0 vSphere Editions and Features

admin@ozvms.com (Administrator) — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 23:53:25 +0000

The different versions of vSphere are Standard, Advanced, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus. If you are an existing VI3 customer covered by SnS and licensed for VI3 Enterprise you will be transitioned to vSphere Enterprise Edition.

If you then want to take advantage of the distributed network switch, use a third party distributed switch or host profiles you will have to upgrade to Enterprise Plus.

The different versions have different featuresets and limits. The table below identifies which feature is included in what edition.

Featureset	vSphere Standard	vSphere Advanced	vSphere Enterprise	vSphere Enterprise Plus
Host Profiles	NO	NO	NO	YES
vNetwork Distributed Switch	NO	NO	NO	YES
DRS/DPM	NO	NO	YES	YES
Storage vMotion	NO	NO	YES	YES
Fault Tolerance	NO	YES	YES	YES
Data Recovery	NO	YES	YES	YES
vShield Zones	NO	YES	YES	YES
Hot Add	NO	YES	YES	YES
vMotion	NO	YES	YES	YES
Thin Provisioning	NO	YES	YES	YES
vSMP	4-way SMP	4-way SMP	4-way SMP	4-way SMP
HA	YES	YES	YES	YES
vCenter Update Manager	YES	YES	YES	YES
vStorage API's	YES	YES	YES	YES
vCenter Server Agent	YES	YES	YES	YES
ESX/ESXi	YES	YES	YES	YES
Core limit per CPU	6 Cores Per CPU	12 Cores Per CPU	6 Cores Per CPU	12 Cores Per CPU
Memory Limit per Host	256GB	256GB	256GB	No Limit

VCP on vSphere

admin@ozvms.com (Administrator) — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 02:10:01 +0000

The VMware Certification website has released the information around certification and paths to VCP on vSphere. This was leaked from the beta program by some other bloggers on the vSphere launch date but is now confirmed and not NDA.
There are multiple options and paths depending on where you sit with your current education and certification path. You may be a VCP on 2.x or you may be a VCP on VI3 or you may have sat a course. Each of these requires a slightly different path so read carefully.

The exam will be released in Beta 30 days after the GA date. So this means it should be available around the 21st of June 2009. The courses will be released shortly after.

Basically, the short of it is :

If you are already a VCP on VI3 (most of you) then you really only need to sit the VCP on vSphere 4 Exam and it must be done before the 31st of December 2009, after that date you will need to sit the "What's New" class in order to upgrade.
If you are a VCP on ESX 2.x, then you can sit the VI3 exam. Pass that and then you can sit the VCP on vSphere 4 Exam, once again this option is only available until the 31st of December 2009. After that date you would need to sit the "What's New" class in order to upgrade
If you are NOT VCP on anything, then you do need to sit the VMware vSphere "Install, Configure Manage Course" or the "VMware vSphere 4: Fast Track" class and then sit the VCP on vSphere 4 Exam. Both of these courses are not currently available and not expected until after late June 2009.
If you are not a VCP but have attended one of the VI3 courses (Install & Configure; Deploy Secure and Analyze or fast track) then you can take the VI3 exam, and the the VCP on vSphere 4 exam OR sit the vSphere 4 "What's New" and take the VCP on vSphere 4 Exam.

The full details of the associated requirements and course materials can be found at the VMware Certification Website.

VirtualCenter vpxd command line switches

admin@ozvms.com (Administrator) — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 07:56:37 +0000

It is a little known fact that the vpxd.exe executable has some powerful command line switches.

The vpxd.exe file is actually the VirtualCenter server daemon and the process that is launched when the VMware VirtualCenter service is started.

To access the command line switches, the process must NOT be running. This means stopping the VMware VirtualCenter service if it is running.

Once you have stopped the vpxd.exe process, open a command line and browse to the C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\VirtualCenter Server\ directory.

Then run the following command to display all of the relevant commands.

C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\VirtualCenter Server>vpxd.exe -h

Usage: vpxd.exe [FLAGS]

Flags:

-r Register VMware VirtualCenter Server

-u Unregister VMware VirtualCenter Server

-s Run as a standalone server rather than a Service

-c Print vmdb schema to stdout

-b Recreate database repository

-f cfg Use the specified file instead of the default vpxd.cfg

-l licenseKey Store license key in ldap and assign it to VirtualCenter

-e feature Set the feature to be in use for VirtualCenter. This option takes only one feature at a time.

-p Reset the database password

-v Print the version number to stdout

Thanks to a friendly VMware SE for the idea of sharing this on the site.

What is a cloud, do you really know ?

admin@ozvms.com (Administrator) — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 04:27:39 +0000

A definition of a cloud's and the related operating systems that I have seen published from VMware is as follows :

"Cloud Operating System
A cloud operating system is a new category of software that is specifically designed to holistically manage large collections of infrastructure – CPUs, storage, networking – as a seamless, flexible and dynamic operating environment. Analogous to the operating system that manages the complexity of an individual machine, the cloud operating system manages the complexity of a datacenter. Although alternative approaches may be pursued, VMware believes that virtualization is the key underpinning technology to enable the cloud.

Internal Cloud
An internal cloud is a cloud infrastructure provided within the internal IT environment, which brings the benefits of cloud computing to internal IT service providers. Gartner refers to an internal cloud as a private cloud.

External Cloud
An external cloud is a cloud infrastructure that is owned and managed by an external IT service provider, such as a hosting or software-as-a-service (SAAS) provider. This is often referred to as a public cloud infrastructure as well.
Virtual Private Cloud
A virtual private cloud is a cloud computing environment that spans internal and external cloud infrastructure, presenting a seamless, managed cloud to the business. "

Wikipedia quotes cloud computing as :

"Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet"

The over the internet term is a bit ambiguous and incorrect in my humble opinion.
I prefer something like this :

"Cloud Computing is about dynamic scalable resources, provisioned on demand to meet the needs of an end user"

The best site I have seen for demystifying the FUD and actually educating people on what a cloud is http://www.rackspace.co.uk where the image below has been taken from.

VMware vSphere General Availability

admin@ozvms.com (Administrator) — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 22:51:20 +0000

General Availability for VMware vSphere will be the 21st of May 2009.

Up until that time, any purchased of VMware Enterprise products will be directed at the current Virtual Infrastructure Suite known as VI3. This includes VMware ESX Server and VMware VirtualCenter Server.

At the 21st of May 2009, you will not be able to purchase any more software licenses for Virtual Infrastructure 3. All customers with current subscription will automatically be entitled to a vSphere license enabling an upgrade.

When talking about licensing, it can be quite confusing. There are three components to a VMware license and for clarity these have been identified in this article as.

The "software licenses" product that is sold which is subject to the GA date.

The "activation code" is based on the license sold and affected by the GA date.

The "License key" which is generated through the portal once the license is purchased can be upgraded or downgraded to ease the transition.

What does this mean for you ?

If you are an existing VI3 customer and have current SnS, then you have to do nothing and can upgrade when you want.
If you are an existing VI3 customer and want to purchase new licensing after May 21st, then you will get a vSphere software license and it will place you in a position where you either need to upgrade or generate a downgraded license key through the portal to VI3.

If you are not an existing VI3 customer and purchase before May 21st then you get VI3 software license with the upgrade software license after May 21st due to your SnS subscription.
If you are not an existing VI3 customer and purchase after May 21st then you will be purchasing a vSphere software license but can generate an VI3 license key.

If you are an existing customer and have let you SnS lapse, then get it fixed!

vSphere Pricing and Licensing

admin@ozvms.com (Administrator) — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 22:38:03 +0000

vSphere recommended retail pricing has been released and is outlined below.

This is RRP and not actually the "buy" price that you can get it on the street for, keep in mind that partners can discount a certain amount based on the partner level.
Additionally, expect to see promotional pricing and bundles coming along but not straight away. The pricing below is for licensing only with the exception of vSphere Essentials, it is the ONLY version that comes with one year of free subscription. It does not come with any free support. All licensing must be purchased with SnS (support and subscription), so that also needs to be in your budget.

Keep in mind that this is also a per processor basis license price and that the CPU's must fall within the licensing and multicore policy outlined by VMware.

Small Business vSphere versions

VMware vSphere Essentials = US $995

VMware vSphere Essentials Plus = US $2995

Medium and Enterprise vSphere versions

VMware vSphere Standard = US $795

VMware vSphere Advanced = $2245

VMware vSphere Enterprise = $2875

VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus = $3495

To manage the vSphere infrastructure and unlock some of the features available you will additionally need to purchase licensing for VMware vCenter. The pricing for vCenter is outlined below.

VMware vCenter Pricing

VMware vCenter Server Foundation = $1495

VMware vCenter Server Standard = $4995

vSphere Multicore Licensing Policy

admin@ozvms.com (Administrator) — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 02:28:47 +0000

VMware vSphere is licensed on a per cpu socket basis with differing versions available. Each physical CPU socket can contain multiple CPU cores.

Assuming the CPU core count falls within the current revision of the VMware Multicore Pricing and Licensing policy and the relevant vSphere license, then only one license is needed per socket.

The multicore policy is up to six cores per processor which is also known as hexacore processors. The VMware Multicore Pricing and Licensing Policy page also contains the following text :

"Does this policy apply to all future multi-core systems? In other words, what happens when 8-core chips are available? This policy applies only to dual-, quad- and hexa-core processors. VMware will revisit its licensing policies as x86 processors with a greater number of cores become available."

VMware has already documented the requirements and maximum core numbers in the different versions of vSphere in the related vSphere licensing document.

The maximum cores for the different versions are :

vSphere Standard - 6 core maximum per physical socket
vSphere Advanced - 12 core maximum per physical socket
vSphere Enterprise - 6 core maximum per physical socket
vSphere Enterprise Plus - 12 core maximum per physical socket

VMware's current policy and tightening of the core restrictions in the different versions of vSphere is a direct representation of how powerful CPU processing power has become. There have been astonishing performance results from Nehalem and reports from the field of customers downsizing the amount of VMware Licensing they have because they have hardware refreshed and do not require as many physical CPU's. This is due to the more powerful CPU's and larger memory limitations allowing much higher consolidation ratio's.

Hyper-V vs ESX - Battle rages on

admin@ozvms.com (Administrator) — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 11:47:41 +0000

While browsing the internet tonight, I stumled across a very lengthy article @ http://www.realtime-windowsserver.com/virtualization/2009/04/how_to_correctly_explain_the_a_1.htm
The core focus of this article was to profess Hyper-V's Efficiency over ESX.

This article was written in response to a well known site administrator and readers comment.

"Many seem to believe that Hyper-V is just Virtual Server 2008. However, I think the main problem is the term "bare metal". What does it really mean? As far as I know any kind of hardware visualization software depends on some kind of underlying operating system. ESX depends on a modified version of Red Hat Linux. But there seems to be a difference in the way Hyper-V and ESX depend on the underlying OS. "

In particular the "ESX depends on a modified version of Red Hat Linux" concerned me greatly, not because it was only incorrect but it was probably one of the only things that was not addressed in the lengthy response. Thankfully a HUGE amount of readers identified this and placed numerous comments in the pages below including someone claiming to be a VMware employee (Randy Robertson). This person stated :

"This is mostly true. With ESX, Redhat is NOT a critical component of the system. No VM I/O goes through the Redhat Console OS. With Hyper-V ALL guest I/O goes through the parent partition. What that means is that if the parent parition gets hacked, not only can your all of your VMs crash, the parent partition could arbitrarily snoop/rewrite any guest I/O such as network traffic. All of your guest OS's are as weak from a stability and security standpoint as the parent partition. To that extend that parent partition _is_ the hypervisor, since the hypervisor by itself will not function.

With ESXi, not only does ESX not depend on a Redhat Console OS for management, there is no Redhat console OS altogether. The Busybox environment is NOT a smaller Linux environment, it is a native ESX environment. With ESXi there literally is NO Linux kernel present anywhere on the system.

ESX does run drivers in the hypervisor directly, but there is no practical difference between this and the Hyper-V approach since a crash in Hyper-V driver in the parent partition DOES bring down the entire host. VMware does extensive QA on certified HCL parts to avoid buggy drivers bringing down the entire platform as might happen if you were to take advantage of the support for odd-ball devices on Hyper-V.

-- VMware employee"

I ran across another couple of interesting snippets from the main page that were definately worth calling out, feel free to trackback to the original site and post your own comments.

"Hyper-V is considered "microkernalized" because its drivers are all installed into its administrative OS and not into the hypervisor itself. For that reason, Hyper-V's hypervisor is only around 260K in size as compared to ESX's 32M. I usually joke with people at this point that, "with a hypervisor of this size, we're talking about Atari 2600-type coding here. It is extremely small, extremely optimized. The smaller the hypervisor, the faster it can be due to code optimizations, the more secure it can be due to fewer interface endpoints and sheer code itself, which equals what amounts to a more bombproof solution."

"ESX's hypervisor is also extremely small and extremely optimized, but there's simply more to it. It is considered "monolithic" because all of its device drivers exist within its hypervisor."

The interesting thing here is that the comparison made is not based on vSphere which is now the industry benchmark, so it must be a moot point. Definately fun watching the chatter though.

vSphere Networking Enhancements and Features

admin@ozvms.com (Administrator) — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 04:18:59 +0000

Yesterday I covered the detail associated with the launch of VMware's vSphere product and that it not only delivered HUGE performance gains, but had over 150 new capabilities that were not present in previous software products, such as VMware's Virtual Infrastructure.

A number of these enhancements have taken place at the switching and networking layer.
vSphere 4 has claimed to be able to deliver enough network I/o to saturate a 10Gbps for transmit and recieve, this is primarily due to the direct improvements for the VMkernel TCP/IP stack.

One of the capabilities that is included in vSphere is VMXNET Generation 3 or VMXNET3. It has additional features such as :

VLAN Off-loading
Large ring sizes for TX/RX - this is able to be configured from within the virtual machines
TCP Segmentation offloading over IPv6
IPv6 Checksums
Windows 2008 side scaling support - enabled through the virtual machine on the adapters properties tab

The most exciting functionality in networking enhancements for vSphere is the distributed switch, which allows configuration of one vNetwork Switch for multiple hosts.
A distributed vNetwork Switch is the key feature that allows the scalability enhancements on the network side and opens up a world of possibilities that featuresets like Fault Tolerance leverage.

The vNetwork switch is also the basis of which the Cisco Nexus series switching is built upon, allowing administrators who are familiar with Cisco switching to expand upon the inbuilt switching featuresets, and integrate the virtual switching environment tightly into the datacenter. This has Operational benefits as well, reducing the time required to ramp up to vSphere and the next generation datacentre.
In summary there are three types of vNetwork switch options available for vSphere.

VMware vNetwork Standard Switch

The best description of this switch is that is is a host only switch, and has carries through all of same capabilities that a vSwitch in ESX 3.5 had plus some additions.

VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS)

The vDS is an extends the capabilities of the vNetwork standard switch because it is a single switch that is distributed across multiple servers in the datacenter.

Cisco Nexus Series Switches

The Nexus is a virtual switch developed in partnership with VMware and Cisco that allows extension of the capabilities that the VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch adds. The extensions to the capabilities are nothing short of astounding and include :

IGMPv3 Snooping
Virtual PortChannels
Link Aggregation Control Protocol
Source and Destination MAC addresses for load balancing
Source and destination port IP for load balancing
Additional hashing options for load balancing
Differentiated Services Code Point (DCSP) for QOS
Type of service for QOS
Class of service for QOS
Local PVLAN enforcement
Access Control Lists (ACLs)
IP Source Guard
Dynamic Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) Inspection (DAI)
Switched Port Analyzer (SPAN)
Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) v3 Read and Write
Packet Capture and Analysis
RADIUS and TACACS support

More detail on all of these featuresets can be obtained via VMware's website and Cisco's website, but there is bound to be an option to suit your roadmap and strategy.

Efficiency, Control and Choice - vSphere Launch Review

admin@ozvms.com (Administrator) — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 09:14:59 +0000

As promised, here are my notes from the vSphere launch and some of my thoughts mixed in for good measure.

The launch opened with quite an impressive marketing video, the video described vSphere as "a revolutionary step and an evolutionary approach" with vSphere being the "first cloud operating system" and both of these items are true.

Immediately after the video, Paul Maritz was welcomed to the stage to talk about vSphere and he was clearly excited. During the time that Paul was on stage, it was clear that he is truly passionate about VMware and vSphere. Paul went on to describe vSphere as a product that "speaks to a hunger", and clearly represented the fact that vSphere is an evolution that extends beyond innovation.

Many more big names got on stage to talk about vSphere and it's capabilities and potential impact that it will have on the IT industry including Steve Herrod (CTO and VP VMware), John Chambers (Cisco), Pat Gelsinger (Intel), James Mouton (HP) and Michael Dell (Dell). One of the key items that was reinforced through the whole launch event was the fact that with vSphere there is not a single workload that cannot be 100 percent virtualised. This was demonstrated in a technical demo, and reinforced via statements and benchmarks from multiple presenters. In particular, comment was made around the workloads such as Oracle, and SQL of high transactional nature.

Steve Herrod announced that General Availability (GA) for the vSphere product set will be this quarter, and described the amount of effort that went into creation of the ground breaking cloud computing operating system. There were over 1000 engineers involved, 3 million engineering hours and all of this work led to over 150 new capabilities and featuresets over VI 3.5.

Steve led a demonstration outlining some of the key features that lead to the efficiency, control and choice that vSphere delivers including :

Host Profiles - The ability to standardise configurations, identify deviation from these configurations and the ability to remediate based on deviation.
Fault Tolerance - A shadow virtual machine replica running in lockstep to protect a virtual machine with zero dowtime and self healing properties
VMsafe API's - Including vShield Zones allowing a distinct level of trust and confidentiality
Storage VMotion - Now available through the GUI and therefore widely usable, it appears to have finally grown up.
Thin Provisioning and other storage related features such as hot extents and hot adds into virtual machines

There are many more features than this available and much more detail can be described on the featureset, but the level Steve went to was appropriate for the launch. He ran a demonstration of the fault tolerance with a blackberry server. The different versions and pricing was also discussed at a high level, and of particular note was the entry point price of only $166 per CPU for the essentials package targetting small business.

Michael Dell had some interesting comments to make, explaining his vision that the crisis and the economic downturn is presenting an opportunity. He explained that IT departments today are spending 1 dollar to acquire technology and 8 dollars to manage it which not sustainable. Variation in infrastructure was identified as a killing blow, and a key feature that appeals with vSphere is the standardisation opportunities that it brings to the datacentre.

It must be mentioned that at many times during the launch, the team that created vSphere was credited for the success they have achieved and the success that vSphere will enable the company to achieve in the future.