This paper discusses the benefits of deploying VMware vSphere with HP 3PAR Utility Storage including: greater virtual machine (VM) density, simplifying administration, and realizing significant cost savings in virtualized server environments. The paper also includes best practices for an integrated VMware vSphere and HP 3PAR Utility Storage solution.
- Performance and reliability features - Queue depth throttling - Metadata locking with SCSI reservations - vSphere Storage APIs – Array Integration (VAAI) - Storage I/O Controls - vSphere Storage APIs – Storage Awareness (VASA) - VMFS versus RDM
Foglight Network Management System (NMS) is an enterprise ready network performance monitoring and configuration management solution. It installs in less than 15 minutes and auto-discovers key metrics for network resources, including hardware, operating systems, virtual infrastructure, databases, middleware, applications, and services allowing you to:
- Reduce the wasted time and chaos associated with sudden network issues - Mitigate the risk of downtime - Reduce mean-time-to-resolution of network incidents - Provide admin and management level visibility - Manage up to 100 network devices for FREE - Download and install in only 15 MINUTES
VMware has announced VXLAN, the Virtual Distributed Layer-2 Network IETF draft standard, of which Arista is a co-author. VXLAN is a special encapsulation mechanism that runs between virtual switches and enables virtual machines to be deployed and moved on or between any server within the network. The main benefits to the IT department in planning to support VXLAN is the ability to deploy a virtual machine on any server within the network, regardless of its IP subnet. This enables the IT department to create a scalable network architecture that supports capacity on demand and workload mobility regardless of geography and IP addressing. VXLAN requires no changes to the underlying IP addressing architecture and should require no major changes to installed infrastructure in the data center.
What is VXLAN?
Virtual eXtensible LAN is a new network encapsulation and segmentation mechanism that enables a VM to be deployed on any server, regardless of the IP subnet the physical ESX host is in. It accomplishes this by encapsulating the MAC and IP packets from the virtual NIC with a UDP header and then using IP multicast to emulate a broadcast domain. To get traffic in and out of this encapsulated 'virtual wire' the non-encapsulated traffic must go through a vShield Edge virtual machine acting as a VXLAN gateway. Performing these elegant L3-transparent migrations with L2-only storage transport technologies like FCoE is impossible.
I invite you to take a look at the 'Fall 2011 Arista Webinar Series' that kicks off at the end of September. Arista will be joined by top industry partners to reveal the best practices of data centers, one vertical at a time. Arista Tech Education - For Engineers, By Engineers.
ESX includes a CIM Object Manager (CIMOM) that implements a set of server discovery and monitoring features. With the VMware CIM SMASH/Server Management API, clients that use industry-standard protocols can do the following:
• Enumerate system resources • Monitor system health data
The plugin is general enough to support other CIM compliant services and is not limited only to ESX. The goal of this plugin was to expose ESX CIMOM in the vCenter Orchestrator.
With VMware Data Recovery 2.0, VMware has extended the ability to quickly and simply protect and restore virtual machines. Fully integrated with VMware vCenter Server, VMware Data Recovery gives central management of backup and restore operations, and the inherent deduplication of data saves significant disk space and provides flexible options for storage. VMware Data Recovery 2.0 has introduced a number of improvements including performance enhancements, speed, and reliability improvements, as well as capabilities to enhance management with the ability to email reports and schedule maintenance windows.
Several fixes have been included that rectify issues found in VMware Data Recovery 1.2.1. Issues that have been resolved include:
• CIFS target handling and resilience • Incremental RDM backup • Backups failing with “not enough disk space” errors • Backups failing with “disk full” error despite free space being available
vSphere supports several command‐line interfaces for managing your virtual infrastructure including the vSphere Command‐Line Interface (vCLI), a set of ESXi Shell commands, and PowerCLI. You can choose the CLI set best suited for your needs, and write scripts to automate your CLI tasks.
The vCLI command set includes vicfg- commands and ESXCLI commands. The ESXCLI commands included in the vCLI package are equivalent to the ESXCLI commands available on the ESXi Shell. The vicfgcommand set is similar to the deprecated esxcfg- command set in the ESXi Shell.
You can manage many aspects of an ESXi host with the ESXCLI command set. You can run ESXCLI commands as vCLI commands or run them in the ESXi Shell in troubleshooting situations. You can also run ESXCLI commands from the PowerCLI shell by using the Get-EsxCli cmdlet. See the vSphere PowerCLI Administration Guide and the vSphere PowerCLI Reference. The set of ESXCLI commands available on a host depends on the host configuration. The vSphere Command‐Line Interface Reference lists help information for all ESXCLI commands. Run esxcli --server <MyESXi> --help before you run a command on a host to verify that the command is defined on the host you are targeting.
A vSphere Installation Bundle (VIB) is a single software package that may contain drivers, CIM providers, VMkernel modules, or otili her software. A depot is a repository of VIBs available online to Update Manager users. You create and maintain a depot to control the VIB files that Update Manager users can access. The depot and Web service portal use a static Web site to deliver a set of files intended for consumption by Update Manager. Before you provide updates to users through a depot, use the Workbench-based developer kit or the VIB Suite to generate the following files:
A vendor-index.xml file. The index lists the product ID and version number, and points to metadata.zip files.
One or more metadata.zip files. The metadata.zip files point to the location of the VIB files. Names of metadata.zip files cannot conflict with other filenames within your set of files or with the files of other vendors.
One or more bulletins describing the VIB file. A bulletin is an XML file that describes the VIB included in a consumable package, metadata.zip. At least one bulletin must be included in every metadata.zip file.
One or more VIB files.
From the vendor depot, Update Manager downloads a list of supported vendor Web site URLs. Based on the list of URLs, Update Manager obtains a list of metadata URLs from the publishing Web site, where it downloads the metadata. The metadata, in turn, contains the URLs for the VIB files. You can create the files required for an update depot by using VIB tools that are part of VMware Workbench. To create an online depot, unzip the contents of an offline bundle created by Workbench to the Web server root directory.
VMware Workstation 8 provides a seamless way to access all of the virtual machines you need, regardless of where they are running. Connect to Server enables remote connections to virtual machines running on VMware Workstation, VMware vSphere, and VMware vCenter. Now you can work with local and server hosted virtual machines side by side within the same interface. You are no longer constrained by the power of your PC to run multiple virtual machines at the same time.In this video you will see how easy you can add another instance of Workstation 8 but also the vCenter server to your inventory.
After you connect to a remote server, the remote host and remote virtual machines appear in the library. If the remote server is running vCenter Server, datacenters and folders appear in the library. To interact with a remote host, you select it in the library. The tasks that you can perform on a remote host appear on the tab for the remote host. For example, you might be able to restart, shut down, or suspend the remote host and create virtual machines.
To interact with a remote virtual machine, you select it in the library. You interact with remote virtual machines in the same way that you interact with local virtual machines, but some features and devices are not supported. Features that you cannot use with remote virtual machines include Unity mode, shared folders, AutoProtect snapshots, drag-and-drop, and copy and paste. Your permissions determine the actions that you can perform on remote hosts and remote virtual machines. When a feature is not supported, or when you do not have permission to use it, the associated menu item is unavailable.
VMware has announced the availability of VMware Workstation 8 -- offering the easiest way to build, share and upload virtual machines (VMs) to VMware vSphere. With more than 50 new features, VMware Workstation 8 advances the way technical professionals can work with multiple virtual machines from their PCs or on enterprise private clouds.
"The users of VMware Workstation pioneer the adoption of virtual environments and private clouds," said Christopher Young, vice president and general manager, End-User Computing, VMware. "Our team recognizes the needs of these users and has made significant enhancements to VMware Workstation 8, making it even easier for them to move beyond the virtual box."
Key VMware Workstation 8 features include:
Remote Connections - VMware Workstation 8 provides a seamless way to establish remote connections to hosts running in Workstation, VMware vSphere, and VMware vCenter™.
"Share" VMs - New in Workstation 8, users can share VMs so they can be accessed by teammates providing a quick way to test applications in a more production-like environment.
Upload to vSphere - Workstation 8 enables users to drag and drop a VM from a user's desktop to VMware vSphere. This feature allows users to deploy a complete application environment from a PC to a server for further testing, demoing, and analysis.
New User Interface - The VMware Workstation 8 user interface has been revamped with simplified menus, live thumbnails, improved preferences screens, and a new virtual machine library with enhanced searching. Users can now search and access a large library of virtual machines that can reside on your desktop, a server, or on another PC running VMware Workstation.
Improved Virtual Machine Capabilities - With support for HD audio with 7.1 surround sound, USB 3 and Bluetooth devices, Workstation 8 delivers new levels of virtual machine performance. In addition, improvements to virtual SMP, 3D graphics performance and new support for 64-GB RAM allows users to run the most demanding applications in a virtual machine.
VMware’s Sreekanth Setty who works as a staff member at the Performance Engineering team has published a great technical white-paper regarding vMotion Architecture, Performance, and Best Practices in VMware vSphere 5.
VMware vSphere vMotion is one of the most popular features of VMware vSphere. vMotion provides invaluable benefits to administrators of virtualized datacenters. It enables load balancing, helps prevent server downtime, enables troubleshooting and provides flexibility—with no perceivable impact on application availability and responsiveness.
vSphere 5 includes a number of performance enhancements and new features that have been introduced in vMotion. Among these improvements are a multiple–network adaptor capability for vMotion, better utilization of 10GbE bandwidth, Metro vMotion, and optimizations to further reduce impact on application performance.
A series of tests were conducted to quantify the performance gains of vMotion in vSphere 5 over vSphere 4.1 in a number of scenarios including Web servers, messaging servers and database servers. An evacuation scenario was also performed in which a large number of virtual machines were migrated.
Test results show the following:
Improvements in vSphere 5 over vSphere 4.1 are twofold: the duration of vMotion and the impact on application performance during vMotion.
There are consistent performance gains in the range of 30% in vMotion duration on vSphere 5, due to the optimizations introduced in vMotion in vSphere 5.
The newly added multi–network adaptor feature in vSphere 5 results in dramatic improvements in performance (for example, duration time is reduced by more than a 3x factor) in vSphere 5 over vSphere 4.1.
3PAR Utility Storage with VMware vSphere 
