operations also recorded two great videos which will give you an in-depth overview of the vCenter Operations Standard edition and will learn you all about to the Troubleshooting Workflow.

VMware has released a great new product which is able to diagnose and analyse vSphere performance metrics. vCenter Operations Standard is for vCenter administrators who want to better understand the performance of their virtual infrastructure, and to diagnose and correct performance problems easily and quickly.

vCenter Operations Standard collects performance data from each object at every level of your virtual infrastructure, from individual virtual machines and disk drives to entire clusters and datacenters. It stores and analyses the data, and uses that analysis to provide you with real-time information about problems, or potential problems, in your enterprise. vCenter Operations Standard presents the data in graphical interface pages that display different views of your virtual infrastructure.

 vCenter Operations Standard adds several benefits to your suite of VMware tools

• vCenter Operations Standard combines key metrics into single scores for CPU, memory, disk, and contention performance.
• vCenter Operations Standard calculates the range of normal behavior for every metric and highlights abnormalities.
• With vCenter Operations Standard, you can view graphical representations of current and historical states of your entire virtual infrastructure or selected parts of it.
• vCenter Operations Standard displays information about changes in the hierarchy of your virtual infrastructure and shows how these changes affect the performance of the objects involved. For example, how moving a virtual machine from one ESX host to another ESX host affects the performance of the two ESX hosts and all other related objects.