Archive for the ‘vCenter’ Category

Well, at last the wait is over. vSphere5 is now available to download and evaluate from VMware.com website. I was actually expecting the bits to drop on Wednesday, that’s what my (no so) reliable sources were telling me. Who knows perhaps they were released at 23.59 on Wednesday!

I wouldn’t know – I was tucked up in bed by 10pm. I’m not one of those people who sleep in a tent outside an Apple store, if you catch my drift.

Of course I went to download vSphere5 I wasn’t able to. You see I’m neither a customer or partner, and therefore my account is NOT “activated” for customer downloads.

That’s a webpage I’ve been looking at for some years. So at the moment I’m downloading the eval, which looks ALMOST fully functional (Update: I’m not seeing the “Depot” version of ESX5i that’s used with Auto Deploy…). That will last for 60 days. After that I don’t really know what I will do. I will probably sign up for a mailinator account, and just keep on evaluating vSphere5. I’m not really sure where I’m heading on licensing with VMware. I’m no longer a VMware Certified Instructor so I’m not on the email list for education licenses, and I don’t know how long it will take for my vExpert licenses to come through.

My task for today once ESX5i installable has downloaded is to test the GA build of the VMware Hypervisor against the Ultimate Deployment Appliance. Yes, that’s right the UDA has a new build number (Build 20) which adds support for ESX5i. But I need to validate it against the GA, before Carl and I make it publicly available. Not that I expect anyone to deploying ESX5i in anger today – except hard-core fanbios like me of course!

The other thing I’m trying to do is get a preview of chapter 1/2 of my “Hotel California” book out on RTFM. Why? Well, chapter 2 has lots of vSphere5 good stuff, and don’t want to sit on it until next year – because well, by then it will be common knowledge….

Ah ha, I thought that would get your attention. A shameless attempt by an inflammatory title to draw your attention to a plug-in… Perhaps I should worked for a tabloid red-top…

Sadly, its not exactly true. There is however, a new VMware Fling on VMware Labs that allows to add non-VMware Hypervisors to vCenter. Currently, that’s VMwareSpeak for HyperV, because there’s not yet support for Xen or KVM. But perhaps this casual one-night-stand, might develop into a more loving relationship with other virtualization platforms. Who’s to say – Flings are meant to allow VMware Engineers to take flights of fancy, and develop their own tools and software – and that has resulted in some (not all) of them become part of the core management platform. Anyway, this plug-in to vCenter is called “XVP Manager”

Anyway, for how toos, and screen grabs – Read on McDuff…

If you have been watching my blog for a while – you might well be wondering  “Where’s Mike”. That’s because I’ve been so busy with this new SRM book, the blog has had to take the back seat for a while. What you might not realise is that doesn’t mean I haven’t been outputting stuff in a shorter more edible format elsewhere. So on top of my book work, I’ve kept writing for my partners over at TechTarget, and also at VMUG Voice. Sometimes I sit back and ponder how the hell I get all this done in a month.

So one of my more recent posts is was about trying to crush the “VMware cost way to much” myth that predominates our industry/culture – especially for SMB/SMEs. I wrote a two part article about how this might not be the case:

http://searchvirtualdatacentre.techtarget.co.uk/tip/Small-business-software-myth-VMware-costs-way-too-much

http://searchvirtualdatacentre.techtarget.co.uk/tip/VMware-gotchas-The-downside-to-small-business-software

Please join VMware executives Paul Maritz, CEO and Steve Herrod, CTO for the unveiling of the next major step forward in Cloud infrastructure.  Paul & Steve’s 45 minute live webcast will be followed by additional online sessions where you can learn more about the industry’s most trusted virtualization and cloud infrastructure products and services. Join us and experience how the virtualization journey is helping transform IT and ushering in the era of Cloud Computing.

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Erm. What can I say without being cuffed and taken down to share a police cell with a large man called “Bubba”? Not much – but you will want to tune in…

It was my recent good fortune to get the loan of two Dell EqualLogic system from Dell. There mainly for use in my work in VMware SRM. I’m ramping up to write my 3rd book on SRM. But along side that it gives me a chance to look at the integration with VMware that Dell have been working for sometime. This follows a recent theme of mine on RTFM covering the various plug-ins from the storage vendors including EMC’s VSI and NetApp VSC.

I’ve made a decision that where a storage vendor has these kind of datastore provisioning tools – is to cover them along side the standard method of creating a new volume/LUN in their fully-blown management systems. I think in short-term we might see these plug-ins evolve to allow even higher management functions such as actually configuring replication for storage with vCenter. Imagine that – you right-click a datastore in vCenter, you see a Dell/EMC/NetApp menu, and underneath that you see link that says “Configure DataStore for use with VMware SRM”

For the moment the Dell HIT-VE does allow you to setup replication of a volume once the appropriate “partner” relationships have been configured between two or more Dell EqualLogic Groups. So I will be including that in chapter on Dell in my SRM book.

I was really quite taken with how easy it was to setup the Dell EqualLogic – it took very little time, and found the management tools easy to follow. That’s always helpful when you’re taking on a new technology. Once set-up I had chance to play with the Dell EqualLogic Host Integration Tools for VMware (HIT/VE) which includes the

• EqualLogic Datastore Manager – Allows administrators to provision new Datastores, expand existing Datastores, and monitor storage usage in the VMware Datacenter
• EqualLogic Virtual Desktop Deployment Tool – VMware View aware desktop provisioning wizard which allows the deployment of manual virtual desktop pools using array based space efficient thin clones and also allows the refresh of these pools.
• Auto-Snapshot Manager/VMware Edition 3.0 – Creates and restores Smart Copies of Hypervisor consistent Virtual Machines (VMs). Utilizes snapshots, clones, and replicas within PS Series group allowing for fast restoration or disaster recovery

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It’s been a while since I played with the latest plug-ins from NetApp. Yesterday, I was very fortunate to have one of NetApps specialists (Luke Reed) come up to my collocation – and do a controller and OnTap update to my FAS2040s. So I’m now cooking on OnTap8, with access VAAI.

Things have moved on the plug-in side of things from NetApp since I last looked them this time last year. Back then the plug-ins were each a separate install – now they are bundled all together in a single installer – and NetApp have adopted the Virtual Storage Console as the moniker to cover a whole range of functionality. To some degree this shows in the plug-in with each bit of functionality having its own independent controller configuration (where you type the name/ip/username/password) of your NetApp system – rather than doing this centrally from one location.

Some of this stuff is not new, and some it is new. But this is kind of stuff you can do with the NetApp VSC:

• Enhanced Storage Views – above and beyond the standard VMware vSphere Storage Views
• Rapid Cloning for VMware View, Citrix XenDesktop
• Backup and Recovery
• VSC CLI

What’s new here to me is the addition of the ability to create, mount and revert – NetApp Snapshots of VMs. This used to be called “Snap Manager for Virtual Infrastructure” – and had a separate (not together pretty) UI. This has now been integrated as right-click option within vCenter once NetApp VSC has been installed and configured. For me this is the biggest improvement in NetApp’s plug-in. The next thing I would love to see them (and their rivals) do is add the ability to configure SnapMirror from the plug-in – with that I would never need to touch FilerView or Systems Manager when setting up a basic VMware SRM environment. But as the great man said, all in good time – all in good time.

The other thing that’s new to me, is the VSC CLI. That’s right, the plug-in that adds new GUI enhancements to the vSphere Client, has its own CLI. That might strike you as a bit odd, but I do see value there for folks who want to use the vCLI/PowerCLI to script events in VMware, whilst at the same time scripting storage events too… without the need to PuTTy into the NetApp Filer and run commands there.

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UPDATE: My fellow vExpert and Blogger, David Davis – managed to capture some video of the User Awards, together with an interview with the overall winner. Check it out here

On day two of VMworld. I stayed in bed. Yes, I’d been partying hard on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday -  and so when Wednesday morning broke – I found myself supine. But I was still productive – I managed to get some blogpost done from the comfort of my room – before getting my proverbial together to help present the Best of VMworld Europe – TechTarget USER Awards. My co-presenter was Jo Maitland from TechTarget…

Both me and Jo had these crazy mics on which were used throughout the event. Every time I had mine on, I felt an irresistible urge to promote my exercise video, and try out my Madonna impression. Fortunately, no video footage exists of me making a berk of myself!

The very last picture shows Simon Gallagher (best in show) stepping up to win his award – a brand new iPAD…

In San Francisco I helped judge the catagories for vendor awards – but in my heart of hearts I was really looking forward to the User Awards – sponsored by VMware – the intention is to recognize exceptional work by customers in the field. It’s the kind of users/customers/community stuff that floats my boat. Vendors are for ever getting recognition for the work, but this was  a real opportunity to reward outstanding efforts by the virtualization community.

Myself and Tom Howarth – judged the Private Cloud, Virtual Desktop and Home/Remote Office categories, whereas Gabrie Van Zanten and David Davis – judged the Server Virtualization and BC/DR categories. Simon Gallagher won the “Best in Show”…. and not unsurprisingly Simon is really stoked that he won, and his post has been updated to explain in detail how he built the vTardis….

It always makes me smile when I hear that phrase – I’m sure Simon has a healthy coat, strong teeth and healthy bones!

You can hear me and Gabrie discussing the judging process, and what says about the current state of virtulization in a audio podcast recorded just before the event

Here’s an article that gives an overview of the results (there was 80 submission in total)

As VMworld Copenhagen drew to a close – Big John Troyer from the VMTN Communities had me and Simon VMworld-TV to discuss the awards generally, and Simon’s vTardis in particular…

In case you haven’t heard of vTardis yet. Its single box with ESX on it – in turn running 6 “nested” ESX hosts (ESX running inside a virtual machine), and Simon has had upto 60 VMs run on this system. It includes shared storage (OpenFiler as a VM), and firewall (Vyatta), and supports a VLAN configuration to boot! Simon’s vTardis a pun on the popular BBC TV series “Dr Who” where the Dr’s timetravelling machine is larger on the inside, than on the outside. In the same way, Simon gets more servers running side the box, than there are physical servers. Not to rest on his laurels – Simon has been busy improving and upgrading the original vTardis – to include support for VMware’s vCloud Director. Originally vTardis stood for “Trolley Attached Random Datacentre of Inexpensive Servers” (as it was attached to trolley to make it portable), but as time as gone by Simon keeps on dreaming up other names I think its currently ”

Watch live video from VMworld 2010 Live on Justin.tv

In the last couple of months I’ve become increasing anxious about the availability of VMware’s vCenter server – so much now relies on the little management server that could – View, SRM, vCloud to name but a few that are close to my heart. Anyway, in the last couple of weeks I’ve been playing with VMware’s vCHB (OEM from NeverFail). I’m pleased to say that all 4 parts of my article which outline setup and my experiences are now available on TechTarget’s SearchVirtualDataCentre.co.uk

I worked very closely with the NeverFail, in fact they were rather excellent – and helped me on a mammoth 4/5 hr web-ex to get to the bottom of an issue I was experiencing – which I’m pleased to say has surfaced as a KB Article on vmware.com! That’s something I’m really proud of, and pleased about – it goes to show if you really engage with VMware/NeverFail they are willing to really help you out.

Anyway, you can read the entire series over here. Settle down with a big mug of coffee cos this is a long one!

Part 1 is narrated (by a computer below)…

Boost vCenter Availability with vCHB - Part1 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Well, there’s been a little bit of confusion about what to call this thing. vCenter Hearbeat Service? vCenter Server Heartbeat? vCenter Heartbeat – and of course, from then comes an alphabet soup of acronymns – but as I guess so long as the letter v is lower-case I should be just fine. Right? Anyway, I will be soon be jetting of vMwOrLd soon :p

I’ve written a ton load of stuff about vCHB – about 5K of words – which is way over my allocation with TechTarget, but fortunately my long suffering editor has cut me some slack. So what do we have. Well, a 4-part article with Part1/2 appearing in this months edition of SearchVirtualDataCentre, and the next two parts in September when I get back from VmWoRlD. Part1/2 concern the setup and post-configuration of vCHB, and significance to VMware customers in the round. Parts 3/4 cover my experiences of the product caused by me doing various tests (i.e braking stuff) to see how vCHB copes with an outage.

Here’s Part1 and here’s Part2

I had a funny experience this week. Earlier I completed my upgrade to vSphere4.1 (I think the change is not related, but not 100% sure…). I was inspired to get back to work on my guide on View 4.5. But when I started to create new Window 7 desktops I got a weird error which looked like this: (more…)