Kendrick Coleman dot com

LEAP YEAR GIVEAWAY: VMware View on Vblock Starter Kit!

kendrickcoleman@gmail.com (Kendrick Coleman) — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 04:00:00 +0000

It's time for another grand giveaway from kendrickcoleman.com! I have more gear and swag this time so get ready to cast your entry.

First off, THANK YOU, the readers of my blog. If it weren't for you, I wouldn't have the sponsorships and the will to continuously put out new stuff. Second, Thank you TrainSignal for your support and for donating some of the best content around. If you don't win the contest, you should be purchasing TrainSignal Training DVDs anyway because the content is just unreal and it comes from amazing smart people.

The Rules: The contest will run from 2-6-2012 and ending 2-29-2012 at 12:00PM EST. 29th is crazy because it's a leap year and you don't get paid to work that extra day, so you might as well win some free stuff :) . You must be a resident of the planet Earth. That's right, anyone around the world is eligible to win, I'll ship this stuff to Mumbai. When you put in your entry, you MUST use a VALID FULL NAME with EMAIL ADDRESS. I have to be able to get in contact with the winner. If the winner doesn't respond within 72 hours, a new winner will be drawn. Only one entry per person, please be respectful.

How To Enter: At the bottom of this web page there is a Disqus comment system. All you have to do is put in a comment. It can be something like "TrainSignal and Vblocks rule!" or "Thanks for the giveaway, pick my freebie wanting butt!". I don't care what you write, but just leave a comment. Make sure you use a valid email address (that will be hidden publicly, but I can see it.) If Disqus gives you any problems, simply send an email to kendrickcoleman [@] gmail d0t com and I'll add your entry. Only one entry per person, please.

What do you win: This is a VMware View on Vblock Starter kit. So you are going to win some amazing TrainSignal Training DVDs, along with a bunch of awesome VCE swag, and some VMware posters that were only given to VMware vExperts! These DVDs feature David Davis, Elias Khnaser, Brian Knudtson, Lane Leverett, and Jason Nash, some of the best dudes in the industry. Some limited edition VCE swag only available to some internal people and booth exhibitors. Awesome posters that I can't keep because my wife won't let me hang them up, so my loss is your gain. Sorry, no actual Vblock is being given away, but perhaps one day.

Here's the whole package!

TrainSignal DVDs:

VMware View 5 Essentials, vSphere 5 Training, and the brand new Implementing Cisco UCS Training. That's almost over 120+ hours of training content!!

vSphere Management with PowerCLI 5.0 Poster

VMware ESXi 5.0 Reference Poster

A VCE Branded Little Black Book for Meeting Notes

A Vblock Laptop Sticker

Newly debuted VCE beanie from Cisco Live that will keep you warm when you walk in your datacenter

2 VCE Beer Coozies so you can toast with a friend when you get your Vblock delivered

4GB VCE USB Key for storing cool Vblock Visios

And a short sleeve VCE branded button down shirt (size M) so you can look good going to meetings

Here's the whole package once again!! Enter Now!

GOOD LUCK!

**UPDATE 2/25/12** One more addition! Old School VMware logo backpack, brand new!

Playing with CSS and vCloud Director

kendrickcoleman@gmail.com (Kendrick Coleman) — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 15:00:33 +0000

This was something i've been wanting to play around with for a while. vCloud Director has the ability to do some customizations so you can help brand your vCloud portal. After playing around with it for an hour, I was able to build myself a new color customized portal view. It's kind of cool and pretty simple. Here is a KB article called Customizing the vCloud Director User Interface Using CSS. From here, i downloaded the cloud-director-template.css and started changing around HEX color codes. It took a while to figure out what color code changed what because sometimes nothing at all would be changed. It's still pretty buggy, and doesn't really let you customize everything. I wanted to customize the arrows on the top left, as well as the blue highlighter when scrolling over the datagrids and the left menu, and some links, but I'm sure it will come in time.

I wanted to create a feel that is comparable to my website so it feels like there is some correlation. If you want my template, you can download it here or at the bottom of this page: kcdotcom.css

here are some pictures of the new layout...

VM Advanced ISO. Free Tools For Advanced Tasks

kendrickcoleman@gmail.com (Kendrick Coleman) — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 03:25:00 +0000

I have compiled a list of free VMware vSphere tools that any administrator can use. I even made a Top 10 list out of that. But what about some more advanced tasks?

Look no further. I've created a collaboration of, yet again, FREE TOOLS for virtual machines within your VMware environment. All of the tools in this package were pooled together for performing advanced tasks to optimize performance, reclaim lost space, and clean up your virtual machine. The goal of this project was to mount the ISO to your VM and run the scripts or tools that are packaged. Of course not all of these tools will run from a VM, but most can. I do not want to take any credit for any of the programs or scripts packaged. I simply took the time to place all of them in one spot. Take a moment to thank the creators of scripts and programs that I have linked within every ReadMe in every folder.

CURRENT VERSION = 0.7

DISCLAIMER: I do not take any responsibility for your actions. If the tools are not used properly according to the ReadMe and How-To’s provided, you run the risk of destroying data. Before running any of these tools, please have backups of your VMs.

Without further ado here is what is packaged in VM Advanced v0.5 (154MB):

FoxitPortablePDF
01 - P2V Clean-up
- 01 - Resolution Resize
- 02 - HP ProLiant Cleaner
- 03 - Remove Non Present Devices
- 04 - Rename Local Area Connection
- 05 - Network Settings
- 06 - Dell Cleanup
02 - Hal Upgrade-Downgrade
- 01 - HAL_Toggle <- UPDATED
03 - Partition Alignment
- 02 - mbrtools (only how-to is provided) <-REMOVED, Use UBERAlign
- 04 - Paragon Alignment Tool 2.0 (free tool for limited time but cannot distribute within ISO) <-REMOVED, Use UBERAlign
03 - VDI Performance
- 01 - VM Check Partition Alignment
- 02 - Aligning VMDK Partition For Template
- 03 - Quest Desktop Optimizer <- NEW
04 - Reclaim Space
- 01 - SDelete
05 - Analysis
- 01 - IOPS w/ IOmeter
- 02 - LoadStorm
- 03 - NetworkPerformance
06 - SysprepFiles
- 01 - vCenterSysprep
- 02 - vCloudSysprep
07 - Virtual Router
- FreeSCO
08 - Floppies
- 01 - LSI_Logic_Parallel_WinXP_x86
- 02 - Bus_LogicParallel_WinXP_x86
09 - vSphere Client
- vSphere Client Thinapped (from VMware Labs)
10 - Security
- 01 - Angry IP Scanner
- 02 - Blues Port Scanner
- 03 - NetworkActiv PortScanner
- 04 - PuTTY
- 05 - HijackThis <- NEW
11 - SQL Native Client <- NEW
- 01 - SQL Native Client

If you have any more ideas of free advanced tools for virtual machine optimization, please send me an email at kendrickcoleman [@] gmail [d0t] com or leave a comment below. I would also like to try and create some sort of auto run menu, but coding isn't my specialty. If you want to help on this project by creating a menu where scripts can be run directly from it, you would be pretty cool in my book.

Download Here:

VM Advanced v0.7 ISO

Understanding Lease Times in vCloud Director

kendrickcoleman@gmail.com (Kendrick Coleman) — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 21:51:52 +0000

I was with a customer the other day and and they asked me to go more in-depth with lease times. To be honest, my initial thought process was incorrect and I want to dive a bit more in-depth on some configurations. This will hopefully make you understand how lease times work with vCloud Director.

As a cloud admin, it's always a recommended practice to create an organization that aligns with something for your internal IT/Administrators. Having an internal org is necessary because you only want a select few organizations actually creating public catalogs for consumption across the vCloud. For instance, in my very own vCloud instance, I created an organization called KendrickColeman that gives me the ability to publish public catalogs. You wouldn't want tenants of the vCloud publishing vApps to other tenants.

Now, you're probably wondering, what does that have to with lease times? Well if you aren't careful, the organization that you created to be the host of the public catalog can have its own templates expire. For instance my IT Organization, KendrickColeman, creates the catalog that makes VMs such as Windows XP, Windows 2008R2 and UbuntuLite available across the vCloud.

By default, when you create an organization the maximum storage lease for a vApp template is 90 days. As soon as you import a vApp template into a catalog, the clock starts.

Once you hit that 90th day, this vApp will be unavailable because it has moved to one of two places chosen in the Storage Cleanup options. Of course, if you are a good IT admin, you will be updating your VMs in the catalog regularly because of patch cycles.

The easiest way to fix this problem is setting the vApp template lease to "Never Expires" when you are configuring an Organization. This also configurable after an organization has been created. As a primary public catalog publisher, now organizations will not be submitting help tickets because a vApp they used to access is no longer available. NOTE: this is ONLY for the IT or Admin Organization. You do not want to change this setting for every organization because we still will want other tenants catalogs to expire so we can reclaim that storage.

Now lets examine the leases and how they actually work. When we created an organization, there are some defaults that come into play, but these are configurable. As we can see from the drop down menu, you can completely customize the MAXIMUM amount of days or hours you want to set on a lease for that particular organization. This will all depend on your tenant because they may all have different requirements. Another thing to keep in mind is that the more and more VMs you have running, the more resources that are being consumed. Use lease times in your favor to make sure VMs aren't being dormant and are utilizing precious CPU and RAM.

We will just say you gave an organization the defaults for lease times. When it comes time for an organization to deploy their first vApp, they have the ability to reconfigure a vApp up to the maximum you defined, as the cloud admin, in the previous screenshot.

As soon as the vApp owner presses FINISH on creating a VM, the countdown timer for the Maximum Storage Lease begins. You don't even have to power on the vApp, the timer starts for how long this VM will actually be kept around to be powered on. Yet, once a vApp is powered on, the Maximum Runtime Lease begins and the Maximum Storage Lease is reset. After the Maximum Storage Lease expires, there are two actions that can take place, which are called Storage Cleanup options. The first is to "Move to Expired Items" which is a menu item under the My Cloud tab. The second option is to Permanently Delete the vApp. The "Move to Expired Items" option will keep the vApp around indefinitely. It's very easy to restore an expired vApp by right clicking on the expired vApp and clicking to renew the lease. The lease renewal will not change from the original lease options given to it. The latter option, Permanently Delete, will not keep the vApps and will delete them from storage immediately. If you set the Storage Cleanup option to Move to Expired Items, you as the cloud admin, must keep a watchful on eye on expired items to make sure it doesn't start overtaking all your storage. Feature request if anyone from VMware is reading... Add a Permanently Delete after X days in Expired Items option to the lease times.

Once a vApp owner powers on a vApp for the first time is when the clock starts for the Maximum Runtime Lease. The Maximum Runtime Lease is how long a vApp can be powered on before its automatically suspended. It doesn't matter if you are working on the virtual machine because it doesn't take into account an idle period. This measure is put into place to keep dormant VMs from consuming CPU and RAM when it isn't necessarily being used. If you are on a Pay-as-you-go (PAYG) model with chargeback involved, perhaps you will want to set the runtime lease of a VM to 8 hours or during the working day when you know you are going to be using that VM. You can come in every morning, power on your VM, and you won't be charged for those nightly hours when your VM was turned on but wasn't being used. It's just like keeping the lights on in a room when no one is in there. As a cloud admin, be mindful of how much time you are allowing tenants to keep VMs powered ON so you aren't wasting resources.

In essence, a vApp could never die off. Sure, the Maximum Runtime Lease may expire, but as soon as you power it back on, the timer starts over and the Maximum Storage Lease timer is erased. As soon as the vApp powers off, the Maximum Storage Lease timer begins. It's a consistent cycle of power On and Off in relation to the timers associated.

If a vApp Owner originally created a vApp and set the lease times to 1 day for everything, it can be reset or reconfigured. Go over to My Cloud -> vApps -> Right Click on your vApp and click on properties.

The first page that comes up shows the lease times. From here you can do two things. You can hit check the Reset Leases check box which will restart the countdown timer for the vApp. Another option is once you reset the lease, you can change the amount of lease times available to your org depending on how long you want to keep this VM around.

**UPDATE** 12/21/2012 @ 10:07PM

Thanks to Josh for his comment below. I performed two more tests to see what the correlation is between the runtime and storage lease. I created 2 vApps, Both with a Runtime Lease of 1 Day and Storage Lease of 1 Hour. I kept 1 vApp turned off, and I turned another vApp on. The vApp that was kept off, moved to the expired items folder after 1 hour. The vApp that was powered on, however, was still on and didn't move to the expired folders. So I'm guessing that the moral of the story here is that you should always focus on the Runtime Lease first and then the Storage Lease to follow. A Storage Lease timer will only take effect if the vApp is powered OFF. Consider the Storage Lease more like "house keeping" and the Runtime Lease as "administrative know-how".

My Small VMware Certification Rant

kendrickcoleman@gmail.com (Kendrick Coleman) — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 16:39:36 +0000

Today I went and took my VCP5 certification exam and passed. Thanks to all my fellow twitterati for the resounding congratulations. While VCP5 is still a great certification to have and I'm happy that I passed, I honestly didn't want to take the test. Here's why...

Around 6 months ago, I passed both my VCAP4-DCA and VCAP4-DCD. These were two exams I was psyched about passing. I spent about 3 months preparing and by passing those two exams, I'm only one giant leap away from doing a VCDX defense. I'm not going for a VCDX at this time, but that's not the point. The point is that by going higher up in the certification stack, the certification renewal process should be easier. VMware has the right thought in mind that if I pass VCP4, and then pass a VCAP4-DCA, if I take my VCAP5-DCA, it will automatically renew my VCP4 to a VCP5. To bad that's not what is happening in reality for many test takers...

Someone at VMware has figured out how to play the certification game by making VCDXs go and take a VCP test. It's completely bogus, IMO. You will never see a Cisco CCIE be pressured to go and take their entry level CCNA exam would you?

My goal was to keep renewing my VCAPs and maybe one day make the leap for a VCDX, I never wanted to take a VCP certification exam ever again. VMware does good by giving current VCPs a grace period for not having to take a "What's new" class before upgrading to the next VCP. The problem is that every other advanced certification comes 8-12 months after GA. The VCAP5-DCD BETA just got announced this week, which is almost 5 and half months after vSphere 5 went GA, still no word on VCAP5-DCA. After the beta period is over, it will still take 8 weeks for results to be published to the test takers then another 3 or 4 weeks for the test to actually be generally available. For a company that makes major releases on a 2 year cycle, this puts people like me (and everyone else for that matter) in a position where we are constantly in and out of PearsonVue testing centers. It wasn't worth it, in my opinion, to allow this VCP4 to VCP5 grace period to expire. So I got suckered in, bit the bullet, and just went and took the exam instead of waiting longer for a VCAP5 exam to become available. I know many others are in that situation as well because they get pressured by their company to have VCP5s on staff. These people have already passed VCAP4 exams and have to go take another test just because the VCAP5 still isn't available. Even if I wanted to take the VCAP5-DCD Beta, waiting 8 weeks for the results still puts me past the grace period for the VCP upgrade.

I'm sure that a lot of hard work goes into making these advanced certification exams, but not having these advanced certifications being available earlier puts many people in a tough situation. Heck, the VCP5 beta exams were actually being taken place BEFORE vSphere5 was GA! Why can't this be done for not only VCAPs, but also getting requirements and submission forms ready for VCDX? The VCAP and VCDX certifications seem to be about a year behind on schedule compared to VCP. If I was to make the major leap for a VCDX, which not only takes a ton of time away from work and family, but also a ton of money, I can only become a VCDX4. Which means that when VCAP5-DCD finally gets released, I have to go take that to make my VCDX4 a VCDX5. By that time, vSphere 6 might already be announced. Do you see what I'm getting at here? Something is broken in the system because I don't see CCIEs having to go through this much trouble. Bottom line, VCP, VCAP, and VCDX should all be available at the same time for a major release.

End rant. I guess at the end of the day I could have just not taken the exam and waited for a VCAP to become available, but I was tired of waiting. If you have some of the same opinions, or perhaps completely oppose my ideas, please share your thoughts.

VCE Vblock Visio Stencils

kendrickcoleman@gmail.com (Kendrick Coleman) — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 19:30:00 +0000

Simon Long got in touch with me because he wanted a Vblock Visio stencil he could use for a diagram he was creating. Of course, nothing like that existed until now. I created a few Vblock stencils that you can use in Microsoft Visio.

These stencils can be used by partners for presentations to show they are Vblock Qualified or by parent companies to show validated diagrams such as a Cisco Virtualized Multi-Tenant Data Center Solution.

Here is the download link. The .vss is located in the .zip. VCEVblockStencils.zip

Here are pictures of some of the stencils shown in the vss. Enjoy!:

Updated 2/10/2012 with 8 more new images of Vblock 300 and 700 series... some shown below.

DOWNLOAD HERE - VCEVblockStencils.zip

VMware vCloud and View Design around the Management Stack for Vblock

kendrickcoleman@gmail.com (Kendrick Coleman) — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 12:03:55 +0000

When a customer is deploying a Vblock Infrastructure Platform with VMware View or VMware vCloud Director, there is a consistent message that always arises, where do they run the virtual management infrastructure stack? View and vCloud come up on a regular basis, but this article focuses on any application that utilizes the Vblock as resources for a particular stack of virtual machines that comprise a Virtual Management Infrastructure Stack. This article is heavy on VMware design and I will be discussing what options are available to you to run a Virtual Management Infrastructure Stack and will make you think about your overall comfort with a solution.

To set the scene, take a look at these diagrams. I have created both a View and vCloud diagram that depict what we are trying to accomplish. In every management stack, there are a multitude of different VMs that make an application function.

In a VMware vCloud Director environment for Vblock, you will usually have these VMs (not all are required):

1 vCenter Server for Management Components
1 vCenter Server for vCloud Resources (optional but best practice)
2 Database Servers SQL/Oracle (1 required, 2 optional)
1 vShield Manager VM (can run in Fault Tolerant mode)
2-X vCloud Director Nodes. The amount of nodes depends on size of vCloud environment and level of redundancy
2-X Virtual Supervisor Modules for Nexus 1000v. The amount of VSMs depends on vCloud Size
1 VMware vCenter Chargeback Server
1 vCenter Orchestrator Server
1 RabbitMQ Server
1 Load Balancer
and more…

In a VMware View environment for Vblock, you will usually have these VMs (not all are required):

1 vCenter Server for Management Components
1 vCenter Server for View Desktop Resources with View Composer Installed (can be concentrated into 1 vCenter, but 2 is best practice)
2 Database Servers - SQL (1 required, 2 optional)
2-X VMware View Connection Broker Servers. The amount of servers depends on size of View environment and level of redundancy
2-X VMware View Security Broker Servers. The amount of servers depends on size of View environment and level of redundancy
2-X Virtual Supervisor Modules for Nexus 1000v. The amount of VSMs depends on size of View environment
1 ThinApp Guest for ThinApp'ing Applications
1 vCenter Orchestrator Server
1 Load Balancer
and more...

As you can see, these applications can have a lot of moving pieces depending on how simple or complex the solution.

One of the more common requests that I see, is customers wish to run these components in VCE's Advanced Management Pod (AMP). The AMP is an engineered solution from VCE that is responsible for hosting the management applications in a Vblock. There are two different versions of the AMP. The HA-AMP, which consists of 2 Cisco C200 servers and a VNXe 3100 Array where VMs are hosted on the VNXe. The Mini-AMP is a single Cisco C200, no array, and VMs are hosted on local storage to the server. Each Cisco C200 server is equipped with 48GB of RAM, and the VNXe 3100 has 6 2TB NL-SAS drives in a Raid 5 configuration.

For the context of this conversation, we will be using the HA AMP for all discussions because it's a VCE best practice to use the HA-AMP to overcome any hardware failures. The Mini-AMP is an option for different scenarios.

Here is the profile for all virtual machines that reside on the AMP:

vCenter Server - 2vCPU - 4GB RAM
vCenter Update Manager Server - 1vCPU - 4GB RAM
SQL Server - 1vCPU - 8GB RAM
Array Management & Licensing Server - 1vCPU - 4GB RAM
ESRS - 1vCPU - 3GB RAM
UIM - 2vCPU - 16GB RAM
Nexus 1000v VSM 1 - 1vCPU - 1.5GB RAM
Nexus 1000v VSM 2 - 1vCPU - 1.5GB RAM

If we count correctly, that is a total of 42GB of RAM allocated to these VMs. VCE engineered the AMP to host only the virtual machines that were essential to the management applications of the Vblock and should be considered out-of-band management. Do NOT make the mistake that you can run a bunch of virtual machines in the AMP because you have additional capacity. When you install vCloud Infrastructure VMs or View Infrastructure VMs on the AMP, you are going beyond what is currently supported by VCE because the AMP was never intended to accommodate these extra workloads. The AMP is however capable of handling an additional small workload such as a vCenter Operations Server or a vCenter Chargeback Server.

The current amount of VMs required to run on the AMP amount to 8 and there is a total of 42GB of RAM assigned to all of these VMs. These VMs are spread out among 2 hosts, but can be consolidated into 1 host in a mini-AMP option. Windows 2008 R2 VMs use large pages in memory for better performance and therefore do not utilize VMware's Transparent Page Sharing (TPS) technology to reduce the amount of RAM consumed. The only time a 2008R2 VM will be able to utilize TPS is when there has been an overcommitment of memory on the host. These 2MB large pages will begin to break down in 4KB chunks to relieve RAM contention. When this happens, the 2008R2 VMs experience a degradation in performance (source). The VMs are spread across both hosts because if an HA event occurs, the VMs will have the resources to failover and power on. The additional VMs needed for a vCloud environment such as 1x vCenter, 2x vCloud Cells, 1x vShield Manager using FT, Chargeback, vCO, etc, will far outweigh the resources the AMP hosts contain. If we take the example above, this would account for an additional 22GB of RAM total for the vCloud Components. The same amount of additional VMs goes for VMware View as well. In the event of an HA failure, there would be VMs that couldn't power on. The only way to make sure that the VMs needed are powered on is by setting a multitude of HA rules. Even at that, it's very much a possibility that the VMs you don't want on, will continue to run in an HA event as well. For instance, since UIM isn't critical during normal operations, that will be one of the VMs you don't want powered back on in a HA event. If this VM lives on Host A, and Host B fails, UIM will not power itself off to accommodate the more important VMs that failover to Host A. The AMP was never meant to host more VMs than what is currently associated to it because of the resources needed to run the VMs in an optimal performing state in the case of a failure. Therefore, in an HA event, it's possible that your vCloud or View infrastructure VMs will not be able to power on or recover.

The C200's are equipped with 2 on-board 1GB NICs that are responsible for all VMware networking. The 2 1GB NICs are sufficient for the small amount of VMs that are currently assigned to the AMP. These VMs are management VMs and do not require any intense I/O workload. That being said, all ESXi Management, vMotion, Fault Tolerance, IP Storage, and Virtual Machine Networking all have to traverse 2 1GB NICs. IP storage alone can saturate a 1GB link, and when you add in vMotion, that can saturate the second link. The standard AMP build uses VMware Standard vSwitches and cannot rely on Network IO Control (NIOC) for vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS) operations. For vCloud, vShield Manager can be used in Fault Tolerance mode and the FT logging that goes between the VMs can be network intensive. In a vCloud environment, you will most definitely saturate the links because the AMP is now the broker for all remote console connections which can be very traffic intensive. In a VMware View environment, the Connection Brokers are your gateway to the hosted VMs, and having a couple hundred connections creates heavy network I/O. VMware's best practice is to have a minimum of 6 1GB NICs to accommodate redundancy of physical network adapters, redundancy of traffic flows, and ensure proper network I/O bandwidth for a Tier 1 cluster. If you add in an application stack such as vCloud or View, you are going to saturate the bandwidth needed and will be unable to accommodate SLAs and network bandwidth. It's not a simple VCE exception to add additional NICs because depending on the type of Vblock, there may or may not be ample connections for all 1GB NICs in the Catalyst 3560s.

The AMP was designed to be a management domain, or out-band management, and therefore if the AMP is lost the Vblock is still up and operational. If you happen to lose vCenter and the VSMs, the Vblock will still be operational. In a vCloud or View environment, the infrastructure VMs, such as vCenter, become Tier 1 applications. The AMP was never intended to host a Tier 1 application. If the AMP is hosting Tier 1 applications and a network isolation occurs or a complete hardware failure happens, the entire functionality of the Vblock(s) dedicated to that application as resources are unusable.

To add on the networking piece, the AMP comes equipped with a VNXe 3100. The VNXe 3100 is an iSCSI and NFS only capable IP storage device. The VNXe 3100 in the AMP only comes with 2TB NL-SAS drives, and performance won't be equal to what you would see with 15K SAS drives. There is absolutely nothing wrong with IP Storage, but do you trust your Tier 1 application on a VNXe 3100 when you have a VNX or VMAX sitting next to it? The VNXe 3100 is only capable of 1GB IP Storage connectivity. This is a choice the customer must make on their level of comfort with performance and the redundancy associated with the different EMC storage platforms.

As your vCloud or View environment begins to scale, you will need to add additional vCloud Nodes or Connection Brokers to accommodate the additional workload. The AMP will not be able to meet a customer's ability to scale. Again, the AMP was designed to house the components required for Vblock management. Adding in additional C200's requires an engineering exception based on available rack space and network connections.

If you still feel you are going to test the limits and run the vCloud or View components in the AMP, please note that this will NOT break or invalidate seamless support. All you are doing is running an unsupported configuration that doesn't adhere to best practice standards. At the end of the day, it's your kit and you can do whatever you want with it, but don't come running for help when something bad happens and I get to say the 4 words I hear constantly from my wife, "I told you so."

You're probably wondering, why can't I just add another server to the cluster, change the amount of NICs, and run storage on the Vblock? You must remember that VCE is built on standards. VCE standards give a customer a guaranteed predictable amount of performance while reducing the risk associated with a "build your own" infrastructure. The time to market VCE is able to achieve is because of the streamlined build process and exceptions to the rule introduce latency. Every piece of the Vblock, including the AMP, was designed and engineered for specific application workloads. The Advanced Configuration Tool (ACT) is a Vblock bill of materials (BOM) calculator that outputs every single piece of equipment that is necessary to build a Vblock. There is no other single tool like it in the industry. Anyone can spit out a BOM from a single manufacturer, but VCE's ACT is the only tool that builds out all 3 parent's products including the cables necessary for communication, plus cable length to boot. Try doing that with anything else out on the market. VCE's standards ensure a guaranteed predictable performance in a time to market that no one else can match.

Now that I've gotten my VCE pitch out of the way, let's focus on the options that are possible for running Tier 1 application management stacks while using Vblock(s) as a resource.

In all of these following options, it is recommended that vCenter, vCenter Update Manager, SQL, and Nexus 1000v VSMs be moved to the respective locations as depicted below. These components that normally run in the AMP have become Tier 1 applications in relation to VMware View and vCloud Director technologies. The loss of any of these VMs can be detrimental to the operations of the application.

The first option is the most simple and will work well for any VMware View or vCloud Director environment running in a very small production environment or perhaps a POC or Pilot. Run the Tier 1 Stack of VMs inside the Vblock on the blades with the same VMs used as resources. This simple design removes the complexity out of any other solution and is also very cost effective because you are not spending capital for an additional infrastructure. There are some key design decisions to take into account though. You may want to use a resource pools for your vCloud VMs and assign them with the label "High". Since every virtual machine in a vCloud environment will be thrown into a resource pool, the mathematics of making sure your resource pools are not unbalanced is relaxed. In a View environment, you may not want to use resource pools. In a VMware View environment, you are cramming as many VMs as possible on to a server. If you create a resource pool for your infrastructure VMs, and then another resource pool for your desktop VMs, it will be very unbalanced. See the resource pool pie chart paradox. Perhaps you can get away with creating a resource pool for your infrastructure VMs and leaving the desktops at the root, but this is going to be a game of checks and balances to make sure your Infrastructure VMs have enough resources to function. If you opt for putting all Infrastructure VMs and View Desktops at the root level of the hosts, you may experience problems with your Infrastructure VMs being constrained for resources. This option takes away the math of resource pools, but you are putting your View environment at risk.

Putting the Infrastructure Stack with your regular workloads can be OK for small production environments or pilots, but that is why VMware recommends the approach of having a separate physical infrastructure for these workloads. By segregating off these important pieces, you are not putting your VMware View or vCloud infrastructure at risk of resource constraint. Let's examine what's possible with a Vblock.

The most simple way to accomplish having a separate infrastructure is by utilizing blades within the Vblock. VMware recommends nothing less than 3 hosts in a single cluster to account for N+1 reliability. This of course, may be a money constraint for many and sometimes, two hosts may be a suitable option for beginning your deployment and expanding later on. When you purchase Cisco B-Series blades in a Vblock, they must be purchased in quantities of two. The rationale behind this purchasing is that you will always need to buy enough for failover capacity. The choice of purchasing the required amount of blades for your management infrastructure is all dependent on your current size and where you want to scale. It's also wise to start off with 2 blades, and as your environment grows, the management infrastructure grows with it so more blades can be added to the management cluster. In addition, this scenario can be Highly Available by placing blades in different chassis to overcome the rare event of a chassis failure. To keep costs at a minimum, the management infrastructure blades can be Cisco B200 M2s with 48GB of RAM, while your View or vCloud environment could be B200 blades with 192GB of RAM. Running your View or vCloud Infrastructure in a set of dedicated blades can be more costly than some options because blade technology isn't cheap and there are required software components of PowerPath V/E and Nexus 1000v that must be added on. On the other hand, this solution is very clean, gives infrastructure VMs the underlying performance necessary, and doesn't require any engineering exceptions by VCE. This is a great way to begin your journey into vCloud Director. As your vCloud continues to grow and you would like to create a dedicated management infrastructure outside the Vblock, the infrastructure VMs can be migrated off and the old blades can now be re-purposed inside of vCloud Director as a Provider vDC. To help soften the cost, the Mini-AMP can be purchased because VMs such as vCenter, SQL, VUM, and N1KV VSMs which normally live on the AMP need to be migrated into this management cluster. When taking this approach, be sure to size your Compute needs accordingly.

The next design is going to be more complex because there are a lot of options available. As we showed in our vCloud on Vblock whitepaper, you can create a separate cluster of C200 hosts that will run your View or vCloud infrastructure stack. These sets of hosts can be a good approach because it's cost efficient since you aren't using up costly blade slots and it increases your HA failover domain. The design decisions from here continue to grow. Networking decisions have to be made next. It's possible to go with a 1GB Multi-NIC approach or perhaps a 10GB NIC approach. These connections can be taken into the pair of Cisco Nexus 5548 switches which are 10GB capable. When going with this approach, don't forget to include the right kind and amount of SFPs that plug into the 5548s. You also have the option of going with PALO adapters and controlling the networking capability inside of UCSM. Depending on the type of Vblock you purchase, there may or may not be available ports in the Cisco 6140 Fabric Interconnects. In either option, 6140s or 5548s/9148s, the amount of 10GB/FC licenses need to be accounted for. Next is storage. Since you are going this route, you will more than likely want to utilize the Vblock storage capabilities because of the underlying performance and redundancy. If you went with the 1GB or 10GB NIC approach, you can run NFS or iSCSI based storage to your hosts. If you prefer Fiber Channel, HBAs can be inserted into the Hosts and into the Cisco MDS 9148s to get Fiber Channel access to the Vblock array. If you went with a 1GB NIC approach, you may not have very many PCI/PCI-e slots in the hosts to support a multi-nic and fiber channel design. The 1GB NIC approach may not be suitable because there won't be enough access port on the AMP 3560s, and using the 5548s for 1GB connections isn't cost effective. If the PALO adapter was your choice, then you can use Cisco's ability to virtualize HBA adapters and get FC access to your hosts as well as run NFS storage.

Now that you have thought out your multi-host design and network decision, where are we going to place of all this? A Vblock has been pre-engineered so all the components go into the same place every single time. There is limited space in a Vblock if you go with all the bells and whistles. These components do not need to live inside Vblock racks and can live anywhere in your datacenter. It's up to you as the customer to know the lengths and types of cables that are needed to establish connectivity. If you would like to make this a seamless solution and have everything fit inside the Vblock racks, the only way you can free up space is by purchasing the mini-AMP. Since you are moving vCenter, SQL, VUM, and the VSMs out of the AMP and into your management cluster, the amount of VMs needed in the AMP have been drastically reduced. Removing a C200 and the VNXe 3100s in an HA AMP option down to a single C200 mini-AMP will free up 3U of cabinet space. Depending upon how much storage your purchase, and you haven't populated the second, third, or 4th cabinet with DAEs, there will be available space there as well.

This solution is very complex because there are a bunch of moving parts and takes design considerations in effect. Not only that, since this isn't a standard VCE solution, this will have to be a custom quote that can be delivered from VCE, Cisco, or a VCE certified partner. You may also find out that VCE will not take responsibility for the racking and stacking of these components. A VCE qualified partner may need to be brought in to perform something like this. It goes without saying that this route will require an exception from VCE engineering. There are efforts underway to make a Tier 1 Infrastructure POD a standard SKU in VCE, but for the time being, this is the route that must be taken.

If you're View or vCloud infrastructure is very large, you may consider purchasing a smaller Vblock to host your Tier 1 Application Stack. It may sound crazy, but there are customers doing this today because it's a simple yet effective way to take care of it.

The final way to accomplish hosting your Tier 1 Application VMs are to utilize an existing infrastructure. If you feel that you are buying the Vblock specifically for View or vCloud resources, your existing infrastructure may be able to handle the management stack. This is a definite YMMV because you are going to know your environment better than anyone else. This approach is not common right now because customers are looking to VCE for new deployments, rollouts, and standardization of their datacenter. This approach will also cause a bit of confusion during the VCE logical build process because it's not a standard way to factory build a Vblock.

I hope this article has cleared up some confusion and has set you on the right path to deciding how to host your VMware View or vCloud Director Infrastructure.

To read more about the design of multiple vCenters in any of these options above, please read the vCloud on Vblock white paper

"Blogging is not writing, it's just graffiti with punctuation."

kendrickcoleman@gmail.com (Kendrick Coleman) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:25:50 +0000

As everyone knows, the Top 25 virtualization blog voting machine is now open for business. This is NOT another "vote for me" post. I don't want to act like a selfish single child who needs more attention. Instead, this post is to encourage you to just go vote. More and more virtualization blogs are popping up everyday and these individuals put in a lot of work into sharing their knowledge with the world. Bloggers spend more time than you would think whiteboarding ideas or taking tons of screenshots to show you step by steps to spark your interests. It's almost a second job to many.

There is a great quote from the movie Contagion that i find amusing "Blogging is not writing, it's just graffiti with punctuation." There are so many blogs out there that it's very hard to find the few golden nuggets out of the mess written on the walls. The best blogs are consistently the best because they have the greatest content and make it amusing and fun for their readers. You only get 10 votes, so sort through the 100+ blogs, and choose the ones that consistently bring you back to want and read more. It means a lot to get votes from readers. I always love reading the emails that start with "Hey Kenny, i was reading your blog and..."

Again. This is not a pitch for me, but I would encourage you to take the 5 minutes out of your day to just go and vote because the bloggers that do get your votes appreciate every single one of them. Bloggers put in a lot of time to deliver content, please take the few minutes out of your day to give back by voting.

Virtual Machines Exhibit Poor CPU Performance in vCloud Director

kendrickcoleman@gmail.com (Kendrick Coleman) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 19:27:17 +0000

Someone call the n00b patrol because this one should have been a no-brainer. I was working with a customer today and their default image inside of vCloud Director is a Windows 2008 R2 VM with 1vCPU and 4GB of RAM. Whenever they deployed a new VM from vCloud Director, it would take approximately 45 minutes to complete the entire sysprep process and boot up. After that 45 minute process, when they tried to use that VM, it was almost unbearable through the web UI because it was so slow. The CPU performance was just outright horrible.

After a few quick conversations, I did a bit of troubleshooting to narrow it down to a vCloud problem. I used the same exact image and deployed it from template on a blade used for vCloud resources. It also deployed on the same datastore so we could cancel out the hardware issue. Sysprep ran, and the VM was created and ready for use after 4-7 minutes. So it was definitely a problem in vCloud.

I opened up the vSphere Client to the vCloud vCenter and started looking at the VM that was spun up from vCloud Director under the resources tab. This should have been as clear as day to point out. The VM has a limit set on it of 260MHz.

The notion of giving organizations access to provider vDCs is so they consume only as much as they need or want to use. By default, when creating an Organization vDC and assigning a Provider vDC to it, the default setting is that it can only consume "0.26GHz" of CPU, or 260MHz. Which 260MHz isn't near enough for a 2008 R2 VM.

To fix this, simply set this setting to something much higher. This setting depends on the speed of your underlying processor. So if you have a 12 cores and a processor speed of 3.36GHz, that means a VM with a single vCPU running a single threaded application, can only consume 3.36GHz (theoretically). But the more vCPUs and the more threaded applications may need more CPU power. The setting defines what a SINGLE vCPU will consume, not the aggregated amount among multiple vCPUs on a single VM. So 2vCPUs will take a the setting and multiply it by 2. To change the setting, make sure you do it during the Organization vDC creation, or if they are created already, simply right click on the Organization vDC and go to Properties.

Highlight the vCPU Speed setting and change it to something higher based on your chargeback model. Since I wanted to set it and forget it, and I'm not running a chargeback model for CPU consumption, I just set it to 5GHz. Click OK. You may want to set this to something lower depending on your tenants and their needs. Since CPU is hardly a constraint for people (RAM is), you may only be charging for RAM in your chargeback model. But if you charge for CPU, and you want to make sure that particular Org vDC doesn't over consume, you will want to change it to something below your single core clock speed.

Now, when you Power Off and Power On your vApp, there will be a new limit of 5GHz set on the VM.

Nexus 1000v On A Network With No VLANs

kendrickcoleman@gmail.com (Kendrick Coleman) — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 19:16:56 +0000

So the title is technically inaccurate. Everything has to traverse a VLAN, and if no VLAN is specified, then you're riding on VLAN 1.

I volunteered to build some Hands On Labs for our technical sales folks and I was in charge of creating the Nexus 1000v Lab. After battling a few quirks for about 7 hours, I was finally able to get everything functioning correctly. The networking piece didn't take 7 hours, but the lab was convoluted enough that I will save you from reading about it.

The lab consisted of running the latest software:

vCenter 5 Build 455964
2x Nested ESXi Servers running 5.0 Build 504890
Nexus 1000v VSM 4.2(1) SV1(4a)
Nexus 1000v VEM 201108271-BG

The lab ran on physical ESXi hosts and a network that was completely flat with NO VLANs in use. I know, it's a bad practice, but we're just making due with what we have. The nested environment ran on a single VLAN, but that VLAN was unique, had no actual VLAN properties associated with it, and all VMs had to be running on the same host for communication. It's a complicated setup, but just go with me on this.

When creating a VMkernel Port on an ESXi host, it would be given an IP address in the /24 range, and could be pinged when it was configured with None (0) as the VLAN ID inside of the networking configuration in vSphere.

The tricky part of the networking piece is how does None (0) relate in terms of Nexus 1000v. At first, I thought it would be the same thing as setting the uplink on regular switch on a flat network by making it an access port. After some trial and error I finally nailed down the configuration for the uplink of the physical NICs.

conf t
port-profile type ethernet system-uplink
vmware port-group
switchport mode trunk
switchport trunk allow vlan all
switchport trunk native vlan 1
system vlan 1
no shutdown
state enabled
end
copy run start

Configuration of the vethernet port groups was pretty simple and straight forward.

conf t
port-profile type vethernet N1KV-VMnetwork
vmware port-group
switchport mode access
vmware max-ports 1024
no shutdown
state enabled
end
copy run start

Hope this helps anyone else out there who is configuring a network the wrong way. :)

Register for a Free Tools Webinar Sponsored by TrainSignal

kendrickcoleman@gmail.com (Kendrick Coleman) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 21:15:48 +0000

another webinar about free tools??! oh yeah! David Davis and I are once again presenting our infamous VMworld presentation. I don't have to talk about it any more. Just know that since this is being sponsored by TrainSignal there will be some vSphere 5 Training Give Aways, which is always fun.

It's taking place on Wednesday 1/11/2012 at 3:00pm EST. Hope to see you there!

How To Setup Riverbed Stingray Traffic Manager / Zeus Load Balancer for VMware vCloud or View

kendrickcoleman@gmail.com (Kendrick Coleman) — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 22:27:53 +0000

Recently, my virtual Zeus load balancer wouldn't boot up properly so I figured I would just rebuild it. Come to find out, I couldn't remember everything I did to get it working properly so now I'm documenting it for anyone else that may want to do this. Zeus Load balancer is a great free utility that was recently acquired by Riverbed Technologies and is now labeled as the Riverbed Stingray Traffic Manager. It's a good product for home labbers because it will do SSL HTTPS load balancing which works great for vCloud or View testing. Check out Chris Colotti's post Load Balancing Considerations for vCloud.

To get the product, sign up for a Zeus/Riverbed Developer Account. You will be emailed a username and password and will get access to the downloads area and see these files below:

I downloaded the VMware OVF (64-bit). Unzip the package and begin the OVF transport process from the vSphere Client. Make sure you download your license key somewhere as well because it's needed during setup.

Be sure to set the portgroup of this NIC to whatever you want the management of the device to be. DHCP is preferred

Before we power on the VM. Edit the settings and add an additional NIC. This secondary NIC is what we will use for the actual load balanced traffic. This way we can separate our types of traffic on the NICs/VLANs and not interfere with workloads. I also changed my VM to only use 512MB of RAM (doesn't show in the picture) because this is a home lab and RAM gets used up quickly.

Also, before we begin, let's add our DNS entries. I added a DNS entry for our management IP and DNS entries for my vCloud needs.

Now let's fire up the VM. Once the VM fires up, check out the IP address.

Head on over to that IP address and begin the installation process.

Once we have configured it with a new IP address, lets go ahead and login. We can use the DNS address we assigned earlier.

We need to do a little house cleaning to make sure this will work correctly. First thing is to make sure we get eth1 as our default for all traffic. Click on the globe on the main menu and select Edit for Traffic IP Networks. Add in the subnets you want this load balancer to handle on eth1. for mine, I selected 192.168.50.0/24. Click update and you're done.

Next we need to create a new traffic group. I went ahead and made mine vcloud.kendrickcoleman.c0m and assigned the IP address used in the DNS setup.

After it's configured, the drop down box should say that it will be using eth1.

Go to the Wizard menu at the top right and select Manage A New Service.

A pop-up window will come up to begin the process. Click Next

Give your service a name, select the type of connection (for vCloud and View, it will be SSL with HTTPS), ports will be auto-populated.

Enter in the hostnames for every server running the software. click add node and the port will be appended to it automatically

Click Finish. This has created a virtual server and pools for you. We will need to edit these setting before we continue.

Go back to the global editing view so we can edit our virtual server

scroll down to the basic settings and change from All IP Addresses to the Traffic IP Group that we created earlier. Now click update

Click on the Pools configuration and let's edit our newly created pool

If you scroll down there are a few different options we can set. The first one is the load balancing algorithm. By default, it's set at Round Robin, so each new connection goes to a different connection server. This is good for making sure that all servers are functioning properly. You may want to change this to the server with the least amount of connections or anything else you wish. You can also set the monitoring capability. By default, it is set at Ping, but that can be changed to SSL HTTP if you want and you can test logging with a username or password. Ping is good enough for me though. The other important setting we need is Session Persistence. Lets go ahead and edit this setting.

Click on Manage Persistence Class

Add a new class called "IP Persistence". Doing this will send a user to the same node if they are in the middle of a long session. You can do this based on cookies as well, and it's up to you as the admin.

Click on the Home button and make sure that your new service is started and running.

Now go to your newly created load balanced page :)

VCE Releases the Vblock Version Tool

kendrickcoleman@gmail.com (Kendrick Coleman) — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 15:34:56 +0000

I'm amazed every day by the amount of effort people in VCE contribute. VCE has that VMware Labs feel to it. If you see a hole that needs to be filled, go fill it. Do you have an idea that you want to make into a project, run with it. It's innovation and ideas that keep things moving forward.

Today, VCE released a new tool for its customers called the Vblock Version Tool. This program will allow a partner/customer to gather all the required firmware/software level versions on their Vblock and compare it against the Official Release Matrix. If you don't know, the Official Release Matrix is a chart/martix/pdf that gets updated about once or twice a quarter (depending on how many and what types of firmwares are released) and plays into VCE's strategy of a Pre-Integrated & Pre-Tested Product. Every component in the Vblock (Storage, UCS, VMware, MDS, Nexus, 1000v, PowerPath V/E, UIM, etc) all have some sort of firmware or software level tied to them. VCE's goal is to release a product that adheres to specific firmware/software levels to ensure complete interoperability and superior performance. The Official Release Matrix contains all the software/firmware levels for specific Vblock models and can be found internally on VCE Portal or partners can get it on VCE Partner Portal.

The Vblock Version Tool shows the continued effort VCE makes in building the industry's ONLY integrated stack with true differentiating characteristics. VCE is continuing to help customers realize the value in Vblock above and beyond the best of breed hardware components. The VCE Vblock Version Tool can be found on the VCE Partner Portal and customers can get the tool from VCE Support Portal.

Ok. enough jibber jabber, let's see it!

Step 1. Select the Vblock Platform type or AMP type. Then choose the support matrix version to compare against.

Step 2. Fill out all appropriate fields. Select output types desired. The “Applications List” section will attempt to gather software versions on the local host where the Vblock Platform version tool is executed. If those applications are located on a remote host, please specify host name or IP. In addition, the host must be on the same network. Disable any component that is not going to be gathered. To disable components, click the checkbox next to Disable (Do not collect).

Step 3. Click the Generate Version Output button and select the filename and location. Note: Depending on the types of output selected, the file extension will vary. If selecting HTML, CSV, and XML, the initial filename extension will be listed as HTML, but when the tool generates the output files, the name given to the HTML file will also be applied to the .csv and .xml files.

Step 4. The tool will gather all component information. Any warnings or errors will be saved to a log file named with the current date when the tool was executed. The log files are stored in the Vblock Platform version tool installation folder location, in the log folder.

Step5. Upon completion, the file output names and locations are displayed in the Output Complete dialog box.

Below are examples of HTML, CSV, and XML outputs.

That's a taste of version 1.0 sitting high level. The upcoming versions will include more detailed information such as UCS specifics with C200s and FI, gather serial numbers for all the components, chassis info, blade specifics such as processor type, ram types, and DIMM status. You can also expect to see a CLI or perhaps PowerShell Cmd-lets so you can script it to run it against multiple Vblocks at a single time.

How To Deploy a VM or vApp from vCloud Director

kendrickcoleman@gmail.com (Kendrick Coleman) — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 19:07:52 +0000

I got a request internally for a simple step-by-step of how to deploy a vApp or VM from vCloud Director because the IT group has no experience with vCloud. I toiled on putting this blog article up because the simplicity is just, well, simple. Thanks to a few twitterati (@P2Vme, @angeloluciani, @jmichelmetz, and @mtellin) for making me do it anyway. here we go

Before you begin, you need to know where to go. vCloud has a few different portals but there is going to be one defined for your particular organization. For instance, my vCloud Director instance rests at https://vcloud.kendrickcoleman.c0m/cloud/. This webaddress is for administrator access. When you create a new Organization inside vCloud Director such as Developer, you can create a new logon portal that can be accessed at https://vcloud.kendrickcoleman.c0m/cloud/org/Developer.

After you login you will be presented with a home screen that looks like this if you aren't the cloud admin.

Before you get to this point, the cloud admin has to add VMs or media to the public catalog. To start deploying a VM or vApp, there are two places. You can do it from the home screen or by going to the My Cloud tab. You can build a new vApp with the Build a New vApp button or Add a vApp From Catalog button, which will only configure a single VM.

In this example we are going to "Add a new vApp from Catalog"

Select a VM from the catalog and click next to deploy a new vApp

Give the vApp a unique name and click next. Shown below is a default name. You can also set the lease times for when the vApp will expire if it's not used.

On the next screen we need to change a few thing. First you will notice that there is a "Select Virtual Datacenter" section that may or may not have multiple options in the drop down. This is your provider virtual datacenter and you can choose the level of service that has been granted to your organization. Next, You will want to change the Full Name because that is the name you will see tied to the VM inside of vCenter. The Computer Name is the actual name that will be assigned to the VM after sysprep does its thing. Depending on what this VM is destined to do, you need to assign an appropriate network. The type of organization network will be configured by the Cloud Admin or the Organization Admin. You can also choose the type of IP Assignment, but Static IP Pool by default is always a good choice.

Choose networking options if necessary. Read up on Fencing and more if you plan to utilize these features.

Click finish and let the VM / vApp start to build. You will be taken back to the home screen and you can watch the process of the VM being created

Another option is to build a vApp from catalog so you can add multiple VMs to a single vApp

As I said previously, this will allow you to bring in multiple VMs into a single vApp. Click on the VMs available in the catalog and click the "Add" down arrow. You can also click on the "+ New Virtual Machine" button to create a VM from scratch with an ISO.

From here on out, it's just like before. Choose your provider virtual datacenter, change some names, and choose networking.

After you click finish, your home screen will now be populated with all the vApps you have created within your self-service portal.

A List of FREE VMware vSphere Tools

kendrickcoleman@gmail.com (Kendrick Coleman) — Wed, 04 May 2011 05:00:00 +0000

Why?

I wanted to create a list of free tools that you can use with vSphere. Not just 30-day trial tools, but actually *free* tools. I will be testing out all these applications in the next 2 months in preparation for a Top 5 or 10 blog and presentation at the Kentuckiana Virtualization Users Group meeting May21st

**UPDATE** 9/8/2011 - Top 10 Free VMware vSphere Tools and Utilities for 2011

The Top 10 Free vSphere ESX Tools and Utilities post has been released. (2010 Article)

Let me know if I missed something because I would like to add it. kendrickcoleman [at] gmail [dot] com or @KendrickColeman on twitter.

If you want to dive into performance, take a look at VM Advanced ISO. Free Tools for Advanced Tasks

Utilities & Programs

Veeam Monitor Free Edition - VMware monitoring solution designed to meet the day-to-day needs of VMware administrators who need real-time performance monitoring and alerting.

Veeam Business View - an add-on that works with other Veeam products to provide business categorization for your VMware vSphere environment.

Veeam FastSCP - FastSCP provides a fast, secure and easy way to manage files and bulk copy VMs across your VMware ESX environment.

SolarWinds Free VM Monitor - continuously monitors a VMware ESX Server and its virtual machines. Track virtualization health at-a-glance and impress your boss with X-ray vision into your ESX Servers! <-- not vSphere compatible

VKernel VM Stats - Provides key summary statistics for your VMware environment

VKernel Capacity View - provides quick visibility and alerting to the storage and server capacity issues in your VMware virtualized infrastructure.

Take a look at my Home Lab w/ Capacity View. Be sure to include the referral from kendrickcoleman [@] gmail [dot] com for validation(without the brackets of course).

VKernel SearchMyVM - “Google–like” SearchMyVM tool, delivered as a virtual appliance, instantly connects to VMware vCenter (VirtualCenter)and indexes the entire VMware ESX environment

VKernel SnapshotMyVM - completely automates the time–consuming process of documenting all virtual machines (VMs) in the dynamic data center

VKernel Capacity Modeler - allows you to easily assess the performance impact of capacity changes to your existing virtualized environment

CPUID System Information - shows the VMHost CPU Info by NTPRO

RVTools - uses the VI SDK 2.5 to display information about your virtual machines and ESX hosts.

VMware CPU Host Info 2.01 - allow you to read out all CPU information from all your ESX Servers by querying your VC server. It will show what features are available on your CPUs and if they are compatible to vmotion VMs and if FT is supported.

ESX Manager 2.3 by ESXGuide - lots and lots and lots of management tools. ESX Manager 3.0 is on the horizon and looks very promising. Not sure how well this version works w/ vSphere. Now a Part of VM Vision Manager

vSphere Mini Monitor 2.0 - VMM will now monitor a large number of changes to multiple objects within the vCenter environment

EMC Ionix Compliance Checker for VMware ESX - providing detailed compliance checks against both the VMware Hardening Guidelines and the CIS benchmarks for ESX <-- not vSphere compatible

Trilead VM Explorer - Backup & Restore & Browse for ESX virtual machines

vLogView - a Windows based application which manages VMware ESX Server log files

vAlarm - Windows based application which monitors alarms generated by VMware vCenter.

Hyper9 Virtual Machine Manager - Open source solution to manage VMware VI3/vSphere4, Citrix XenServer 5 or Microsoft Hyper-V from your mobile device or cell phone. Disappeared

Vdisk Waste Finder - report which disks are over-allocated

Plugin Wizard for vSphere vCenter - allows you to register websites or web portals within your vCenter VI Client.

Vizioncore vConverter SC - 4.2 - Freeware enterprise-class P2V and V2V solution that significantly reduces the time and effort in converting servers. Replaced with vConverter DR which is not free.

Vizioncore vOptimizer WasteFinder - 2.2 - scans vCenter Servers (Virtual Centers) and alerts customers as to how much over allocated virtual storage they have and provides potential savings estimates if this wasted space is reclaimed.

Vizioncore vOptimizer WasteFinder - 3.0 - scans vCenter and can shrink VMDKs to reclaim storage and can also realign VMDKs to 64k on 2 VMs for free.

EMBOTICS V-Scout - agent-less tool for tracking and reporting on VMs in VMware VirtualCenter enabled environments (End Of Life September 2010)

Novell PlateSpin Recon 3.7 for Inventory - enables users to take a complete hardware, software and services inventory of x86-based physical servers or virtual machines running VMware or Microsoft Virtual Server with absolutely no manual effort or disruptive agent technology. No longer free.

PHD Virtual Patch Downloader 6.01 - simplifies the task of downloading patches for various ESX versions by automating the task <-- not vSphere compatible

PHD Virtual Patch Downloader 6.2.0.5 - simplifies the task of downloading patches for various ESX and ESXi versions (including vSphere) by automating the task.

VMDK Stub File Generator - The PHD Virtual Stub File Generator lets you recreate the .vmdk STUB file so that you can re-attach and access the data in the -flat.vmdk, eliminating any data loss from within the virtual disk making it very useful for vmware systems administrators and disaster recover experts.

ESX Deployment Appliance (EDA) - an appliance dedicated to deploying ESX servers fast and easy. It has a scriptbuilder to quickly create %post-scripts.

VKernel AppVIEW - Monitor your five most important VMs and see detailed data on how these applications are running in your virtual environment. Read my latest blog post VKernel AppVIEW and Your Hidden VI Issues

Loadstorm - utility to generate CPU and/or memory load within a virtual machine. Great for testing out DRS

vmClient - a lightweight tool which enables you to control the power of your virtual machines, it’s also capable of presenting the MKS console of your virtual machines (Read More)

vFoglight QuickView - performance monitoring solution that provides essential alerts and data to enable administrators to quickly detect, diagnose and resolve critical issues within the virtual infrastructure.

VKernel StorageVIEW - instant visibility into the top five host/datastore pairs and their associated VMs with the highest latency.

Xangati Free - VMs, networks, storage, apps, end-user devices in one pane of glass. Real-time continuous UI with ability to DVR record anything. Rich historical reporting on VM and application activity

Solarwinds SAN Monitor - Gain Visibility into Storage Performance & Stay Ahead of SAN Slowdowns

CloudCleaner v2.5 - Luke Terheyden of VMware, coded a clean-up tool for vSphere environments prepared and managed by VMware vCloud Director. Now a VMware Labs Fling

VMTurbo Monitor - Discover all physical and virtual resources, View virtual infrastructure hotspots at a glance through a color-coded heat map, Identify overutilized and underutilized resources, Keep your virtual infrastructure healthy while assuring application performance Rolled into the Pay for Product VMTurbo Monitor

VMTurbo Watchdog - detects and troubleshoots problems in real time and helps you analyzes their impact. Rolled into the Pay for Product VMTurbo Monitor

VMVision Manager - A new way to view the virtual machines in your environment

vDisk Informer - demonstrates which virtual disks have potentially wasted space on them and which virtual disks are misaligned causing a performance impact

VMTurbo Performance and Efficiency Reporter - Free Right-sizing and Six Other Actionable Reports

Hyper9 Search Plug-in - Enables users to jump directly to a VM in the Hyper9 Virtualization Manager for a VI3 or vSphere 4.0 client. Disappeared. No clue where where Solarwinds hid all the Hyper-9 stuff.

VMware Scanner 1.4 - scan for VMware Servers (ESX, ESXi, VirtualCenter and VMware Server). It uses the VMware API to identify a VMware server and query the product name, version and build number.

ESXi Customizer - automates the process of customizing the ESXi install-ISO with drivers that are not originally included

UBERAlign - free and powerful tool to resolve alignment of VMs

Thinware vBackup - an actual FREE backup solution for virtual infrastructure that can be easily implemented in any environment.

VMware vSphere Visio Stencils - Box Shots, Icons, and Products. Get them all here.

Veeam Backup & Replication (2 socket license) - If you are a VMware vExpert, VMware Certified Professional (VCP), VMware Certified Instructor (VCI) or VMware User Group (VMUG) member, you can get a FREE 2-socket NFR license for your home or work lab.

VMTurbo Community Edition - a complete suite of Virtual Infrastructure Monitoring capabilities that also includes reporting. Seen many times on the top 10 Free Tools edition.

VKernel vScope Explorer - Enterprise wide visualization of performance, capacity and efficiency issues across multiple vCenters and resources

vCenter Plug-Ins

vSphere Plugin Wizard 2.0 - create a tabbed plugin of your favorite website or admin page inside vCenter

Hyper9 GuessMyOS Plug-in - replaces generic VM icons in the VI3 and vSphere4 client inventory trees with OS-specific icons for both Windows and Linux guests. Disappeared. No clue where where Solarwinds hid all the Hyper-9 stuff.

vSphere Client RDP Plug-in - Xtravirt vSphere RDP Plug-in provides integration of the Windows Remote Desktop tool with the VMware vSphere Client.

sshAutoConnect vCenter Plug-in - creates a direct SSH icon to your ESXi hosts using PuTTy

Auto Deploy GUI - a front end interface to the Auto Deploy/Stateless infrastructure

vCloud Connector - lets you view, operate on and transfer your computing resources across vSphere and vCloud Director in your private cloud environment as well as public clouds from vCloud Service Providers. Walkthru provided by Chris Colotti

Scripting tools

vEcoShell - enables IT administrators to unlock the full potential of their virtual infrastructure and reduce the daily operating costs of managing multi-platform environments. Fostered and supported by The Virtualization EcoShell Initiative (VESI) - an online community-driven Web site sponsored by Vizioncore - the Virtualization EcoShell is enhanced by the participation of community members through the exchange of new ideas, value-add services and extensible scripts (PowerCLI) - Project is dead and now PowerGUI is the predecessor.

PowerGUI - a GUI for all those neat powershell scripts :)

VESI PowerPack V3 - A huge power pack developed by Alan Renouf for vEcoShell that is more than just a one-trick pony tool (PowerCLI). Now held at PowerGUI VMware Community PowerPack

PowerGUI VMware Community PowerPack - everything from the VESI PowerPack v3 and much much more!

vGhetto - a nice consolidation of all the scripts written by William Lam and some members of the VMTN community (VMware vSphere CLI & Perl)

Image Builder & Auto Deploy Powerpack - a PowerGUI Powerpack which enables us as VMware admins to have a graphical interface to Image Builder and Auto Deploy which are currently released as PowerShell snap-ins only.

Free tools brought to you by VMware

VMark - Get an accurate measurement of application performance in virtualized environments with VMmark, the industry's first virtualization benchmark for x86-based computers

vCenter Converter - of course we all know this appliance for easy P2V migrations

vSphere Management Assistant - allows administrators and developers to run scripts and agents to manage ESX/ESXi and vCenter Server systems.

PowerCLI - a powerful command line tool that lets you automate all aspects of vSphere management, including network, storage, VM, guest OS and more.

VMware Support Toolbar - have a direct way for all the necessary links, downloads, RSS feed news for all things from VMware. Compatible w/ Firefox, IE, and Safari

VMware SiteSurvey - Produces a report showing hardware compatibility and software configuration compatibility with advanced VMware features such as Fault Tolerance.

CPU Identification Utility - Displays CPU features for VMotion compatibility, EVC and indicates 64-bit VMware support.

VMware Studio - an integrated development tool that packages software applications into virtual appliances and vApps that are ready to run and optimized for VMware product platforms and the cloud.

VMware vCenter Update Manager 4.1 Sizing Estimator - get the right answer to your question whether to install the VMware vCenter Update Manager database on the same DB as vCenter DB or not. And also if yes or not to install VUM at the same host as the vCenter Server host

VMware Compliance Checker for vSphere - Check the compliance of your IT infrastructure against specific standards and best practices that are applicable for the environment

VMware vCenter Orchestrator Appliance - Begin automating your vSphere environment

Wavemaker - a rapid application development environment for building, maintaining and modernizing business-critical Web 2.0 applications

Free Tools From VMware Labs

(I put a * next to tools I feel are worthy of being everyday tools.... note from Pable Roesch from VMware: these tools are not even in beta, these are more like science experiments w/ out any strings attached)

Apache Pivot - Like most modern development platforms, Pivot provides a comprehensive set of foundation classes that together comprise a "framework". These classes form the building blocks upon which more complex and sophisticated applications can be built.

Dynamo RIO - exports an interface for building dynamic tools for a wide variety of uses: program analysis and understanding, profiling, instrumentation, optimization, translation, etc.

esxplot - * GUI based tool that lets you explore the data collected by esxtop in batch mode.

Onyx - * standalone application that serves as a proxy between the vSphere Client and the vCenter Server. It monitors the network communication between them and translates it into an executable PowerShell code. Later this code could be modified and saved into a reusable function or script.

SVGA Sonar - demo application for SVGADevTap

vApprun - vApp features become available to both Workstation and Fusion users

vCMA - * VMware vCenter Mobile Access (vCMA) - vCMA allows you to monitor and manage VMware Infrastructure from your mobile phone with an interface that is optimized for such devices.

VGC - * VMware Guest Console, too many cool things to list

VI Java - vSphere Java API is a set of Java libraries that sits on top of existing vSphere SDK Web Services interfaces

Virtual USB Analyzer - free and open source tool for visualizing logs of USB packets, from hardware or software USB sniffer tools

Weasel - insert the ESX Installation DVD, this program guides you through the steps of network configuration, disk selection, etc. Or it can perform an automated install based on a script similar to Redhat kickstart scripts.

IOBlazer - a multi-platform storage stack micro-benchmark.

PXE Manager for vCenter - enables ESXi host state (firmware) management and provisioning

Thinapped vSphere Client - Run vSphere client 4.1 in a snap. No install, just download the EXE and double-click.

vCenter XVP Manager and Converter - provides basic virtualization management capabilities for non-vSphere hypervisor platforms towards enabling centralized visibility and control across heterogeneous virtual infrastructures

VMware Auto Deploy - supports automatic PXE boot and customization of large numbers of ESXi systems

Boomerang - allows you to use multiple vSphere servers simultaneously

I/O Analyzer - a simple and standardized way of measuring storage performance in a VMware vSphere virtualized environments.

ESX System Analyzer - help administrators plan a migration from ESX to ESXi

CloudCleaner - It selectively (or completely) removes all vCD-created virtual machines, resource pools, network pools, and networks. It can also unprepare hosts that have been prepared by vCD.

InventorySnapshot - allows a user to "snapshot" a given vCenter inventory configuration and then reproduce it.

vCD-nclient - aims to be a quick start for using the new Notifications feature in vCloud Director v1.5.

Auto Deploy GUI - a front end interface to the Auto Deploy/Stateless infrastructure

VMware View

vAudit 1.5 - a utility for VMware View environments (3.01 and 3.1). The tool will display when your users are logging in to their virtual machines and it can also display and unsuccessful login attempts

VDI Calculator - VDI calculator is targeted for VMware View designs, however you can use the calculator for any VDI running on top of vSphere infrastructure

Quest vWorkspace Desktop Optimizer - 40 optimizations to tweak your golden image.

PCoIP Log Viewer 2.0 - provides capabilities to visualize and analyze PCoIP performance metrics collected from PCoIP server log files and real-time WMI counters.

TS Tweaker - This Application will allow you to tweak some common registry changes to optimise Terminal Server

Virtual Storage Appliances (VSA)

Celerra UBER VSA v3 – A VSA of EMC's Celerra

UBER VNX (NFS) v1 - A VSA of EMC's VNX currently only working with NFS

Nexenta - VSA of Nexenta

NetApp VSA - must login to your NetApp Account to download and must be a NetApp customer

OpenFiler - OpenFiler

FreeNAS - FreeNAS

StarWind Free Edition - iSCSI SAN with Deduplication