Eric Sloof

The VMware Site Recovery Manager API provides an interface for Site Recovery Manager in the same way that the VMware Infrastructure API provides interfaces for the VMware Virtual Infrastructure Management framework. The SRM API provides a way for third party systems to initiate tests or failovers and collect the results. The APIs do not help with setup or failback. The SRM API provides the following ways for a client application to use Web services:

􀂄 Log in to the SRM server
􀂄 Obtain the API version
􀂄 Get a list of recovery plans at the SRM site
􀂄 Get the settings of a specific recovery plan at the SRM site
􀂄 Start a specific recovery plan in recovery or test mode
􀂄 Pause a running recovery plan
􀂄 Answer a prompt
􀂄 Restart a paused recovery plan
􀂄 Cancel a recovery plan
􀂄 Get the final status of a recovery plan
􀂄 Log out of the SRM server

The SRM API complies with the following standards organizations:

􀂄 Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS�?I) Basic Profile 1.0
􀂄 Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) 1.1
􀂄 Web Services Description Language (WSDL) 1.1
􀂄 XML Schema 1.0

This newest version offers the capabilities from before, plus an array of new features, increased performance and stability—including a broader range of guest operating system support, direct access to virtual machine consoles, an intuitive Web-based management interface, and increased memory for greater scalability. With over 3 million downloads worldwide, VMware Server continues to innovate to provide users with a superior introductory experience to virtualization—for free.

What's New

• Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS):  Properly backup the state of the Windows virtual machines when using the snapshot feature to maintain data integrity of the applications running inside the virtual machine.
• Virtual Machine Communication Interface (VMCI): Support for fast and efficient communication between a virtual machine and the host operating system and between two or more virtual machines on the same host.
• Support for SCSI pass-through (generic) devices: Allows for SCSI devices such as tape backup devices to be connected to virtual machines.
• Expand disk capacity on the fly: Allows for adding new SCSI hard disks and controllers to a running virtual machine.
• Firefox 3 as a supported browser for the management interface.
• Remote Client Devices: Access devices such as CD-ROMs that are not physically connected to the host via VMware Remote Console

At the 3th of October the Dutch market leader in virtualization training XTG will deliver the Dutch virtualization event. The Xpert Training Group V-Event is the key virtualization event of the year. At this event you will receive the latest product updates and information, see live demos and get deep level of understanding required to turn your infrastructure challenges into a competitive advantage through server, desktop and storage virtualization solutions and technology. No commercial presentations but the real deal from VMware certified trainers. You can register at the following link.

Chris Skinner, a Technical Trainer over at VMware created a document for clustering VirtualCenter 2.5 with MSCS. Feel free to distribute to clients and colleagues. A special thanks to Seva and Charu for challenging Chris to do this based on their VC2.0 document. This paper documents the steps to successfully implement a high availability solution for VirtualCenter 2.5 using Microsoft’s cluster services. There are some basic requirements to start the process. Microsoft requires Active Directory for cluster services. Additionally, Windows 2003 Enterprise server or higher will be necessary. This document was compiled from several sources. It demonstrates creating a VC cluster on the same ESX host (cluster-in-a-box) with a SAN-based quorum disk. The hyperlinks at the end of the document has more detailed information for other types of configurations, such as, cluster-across-boxes and physical-to-virtual.

Openfiler converts an industry standard x86/64 architecture system into a full-fledged NAS/SAN appliance or IP storage gateway and provides storage administrators with a powerful tool to cope with burgeoning storage needs. Building upon the popularity of server virtualization technologies such as VMware, Virtual Iron, and Xen, Openfiler can also be deployed as a virtual machine instance.

This deployment flexibility of Openfiler ensures that storage administrators are able to make the best use of system performance and storage capacity resources when allocating and managing networked storage in a multi-platform environment.

Openfiler addresses all the key data storage concerns

Reliability - Openfiler supports both software and hardware RAID with monitoring and alert facilities; volume snapshot and recovery.
Availability - Openfiler supports active/passive high availability clustering, MPIO, and block level replication.
Performance - Linux 2.6 kernel supports the latest CPU, networking and storage hardware.
Scalability - filesystem scalability to 60TB+, online filesystem and volume growth support.

What's new in Openfiler 2.3

Per-network NFS.
Tuning Enhanced CIFS Options.
Multiple NIC Bonding.
Advanced iSCSI Setup.
Fine-tune NFS client access; set wdelay,sync, origin port etc.
Advanced CIFS share configuration enables enhanced application compatibility.
Create multiple bonded NIC configurations to improve performance.
Create multiple iSCSI targets and map LUNs and snapshots.

Alistair Sutherland over at B2V updated their ESX command guide. This guide has been compiled by the consultants & trainers at Taupo Consulting and is based upon their personal experiences with the VMware ESX Server 3 product and is updated frequently. The information in this guide is not verified or sanctioned by VMware and they encourage their website visitors to use www.vmware.com/vmtn as the primary source of VMware product information. They are of course delighted if you find their shared experience documented in this guide of use in your environment and always appreciate being linked to.

Eric Siebert over at VMware-Land has put together a new Top 10 list featuring the Top 10 free tools that should be in every VMware administrator's toolkit. My little vmCDConnected app is on the 9th place. After a lot of late hours of coding I finally can release the vmCDConnected application. What’s so special about this application ? Well it scans all the Virtual Machines and shows if they have a CD connected to it. After scanning the VM’s you can disconnect all the CD’s with a click of  a button. Why do we need it ? Imagine you have a DRS cluster with 80 VM’s, when one of those VM’s is connected to a CD it will stay on the same ESX server because V-Motion doesn’t work in combination with a connected CD.

9) VMCdConnected - http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/172-Software.html
    • Scans all Virtual Machines and shows if they have a CD connected to it. After scanning the VM’s you can disconnect all the CD’s with a click of  a button.

VMware Stage Manager, a break-through product for delivering applications from staging to production is now generally available. VMware Stage Manager solves the problem of server sprawl, configuration drift, and repetitive system testing in pre-production by running IT services and business applications as virtual machine configurations that can be easily transitioned through the release process. VMware Stage Manager allows IT to roll out new and updated applications into production more quickly, avoid the risk of unplanned downtime, and accelerate change requests to production systems.

VMware Stage Manager is available for VMware Infrastructure 3 Standard or Enterprise and can be purchased as part of the VMware Management and Automation and IT Service Delivery bundles, or a-la-carte.

Christoph over at 21st century storage has written a good article about 10 GigE. Here are some quick performance results from VMware servers with 10 Gigabit Ethernet cards (from Sun with an Intel 82598 controller. The servers were Sun X4150 with Dual-Quadcore processors. I fired up two test VMs with Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 (64 bit) and used netperf to measure TCP bandwidth between them (the exact command used was netperf -H <target ip> -t TCP_STREAM -C -c -l 60 -f M).

Generally this is exactly what we expected: to be able to provide good performance to many virtual servers which do network and/or disk-I/O only periodically without overprovisioning the whole infrastructure.

At the moment there is exactly one dual-port 10 GigE card in every VMware server and there are two physical connections to two different switches - a much cleaner setup than the 12 (!) GigE interfaces per server we had before. Via Arne Fokkema over at ICT-Freak.

Carter Shanklin over at the VI PowerShell Blog created another great Excel sheet with an integrated PowerShell script. If an ESX host you want to manage doesn't appear in VirtualCenter, you need to add it. This is a bit tricker than reconnecting since there's no inventory in VirtualCenter to tell you the IP addresses of all the hosts you use, and you also need to know a host's password in order to add it. This is another case where entering things in a spreadsheet can really speed things up. He made just such a spreadsheet, and here's a video of him using it.

Attaching lots of VMware ESX hosts to VMware VirtualCenter. from Carter Shanklin on Vimeo.