With vSphere VMware introduced a percentage next to an amount of host failures. The percentage avoids the slot size issue as it does not use slots for admission control. So what does it use?

When you select a specific percentage that percentage of the total amount of resources will stay unused for HA purposes. First of all VMware HA will add up all available resources to see how much it has available. Then VMware HA will calculate how much resources are currently consumed by adding up all reservations of both memory and cpu for powered on virtual machines. For those machine that do not have a reservation a default of 256Mhz will be used for CPU and a default of 0MB+memory overhead will be used for Memory. (Amount of overhead per config type can be found on page 28 of the resource management guide.)

In other words:

((total amount of available resources – total reserved VM resources)/total amount of available resources)
Where total reserved VM resources include the default reservation of 256Mhz and the memory overhead of the VM.

Let’s use a diagram to make it a bit more clear:

Total cluster resources are 24Ghz(CPU) and 96GB(MEM). This would lead to the following calculations:

((24Ghz-(2Gz+1Ghz+256Mhz+4Ghz))/24Ghz) = 69 % available
((96GB-(1,1GB+114MB+626MB+3,2GB)/96GB= 85 % available

As you can see the amount of memory differs from the diagram. Even if a reservation has been set the amount of memory overhead is added to the reservation. For both metrics HA admission control will constantly check if the policy has been violated or not. When one of either two thresholds are reached, memory or CPU, admission control will disallow powering on any additional virtual machines. Pretty simple huh?!

The first one is the Virtu-Al VESI & PowerGui Powerpack. If you are like me, not a powercli hero, this is what you were looking for all along. Alan has bundled all his script into a Powerpack which enables you to import all his scripts at once and run them with a single click. All scripts are placed into categories which makes them easy to find. Not only can you use them you can also modify them to your needs. Of course if you do improve these scripts give some feedback to Alan so that he might be able to incorporate it into the Powerpack.

The second one is Version 3 of the daily report or vCheck as it is called as of v3. I wrote about version 1 and many people have downloaded it and are using it in their environment. The script just got better and a whole set of new features have been added. Alan was smart enough to ask around in the community what his report was lacking and incorporated all these tips in Version 3 of vCheck(previously known as the Daily Report). Again, if you feel there is anything missing don’t hesitate to leave a comment and ask Alan if he can add it… Here’s the list of new features:

• Status report to screen whilst running interactively
• At the top of the script you can now turn off any areas you do not want to report on (this makes it faster to run)
• VMs on Local storage has been changed to report VMs stored on datastores attached to only one host
• VM active alerts
• Cluster Active Alerts
• If HA Cluster is set to use host datastore for swapfile, check the host has a swapfile location set
• Host active Alerts
• Dead SCSI Luns
• VMs with over x amount of vCPUs
• vSphere check: Slot Sizes
• vSphere check: Outdated VM Hardware (Less than V7)
• VMs in Inconsistent folders (the name of the folder is not the same as the name)
• Added the number of issues to each title line

Carter can you please hand over your crown to Alan?! Thanks,

Here are the links that were dropped in the chat window for those who are interested:

• VMware – vStorage API for dataprotection
• Anton Gostev – What is VMware vStorage API?
• Chad Sakac – So, what does vStorage really mean?
• VMware – Virtual Disk Development Kit Documentation
• VMware – VDDK FAQ
• VMTN – Install VDDK on vMA
• SNIA.org – Hypervisor Storage Interfaces for Storage Optimization White Paper DRAFT rev 0.5a

There can be specific constraints or requirements (both technical and business related) which justify your decision, but if you don’t document these constraints or requirements chances are someone will change the design based on a false assumption and who knows what it will lead to…

Key results:

• Powerpath/VE provides superior load-balancing performance across multiple paths using FC or iSCSI.
• Powerpath/VE seamlessly integrates and takes control of all device I/O, path selection, and failover without the need for additional configuration.
• VMware NMP requires that certain configuration parameters be specified to achieve improved performance.

I recommend reading the whitepaper to get a good understanding of where a customer would benefit from using EMC Powerpath/VE. The whitepaper gives a clear picture of the load balancing capabilities of Powerpath/VE compared to MRU, Fixed and Round Robin.  It also shows that there’s less manual configuration to be done when using Powerpath/VE, and as just revealed by Chad Sakac on twitter an integrated patching solution will be introduced with ESX/vCenter 4.0 Update 1!

• vSphere Blog – Details on blogging contest
• vSphere Blog – Winning Blogging Contest Cycle 1
• vSphere Blog – Winning Blogging Contest Cycle 2
• vSphere Blog – Winning Blogging Contest Cycle 3
• VMware.com – What’s new in VMware vSphere Storage
• Vroom Blog – Storage performance improvements
• Virtual Geek – Thin on Thin?
• NetApp on YouTube – The finer points of dedupe
• Yellow-Bricks – 8MB Block size
• vCritical – PowerShell Prevents Datastore Emergencies
• Virtu-Al – VI Toolkit One-Liner: VM Guest Disk Sizes
• VirtualInsanity – Get Thin Provisioning working for you in vSphere
• Yellow-Bricks – Storage VMotion and moving to a Thin Provisioned disk
• NetApp on Youtube – vStorage APIs for Array integration

The answer is simple, if it is not on the VMware it has not been certified yet. Every SRA needs to go through a quality assurance process to validate/certify it. If this hasn’t been completed the SRA will not be available for download on the VMware website.

Most of the questions I received where about the EMC SRDF SRA by the way. I have been told that it should be available really soon, I am not allowed to disclose any details though but who knows Chad might chip in and give a hint…

We are looking for beta participants to test out some new vSphere features currently in development. Interested? If so, contact your VMware account team for further details.

Unfortunately there are no details disclosed at this point in time and of course I can’t comment… I suggest everyone to contact their local account team and try to be part of this beta program! There are some great new features being developed at the moment and participating in this beta is definitely worth it!

vCenter Chargeback 1.0.1 | 10/29/2009 | Build 204097

Last Document Update: 10/29/2009

What’s New in this Release

vCenter Chargeback 1.0.1 provides the following new features:

• Support for Windows Authentication
  This release of vCenter Chargeback supports Windows Authentication for SQL Server databases. If you are using SQL Server for the vCenter Chargeback database or for the vCenter Server database, then you can configure the application to use Windows Authentication instead of SQL Authentication.
• New computing resource and billing policies added
  This release of vCenter Chargeback introduces a new computing resource, vCPU, and two new billing policies, vCPU Count and Memory Size and Fixed Cost and vCPU Count and Memory Size. These policies enable you to calculate cost based on the number of virtual CPUs and the amount of memory allocated to the virtual machines.
• Resource Summary section lists rolled-up usage data for all entities
  The Resource Summary section of the chargeback reports show the rolled-up usage data for all the entities.
• Global fixed cost history is retained
  This release of vCenter Chargeback lets you to set different cost values for different time periods on the same global fixed cost. The old values are retained and not overwritten.
• Ability to undo to the most recent operation on the chargeback hierarchy
  The most recent operation on the chargeback hierarchy can be undone. This undo feature is available for entities that are added or moved in the hierarchy. The undo option is not available for rename and delete operations.

Ability to use the vCenter Chargeback APIs
vCenter Chargeback APIs provide an interface to programmatically use the various features of vCenter Chargeback. As an application developer, you can use these APIs to build chargeback applications or integrate vCenter Chargeback with your internal billing systems and compliance policies. Please do note that the APIs released with this version of vCenter Chargeback are only for a technical preview.