I was going to do some write-up to go along with this diagram and explain it's components, but it looks like a great new VMware KB article was published recently detailing that! I recommend that you read that KB article after taking a glance into the diagram to visualize how everything communicate together in this fascinating concept of "Cells" in vCD.

Stay tuned for similar diagrams soon.

Diagram: The VMware vCloud Director Cell Architecture posted by Hany Michael @ HYPERVIZOR.COM

I hardly ever publish blog posts like this one, but I'm super impressed with the video-based KB articles around VMware vCloud Director that have been published lately. If you are a regular reader of my blog, you know that I always prefer these kind of video tutorials rather than reading a lot of text. It's more convenient and time effective, especially for someone like me who's job already requires reading a lot of documents on daily basis!

Here are a list of the recently published vCD tech tutorials followed by some very cool videos for the smart engineers behind this product. Enjoy!

(I highly recommend watching the tech videos in the order below for better follow-up)

• Understanding and using the VMware vCloud Director web interface
• How to configure Oracle databases for use with VMware vCloud Director
• How to install and configure vShield Manager for use with VMware vCloud Director
• How to install VMware vCloud Director on the first server
• How to create Sysprep packages for use with VMware vCloud Director
• How to attach a vCenter Server to VMware vCloud Director
• How to create a Provider Virtual Data Center in VMware vCloud Director
• How to create an Organization within VMware vCloud Director
• How to create External Networks in VMware vCloud Director
• How to create a Network Pool in VMware vCloud Director
• How to add a catalog to an Organization within VMware vCloud Director
• How to collect diagnostic information for VMware vCloud Director

   

Meet The Engineers Videos:

• VMware vCloud Director Catalogs with Orran Krieger
• VMware vCloud Director Networking with Anupam Dalal
• VMware vCloud Director Resource Management with Tichomir Tenev
• VMware vCloud Director Security with Serge Maskalik

A lot of videos on VMware vCloud Director! posted by Hany Michael @ HYPERVIZOR.COM

News Flash: Redwood is GA

A Quick Introduction:

I'm not going to talk about VMware vCloud Director (vCD), or how it's a true game changer in the evolving world of Cloud Computing. I urge you to watch the VMworld 2010 opening keynote (a great presentation/demo by Paul Maritz and Steve Herrod) or check out the product page for high level information.

The first time I got my hands on the beta binaries of vCD, it took me one week (i repeat: one week) to get this beast up and running. I didn't have at that time a hardware lab or even any guide to help me with the task. My idea was simple: I had a brand new 8GB memory laptop from VMware and I was so excited to run redwood on this PC (yes it was not a Mac and don't ask me why!). This task took that long not because of the vCD software itself, in fact, and as you will see in this post, installing vCD takes less than 1 min! The task took so long with me because of the other dependencies for that software, to be more specific the Oracle DB (which I had absolutely no experience with it) and the SSL certificates generation!

With all that said, I'm going to be very practical in this post and help you experience this incredible product with the least requirements, whether it's hardware or software.

Motivation!

By the end of this post you should have a virtual private cloud running on your laptop/desktop, and you should see the following screens on your monitor!

__

__

Lab Overview:

As you see in the diagram below, we will utilize here the VMware Workstation 7 for running our cloud. I prefer to use the Workstation "Team" here to organize things better and to have this one whole container should I choose to move, or share the VMs with someone else. As you see also, we have 4 base VMs running Win2k3 AD+DNS, Win2k3 64bit running Oracle 11G and vCenter 4.1 Server, CentOS5.5 64bit running the vCD, and last but not least the vESX 4.1.

The vESX host will run vShield Manager (vSM) as a nested VM. It will also run the nested cloud computers when you finish configuring your vCD.

What You Will Need?

Here are the downloads that you need to start with right away:

• VMware vCloud Director – [200MB]
• vShield Manager – [500MB]
• CentOS 64bit DVD ISO – [3.9GB]
• Oracle 11G 64bit Enterprise – [2.1GB]
• Java Development Kit – [78MB]
• vSphere 4.1 Enterprise-Plus (vCenter & ESXi) – [2.5GB]
• VMware Workstation 7.1 – [568MB]

Before We Start: DNS, DNS, DNS!!

To avoid any issues during your installation and configuration, please make sure that your DNS server is up and running with all the entries for the VMs set in advance. This includes: vCD, vSM and the ESXi host. I can't stress enough on this point!

Step1: Installing the Oracle DB (VIDEO)

First thing first. You need a backend database for all you apps. I chose to install here Oracle 11G on Windows rather than Linux for two reasons:

1 – It's easier and there is no shame from that! Installing Oracle on Windows requires no tweaking, optimization or prerequisites. All what you need is to download the binaries and set it up. If for any reason you think that you really need to run Oracle on Linux, then I won't leave you in the dark. Here is an excellent article detailing step by step how to do it if you are a newbie. (click here)

2 – We need to save memory. I'm assuming all the way through this article that you are having a maximum of 8GB memory on your laptop/desktop. By installing Oracle on Windows you will save a new VM because we will install vCenter on the same VM. It's not just that, we will actually leverage that same Oracle server to host the vCenter DB. Bingo! No need for MS-SQL Express.

Now let's install Oracle in this video and set it up to be ready for our vCloud Director and vCenter Server.

Click here for an iPod/iPad version of this video

The commands used in this video:

• sqlplus system/oracle@localhost/cloud
• create user cloud identified by oracle;
• grant "RESOURCE", "DBA", "CONNECT" to cloud;

Step 2: Configuring vSphere 4.1 in Workstation

It's never been easier. Workstation 7 now supports running vESX 4.x out of the box. All what you need is to download the ESXi 4.1 iso from vmware.com and then create a new VM and choose your GOS to be (VMware ESX) as shown in the screenshot below. After that you will need to install the vCenter Server 4.1 on top of the Oracle DB VM as described above. OF course you will need to setup before that the ODBC connection to the Oracle DB which is quite straight forward.

Step 3: Preparing the SSL Certificates

You will need to download the Java Development Kit (JDK) from the link provided above to your Guest OS (e.g XP or W7), and then generate the self-signed SSL certificates using the following commands:

• "C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jdk1.6.0_20\bin\keytool" -keystore certificates.ks -storetype JCEKS -storepass hypervizor -genkey -keyalg RSA -alias http
• "C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jdk1.6.0_20\bin\keytool" -keystore certificates.ks -storetype JCEKS -storepass hypervizor -genkey -keyalg RSA -alias consoleproxy
• "C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jdk1.6.0_20\bin\keytool" -storetype JCEKS -storepass hypervizor -keystore certificates.ks -list

Please note that the password in the example above is "hypervizor" and the output file is "certificates.ks".

Step 4: Installing vShield Manager (VIDEO)

This is a fairly simple task and needs nothing but deploying the vShield Manager OVF package.

IMPORTANT NOTE: After Installing the vShield Manager there is one more step. You need to apply your vSM licenses to the vCenter Server. Without doing this step you will not be able to leverage the vSM in deploying the new edge devices for the different networking options in vCD.

Step 5: Installing CentOS Linux

I was going to record a video for installing CentOS linux but then i thought that it might be an overkill for this post. It's pretty straight forward with the famous Anaconda GUI, so I expect no issues even for the Linux newbie. A few notes here:

• I'm using here CentOS because it's the closest distribution to RHEL. I knew later on that some of the SE in VMware are using the same for doing the labs and testing. Needless to say that this distribution is not officially supported by vCD and that everything you see in this post is *NOT* meant for production.
• I recommend installing the complete packages to avoid downloading a lot of RPMs and going through the dependencies mess. This could be quite difficult for people new to Linux.
• You have to install the CentOS VM with two network cards. The first will be used for the Web UI access, and the other one will be used for the vCenter proxy access.
• After installing the CentOS i recommend disabling the embedded firewalls because it could affect some of the communications with vCenter Server and the Oracle DB. Don't worry, you will see this option to disable the firewall at your first login.
• You will need to upload some files to the CentOS before and after the vCD installation, this includes: the certificates.ks that we generated in the previous step. The vCD .bin package you downloaded from vmware.com. The sysprep files needed for the vApp customizations later on. Now, you can either do this the traditional way by enabling the FTP daemon (service vsftpd start) and then upload the files with your favorite client, or, on the other hand, you can use the Shared Folder in Workstation as shown in the screenshot below. I'm an old school so I always prefer using FTP and command line, but it's your choice.

Please also note that you will need to install the VMware Tools for the CentOS to use the Shared Folder option. It's always a good practice to install VMware Tools on all your VMs.

Step6: Installing VMware vCloud Director (VIDEO)

Are you ready to unleash the beast? Let's do it:

Click here for an iPod/iPad version of this video

You will notice in the video that I had an issue with the path to the certificate. I'm not quite sure why this was happening, but I realized that if you put the file (certificates.ks in my case) to the vCD home folder (/opt/vmware/vcloud-director/) and then just type the file name with no leading path, the installer will accept it.

UPDATE: (Thanks to Kyle Smith, Sr.MTS @ VMware, for the following explanation)
For the certificates and any response file you need to make sure that they are in a directory that the vcloud user (created by the VCD installer) can read and the files themselves need to be readable by the vcloud user.

This means the files need to be outside of any user's home directory (since they typically have a mode of 700).

Here is the command for "tailing" the log file for the application startup:

tail -f /opt/vmware/cloud-director/logs/vcloud-container-info.log | grep "Application Initialization"

What's next?

Now you need to start exploring this incredible product and see if you can get your first vApp up and running in the cloud. You won't be left alone. The front-page wizard will take you through the process step by step, starting from allocating your vCenter resources, all the way to creating your first service catalog. You can use the vCD evaluator's guide as well to walk you through the process, but remember that this whole "cloud in a box" thing is limited by its nature and meant only for having a working vCD installation on the go with you!

I have a couple of ideas and I might be coming back soon with something like a demo-script to show you (on a deferent physical lab) a real-life example how you can leverage vCD in your private cloud journey.

Until then, Happy Clouding!

Video Guide: Taking VMware vCloud Director for a spin…and on the GO! posted by Hany Michael @ HYPERVIZOR.COM

Yes, finally! It's been like what? Five months?! Well, the delay in publishing this part was mainly because of the delay in certifying the new IBM HX5 blades on vSphere. It's a quite long process that you can read about it here, but the good news is that the hardware is finally on VMware's HCL, and that I can comfortably blog about the subject now without causing any confusions to the readers.

Before we dig deep into the new designs, I'd like to mention some minor changes in the diagram.

Updated Diagram

I've included the old configurations along with the new ones in one updated PDF. The main difference now is that I'm using normal pages for showing each configuration. In the old version I used the layers to show and hide the configurations as you select them. I thought now that using separate pages for different diagrams would ease the process of browsing through the configurations, and to tell you the truth, to reduce also the high complexity of designing the diagram. It's a crazy process to keep track of all these layers in Visio especially when we are talking about more than 7,000 shapes floating on the same design area!

Now let's get down to business.

Configuration (5) – HX5:

This is the Big Blue's latest two-node blade technology. I emphasized on the "two-node" here because it's the only configuration certified to run with vSphere as of the time of writing these lines. Please note that you can use up to 4 nodes with the HX5 but this won't be supported by VMware. When we talk about two nodes here we mean the following:

• Having the base blade (CPU + Mem + HDD) (+Plus+) the MAX5 expansion try to scale up more memory for the blade.
• Having the base blade (again CPU + Mem + HDD) (+Plus+) another similar expansion board to scale all the blade components, that's 4 x CPUs + 2 x Memory modules + 2 x IO expansion cards.

As you will see in the diagram, I chose the second option to talk about.

Now, what do we have here? it's simply the redundancy at its best! We can place our networks here freely with full redundancy as you see in the layout of the vNICs. For example, if we have a failure in the CFFh expansion card on any of the two nodes, we will still be able to flow the traffic without any issues on the other CFFh card. Same thing holds true for the on-board ports, if for any reason one of these posts fail, the traffic will flow on the other node's board.

Apart from that, I'm introducing here the DMZ networks for the first time. Most of the enterprises prefer to separate the DMZ networks/servers on different chassis for security reasons. While this is a valid decision, we can have with this blade configuration a workaround for organizations that are less paranoid about the DMZ security, yet with good isolation. Let's see how this is done in details:

• For the networks, we have two dedicated blade switches that will be uplinking *only* to the corp DMZ switches (in this case Bay 9 & 10). This means we will have no traffic following from either the internal networks or the VMkernel networks. Same thing for the blade ports, you will always have the NICs 4, 5, 10 and 11 dedicated for the DMZ networks and running in full performance and redundancy.
• For the SAN, we can also ensure that we have a dedicated HBAs as well as an isolation. The uplinks to the SAN switches will be segmented across the two bays 3 and 4, and connected directly/physically to the appropriate SAN fabrics.

Configuration (6) – Virtual Fabric:

Before we start with this configuration, I would like to state that I am not quite sure whether these Emulex Virtual Fabric Adapters (VFA) are supported by VMware or not. While I can't see them clearly on the HCL with the name VFA, I can see some Emulex documents saying that they are. Of course the reference here should be always the VMware HCL itlself, not anything else, but I will double check on that and update this post later. With that said, please refer to this configuration carefully and make sure to confirm this point before engaging with any vSphere design around it.

Now let's dig deep into this cool technology. IBM simply has this Virtual Fabric concept of slicing your CFFh expansion card into 8 different ports. This doesn't only mean that you have the flexibility to adjust the speed, but also the protocol. For example, you can choose to use either Ethernet, Fibrechannel, FCoE or even iSCSI with hardware initiators.

In our case here I used only Ethernet as the protocol for these ports, and then sliced them into 8 different vNICs with various link speeds. Perhaps a screenshot from the diagram would make things more clear.

As you see, we set the bandwidth for the SC to 1GB since we normally don't require high BW for management, while we set 3GB and 5GB link speed for the Fault Tolerance and VM Networks respectively. By default these ports are set to 2.5GB ( 4 x 2.5GB = 10GbE into two ports), but you have the full flexibility to change that as you see.

Configuration (7) – CNA:

A very simple design to wrap up this series with. It's the traditional CNA (oh yeah, it's a common and traditional technology now!). As you see in the diagram, we have here a CFFh expansion card, and it has got four ports:

• Ethernet ports: that's 2 x 10GbE Ethernet ports for the networking traffic. We will treat them here normally as we treat any 10GbE port. We will slice them via the vNetwork traffic shaping in vSphere to achieve the bandwidth that we want.
• FibreChannel ports: that's 2 x HBA ports for SAN traffic. Instead of going into the traditional Bay 3 & 4 as we've see across the whole series and configurations, this time the traffic is multiplexed and pushed to the Nexus 4000 blade switches.

Did I just say Nexus 4000?! yep, that's a specially developed Nexus switches by Cisco to be used only/currently with the IBM BladeCenter H/HT. But here is the catch, you will still need to have the Nexus 5000 switches to segregate the FCoE traffic coming from the Nexus 4000 and then forward the network and FC traffic to the existing LAN and SAN respectively. Of course we should have redundancy here at all layers. In the BCH we have two Nexus 4000 sitting in bays 7 and 9, while we have two Nexus 5000 switches in the back end.

Now what?

Well, as much as I worked really hard in this series to come up with different kind of configurations and design scenarios, as much as I enjoyed it! Now I need to move on to another vendor, but without all these mad options. I initially was planning to jump straight to the HP realm, however, i found myself involved in two different Cisco UCS vSphere designs lately, so it would make much sense to me if I blogged about this platform now. Don't take my word for it though, I might surprise with a Dell or Fujitsu series, who knows?!

VMware vSphere on IBM BladeCenter H – (Part 2 of 2) posted by Hany Michael @ HYPERVIZOR.COM

We are expanding in our Middle east and North Africa region (MENA) and hiring for multiple positions. At the time of writing these lines there are five openings:

• Senior Consultant – Professional Services – Saudi Arabia
• Enterprise Account Manager – Sales – Saudi Arabia
• Engagement Manager – Professional Services – Dubai
• Partner Business Manager – Sales – Dubai
• Senior Systems Engineer – Sales – Dubai

You can click on each link to get more information, and you can also apply from there. If you are looking for technical positions and you think you are good enough, don't hesitate to contact me directly and I'd be happy to forward your CV along. Please note that I have no influence in the recruitment process, but I can put a good word for you if I felt that you are qualified and passionate about the position.

My email: hany [AT] vmware [DOT] com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/hanymichael

VMware MENA region is expanding and hiring! posted by Hany Michael @ HYPERVIZOR.COM

My second newsletter in a row. Can't believe it's been 2 weeks already. Time seems to fly these days!

The VM Crowd in the wild

I was really happy with the feedback I received regarding this crazy idea. I didn't expect that much of attention especially that the first episode is simply a bunch of inside jokes. You literally have to be on twitter day and night to get these jokes and know what on earth I'm talking about. As just an example, the "underwear saga" (as Massimo like to call it) actually happened to me and the latter in London. We were literally stranded in the UK due to this ash cloud, and we did go out together to shop for underwear. I can't believe I've mentioned that twice on my blog! Okay, before I jump to the next point I'd like to thank you for the positive feedback. Stay tuned for more.

Two cool new courses from VMware Education

VMware Education Services lunched two new cool courses:
1 – Transitioning to ESXi: I really like this course, and from what i've seen in the course material it has a quite valuable content. I highly recommend this to any one starting fresh on ESXi or planning for the transition. Even if you are quite happy with your classic ESX and its service console, this course will make you change your mind.

2 – vSphere 4.1: Install, Configure and Manage: The course title is self explanatory. We all know about the cool new features of vSphere 4.1 and it's all in there.

"Virtual Roads. Actual Clouds."

Yes, VMworld 2010 is approaching and this is the official motto of the event. The sessions and labs catalog are now available online also for your to start exploring the great subjects covered in this event. Some vendors started to talk about their activity in the event, don't miss the EMC and the IBM ones.

The first end-to-end FCoE solution certified by VMware

This is the industry's first end-to-end solution by Cisco (datacenter switches) and NetApp (storage) that is certified and supported by VMware. Pretty exciting stuff to the all the FCoE enthusiasts out there. Vaughn Stewart has nice blog post talking about this with a big screenshots from the VMware HCL.

Free Book from NetApp

Still with NetApp and Vaughn, they are giving away free copies from the "vSphere on NetApp Best Practices". Last word from twitter: the books are flying and only 150 copies are left. You have to have a shipping address in the US to get your copy. Thanks to Aramex.com, i will get my copy

TrainSignal's vSphere Pro Series Volume 2!

Landed in Doha yesterday after a week of travel to see a very nice surprise in my mail. It's the TrainSignal second volume of the vSphere Pro Series and It's featuring some very cool products like SRM, Veeam (Monitor, Reporter and Backup) as well as VDR! I can't wait to start watching these videos especially the SRM ones!

Cisco UCS Visio Stencils Hidden Secret

I'm working these days on a vSphere design on UCS and of course I had to use Visio in the architecture. I was surprised to see a very few stencils in the official Visio pack from Cisco, and that all of these shapes were just showing the front view of the devices. After "tweeting" out to the community and knowing that it's not just me who's frustrated about that, I received the simple answer from Cisco Dubai! you need to right click on the shapes (after placing them in your work area and then you will get the option whether to use the font view or rear one! Doh!

New VMware Releases:

A lot of new releases from VMware in the past few weeks among which: vCenter SRM 4.1, vCenter Orchestrator 4.1, vCenter Server Heartbeat 6.3

HVNL02: VMworld 2010, New VMware training courses and product releases, NetApp free book, TrainSignal vSphere Pro Series Vol2, Cisco UCS. posted by Hany Michael @ HYPERVIZOR.COM

It's an idea that I had for a quite long time, and yet I managed to get it out in the busiest time of my life. Love it or hate it – it's just for fun, guys!

The VM Crowd – Episode 1: I'm On Twitter. posted by Hany Michael @ HYPERVIZOR.COM

Yes, I'm still alive. It's been over three months now without blogging, and yes it's crazy!

Apart from being a Sr.Consultant and a TAM at VMware with 100% utilization in this huge and active region, I've been also doing lots of reading and studying lately to prepare for the VCAP exams. Not to mention my growing obsession with the Redwood project whether through testing and evaluating it, or following its daily discussions on our developers & PMs mailing lists. Add all that to the frequent traveling and you won't find a time to scratch your head!

I won't take much time in this introduction, so straight to the point: I decided to start a newsletter (or whatever they call it these days). I have to admit though that this is not my most original idea. Firstly I was inspired by one of my colleagues in VMware (Michael White – who's also one of the SRM legends out there). He has an internal weekly newsletter with lots of invaluable information and I really enjoy reading it! I thought of doing the same on my blog, but I wasn't sure about this idea until I started receiving another mind-blowing weekly newsletter written by our CTO, Steve Herrod. At that point I realized that I'm a newsletter person and I do like the idea of having everything consolidated in one place at a time. I won't do this letter however on weekly basis, at least at the beginning. Let's make it casual every two weeks or so until I see my readers feedback.

At least I get to blog, and that's all what it matters. Here we go.

News flash: vSphere 4.1 is released!

Yes the debate around the numbering (4.1 Vs. 4.5) is finally over. Most of this debate was driven mainly by the fact that it's a quite powerful release with major enhancements and rich features normally found only in major releases. There is no point of copying and pasting the release notes here if you can read it directly on VMware's website. Here you go:

• For ESX Classic : http://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere4/doc/vsp_esx41_vc41_rel_notes.html
• For ESXi : http://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere4/doc/vsp_esxi41_vc41_rel_notes.html

The password issue with ESX/i 4.1

You've probably heard about the 8-char password issue with ESX/i 4.1, but in case you haven't heard yet about its solution, you can find the details here in this KB article:
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1024500

VCB Support in vSphere 4.1

I had a couple of customers asking me about the VCB support and whether it has been removed, and the answer is no. VMware extended the support in 4.1, but I personally recommend moving to the vStorage API for Data Protection (VADP) in case you are upgrading or starting a new vSphere environment.

From our internal mailing list I also quote this: "Several backup vendors have released VADP based backup solutions. These include VMware Data Recovery 1.x, Symantec NetBackup 7.0, Symantec Backup Exec 2010, CA ArcServe 12.5, EMC Avamar 5.0, IBM TSM 6.2, Veeam 4.0 and VizionCore 4.5"

vSphere on IBM BladeCenter H Part II

I've been getting many questions about the second part of the BCH, and when I will release it. I actually finished nearly all the Visio diagramming, but the problem is simpler than this. The HX5 and Virtual Fabric expansion card from IBM are not been certified yet by VMware! I was really hoping that both will be on our HCL by the release of vSphere 4.1, but nothing so far. I see no point to publish my article if you won't be able to use it. Besides, it can cause lots of unnecessary confusions to the partners and customers. I won't leave you disappointed however, and I'll direct you to an awesome new redpaper written by IBM on the Virtual Fabric.

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpapers/pdfs/redp4673.pdf

Mobile Noter for iPad!

Every day I find more value for the iPad! I'm not really into games or apps in general, and my main reason for buying an iPad was PDF reading and web surfing while traveling, but I have to admit that it has a lot more value than that. A couple of weeks ago I came to know about this cool App called "Mobile Noter" and it was like a dream came true! I used to take notes and document things on OneNote since it was released back in 2003, and till this moment I still do. The MN simply allows you to synchronize your iPad with either you desktop over a WiFi network, or to the cloud over 3G or WiFi. I can now have all my notes on the go with me either on the iPhone or iPad, and also keep them all synchronized.

New books:

Interesting 2 books talking about the forensic investigations in our virtualization and cloud computing worlds.

• A Digital Forensic Investigator's Guide to Virtual Environments
  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1597495573
  
• Digital Forensics for Network, Internet, and Cloud Computing
  http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Forensics-Network-Internet-Computing/dp/1597495379/
  

To the partners

I know there are a quite big number of VMware partners subscribed to my blog (as I see from the email domains), so I'll try to keep you updated with any important news whenever applicable.

A new version of the HealthAnalayzer appliance has been released with strong support for the vSphere best practices. Make sure to download, test and patch this appliance to the latest updates before going to the customers. Great tool as it has always been!

HVNL01: vSphere 4.1 release, VCB Support, IBM Virtual Fabric, Mobile Noter for iPad, New vBooks posted by Hany Michael @ HYPERVIZOR.COM

Important: In case you haven't done that already, please take a moment to read the first post of this series.

Due to the insane number of expansion modules/options available in the IBM BladeCenter H, I had to split this post into two parts. In fact, I was initially planning to have around 12 different designs for vSphere on BladeCenter H (yes twelve) but I then I started to shrink and skip some designs to fit as many scenarios as possible in a reasonable two-part article. With that said, the following is by no mean a list of all the possible design scenarios you can achieve with this hardware platform. If you started the "mix and match" game, you may literally end-up with uncountable possibilities!

The Diagram

Here is some important notes before using the diagram:

• You will see different configurations in this post and the relevant architecture of each configuration in the diagram. This is done through the PDF layers, which basically means than you should *not* activate more that more layer in the same time.
• By default, "Configuration 1" is the first active layer when you open the PDF file. You can show/hide the other layers by simply clicking on them. Again, you should only show one layer/configuration at a time.
• You will always see two boxes on the right side of the diagram, the upper one will show you the current vSphere configuration, and the lower one will show you the relevant hardware configuration. You should typically start looking at those two boxes before scanning through the diagram to understand the "ingredients" of the design.
• At the time of writing this post, you will see four configurations only in this diagram, however, when I publish the second part, there will be additional configurations that I will add to the existing ones. In other words, the diagram will be updated later on to have those additional configurations so keep that also in mind.

The common design and configurations

You will find in most of the configurations a common design, unless I explicitly state otherwise. I will list them here in details:

The Clusters:

You will see two type of clusters:

• Management Cluster: it is typically a two node cluster running the management and infrastructure services. For example, if you want to virtualize the vCenter Server, the VM should be running on this cluster rather than the actual production clusters. Same thing holds true for other vCenter products like: AppSpeed, CapacityIQ, SRM and so forth. There are two reasons for doing that: the first, we don't want to run into the problem where vCenter Server is not accessible (there are some examples published in the community but my favorites are Jason Boche's Catch22s!). The second reason, we don't want to either affect our workloads' performance with our management virtual appliances or vice versa.
• Production Clusters: You can see here two production clusters (Cluster A and Cluster B). The take away from that is the following:
  • You don't have to stick with that number of hosts per cluster, it depends on what you want to achieve, and also on some configuration maximums that may or may not limit you.
  • The nodes have to be spanned across the two chassis as numbered and illustrated in (Config 1). There are two reasons for that: Firstly, you don't want your whole cluster to fail in an unluckily event when a whole chassis fails. Secondly, you have to keep in mind that VMware HA selects the first 5 hosts in the cluster and promote them as a "Primary" nodes, if they fail, your HA cluster fails.

The Blades:

You will see two consistent blades throughout the first four configurations, the HS22 and the HS22V. Both blade servers share the same IO expansion capabilities, however, there are a some differences between them. For example, the HS22V has no hot swappable HDD but it is superior in the memory capacity (144GB compared to 96GB in the HS22). In part-two of this article, I'll talk in details about the new HX5 and what it can bring to the table in terms of scalability.

The Expansion cards:

Every HSxx blade comes with two onboard 1Gbps Ethernet ports for basic networking. They will always show in vSphere as vmnic0, and vmnic1. These ports are in turn mapped to Bay 1 and Bay 2 in the chassis. Of course no one recommends implementing vSphere using 2 x 1GbE ports in an enterprise environment (although it will technically work), so we will use here what we call: expansion cards. There are two slots for expansion cards in any HS22/V blade, the first one is called CIOv (for vertical expansion modules) and CFFh (for the horizontal fast IO modules). The CIOv is usually used with the FC HBAs (although we will see later how we will utilize it for iSCSI connectivity), and they are mapped to Bay 3 and Bay 4 in the chassis. The CFFh on the other hand is mapped to four fast expansion modules (7, 8, 9 and 10). I say fast because this is the only card that can leverage the 10GbE connectivity (or Infinibad but it's not relevant to our series). Depending on the configuration, you will see how we will use different cards to support our designs, however, the onboard 2 x 1GbE port will be always common, and always there.

Now that we've talked about the common stuff, let's start talking about the unique configurations. Oh yes, we were just warming up!

CONFIGURATION (1):

We have in this configuration 6 x 1GbE pNICs per blade to support our MGMT, VMkernel and Virtual Machine networks. We teamed three pNICs here in a vNetwork Standard Switch (vSS) to serve the SC, vMotion and FT. The other three pNICs are teamed in a vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS) to serve the VM networks. Let's dig litter deeper on how this is done.

As mentioned earlier, we have three type of IO ports on the blades: the onboard ports, the CIOv, and the CFFh. In order to achieve the maximum availability, we teamed one onboard port with a couple of ports from the CFFh card. In this case, if we had a failure in any IO port (on board or expansion card) we will be able to tolerate that failure.

The second consideration here is to distribute the load and bandwidth for our networks. For example, the SC network will be active on vmnic0 and standby on vmnic1. The vMotion will be active on vmnic1 and standby on vmnic0 and so forth.

You may have noticed also that we grouped the SC + VMkernel network on a vSS, while we grouped the VM networks on a vDS. The reason behind that is to ensure that you would still be able to control your SC network even if your vCenter fails. For the VM networks, you would still leverage the great enhancements and features of the vDS. This is *not* a best practice from VMware, and as far as I know there is no documentation recommending that. It is up to you whether you would go with that setup or simply have everything on a single vDS.

CONFIGURATION (2):

This is nearly identical configuration except for the IP SAN. In Config1 we were running on a FibreChannel SAN, while in this configuration we have an iSCSI. The thing to note here is that you will need to install your Ethernet expansion modules in Bay 3 & 4. We will swap also the CIOv card from being a FC HBAs to a traditional 2 x 1GbE card. Of course you will use in this case the vSphere iSCSI initiator for doing your storage networking. This is fine in nearly most cases, except the one where you will actually need to boot your ESX server from SAN.

Please also note there that you can use NFS with the same layout. Your 2 x 1GbE blade ports + the 2 x expansion modules (bay 3 & 4) will all serve your NFS requirement in a high availability design.

CONFIGURATION (3):

What you will see in this configuration is something a bit different. We are using here a 2 x 10GbE ports through the CFFh expansion card to serve "all" our networks. This card is mapped to two 10GbE expansion modules sitting in Bay 7 and Bay 9.

The trick here is this: how can you have a proper network segmentation if you are using two pNICs only? The answer, of course, is VLANS. As you see in the diagram, we have two production networks and one lab network. All these networks are tagged with a VLAN ID to flow the traffic through the vmnics to pNICS all the way to your enterprise/core switches. The ports on your core switches need to be of course in trunk mode.

Now, the second question here would be this: how can you ensure that no network will saturate the whole link and affect the performance of the others. The solution for that is to use the vSphere traffic shipping. You can simply dedicate the bandwidth to each "port group" per your requirement. Example, for SC you normally don't need more than 1Gbps. For vMotion and FT you would definitely require more bandwidth. To keep things simple, I illustrated in the diagram how the segmentation and bandwidth allocation can be distributed across the two links in an Active/Standby approach.

You will notice here also that we are utilizing the two on board Ethernet ports to have an additional iSCSI SAN (for the Lab environment for example) along with the FC SAN for your production workloads.

CONFIGURATION (4):

In the previous configuration we saw how we leveraged the VLANs to do our network segmentation and how that was quite easy and flexible. But what if the customer has a policy not to use VLANs to consolidate the networks (for a security reason as an example)? Easy, we would still be able to comply with that. Basically we will need to swap here the 2 x 10GbE CFFh card with a 4 x 10GbE card and of course add additional two 10GbE expansion modules to Bay 8 and Bay 10.

Now, what did we achieve by doing that? Two things:

1 – We are compliant with the customer requirement to have a physical segmentation between the Management/FT/vMotion networks and the production networks.
2 – We are using the vSS for our management network while leveraging the vDS for our Virtual Machine networks.

You have also here another two options that were not included in the diagram. You can make use of the two onboard ports to have an additional iSCSI SAN as we did in the previous configuration, or, you can use them as a standby ports for your Management/VM networks in case of a CFFh card failure. Do you see now what I meant above by the "mix and match game"?

Coming Soon – Part 2:

I'll talk about the new HX5 and how you can have a lot more memory or extended IOs to support special workloads or strict design requirements. I will talk about FCoE and CNAs. I will also talk about the new & promising Virtual Fabric from IBM, and how you can basically slice your pNics into almost any protocol or speed you want.

Stay tuned!

VMware vSphere on IBM BladeCenter H – (Part 1 of 2) posted by Hany Michael @ HYPERVIZOR.COM

This is going to be a quite long series of posts, so I'd better make this introduction as short and compact as possible. Here is a Q/A approach, just pick up the part you are interested in, and then jump straight to the first vendor in our series.

Why I decided to start this series?

Everyone already knows the revolution the blades had brought to our industry. I'm not going to repeat here what you already know. I'm not going also to promote the blades over the traditional rack servers, or try to answer the eternity question: "scale up or scale out?". You might have already made you decision to go with blades, or still considering that, in both cases this series should help you to take your next step. My main and only focus here is vSphere. I'll never try to promote a vendor over another, and I will never try to influence your decision to go with a specific design. Go to the next Q/A to see how can you benefit from this series, or at least how I think you might do.

Who might be interested in this series?

• Consultants or Customers: if you want to have an over whole idea on designing and/or implementing vSphere on specific blade vendors.
• VMware partners: if you are a partner, you may find this series useful to support your presentations to customers. I've seen many partners who can talk fluently about their hardware products, however, they can struggle to answer very simple VMware related questions like: how should I map the vSwitches' uplinks to the blades nics, or how can I have redundancy for my networks, and soon and so forth!
• Knowledge seekers: anyone, like myself, who's fascinated by VMware and willing to understand how these incredible software technologies can run on different hardware vendors with the same level of flexibility.

What vendors will be covered here, and in which order?

Any blade vendor that is listed in the VMware HCL might be included. I say "might" because it also depends on how fast I'll be able to learn about this specific vendor technologies given the highly complex and variant architectures from one vendor to another. You should know also that I work on my own here, no help from anyone what so ever. It really takes a lot of blood, sweat and tears to understand each vendor's approach in doing things.

There is no specific order in this series, I started with IBM because it's simply the hardware platform that I have worked the most on. If you like the series/concept let me know your thoughts and feedback and based on that I'll try to prioritize vendors over others. There is no preferences for me personally.

Are you a hardware vendor?

If you work for a blade vendor and stumbled through this series, please take a moment to read the following:

• If you'd like to comment, you are most welcome to add, correct, or amend any details in my posts that are related to your hardware. However, you are not welcome – under any way, shape or form – to bash your competitors in this series.
• I can work with you to highlight anything that can make the vSphere implementation more solid, unique or innovative on your hardware. On the other hand, I will not allow on my blog any vendor to criticize the design and/or implementation options of the other vendors. In short, no FUD please.

Alright then, enough introduction and scary thoughts and let's get to it. I'll keep the following list up-to-date to always reflect the new posts of this series.

• vSphere on IBM BladeCenter H

New Series: VMware vSphere On Blade Servers. posted by Hany Michael @ HYPERVIZOR.COM