Get 4 Free whitepapers in one kit

There is free download offer from Tradepub which you might want to check. In fact, when registering for this download, you’ll get  4 Free Whitepapers.

This 4 selection White papers brings some questions and answers about the TOP mistakes when it comst to virtualization, gives some WAN optimization tips, talks about desktop virtualization from any device. And there is also one paper which talk Hyper-V.

In this Single Request Download you’ll get those 4 Whitepapers:

- 14 Common Virtualization Mistakes – And How To Avoid Them
- WAN Optimization Gives Rise to Edge Virtual Server Infrastructure
- Desktop Virtualization: A Cost-Effective First Step For Creating a Virtualized Desktop Experience Anytime, Anywhere, Any Device
- Microsoft Hyper-V Backup and Recovery Best Practices

This is a free offer provided by Tradepub, and which you can also find in my Free Virtualization Content section of my website. When you get there, there is a collapse menu which enables you to choose the sub-section you need. For example you can drill down through Information Technology Section > Servers and server OS > Virtualization… to get to your favorite topic.

You might also be interested in subscribing to our website via RSS or by E-mail. I hope that you enjoy this small selection of resources.

You might also be interested in those related posts from my website:

• How-to set prices for Private or Public Clouds
• Preparing for vSphere 5′s capacity and performance impacts
• Get the vMotion working right with OpsCheck which help you to check your configuration
• Great tip how-to boot from USB stick inside of VMware Workstation
• Free Virtualization Kit from VMware to download

This post was originaly posted at www.vladan.fr by Vladan SEGET. Newly released VMware vSphere 5 Training - VCP-510. Don't have a lab to prepare for your VCP? Try to learn with those High quality DVD training package. Read my Article on the Release. Prepare to pass your VCP-510 exam with those learning courses done by David Davis and Elias Khnaser.. Check my home lab. Do you want to get trained by VMware Education? See the whole Public Catalog

You can subscribe for Free by RSS or follow me on Twitter. or see me at Facebook.

There is an alternate way to configure DHCP for Razor and I have created a Wiki page on the Razor project to walk your through setting it up.

Go here to read the page: https://github.com/puppetlabs/Razor/wiki/Alternate-Pre-boot-Options-for-Compatibility

.nick

Firstly the script was written using the VDS PowerShell fling (Check it out, its cool), some people were not able to use this fling in production systems as it is not officially supported by VMware.

Secondly the fling only supported VDS and not the Nexus 1kv, some customers had this issue with the N1KV so needed a resolution.

The good news…

I have re-written the script to no longer use the fling but instead use the raw API’s, this means all you now need is PowerCLI 5.0.1 and you can run the below script in the same way as before to check and remediate for issues.

Thanks goes to Luc who came up with an easy way to check for free ports on the VDS here.

Remember this does not fix the issue completely, only a patch from VMware will do that but it does however tell you if you have the issue and plug the gap temporarily.

Just as a reminder, here is how the script is used:

Using the script

To check the VMs we can easily pipe a list of VMs into our function which can be seen below.  This can be all VMs in a Cluster, all VMs on a particular host or any other list of VMs you can think of, for my examples below I have shown all VMs attached to a vCenter

As you can see from the above screenshot, all VMs are fine apart from VM12 which currently has the problem described in Duncan’s article,  now to fix the issue.

We can use the same script with a –Fix parameter which allows us to fix the issue, when fixing the issue the script will move each of the VMs network connections to a new port on the same portgroup and then move it back again to its original port.   If no free ports are available the script will expand your portgroup temporarily and then decrease the ports when finished.

As you can see from the above screenshot, the issue has now been resolved for this VM by using the function with the –Fix parameter and further running of the script in test mode will show all are now fine.

The Script

Function Get-FreeVDSPort ($VDSPG) {
	$nicTypes = "VirtualE1000","VirtualE1000e","VirtualPCNet32","VirtualVmxnet","VirtualVmxnet2","VirtualVmxnet3"
	$ports = @{}

	# Get all the portkeys on the portgroup
	$VDSPG.ExtensionData.PortKeys | Foreach {
		$ports.Add($_,$VDSPG.Name)
	}

	# Remove the portkeys in use  Get-View
	$VDSPG.ExtensionData.Vm | Foreach {
	    $VMView = Get-View $_
		$nic = $VMView.Config.Hardware.Device | where {$nicTypes -contains $_.GetType().Name -and $_.Backing.GetType().Name -match "Distributed"}
	    $nic | where {$_.Backing.Port.PortKey} | Foreach {$ports.Remove($_.Backing.Port.PortKey)}
	}

	# Assign the first free portkey
	if ($ports.Count -eq 0) {
		$null
	} Else {
		$ports.Keys | Select -First 1
	}
}

Function Set-VDSPGNumPorts ($VDSPG, $NumPorts) {
	$spec = New-Object VMware.Vim.DVPortgroupConfigSpec
    $spec.numPorts = $NumPorts
	$spec.ConfigVersion = $VDSPG.ExtensionData.Config.Configversion
    $VDSPG.ExtensionData.ReconfigureDVPortgroup($spec)
}

Function Test-VDSVMIssue {
	Param (
		[parameter(Mandatory=$true,ValueFromPipeline=$true,ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName=$true)]
        [PSObject[]]$VM,
		[switch]$Fix
	)
	Process {
		Foreach ($VMachine in $VM){
			Foreach ($NA in ($VMachine | Get-NetworkAdapter)) {
				$VMName = $VMachine.Name
				If (($NA.ExtensionData.Backing.GetType()).Name -eq "VirtualEthernetCardDistributedVirtualPortBackingInfo") {
					$PortKey = $NA.ExtensionData.Backing.Port.PortKey
					$vSwitchID = $NA.ExtensionData.Backing.Port.SwitchUUID
					$Datastore = (($VMachine.ExtensionData.Config.Files.VmPathName).split("]")[0]).Replace("[","")
					$filename = "$($datastore):\.dvsData\$vSwitchID\$PortKey"
					if (-not (Get-PSDrive $datastore -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue)) {
						$NewDrive = New-PSDrive -Name $Datastore -Location (Get-Datastore $Datastore) -PSProvider VimDatastore -Root '\'
					}
					$filecheck = Get-ChildItem -Path $filename -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
					if ($filecheck) {
						Write-Host -ForegroundColor Green "$VMName $($NA.Name) is OK"
					} Else {
						Write-Host -ForegroundColor Red "Problem found with $VMName $($NA.Name)"
						If ($Fix) {
							Write-Host -ForegroundColor Yellow "Fixing issue..."
							$VDSPG = Get-VirtualPortGroup -Distributed -Name $NA.NetworkName
							$DVPort = $null
							Write-Host -ForegroundColor Yellow "..Finding free port on $($NA.NetworkName)"
							$DVPort = Get-FreeVDSPort $VDSPG
							$Move = $True
							if (-not $DVPort) {
								Write-Host -ForegroundColor Yellow "..No free ports found on $($VDSPG.Name), adding an additional port"
								If (($VDSPG.ExtensionData.Config.Type -ne "lateBinding") -and ($VDSPG.ExtensionData.Config.Type -ne "earlyBinding")) {
									Write "Unable to add a port to $($NA.NetworkName) since dvportgroup is configured as $($VDSPG.PortBinding)"
									Write-Host -ForegroundColor Red "Problem still exists with $VMName please resolve manually"
									$Move = $false
								} Else {
									$CurrentPorts = $VDSPG.NumPorts
									$NewTotalPorts = $VDSPG.NumPorts + 1
									Set-VDSPGNumPorts -VDSPG $VDSPG -NumPorts $NewTotalPorts
									$PGAdded = $true
									$VDSPG = Get-VirtualPortGroup -Distributed -Name $NA.NetworkName
									$DVPort = Get-FreeVDSPort $VDSPG
								}
							}
							If ($Move){
								Write-Host -ForegroundColor Yellow "..Moving $($NA.Name) to another free port on $($VDSPG.Name)"
								$NA | Set-NetworkAdapter -PortKey $DVPort -DistributedSwitch $VDSPG.VirtualSwitch -Confirm:$false | Out-Null
								Write-Host -ForegroundColor Yellow "..Moving $($NA.Name) back to port $PortKey"
								$NA | Set-NetworkAdapter -PortKey $PortKey -DistributedSwitch $VDSPG.VirtualSwitch -Confirm:$false | Out-Null
								Write-Host -ForegroundColor Yellow "..Checking changes were completed"
								$filecheck = Get-ChildItem -Path $filename -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
								if ($filecheck) {
									Write-Host -ForegroundColor Green "$VMName $($NA.Name) is now fixed and OK"
								} Else {
									Write-Host -ForegroundColor Red "Problem still exists with $VMName please resolve manually"
								}
								If ($PGAdded) {
									Write-Host -ForegroundColor Yellow "..Removing the added port on $($VDSPG.Name)"
									Set-VDSPGNumPorts -VDSPG $VDSPG -NumPorts $CurrentPorts
									$PGAdded = $false
								}
							}
						}
					}
				} Else {
					Write-Host -ForegroundColor Green "$VMName is not connected to a dvSwitch so this issue is not relevant."
				}
			}
		}
		Get-PSDrive | Where { ($_.Provider -like "*VimDatastore") -and ( $_.Name -notlike "*vmstore*")} | Foreach {
			Remove-PSDrive $_ | Out-Null
		}
	}
}

# Example code to check all VMs attached to vCenter for the issue:
# Get-VM | Test-VDSVMIssue

# Example code to fix all VMs attached to vCenter:
# Get-VM | Test-VDSVMIssue -Fix

# Example code to fix all VMs in Cluster01 for the issue:
# Get-Cluster01 | Get-VM | Test-VDSVMIssue

# Example code to fix all VMs in Cluster01:
# Get-Cluster01 | Get-VM | Test-VDSVMIssue -Fix

Updated Script to remediate VDS/SvMotion issue is a post from: Virtu-Al.
Virtu-Al is one of the authors of VMware vSphere PowerCLI Reference: Automating vSphere Administration"

Buy it now from: Amazon USA Amazon UK Sybex

Keyboard Shortcuts VMware Workstation 8

To speed up the daily use of VMware Workstation, it’s good to know some keyboard shortcuts. I wanted to point out some of them that I use the most. Shortcuts that save you some time searching through the icons or menus.

There is much more than listed below but I won’t bother you to list all of them, since the not All are used on daily basis.

So here we go. Here is the first one.

CTRL  + Alt – This one is the first shortcut I ever learned on VMware Workstation, a couple of years ago…. This shortcut does free the mouse cursor from the Guest OS when the mouse “get stuck” inside of the VM.  Youll need to know this shortcut before you actually install VMware Tools inside of your guest OS. If you don’t know this shortcut, you can’t do much…

CTRL + Enter – Full Screen. You like to use Full screen? Me too. It’s excellent to “mask” your underlying OS and make to think to your friends that you’re running natively whatever operating system on your laptop..

CTRL + Alt + Righ Arrow – This is next necessary shortcut to know if you’re using Full Screen mode, since this shortcut will get you, In full screen mode, to the next powered-on virtual machine.

CTRL + Alt + Left Arrow – Same as previous one, but this time you’ll navigate to the previous powered-on virtual machine.

CTRL + Alt + Ins – If you want to log in, Sends a command to the VM in order to invoke CTRL + ALt + Del, to shut down or, depending on the guest operating system, log out of the guest operating system. This command is received by the virtual machine.

Ctrl+Shift+U – While you’re in unity mode and you need to make appear the start menu on your Guest OS system.

You can change all of those shortcuts if you go to Select Edit > Preferences > Hot Keys.  In fact when you click one of the non selected buttons there for example, to use Ctrl+Shift to release control from the current virtual machine, click the Ctrl and Shift buttons. You’ll see that the text under the hot key buttons changes as well and the new value for the hot keys is showing now…..

Enjoy.. -:)

You might also be interested in those related posts from my website:

• VMware VMA – how to change default english keyboard
• Shortcuts to help when your mouse get stuck in the VM
• How to activate the battery reporting level inside of a VM while working in Full Screen Mode
• VMware Workstation On Sale Too…40% OFF !!!
• Free online video learning courses for VMware Workstation users

This post was originaly posted at www.vladan.fr by Vladan SEGET. Newly released VMware vSphere 5 Training - VCP-510. Don't have a lab to prepare for your VCP? Try to learn with those High quality DVD training package. Read my Article on the Release. Prepare to pass your VCP-510 exam with those learning courses done by David Davis and Elias Khnaser.. Check my home lab. Do you want to get trained by VMware Education? See the whole Public Catalog

You can subscribe for Free by RSS or follow me on Twitter. or see me at Facebook.

Out of the box the “default gateway” is used as an isolation address. In most cases it is recommended to specify at least one extra isolation address. This would be done as follows:

• Right click your vSphere Cluster and select “Edit settings”
• Go to the vSphere HA section and click “Advanced options”
• Add “das.isolationaddress0″ under the option column
• And add the “IP Address” of the device you want to use as an isolation address under the value column

Now if you want to specify another isolation address you should add “das.isolationaddress1″. In total 10 isolation addresses will be used. Keep in mind that all of these will be pinged in parallel! Many seem to be under the impression that this happens sequential, but that is not the case!

Now if for whatever reason the default gateway should not be used you could disable this by adding the “das.usedefaultisolationaddress” to “false”. A usecase for this would be when the default gateway is a “non-pingable” device, in most scenarios it is not needed though to use “das.usedefaultisolationaddress”.

I hope this helps when implementing your cluster,

• Italy – Amazon.it
• France – Amazon.fr
• UK – Amazon.co.uk
• Germany – Amazon.de
• The rest – Amazon.com

Most customers I work with use FC connections to their EMC storage we’ve sold them, but today I was with a customer who has a complete DELL setup and used iSCSI to connect to their Dell Equallogic PS4000E storage over a set of Dell PowerConnect switches.  I was asked to configure the dependent hardware iSCSI nics.

The Dell PowerEdge R610 hosts had 2 Intel 82576 nics and 4 Broadcom BCM5709 nics. These BCM5709 nics offer 1Gbit networking but also dependent hardware iSCSI. A depedent hardware iSCSI adapter depends on VMware networking and iSCSI interfaces provided by VMware. You’ll notice that a dependent hardware iSCSI adapter presents it self in the ESXi configuration section under both “Network Adapters” and as a vmhba under “Storage Adapters”.

To configure the adapters for iSCSI we’ll first have to make sure which vmhba adapter is connected to what interface. Easiest is to right click the vmhba adapter and open the properties tab. Now you’ll the the mac address of this vmhba: bnx2i-00221967c604. The last part is the mac address. Next check in the network adapters list to what vmnic this is linked, in this example vmnic2. Check your network drawing and determine the IP address you want to connect to this iSCSI interface.

We’ll now create a vmkernel interface with just one vmnic connected to it. This is very important !! Where you would normally configure standby adapters, you now only add one adapter and set all other adapters to “unused”. In this specific configuration that meant setting vmnic3, vmnic4 and vmnic5 to unused and only add vmnic2 as active.

You can either use one vSwitch for all portgroups or use two vSwitches and assign one iSCSI vmkernel interface to each vSwitch. Important when using two vSwitches is that you MUST use different IP ranges on each iSCSI vmkernel interface.

• Right click the vSwitch, choose properties.
• Add the vmnic if this has not already been done.
• Edit the properties of the vSwitch and make sure you set vminc2 to unused
• Click Add and create a new vmkernel portgroup
• Name it iSCSI-1
• Enter the IP address
• Click finish

The newly created vmkernel interface shows in the vSwitch.

If your configuration (network switches / storage switches and storage interface) support Jumbo frames, you can set the MTU size on the vmkernel portgroup to 9000.

Attention: According to “Dell PowerConnect and Jumbo Frames” the Dell PowerConnect requires an MTU of 9216.

Attention: Jumbo frames are NOT supported for the BCM5709 cards in ESXi4, but there IS support for Jumbo frames on the BCM5709 cards with ESXi5 according to KB1025644.

After configuring the vmkernel interface we now need to attach the vmkernel interface to the vmhba. Switch to the Storage Adapters section and select the vmhba that correspondents to the vmnic you just configured the vmkernel interface for. Select properties and go to the second tab “Network configuration”. Now click “ADD” to connect the vmkernel interface.

Go to the next tab “Dynamic configuration” and enter the IP address of your storage you need to connect to or if needed in your case enter a static discovery on the next tab. On the first tab you can set CHAP authentication if needed. After pressing OK and a rescan of the vmhba, you should now see the LUN(s) that have been presented to your host.

To connect the second vmhba, you should follow the same steps again. Create vmkernel portgroup iSCSI-2 and now make vmnic3 (or other vmnic in your case) the only active adapter. Next add it to corresponding vmhba. Of course you want to test if iSCSI failover works after you’re done configuring. The easiest test is to just shutdown the port on the physical switch connected to the first vmhba and then see if the failover works.

See full post at: Dependent hardware iSCSI adapter on ESXi5

For those who have been living under a rock, this book will explain the ins and outs of both vSphere HA and DRS. Admission Control, Resource Pools, Limits, HA Restart Timelines… it is all in there. Pick it up!

VMware View 5.1 performance improvements.

VMware View 5.1 has been released recently. The 5.1 release brings many improvements and enhancements as I reported in my article Download and test VMware View 5.1 now. I this article I focused on the new features and integrations introduced in this release.

There has been a very good read on VROOM blog from VMware, which shows you the improvements for the end user by using simple example of drawing in in MS Paint. This simple test which can be done by anyone. The test with the two different access protocols. RDP 7 and through View 5.1.

A quick quote:

As a simple visual test of this improvement, the picture below show a user rapidly drawing a spiral in mspaint, when connecting to their remote desktop using both RDP7 and View 5.1. With RDP7, the resulting spiral is obviously formed from rough polygons, whereas, with View 5.1, the spiral is significantly smoother (while this test may seem an overly simple example, it is heavily influenced by the speed and frequency at which the client communicates with the remote desktop and clearly conveys the likely differences in scrolling and dragging performance

Network Improvements – The post outlines also other enhancement, for example to the users connected over Wi-Fi networks by using tablets or laptops, where those enhacements can be benefical for playing videos in the VDI sessions and the improvements in the networking helps to achieve up to 8 times better performance in some cases.

Thin Clients – There has been also many optimization done for Thin clients running Atom or ARM platforms. The improvements for video playback performance is improved by as much as 3X over previous versions.

PCoIP Efficiency – The improvements in the PCoIP protocol continues. Some refinements to compression protocols and general performance optimization brings more improvements in reductions in CPU consumption. There is an additional 1.3X reduction in PCoIP overheads.

You can buy VMware View 5.1 through this page.

Get the best VMware View  Training from TrainSignal.

Excellent ressource whitepaper is this VMware View 5.1 Evaluator’s Guide.

The guide is divided into the following main sections:

1. Key New Features of VMware View 5
2. Description of VMware View Components
3. Setting Up a View Evaluation Environment
4. Evaluation Tasks

Enjoy… -:)

Source: VMware VROOM! Blog

You might also be interested in those related posts from my website:

• VMware View 5.0 – performance and best practices white paper
• New Website Design of VMware Website and new product launch – VMware View 4
• VMware View 5 PCoIP Network Optimization Guide
• VMware View Client for iPad 1.2 Has been released
• How-to install VMware View Connection Server

This post was originaly posted at www.vladan.fr by Vladan SEGET. Newly released VMware vSphere 5 Training - VCP-510. Don't have a lab to prepare for your VCP? Try to learn with those High quality DVD training package. Read my Article on the Release. Prepare to pass your VCP-510 exam with those learning courses done by David Davis and Elias Khnaser.. Check my home lab. Do you want to get trained by VMware Education? See the whole Public Catalog

You can subscribe for Free by RSS or follow me on Twitter. or see me at Facebook.

If you are a VC Ops customer and have a great story to tell and don’t mind winning a free ticket and speaking at an event like VMworld I highly suggest you go for it! I have been told that during the VMTN Podcast on Wednesday May 23 @ 12PM PST more details will be shared so make sure to tune in!

Now head over to VMware.com/go/vcops-story and start winning!

How-to speed up P2V conversion by disabling SSL encryption in VMware vCenter Converter 5 Standalone.

I just found VMware KB article which guides through a possibility to disable SSL encryption in VMware vCenter Converter Standalone 5.0, during conversion process. As you might be aware, during the P2V process the copied data are encrypted by VMware vCenter Converter. This might slightly impact the performance.

This is a default setting for the VMware vCenter converter 5 standalone. What must be done is to disable SSL encryption for the converter worker. This can be done by editing the local converter-worker.xml file and restart the windows service called VMware vCenter Converter Standalone Worker.

Follow those steps:

01. Locate the converter-worker.xml file. By default it is located at:

%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\VMware\VMware vCenter Converter Standalone on Windows Vista and newer operating systems
%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Application Data\VMware\VMware vCenter Converter Standalone for older releases

Note: On my laptop running the Windows 7 x64 version, the file was located at this folder:

“C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware vCenter Converter Standalone”

02. Backup the converter-worker.xml file, just in case…..

03. Open the file in a text editor and locate the tag pair . It is located inside the tag and has a value of true. Change the value to false. Save and close the file.

04. Restart the VMware vCenter Converter Standalone Worker service on the machine.

You’re done.

Source: VMware KB Disabling SSL encryption on VMware Converter Standalone 5.0

You might also be interested in those related posts from my website:

• Vmware vCenter Converter 4.0 Standalone is out
• UPdate your free VMware Converter software
• VMware Converter 5.0 is ready for VMware Workstation 8.0
• VMware Converter Best Practices
• Download ESXi v 4.0 free of charge and update your vCenter Converter Standalone 4.0.1

This post was originaly posted at www.vladan.fr by Vladan SEGET. Newly released VMware vSphere 5 Training - VCP-510. Don't have a lab to prepare for your VCP? Try to learn with those High quality DVD training package. Read my Article on the Release. Prepare to pass your VCP-510 exam with those learning courses done by David Davis and Elias Khnaser.. Check my home lab. Do you want to get trained by VMware Education? See the whole Public Catalog

You can subscribe for Free by RSS or follow me on Twitter. or see me at Facebook.

SDRS maintenance mode impossible because “The virtual machine is pinned to a host.”

Blog post on blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/ is a post from: frankdenneman.nl

• VMware vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (VMware vMSC) is a new configuration within the VMware Hardware Compatibility List. This type of configuration is commonly referred to as a stretched storage cluster or metro storage cluster. It is implemented in environments where disaster/downtime avoidance is a key requirement. This case study was developed to provide additional insight and information regarding operation of a VMware vMSC infrastructure in conjunction with VMware vSphere. This paper will explain how vSphere handles specific failure scenarios and will discuss various design considerations and operational procedures.
  http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/10284

VMware vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (VMware vMSC) is a new configuration within the VMware Hardware Compatibility List. This type of configuration is commonly referred to as a stretched storage cluster or metro storage cluster. It is implemented in environments where disaster/downtime avoidance is a key requirement. This case study was developed to provide additional insight and information regarding operation of a VMware vMSC infrastructure in conjunction with VMware vSphere. This paper will explain how vSphere handles specific failure scenarios and will discuss various design considerations and operational procedures.

For me this is a new milestone as this is my first published white paper. I had the honor and pleasure of collaborating with Duncan Epping (DuncanYB), Ken Werneburg (@vmken), Stuart Hardman (@shard_man) and Lee Dilworth (@LeeDilworth) on this paper. Working with industry-leading experts, testing all sorts of scenario’s and listing to them analyzing and brainstorming was inspiring and very educational. Not only is this content great for customers who are interested in vSphere Metro Storage Cluster solutions, but is very educational for people who are interested in HA in general. A must read!

VMware vSphere Metro Storage Cluster Case Study Technical Paper available is a post from: frankdenneman.nl

Post from: boche.net - VMware Virtualization Evangelist

Copyright (c) 2010 Jason Boche. The contents of this post may not be reproduced or republished on another web page or web site without prior written permission.

Invitation to Dell/Sanity Virtualization Seminar

Related Posts

• April 24, 2012 -- AppAssure Webinar – The Top 3 Backup Technologies for 2012
• March 16, 2012 -- vSphere 5.0 Update 1 and Related Product Launches
• December 23, 2011 -- Veeam Offers Free NFR License for Backup & Replication v6
• November 17, 2011 -- Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP)
• November 11, 2011 -- vSphere 5 Configuration Maximums Updated For The Cloud
• November 10, 2011 -- Add ESXi to an Active Directory OU
• October 3, 2011 -- SRM 5.0 Replication Bits and Bytes
• June 27, 2011 -- Force a Simple VMware vMA Password
• June 22, 2011 -- Xangati Packs More Power in Free VMware Management Tool
• June 16, 2011 -- Disk.SchedNumReqOutstanding and Queue Depth

The new version of vOps Server Standard 5.0 from vKernel (Quest) has been released

Major update for vKernel introduces new VM tracking feature which follows the changes that has been made to VM(s) in virtual environment. Those problems were unnown to traditional physical only environments, where the CPU, Memory size was fixed due to a physical hardware. And if any changes were made, the server had to be shut down > then upgrade CPU or Memory > and power back on.

Those days are gone. In today’s large virtual environment, the changes to the VMs are operated by many admins which access the VI infrastructure simultaneously.

If you’re working in large admin team where many admins has credentials for an elevated vCenter access, then this tracking feature will be able to identify not only that there has been a change done by particular person of your admin team, but also which changes has been made by that person, in how many VMs, etc…

This very powerful function enables to track the potential changes to your virtual infrastructure, and revert back automatically in case that performance issues occurs.

Even small changes can make significant impact on part of your environment. That’s where this new tracking feature in vOps Standard will come handy. What exactly this feature provides?

What’s new in vOps Server Standard 5.0

-  Tracking VMs and virtualized storage
-  Possibility to track a difference from “Golden Image”
-  Changes organized as a Timeline
-  Rollback Changes with Right click or Automated.
-  Admin can see who made a change and when
-  Performance Changes can be identified quickly and reverted back.

Additional Enhancements:

Auto-Deployment of Reserved VM Slots – If tied to a VM template these reservations allow for VMs to be auto-deployed with the click of a button.

Manual Overrides for Automated Rightsizing – Allocations for VM vCPUs and memory can now be overridden manually for specific VMs, and then implemented with rightsizing automation.

Exclusion of Local Datastores - VM administrators can exclude local datastores when assessing storage capacity so as to only focus on the storage available in the SAN.

Efficiency Trend Reports - 12 new reports showing the trending of system resource efficiency are now available

Chargeback Enhancements – possibility to generate costs only reports for end user customers. Charging per Ghz or per vCPU usage.

The new update of vKernel vOps Server Standard 5.0 with the new functionality - the historical tracking of changes – also applies to vOps Server Enterprise version customers and it’s a free of charge update.

Here is another screenshot from the dashboard of the new update from vKernel. You can click on the image to see larger view.

As you can see, there is also a Risk column, which enables you to filter on changes which are critical.  By clicking the header of this column, you’ll see all the critical changes that has been made.

Those critical changes can be modified by the administrator.

There is also a video of What’s new in the vOps Server Standard Video, which has been recorded by Alex Rosenblat.

Source: vKernel

You might also be interested in those related posts from my website:

• Free Tool – vOPS Server Explorer, 2 in 1 product now with SearchMyVM enhanced
• vKernel’s vOps 4.0 introduced during VMword 2011
• See if your VMs are over or under provissionned – video
• Free tool to analyse latency on your Datastores
• ESX 3.5 update 4 is finaly available

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*** out take from the vSphere 5.0 Clustering Deepdive ***

vSphere 5.0 introduces many great new features, but everyone will probably agree with us that vSphere Storage DRS is most the exciting new feature. vSphere Storage DRS helps resolve some of the operational challenges associated with virtual machine provisioning, migration and cloning. Historically, monitoring datastore capacity and I/O load has proven to be very difficult. As a result, it is often neglected, leading to hot spots and over- or underutilized datastores. Storage I/O Control (SIOC) in vSphere 4.1 solved part of this problem by introducing a datastore-wide disk-scheduler that allows for allocation of I/O resources to virtual machines based on their respective shares during times of contention.

Storage DRS (SDRS) brings this to a whole new level by providing smart virtual machine placement and load balancing mechanisms based on space and I/O capacity. In other words, where SIOC reactively throttles hosts and virtual machines to ensure fairness, SDRS proactively makes recommendations to prevent imbalances from both a space utilization and latency perspective. More simply, SDRS does for storage what DRS does for compute resources.

There are five key features that SDRS offers:

• Resource aggregation
• Initial Placement
• Load Balancing
• Datastore Maintenance Mode
• Affinity Rules

Resource aggregation enables grouping of multiple datastores, into a single, flexible pool of storage called a Datastore Cluster. Administrators can dynamically populate Datastore Clusters with datastores. The flexibility of separating the physical from the logical greatly simplifies storage management by allowing datastores to be efficiently and dynamically added or removed from a Datastore Cluster to deal with maintenance or out of space conditions. The load balancer will take care of initial placement as well as future migrations based on actual workload measurements and space utilization.

The goal of Initial Placement is to speed up the provisioning process by automating the selection of an individual datastore and leaving the user with the much smaller-scale decision of selecting a Datastore Cluster. SDRS selects a particular datastore within a Datastore Cluster based on space utilization and I/O capacity. In an environment with multiple seemingly identical datastores, initial placement can be a difficult and time-consuming task for the administrator. Not only will the datastore with the most available disk space need to be identified, but it is also crucial to ensure that the addition of this new virtual machine does not result in I/O bottlenecks. SDRS takes care of all of this and substantially lowers the amount of operational effort required to provision virtual machines; that is the true value of SDRS.

However, it is probably safe to assume that many of you are most excited about the load balancing capabilities SDRS offers. SDRS can operate in two distinct modes: No Automation (manual mode) or Fully Automated. Where initial placement reduces complexity in the provisioning process, load balancing addresses imbalances within a datastore cluster. Prior to vSphere 5.0, placement of virtual machines was often based on current space consumption or the number of virtual machines on each datastore. I/O capacity monitoring and space utilization trending was often regarded as too time consuming Over the years, we have seen this lead to performance problems in many environments, and in some cases, even result in down time because a datastore ran out of space. SDRS load balancing helps prevent these, unfortunately, common scenarios by making placement recommendations based on both space utilization and I/O capacity when the configured thresholds are exceeded. Depending on the selected automation level, these recommendations will be automatically applied by SDRS or will need to be applied by the administrator.

Although we see load balancing as a single feature of SDRS, it actually consists of two separately-configurable options. When either of the configured thresholds for Utilized Space (80% by default) or I/O Latency (15 milliseconds by default) are exceeded, SDRS will make recommendations to prevent problems and resolve the imbalance in the datastore cluster. In the case of I/O capacity load balancing, it can even be explicitly disabled.

Before anyone forgets, SDRS can be enabled on fully populated datastores and environments. It is also possible to add fully populated datastores to existing datastore clusters. It is a great way to solve actual or potential bottlenecks in any environment with minimal required effort or risk.

Datastore Maintenance Mode is one of those features that you will typically not use often; you will appreciate it when you need. Datastore Maintenance Mode can be compared to Host Maintenance Mode: when a datastore is placed in Maintenance Mode all registered virtual machines, on that datastore, are migrated to the other datastores in the datastore cluster. Typical use cases are data migration to a new storage array or maintenance on a LUN, such as migration to another RAID group.

Affinity Rules enable control over which virtual disks should or should not be placed on the same datastore within a datastore cluster in accordance with your best practices and/or availability requirements. By default, a virtual machine’s virtual disks are kept together on the same datastore.

For those who want more details, Frank Denneman wrote an excellent series about Datastore Clusters which might interest you:

Part 1: Architecture and design of datastore clusters.
Part 2: Partially connected datastore clusters.
Part 3: Impact of load balancing on datastore cluster configuration.
Part 4: Storage DRS and Multi-extents datastores.
Part 5: Connecting multiple DRS clusters to a single Storage DRS datastore cluster.
Part 6: Aggregating datastores from multiple storage arrays into one Storage DRS datastore cluster.

Some other articles that might be of use:

• SDRS and Auto-Tiering solutions – The Injector (Duncan)
• Storage DRS Load Balance Frequence (Frank)
• SDRS Out-Of-Space avoidance (Frank)
• Storage vMotion and the mirror-mode driver (Duncan)

The following video will give an overview of the above mentioned features… worth checking.