The vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS) streamlines the process of setting up virtual machine networking by providing you with a centralized point of control for provisioning, administration and monitoring through vSphere's vCenter. In today's video and how-to article, vExpert Jason Nash walks you through the configurations required to setup a new vDS in your vSphere environment.

Let's start by briefly reviewing the relevant information associated with the main switch and the uplinks group. First up is the main switch.

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vCenter vDS - Summary Tab

The Summary tab is where you’ll find information telling you the number of hosts, number of VMs, number of networks, total ports, available ports, and so on. As you start rolling out hosts and VMs, those numbers will go up.

vCenter vDS - Networks Tab

The Networks tab contains all your networks, which equate to port groups. Other information includes port binding, VLAN ID, number of VMs, number of ports used, and whether alarms are enabled.

vCenter vDS - Ports Tab

This tab contains vital information related to Port Mirroring and Netflow. When you plug a VM into a vSwitch or a VMs NIC into a vSwitch (as a VM may have multiple NICs), it gets assigned a port. That is, a port ID on the distributed switch.

So, for example, MediaXP is assigned Port 11, while Media SAB is assigned Port 10. Domain Controller (DC) is Port 1 and ViewCon is Port 0.

One scenario wherein these port IDs are going to come in handy is when you’re doing some troubleshooting concerning Port Mirroring and Netflow. That’s because those two reference these port IDs.

So, for instance, you notice that Port 11 is sending a whole lot of traffic. You can go in here and see what Port 11 is. Then you can check what its corresponding VM is, what its MAC is, and what its DirectPath I/O is.

You can also see whether the link is up and which VLAN it corresponds to.

vCenter vDS - Resource Allocation Tab

This is where you configure Network I/O Control and other related stuff.

vCenter vDS - Configuration Tab

The Configuration tab features a GUI showing your current configuration. On the left are your port groups and any VMs you’ve got plugged into them.

Then on the right are your physical uplinks, which vmnic is plugged in, and which servers they are.

Now, if you click on a port group (e.g. FT), it will show you which physical uplinks are being used.

Also, if you click on an “i” icon (enclosed by a blue circle) on the right side, you’ll be able to pull up say CDP for Cisco or LLDP for non-Cisco.

On the other hand, if you click on a similar “i” icon on the left side, you’ll get basic information about the port group in question.

vCenter vDS - Virtual Machines Tab

This tab will just show you all the VMs that are using your distributed switch.

vCenter vDS - Hosts Tab

Similarly, this will show you all the hosts using your distributed switch.

The rest of the tabs include Tasks & Events, Alarms, and Permissions.

Now let’s look at the main options for the main switch. We right-click on the main switch and select Edit Settings from the context menu.

vDS Settings - Properties Tab

In the General section of the Properties tab, you can set the number of uplink ports.

You can also edit the uplink names by clicking on the Edit uplink names button and then changing the uplink names you find in the window that pops up. Notice that there are 4 boxes in our screenshot. That’s because we have 4 uplink ports. The number of boxes will always be equal to the number of uplink ports.

In the Advanced section, one thing you can set there is the Maximum MTU. If you want to do Jumbo Frames (9000-byte frames), you can set it right here.

You can also enable the Discovery Protocol and then set the type to either CDP (Cisco Discovery Protocol) or LLDP (Link Layer Discovery Protocol). In addition to that, you can set its Operation to Listen, Advertise, or Both.

Finally, you can enter some Administrator contact information, such as the Name and other details like email address, phone number, etc. This can show up in CDP or other similar protocols.

vDS Settings - Network Adapters Tab

Here, if you select a host on the left, it will show you vmnics on the right and how they match up with the uplink numbers.

vDS Settings - Private VLAN Tab

This is where you configure stuff like Layer-2 Segmentation or VLANs within VLANs.

vDS Settings - Netflow Tab

This is where you configure the system to send IP statistics to what’s known as a NetFlow collector.

vDS Settings - Port Mirroring Tab

These settings allow you to do traffic sniffing.

Those are your main switch settings.

vDS Uplink Port Group Settings

Then you have what are called Uplinks. For the distributed switch, you only have one set of uplinks. This is in contrast to, say, the Cisco Nexus 1000V, which does allow you to have multiple uplink groups. You may have one uplink group connected to a DMZ network and a second one connected to the production network.

The DMZ uplink group cares about all the VLANs in the DMZ. The one for the production network cares about the VLANs found there. You can’t do that with the vSphere Distributed Switch. If you have a DMZ network and a separate physical production network, you’ll need to segment that, but you only have one uplink group in each vDS.

Let’s now see what we can set for uplinks. You can get to those settings by clicking the Manage this uplink port group link.

vDS Uplinks - General Section

The General section is where you set the uplink’s name. It’s also where you put in a Description, Number of ports, and the Port binding option.

vDS Uplinks - Policies Section

This is where you’ll see a whole bunch of policy settings, including: Security, Traffic Shaping, VLAN, Teaming and Failover, Resource Allocation, Monitoring, and Miscellaneous. The items in the subsections (e.g. Security, Traffic Shaping, etc.) are exactly the same items you’ll see in the main Policies section, except that they’re just grouped accordingly.

One thing to take note of is that most of the items are going to be uneditable. That’s because they’re mainly going to be set at the port group level.

There are still a couple of things you can set. One of them is the VLAN trunk range. The default for that setting is 0 - 4094, meaning, everything. That includes tagged and untagged VLANs. If you follow your security best practices, you should only be configuring this for VLANs that the switch should actually expect to see on the physical world.

Most people leave the setting to the default (0 - 4094), but you can actually set it as shown in the screenshot.

vDS Uplinks - Advanced Section

In the Advanced section, you can allow the system to override certain port policies. You specify which policies can be overridden by clicking the Edit Override Settings link.

Then as you can see, you simply choose either Yes or No if you want to allow or disallow overrides for a particular item.

Basically, there are a lot of things under the uplink settings. But really, the only thing you’ll ever set there is the one concerning VLANs.

Creating a New Distributed Port Group

Let me show you now how to create a new Distributed Port Group.

Just select the main switch and then click New Port Group under the Summary tab.

Give that port group a name.

Next, assign a number for the Number of ports. Remember that when you plug in a VM's NIC, a VM kernel, or something like that, and then you attach it into one of these port groups, it uses a port.

Make sure you set that number to something reasonable. For instance, vMotion might only need 1 port per server. So for that, you can probably set 10 or even 5 and still be OK. If you’re setting for production VM traffic and that particular VM had a /24-network, you might have to put 256 in there.

Just don’t go crazy. Don’t set it to some wacky number like 1024 when all you’ve got is a /24 network. You’re going to use up more ports as you go, and you don’t want to get to that 30,000-limit right away.

For the VLAN type, the choices are None, VLAN, VLAN Trunking, and Private VLAN. None means un-tagged.

VLAN means that as a frame leaves this distributed switch, it’s going to stick a tag unto it for the VLAN number, and the uplink switch is gonna expect those frames to be tagged.

So for instance, in my case, I would set the VLAN ID to 110.

Another option is VLAN Trunking. So if I want to do a trunk, I set VLANs up to my VMs. My VMs are going to expect to see tagged frames. They can have that special guest tagging driver installed.

Finally, there’s Private VLAN. If you see a notice saying Private VLAN is not configured, you then have to configure it in the main switch. Once you’re done with that, you go back here and set the relevant options.

After you click Next, you’ll be shown a summary of the things you just set. Click Finish to proceed with creating the port group.

Configuring a New Distributed Port Group

Now, let’s say you want to configure some settings. Select that newly created port group and then click Manage this distributed port group.

The first settings you can specify, which are found in the General section, are the Name, Description, Number of ports, and Port binding type. Port binding type can be set to either Static, Dynamic, or Ephemeral. This has to do with how it assigns those port numbers that we just talked about. Mostly, you’re going to leave that on Static.

When you proceed to the Policies section, you’ll notice a lot of familiar settings. You’ll see the policy settings for Security, Traffic Shaping, VLAN, and so on.

Here’s where you change your VLAN tagging information and number.

Here’s your Teaming and Failover, set at the port group level. This kind of confuses people because they think you set this at the uplink level. The answer to that is, No. You don’t, because you may do different hashing types and things like that. This depends on the type of traffic and the port group.

By default, it’s just going to be set like a standard vSwitch, and that is Route based on originating virtual port ID. There are actually several options, like:

• Route based on IP hash;
• Route based on source MAC hash;
• Route based on physical NIC load; and
• Use explicit failover order

Route based on physical NIC load is what is known as Load-based Teaming, which is the coolest one because it really looks at the NICs’ load.

All the rest, including Network Failover Detection, Notify Switches, Failback, and others, are standard VMware vSwitch settings.

In the Failover Order list, you can do things relevant to Traffic Separation. For example, if we just want to just use dvUplink4 for vMotion traffic, we can select dvUplink1, 2, and 3 and then click the Move Down button until they’re under the Unused Uplinks.

Or we can select dvUplink3 and move it to Standby Uplinks.

Once you’re done, you just click OK and the changes you made will be automatically saved.

The tabs you see for that port group are basically just the same ones you saw in the main switch, except that they’re specific to the port group for certain things.

Conclusion

Well, that’s it. We’ve gone through nearly all the settings for the main switch, uplinks, and port groups, and so we’re done. See you again next time.

In this post, we’ll talk about vCloud Director Task and Events. We’ll also show you how to monitor Blocking Tasks, view Provider and Org vDC usage, and check vCD Logs.

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Tasks and Events

Just like in the VMware vSphere Client, you also have Tasks and Events inside the vCloud Director. Tasks are things that you requested vCloud Director to do, while events can be either the results of those tasks, or just system events that have happened inside vCloud Director.

As a vCloud Director admin, you need to be monitoring vCloud Director tasks and events just like you do in the vSphere Client. Let’s now go over to an actual vCloud Director client and check out where and how you would do that.

If you start in the Home screen, there a couple of different places to go to when you want to monitor tasks and events. The first one is down at the bottom-left corner: in the Running and Failed statuses.

If you click on either Running or Failed, you’ll be shown exactly the same interface. Of course, one will show you running (or recently ran) tasks, while the other will prioritize recently failed tasks. You can filter results by selecting an item from that drop-down list at the top. You can also conduct searches using the search box beside that list.

Double-clicking on a task will reveal certain details about that particular task.

Another place where you can monitor your tasks and events is in the Manage & Monitor tab. If you go down and select the Logs section, you’ll see a much longer list of tasks and events, not just recent ones, like what was shown earlier.

You can sort columns by clicking on their headings. In the screenshot, we’re seeing all failed tasks first.

You can also filter and conduct searches, like in the previous section.

To view events instead of tasks, click on the Events tab.

If you’re an organizational admin, you can navigate to the Organizations section and click on an organization to monitor tasks and events for that particular organization.

Once inside the organization, you can navigate to the My Cloud tab > Logs and then click either the Tasks or Events tab to, again, check on tasks and events.

Depending on who you’re logging in as, you may have different views of tasks and events.

Those are the places where you can monitor tasks and events in vCloud Director. Let’s now proceed to the next section, where we’ll briefly talk about Blocking Tasks and where you can monitor them.

Monitoring Blocking Tasks

Blocking tasks are only used when you have integrated vCloud Director with other management tools in your organization. That also means you would have installed an Advanced Message Queuing Protocol Broker, or AMQP Broker.

An example of such a broker is VMware’s RabbitMQ. You would install RabbitMQ and then you would use that and integrate vCloud Director with other enterprise management applications (e.g. CMDBs) in your company.

When someone requests a vApp, that vApp has to be approved before it can actually be created in vCloud Director. These blocking tasks are really the status of these messages that flow back and forth between your other enterprise applications and vCloud Director.

Why exactly would you need to monitor blocking tasks? Well, for example, something you expect to happen in vCloud Director may not be happening because a blocking task has yet to complete. For example, a new vApp has yet to be approved by another management application in your infrastructure.

By monitoring blocking tasks, you would know what’s taking something so long to take place.

If you’re logged in as a vCloud Director admin, you can navigate to System > Manage & Monitor > Blocking Tasks. Here, you will see the Status and Timeout of whatever it is you’re waiting for. You will also know who (through the User column) is responsible for these other applications, as well as figure out what vCloud Director is waiting on.

Provider and Org vDC usage

Whenever you’re managing clusters and resource pools in vSphere, you normally want to monitor the resource utilization/capacity-over-time of those clusters and resource pools. You would want to do the same thing inside vCloud Director.

In fact, once you have vCloud Director, you wouldn’t want to stop monitoring those resource pools and clusters inside vSphere Client. However, in addition to those, you would also want to monitor your provider and organizational datacenter usage.

If you go over to the vCloud Director System > Home > Tasks section, you’ll see that under System, you have a link to Manage Provider vDCs. Then under Organizations, you also have a link to Manage organization vDCs. Inside each of these “management” screens, you’ll also find “monitoring” screens.

Let’s follow the Manage Provider vDCs link first. In most cases, you’ll initially be brought to the Manage. However, right beside that tab is a Monitor tab. That’s where you’ll want to go if you want to view resource utilization information.

Notice how this provider virtual datacenter is really nearing the maximum limit for Memory and Storage Allocation.

If you double-click on those percentage bars, you’ll be brought to a lower level where you can monitor resource utilization of specific organization vDCs under that particular provider vDC.

As you can see from the screenshot above, one organization vDC is about to reach its limit in Storage, while the other organization vDC is about to reach its limit in Memory. Both organization vDCs are pulling resources from the WBC-Gold provider vDC. So, there may still be more resources in the provider vDCs, but not enough resources are allocated to certain organization vDCs.

From here, you can go to the Resource Pools tab and get more utilization information there. Apparently, the amount of Memory used by this resource pool is really hitting the maximum. That’s something you really want to be aware of.

You can confirm that information if you go over to your vSphere Client, navigate to the resource pool in question, and then select the Resource Allocation tab. Notice how there is very little available capacity for Memory.

Thus, what you’re seeing in vCloud Director for the provider virtual data center that’s mapped to this resource pool in the vSphere Client is really matching up.

Now, if you go in as an organizational admin and then navigate to Administration > Virtual Datacenters > Monitor, you’ll see the same information regarding the organization vDCs in question.

It’s not just the vCloud Director system admin who is going to see those organization vDCs pushing their resource limits. Organizational admins can go in and see those as well.

vCD Logs

The last section in this post is about vCloud Director log files. It’s important for any admin to go in and look at the text-based log files, or at least know where they are. That way, if VMware Support asks you to send the log files or look into the log files, you’ll know where they are.

When it comes to vCloud Director, if you connect to the console of the vCloud Director virtual machine, you can go to:

/opt/vmware/vcloud-director/logs

to view the log files.

Let’s take a look at the contents of one of these logs.

Conclusion

Basically, there’s a lot of information in there. At least you now know where to find the logs and how to view the information they have inside. The vCloud Director Web Interface doesn’t always give you the information you need in relation to something that doesn’t go as planned. If you hit a blank wall there, you know where to do further investigation.

That brings us to the end of this post. I hope you learned a lot and look forward to having you here again next time.

In Part 1 of this post, we showed you around the vCloud Director web interface and then proceeded to demonstrate how you could connect to vCenter and vShield [VMware vCloud Director Essentials - Setting up vCloud Director - Part 1]. Now, we’re ready to talk about creating two important entities: a Provider Virtual Datacenter and a VM Deployment Template.

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Creating a Provider Virtual Datacenter

According to the VMware knowledgebase, a provider virtual datacenter (provider vDC) “combines the compute and memory resources of a single vCenter Server resource pool with the storage resources of one or more datastores connected to that resource pool,” and that it is the “source for organization vDCs.”

First, you need to create a provider vDC, which is going to serve as the source for all organizational vDCs underneath.

Think of it like this. Assuming you were a private cloud provider and you have three different tiers of service: Gold, Silver, and Bronze. You could, for example, create provider vDCs called “Gold,” “Silver,” and “Bronze,” and then you could create customer organization virtual datacenters inside each one.

As a result, the organizations could have those three different tiers of service. Alternatively, they could subscribe to just one tier of service, e.g. they just have an organizational vDC inside of the Bronze provider vDC.

You need to first create at least one provider vDC, which is going to link to a single resource pool from a single vCenter server. In other words, you’ve got this resource pool, which is part of DRS cluster.

In that Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) cluster, you typically will have at least two hosts so you can take advantage of High Availability (HA) and DRS. The provider vDC would connect to that resource pool inside the DRS cluster. That’s typically how it’s done.

Let’s say you have one management DRS cluster where you run DNS, vCenter, and the vShield Manager. Then you’ve got these other resource DRS clusters, and each of those resource clusters may have different qualities of servers.

You might have some really powerful servers in the Gold resource pool or the Gold DRS cluster. And then down the line to the Bronze DRS cluster, you might have some older servers with some local SAS storage.

You can create a new provider vDC in the VMware vCloud Director by going to the Manage & Monitor tab, click Provider vDC, and then New Provider vDC. Alternatively, you can go to Quick Start and then click on Create a Provider vDC. That’s what is being shown in the screenshot below:

You need to give that new Provider vDC a Name and a short Description. You might want to Enable it by default. If you have brand new ESXi 5 servers, then you can select Hardware Version 8 from the drop-down list. When you’re done with that, click Next.

Your next task would be to select a resource pool. You start by selecting a vCenter server. After that, you select a resource pool that you created earlier in the vSphere virtual infrastructure. Click Next when you’re done.

Next, you need to add some storage. From the top panel, select a bunch of datastores that you want to be responsible for supplying storage to the new provider vDC. In our screenshot below, we opted not to select the local storage option. Instead, we went with the available shared SAN storage.

After selecting datastores, click the Add button. That will populate the lower panel with the names and details of the datastores you selected. Once you’re done, click Next.

At this point, you need to have the ESXi hosts in that DRS Cluster prepared for vCloud Director. That means the vCloud Director agent needs to be loaded on them. To do that, just enter the root username and password into the boxes provided for them and then click Next.

After reviewing the settings and finding everything alright, you can go ahead and click Finish.

You’ll then notice that, under the Quick Start menu, step number two will already be entitled “Create another Provider vDC” instead of “Create a Provider vDC,” which indicates that a provider vDC already exists.

You can check out your newly created provider vDC by going to Manage & Monitor and then to Provider vDCs. If the system is not yet done creating the provider vDC, you’ll see the provider vDC’s Status marked as “Creating Provider vDC.”

Now, if you go down and click Resource Pools, you’ll be able to see your resource pools as well as be able to access them from there.

Similarly, if you click on Hosts, you’ll see your hosts. In the screenshot, they’re shown with Status “Installing.” That’s because, at this stage, the Agent is still being installed on these hosts, an activity which could take a couple of minutes.

You can verify that by clicking on the status themselves (i.e. “Installing”).

After a few minutes, the Agent installation should complete.

Now, in case your vCloud Director Agent fails to load, like in the scenario shown above, one of the things you can check when troubleshooting is whether the hosts could be placed into maintenance mode. That way, the Agent can be loaded.

You can go to your vSphere Client and check on the status of those hosts; see what virtual machines are running on them. If they can’t be moved to another host in the cluster using VMotion, then the host can’t be put into maintenance mode, and the agent won’t be able to be loaded.

Looking at the two hosts in our setup, this host has two virtual machines running.

This host, on the other hand, has no virtual machine running on it, so we decide to check back on the agent on this host first.

After inspecting the status of your hosts on the vSphere Client, you can go back to the vCloud Director and continue your troubleshooting there. To proceed installing the Cloud Agent on a host, select that host and then click the little gear at the top of the panel.

When the context menu appears, click Prepare Host...

Enter your root username and password, and then click OK.

The agent should start installing on your host. Wait until the agent installs successfully on that host before proceeding to the next problematic host.

If you go back to your vSphere Client with installation going on, you will see that the host has entered maintenance mode.

Once the agent is finished installing, the host will automatically get out of maintenance mode.

After that, you can shift back to your vCloud Director.

Assuming you encounter yet another problem, you can simply click the Status to view what the problem is all about. One thing I’d like to point out is that, once you have green check marks on all three columns: Enabled, Ready, and Available, that’s usually a good sign and means the remaining issues can be resolved easily.

The reason why the system wasn’t able to prepare the host in our case was because Host Spanning on our host failed to enable.

The recommended solution was to select “Repair” from the host menu, so we did just that.

Now, even after repairing, you might still receive a couple of system alerts. They’re mostly stuff that can be remedied, so don’t freak out.

For instance, when we clicked on that particular system alert in the screenshot above, we were told that the Host Spanning configuration on our host was not up to date. After reading the FAQs, we learned that the issue normally clears out after a few minutes.

Here’s what we got after also repairing the second host. Like the first host, it displayed a System Alert simply because its Host Spanning configuration was not yet up to date.

If you’re a service provider, you can go in and add more Provider VDCs by navigating to the Provider VDCs menu and clicking the green (+) button.

The reason you might want to do that is because you might want to add other tiers of service like Silver and Bronze. If you have different clusters, you can add a cluster for Human Resources, another one for Finance, and still another for Development. If your company has different divisions, like East, West, European, or Asian divisions, you can create clusters for those and manage them as different Provider Virtual DataCenters.

Creating a VM Deployment Template

Before we wrap up this post, let’s talk about creating a virtual machine deployment template.

Just like with vCenter and vSphere, when you want vCloud Director to perform guest customizations on virtual machines of older Windows guest operating systems like Windows Server 2000, 2003, or Windows XP, you must create Microsoft system deployment templates or Sysprep deployment packages on each cloud cell in your installation.

Now, if all you’re running in your vCloud infrastructure are Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7, then you don’t have to read this part anymore. Just remember that if you ever have to deal with older versions of Windows in the future, you know where to find the information you need.

To begin, you will have to download, extract, and copy the sysprep binary files into a location of your choosing on your vCloud Director server host. That location is usually known as the SysprepBinariesDirectory.

For more information about where you can obtain the binary files and how you’re going to copy them to your server host, refer to VMware KB 1005593. Actually, the information you’ll find in that knowledgebase article pertains to VCenter, but they’re practically the same.

If you scroll down that article, you’ll see a table that shows you where exactly you need to place the sysprep files. Files for different Windows versions should be placed in different folders.

Another good source of information is Duncan Epping’s article at yellow-bricks.com, where you’ll find links to the sysprep files for specific operating systems/service packs of Windows.

Those are actually .exe files, which, when opened, will allow you to extract a bunch of files. Just copy those files to the SysprepBinariesDirectory folder we talked about earlier, i.e., in your vCloud Director server.

During installation, vCloud Director is going to place some files in the sysprep folder on the vCloud Director server host. More specifically, those files are going to be placed in:

/opt/vmware/cloud-director/deploymentPackageCreator for vCloud Director v.1
or
/opt/vmware/vcloud-director/deploymentPackageCreator for vCloud Director v.1.5

In there, you’ll find a script named createSysprepPackage.sh. Run that file in the SysprepBinariesDirectory. If your SysprepBinariesDirectory is /root/yoursysprep, then you would run it this way in vCloud Director v1.5:

/opt/vmware/vcloud-director/deploymentPackageCreator/createSysprepPackage.sh /root/yoursysprep

Lastly, run vmware-vcd restart. You would need to run this on each cloud cell on which you copied the files to.

Conclusion

That ends our 2-part article. We hope what you’ve learned here will help you in setting up your installation of vCloud Director.

VMware's virtualization products, such as ESXi and Workstation, all use versions of the VMDK file format for their virtual hard disk files - essentially an entire hard disk in a .vmdk file. In contrast, Microsoft has standardized on the VHD file format for the same purpose, used by Virtual PC and Hyper-V, as well as being natively supported by the Windows 2008/7 file system. You can mount a vmdk file within Windows but you need to have the VMware Disk Mount utility installed, whilst if you have Windows 2008 or 7 then you can "attach" a VHD file and give it its own drive letter.

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When Should You Use This Guide?

Don't use this guide if you are looking to convert an operating system boot drive, e.g. to migrate a Virtual PC VM to an ESXi server, as there are several additional steps you would need to carry out to make the virtual disk bootable. Instead, use a dedicated conversion utility such as the VMware Converter Standalone, or the Converter plug-in for vSphere as explained in this Petri article: "Importing Hyper-V VMs Into vSphere."

However, if it's just the data files you need to access, then this is a quick and easy way to do it - for example, if you have a corrupted Windows 2008 ESXi VM that no longer boots and you want to access the system disk in order to replace some dll files. Alternatively, you might have a data drive on a Hyper-V VM that you want to copy to an ESXi VM, but for security or speed reasons a network copy is not an option. In both scenarios, the ability to convert from VMDK to VHD or vice-versa can be a real time saver.

The Starwind V2V virtual disk conversion utility

For this task, we will be using the Starwind V2V Image Converter, which is a free utility available from the Starwind website. If you haven't encountered them before, Starwind is best known for their software iSCSI SAN solution, which allows you to present storage space on a Windows system as a shared iSCSI target - essential for advanced virtualization features such as VM High Availability. Apart from anything else, it means that they have an in-depth knowledge of storage systems and virtual disks, enabling them to produce this handy tool.

It's only a small file so it shouldn't take you long to download. When it's completed, run it to launch the installer and follow the installation wizard; you should be fine with all the default options. Once it is installed, launch the program and you should see a window like the image above. For this example, we will take a drive from an ESXi hosted Windows 7 VM, convert it to a Microsoft VHD file, and then attach it as a new drive on a Windows 2008 Server.

To start the process, you need to download the virtual disk vmdk file from the ESXi server to the computer you installed the V2V Converter on. Connect to the ESXi Server with your vSphere Client, select the VM, and make sure you are on the "Summary" tab in the right-hand pane; then in the "Resources" box, right-click on the datastore and select "Browse Datastore."

This will open a new file browser type window showing the contents of the datastore, with separate folders for each VM stored in it, so browse to the one you want to work on. Depending on the number of virtual disks attached to your VM there may be several VMDK files listed, but you can often spot the correct one by just checking the size, unless they are identical. If this is the case, you can confirm the file name by selecting "Edit Settings" on the VM, and then selecting the drive from the hardware list; it will then show the file path and name. When you are happy you have found the correct file, click to highlight it and left-click the "download file" icon in the toolbar above. You will then be asked to choose where you want to download it to; select a suitable location, but make sure you check that there is enough free space first, as the downloader won't do it for you. It's annoying to have a large download fail after 30 minutes because the drive is full!

Now that you have downloaded your VMDK file, close the datastore browser and return to the Starwind V2V Converter, click "Next" to move onto the "Select Source File" window, and use the file browser to select the file you just downloaded. You may find that there are two VMDK files in the location, one of which has "_flat" appended to its name and is the right size for the drive you downloaded, but you need to select the other file with the unaltered file name (if you choose the wrong one then the utility will tell you it can't read the file anyway). Now the utility should show the VMDK file you have selected with a brief description including the total size for the virtual disk it represents:

Now click "Next," and in the next window you will be asked to select what format you want to convert your virtual disk into. The first part should be obvious - "MS Virtual PC," but you also have to choose between "growable" and "pre-allocated," which are Starwind's terms for thin and thick provisioning respectively. If you're not that familiar with virtual disk terms, "thin" provisioning means that the disk file only uses enough storage space to contain the actual data in the virtual disk, whereas "thick" automatically creates a file that is the size of the virtual disk, even if 95% of it is empty space. Thick provisioned disks have better write performance and you don't have to worry about them not working if the host disk runs out of space, but for this operation it will be much easier to keep the file as small as possible, so select the "growable" option. Click "Next" to start the conversion process and wait until it completes. You should see a window like this:

Now you can click "Finish" and the V2V utility will close; browse to the location you selected for the converted file and you should see the .vhd file there. Now for the final step to gain access to the files: If you wish, you can attach the VHD virtual disk to a Microsoft VM, but for this example, we want to mount it as another drive on our computer. Note that this procedure will only work in Windows 2008 or Windows 7; if you have an older version, you will need to use a utility called VHDmount.

To mount the VHD file as a drive, you need to open the Disk Management snap-in; you can either get to this via the Server/Computer Management console, or just click "Start" and enter diskmgmt.msc to open it. You should then see the list of volumes and disks attached to your computer in the console; click the "Action" menu and select "Attach VHD," and you will then be prompted to select the file:

Note that you also have the option to mount the virtual disk as Read-only; this may be useful in some situations, but we will leave it unchecked this time and just click "OK." After a brief pause, you should then be able to see that your virtual disk has appeared in both the list of disks and volumes, and if you open Windows Explorer, you will be able to use it like any other drive. Since we selected the "growable" (thin provisioned) format, you will also find that if you save any new files to this drive, then the .vhd will correspondingly grow in size.

What has actually happened when we attached the VHD, is that Windows has first just mounted it as a drive, and then it inspects the partition table to see if it can recognize the data. Since this VHD started off as a Windows drive originally, the current OS recognizes it as a valid volume and mounts the file system, assigning the next available drive letter (you can easily change the drive letter if you want by right-clicking on the volume). In comparison, if this VHD came from a Linux virtual disk originally, then it might well be formatted using the ext3 file system which Windows cannot read; then it does not assign a drive letter and shows the partition as "unknown." For some foreign filesystems, you can download third party extensions for Windows, which allow it to recognize the volume and assign a drive letter, so you can then access like a normal volume.

When attached like this, Windows treats the virtual disk just like any other physical disk that you might have installed in the PC; you can, in fact, format and partition it from scratch if you feel like it!

Conclusion

You might be thinking at this point that the whole procedure is over-complicated; after all, you could achieve the same result by copying all the files to an external USB drive and plugging that into your computer. However there are many situations, especially with virtualization, where various factors may prevent that from being an option. The single file virtual disk format, whether VMDK or VHD, is flexible and portable, especially when moving from virtual to physical platforms. Being able to easily convert from one format to the other with this V2V utility means that it doesn't matter whether the virtual platform is Microsoft or VMware.

Hyper-V™ vs. vSphere™

Problem: Microsoft’s planned enhancements for Hyper-V version 3 have more and more customers planning for a dual hypervisor environment. Unfortunately, multiple management consoles are hard to use, clunky, and don’t provide the flexibility needed in measuring & managing virtual infrastructures.

Solution: SolarWinds Virtualization Manager now allows you to see both VMware and Hyper-V environments in a single pane of glass.

FREE 30-Day Trial - SolarWinds Virtualization Manager 5.0

Wednesday, April 25th, 2012: What Every Growing Business Must Know About Desktop Virtualization

Desktop virtualization isn't new, which means that Desktop Virtualization Solutions (DVS) have had a chance to mature. They are more affordable and more available than ever, and they're easier to implement than you might think. And as more businesses are relying on remote workers, desktop virtualization is becoming more important.

In this live webinar, David Davis, David Reoch and Dan Reis will cover the benefits and different types of Desktop Virtualization Solutions, security concerns associated with utilizing these solutions and much more.

Learn more and register for this free webinar: What Every Growing Business Must Know About Desktop Virtualization

Thursday April 26th, 2012: Near-Continuous Data Protection for Hyper-V

Data protection is on every system administrator's mind, and Continuous Data Protection (CDP), also known as continuous backup or real-time backup, is usually the best solution for a virtualized environment. The main advantage of CDP is that you no longer need to specify the recovery time until you do your restore. The downside of CDP is the cost.

In this live webinar, Chris Henley from Veeam will explain Continuous Data Protection and how you can achieve near-continuous data protection at a fraction of cost of CDP with Veaam's Backup and Replication.

Learn more and register for this free webinar: Near-Continuous Data Protection for Hyper-V

Friday, April 27th, 2012: 10 Backup & Recovery Questions Every Windows Administrator Must Ask

In recent years, backup and recovery techniques and technologies have undergone major changes, along with the rest of the IT world. What IT administrators knew about data protection ten or even five years ago has markedly changed.

In this live webinar, Greg Shields and Joe Hand will answer the 10 questions that every Windows Administrator must ask in order to achieve the best backup, replication and recovery while minimizing costs and server load.

Learn more and register for this free webinar: 10 Backup & Recovery Questions Every Windows Administrator Must Ask

In this post, we’ll show you how to set up vCloud Director. We’ll start off by giving you an overview of vCloud Director administration. We’ll go into the Web Interface that vCloud Director admins would spend their time in, and then we’ll go through the different tabs and options and other things you might typically see when administering vCloud Director.

VMware vCloud Director Essentials Training

This course teaches cloud computing basics and shows how to use VMware vCloud Director to create a hybrid cloud that can deploy IT resources on-demand. Learn VMware vCD and evolve your datacenter into a model that saves time & money while providing flexibility to users and your business.

VMware vCloud Director Essentials - Available at TrainSignal!!

From there, we’ll move on and perform the first step in setting up vCloud Director from the Web Interface, which is to connect it to a vCenter Server and a vShield Manager virtual appliance. After that, we’ll show you how to create your first Provider Virtual Datacenter and VM Deployment Template.

vCloud Director Administration Overview

When it comes to administering VMware vCloud Director, things are primarily done at the Web Interface. The Web Interface is rich and it really has everything that you’ll need to administer vCloud Director. Whether you’re an administrator or an end user, you’ll spend most of your time with vCloud Director’s Web Interface.

To access the Web Interface, you can just type in the IP address or the domain name of your vCloud Director virtual machine or physical server (if you chose that route) into your Web browser.

That’s most likely going to redirect you to:

where name-of-your-server is just the IP address/name of your vCloud Director server.

If you created a static DNS entry or alias for the IP address, then you can enter that into your browser instead and you’ll still be redirected to the same login screen.

If you log in using an administrator account, you will be brought to the administration homepage. On the upper-left corner of the screen, you should see the tabs: System, Home, Manage & Monitor, and Administration. On the other hand, if you log in as an end user, you will see a tab named My Cloud instead of Manage & Monitor and Administration.

You can navigate to the home screen, to Manage & Monitor (if you’re an administrator), or to My Cloud (if you’re an end user). From there, you can administer the VMWare vCloud virtual infrastructure, roll out new virtual machines, create new organizations, create virtual data centers, create new vApps, access virtual machine consoles, and so on.

A little lower on the same page is the Quick Start section, which you’ll be using to get vCloud Director up and configured with a connection to vCenter/vShield, a Provider virtual DataCenter, as well as other network and organizational stuff.

The items on the right-hand side, which consist of a nice Getting Started Guide, Help, VMware Support, Feature Request, and About, can also be accessed by clicking on the Help drop-down menu at the top.

Inside Preferences, you can set preferences for whatever account you’re logged in to.

There you can do things like:

Specify where you’d like to be brought the moment you log in;

Configure alerts related to leases; or

Change your password.

But if you’re an administrator, the tab where you would really spend most of your time would be in the Manage & Monitor tab. This is where you’ll be creating new organizations and provider data centers; managing networks; creating connections to vCenters, Resource Pools, Datastores, Switches and Port Groups; access Log files; and administer Blocking Tasks.

The Administration tab, on the other hand, is where you would administer Users, Roles, as well as System Settings like Email, LDAP, Password Policies, Cloud Branding, Public Addresses, and Blocking Tasks.

When you click on each of those menus, you’ll notice a little gear at the top of the center panel. If you click on that gear, you’ll be presented with a set of actions which you can perform in the context of that particular menu. For example, you can create a new user or issue a notification.

The (+) icon on that same row is also for adding a new user.

Down at the bottom-left corner are links to access running and failed tasks. You can click on them to find out the status of your tasks, which is very similar to what you would find in your vSphere Client.

If you’re used to using the vSphere Client, you’ll find many similarities with it and this Web interface. It has even more similarities with the new vSphere Web Client.

Before we proceed to the next section, I’d like to talk about those two left and right arrows you see at the upper-left corner of the screen. Those function just like the backward and forward buttons of your Web browser. They can come in handy when you put your Web Interface in full-screen view because that’s when your browser’s back and forward buttons become hidden.

In the succeeding sections, we’ll be spending most of our time going through the Quick Start menu. Going through those 8 different tasks under Quick Start is really the best way to get started.

Once those steps are completed, the section called Tasks, located underneath Quick Start, will become accessible. You can then jump straight from the Home screen into managing provider virtual data centers, networks, network pools, organizations, organization vDCs, and so forth.

Connecting to vCenter and vShield

Now let’s talk about connecting VMware vCloud Director to vCenter and vShield. This is really the first thing you need to do once you go through that Initial Setup wizard. That’s why it’s the first task they will have you perform under the Quick Start menu.

Actually, you won’t be able to do anything with vCloud Director until you connect it to vCenter and vShield. There are two ways to do that. The first one is through the Quick Start menu. The other one is through the Attach a New vCenter Wizard under Manage & Monitor.

Typically, what admins do is use the Quick Start menu first to attach a new vCenter for their very first vCenter. Then later, when they already have other vCenters, they would do it under Manage & Monitor.

Make sure you have a vShield license key in vCenter. Don’t worry, we’ll cover that particular issue here as well.

To connect to vCenter and vShield, you start by logging in as administrator into the vCloud Director interface. You then go to the Home tab and click the Attach a vCenter link.

Once the Attach New vCenter dialog box appears, fill up the required fields. Enter the following information:

• vCenter host name or IP address (you may have to use the corresponding FQDN),
• Port number - you may take the default value,
• User name - your administrator user name,
• Password - your user name’s password,
• vCenter - a name you make up, which will be shown in vCloud Director, and not the host name of the vCenter server,
• Description - a brief description of this particular vCenter

After you’re done entering all that, click the Next button.

On the next screen, enter the host name or IP address of your vShield Manager as well as the administrative credentials for it, and then click Next.

The system will then show you the information you entered earlier. See whether you want to change any of those configurations. If you don’t see any, click Finish.

Wait while the system attaches you to vCenter.

Once it’s done attaching, you should see a number of those disabled links under Quick Start (e.g. Create a Provider vDC and Create an external network) and Tasks (e.g. Manage Provider vDCs and Manage external networks) enable. Meaning, you’re now allowed to use them.

Now, if you go over to the Manage & Monitor tab and click on vCenters under vSphere Resources, you’ll see the vCenter you just configured.

That means you successfully connected to vCenter. The entry shown under the vShield Manager column should also indicate that a connection has also been made to vShield Manager, but remember that vShield license key we mentioned earlier? That could cause a problem if you don’t go to the vSphere Client and enter it.

Launch your vSphere Client and navigate to Home.

Go to Licensing.

You should see a couple of items there that don’t have a license key yet. To add license keys, click on the Manage vSphere Licenses link.

Paste the needed license keys into the top box.

After you’ve added the license keys, you should be able to see the details for those new license keys in the lower box. Review them to see whether you’ve got everything you wanted in there. If they are there, click Next.

The next step would be to assign those licenses. Just go into their respective tabs, select the assets to license, and then choose the appropriate licenses for those assets. Finally, click Next.

Verify that the changes to your licensing configuration are correct and then click Finish.

Conclusion

With those licensing issues already out of the way, you should now be ready to proceed to the remaining steps, which we will go over in Part 2 of this post.

The surge of server virtualization has produced many benefits for IT departments because it allows for better operational control, lowering of existing cost, and better scaling than we’ve ever had before. Let’s look at the top 5 benefits that server virtualization brings to IT operations, as well as the infrastructure improvements that we also gain by virtualizing our networking, storage, and server platforms.

5. Cost Control

The last few years have seen a shift in the computer industry from deploying new applications, new services and new opportunities, to a focus on managing the infrastructure that we already have. The level of innovation of new software and capabilities has now slowed because our operational practices have not managed to keep up.

Therefore, many organizations are looking to virtualization to find ways to dramatically simplify the ownership and administration of their existing IT servers. The operational overhead of staffing, powering, backup, hardware, and software maintenance has now become overly significant in IT budgets, and businesses are looking to reduce their costs through virtualization. Learn More About SolarWinds Virtualization Manager.

4. Better Operation with Automation

Reducing the operational cost is a difficult issue. On one hand, it’s about using less people and fewer resources to achieve more work. Alternately, automation of simple, repetitive tasks can mean no more tedious drudgery of minor works. Virtualization provides options for all of these problems.

VMware is proud of their PowerCLI scripting environment that provides for extensive customization and automation of VMware vSphere. There are also dozens of APIs that have been published to create opportunities for third parties to develop management software that provides better visibility, planning, and reporting than has ever been possible.

3. Reduce Risks with Snapshots

Because the server operating system becomes encapsulated in a Hypervisor, we can now take a snapshot of the current configurations and then perform upgrades. In the event that the upgrade fails, we can use the snapshot to return to the original working condition. This dramatically reduces risk level of making the wrong changes to your infrastructure because the rollback process is now so much simpler. Download a FREE 30-Day Trial of SolarWinds Virtualization Manager.

2. Storage Management

The use of external storage has created new solutions to old problems in the disk drive and backup strategy of the Data Center. Storage arrays provide new forms of backup by performing block level copies of the hard disk drive. Because the storage is centrally arranged, de-duplication of data is now a mainstream technology, either in-line for all data or in backup for reduced backup sizes.

Recent innovations in storage include the development of storage APIs, where the virtualization server can programmatically manage elements of the storage arrays. For example, VAAI (vStorage APIs for Array Integration) from VMware allows the offload of storage processing from the VMware server to the Storage Array, in addition to allowing scripting of the storage subsystem to create and monitor the storage from a single administration console.

Virtualization has created a stimulus for the storage vendors to develop new products and features that has led to significant changes and advances. This change has led the vendors to develop APIs and interfaces that provide better administration and management than ever before.

1. Granular Scaling

The ability to load multiple operating system instances onto a single physical server has many operational benefits. Perhaps the most significant but misunderstood is the ability to scale your Data Center with many more servers than you have physical space.

Today one physical server contains one operating system, and we have advanced the physical manufacture of servers to 1 RU size to minimize the physical footprint. Using virtualization, we are now able to put 20, 30, and even many more operating system instances in a single box.

The current state of silicon production is such that CPU and memory has more capacity and performance than we need for most processing loads of today. Most of us have a number of servers in a Data Center perform small but vital tasks, and Virtualization allows us to collapse these into a very high density cluster that uses much less space and ultimately allows for better scaling of your Data Center.

Where once your Data Center might have held 300 physical servers, it’s not uncommon for people to plan to hold 3,000 servers in the same space. This scaling capability comes with progressively smooth costs that are so important for project budgets.

Conclusion

Those are the top 5 benefits that server virtualization brings to IT operations - cost control, better operation with automation, ability to reduce risks with snapshots, storage management, and granular scaling.

As part of a new free video training on desktop virtualization I am creating for TrainSignal, I finally had the chance to check out a product I have been interested in for some time - VDI-in-a-Box. Citrix recently bought Kaviza whose product they renamed "VDI-in-a-Box". I have been interested in Kaviza since VMworld 2010 when they won the Best of VMworld awards but I hadn't had a chance to try the solution until now. I was told that VDI-in-a-Box made implementing VDI / desktop virtualization so easy that anyone could do it. Plus, implementing VDI could be done using free VMware ESXi or free Hyper-V Server AND you didn't even need a storage area network (although high availability is included). The thought of making desktop virtualization EASY and "the norm" for small and medium size companies around the world really intrigues me so I was excited to try VDI-in-a-Box.

Hyper-V™ vs. vSphere™

Problem: Microsoft’s planned enhancements for Hyper-V version 3 have more and more customers planning for a dual hypervisor environment. Unfortunately, multiple management consoles are hard to use, clunky, and don’t provide the flexibility needed in measuring & managing virtual infrastructures.

Solution: SolarWinds Virtualization Manager now allows you to see both VMware and Hyper-V environments in a single pane of glass.

FREE 30-Day Trial - SolarWinds Virtualization Manager 5.0

I recorded my complete installation, initial configuration, and testing of VDI-in-a-Box. I used a single vSphere ESXi server and the Windows AD option for authentication (although AD isn't required). I happen to have a small NAS (Iomega IX4) in my lab and vCenter but those things aren't required. Here's the video:

In this article, I'll show you how to get started with Citrix VDI-in-a-Box. We'll talk about the installation and configuration procedures and I'll show you how virtual desktops are deployed and how end users can connect to them and actually use them.

VDI-in-a-Box Installation and Configuration

The first thing to do of course, is to download the installation file. Go to Citrix.com > Products and Solutions > Desktop Virtualization > VDI-in-a-Box, and then click the Try it button.

Next, you'll be asked to fill out a form.

You'll then receive an email which will allow you to start downloading one of three versions of the product. Basically, there's one version for each of the supported hypervisors:

• Microsoft Hyper-V
• VMware vSphere
• Citrix XenServer

When we tried this out, we downloaded the appropriate zip file for VMware vSphere because we had prepared a VMware ESXi hypervisor for this activity. Therefore, the interface you'll be seeing in the succeeding discussion will be from the vSphere environment.

After extracting, you'll end up with an OVF (open virtualization format) virtual appliance which you can import into VMware vSphere.

To import, go to your vSphere Client and navigate to File > Deploy OVF Template.

When the next window launches and you're asked to select the source location, browse to the folder where you stored the OVF file, select the file, and click Open.

When that window closes, click Next.

The system should then display the VDI Manager for ESX. Click Next.

Specify a name for the deployed template. Also, select the datacenter where you would like to place it on.

Next, select the specific host or cluster on which you would like the deployed template to run on.

Select a resource pool.

Select a destination storage.

Select which type of format you would like to store the virtual machine disks in.

Click Next to allow it to connect to the default network.

Review the deployment settings. If you see that everything's alright, click the Power on after deployment check box, and then click Finish.

The deployment process might take a few minutes. Once it's done, just click the Close button.

You'll then see your newly added virtual appliance. Select it to view all of its settings. In the General panel of the Summary tab, you'll find an IP address. Take note of that.

Now, go to the Commands panel and click Open Console.

There you'll find instructions on how to access the console. Notice that it has the same IP address I asked you to take note of earlier.

Open your Web browser and enter the URL shown on that last screenshot. You should then be prompted to enter some login credentials. The default login credentials are vdiadmin for the username and kaviza for the password.

If you're able to log in successfully, the first thing you'll see is the Welcome screen. It will show you a brief overview of the set up process. After reading the steps, click Get Started.

There are four general steps involved in the setup process:

• Setting up your hypervisor and VDI-in-a-box grid
• Generating a base desktop image
• Creating desktop templates from the base image
• Assigning users to desktops

Setting up a Hypervisor and VDI-in-a-Box Grid

As shown from the screenshot below, this step requires the following:

• Hypervisor credentials
• Credentials for an existing Active Directory (if you're using AD)
• A reserved IP address for VDI-in-a-Box Manager

Click Continue to proceed.

Enter the IP address and root login credentials for the host that the VDI-in-a-Box virtual machine is running on. Click Next when done.

Once you connect successfully, select a Datastore and a Network Label from the two drop-down lists, then click Next.

In the next screen, you'll be asked to choose whether you want to create a new VDI-in-a-Box grid or to join this VDI-in-a-Box server to an existing grid. Since what we have is a fresh install, we will choose the first option and then click Next.

Give that new grid a name and then select a user database. There are two options for that user database: VDI-in-a-Box workgroup or Microsoft Active Directory.

Additional fields will have to be filled out if you choose Microsoft Active Directory. You'll need to enter the IP address of your Domain Controller/DNS Server, the domain name, and the corresponding administrative login credentials.

If you have vCenter, click the check box labeled vCenter manages servers in this grid and then fill in the additional fields as well. When you're done filling everything in, click Next.

You're almost done. At this point, the system will ask if you have reserved a dedicated IP address for VDI-in-a-Box Manager. Basically, it just wants to know if you are going to use a static IP or a dynamic IP. Choose the appropriate option and click Done.

Generating a Base Desktop Image

The next step is to generate a base desktop image. The base desktop image is the brand new virtual machine you're going to create and on which you're going to install an operating system, applications, and so forth.

Later on, the virtual machines of all other virtual desktops that connect will be cloned from that base image. Basically, a new template will be created from that, and then every time a user connects, he'll get his own virtual machine based on that image.

To complete this step, you will need to verify whether the DHCP set up has:

• Only one DHCP server within range
• Sufficient DHCP addresses available
• A DHCP lease time that is adjusted for short release cycles

You will also need a running Windows XP or Windows 7 VM on the hypervisor to copy as a base desktop image.

Finally, if you are connecting to a Windows AD domain, you will need credentials for an existing domain controller.

Click Continue to proceed.

Assuming you already have an existing virtual machine which you can import as a base desktop image, you should be able to see it on the list on that screen. Select it, give it a name, and put in a description. When you're done, click the Import button.

The creation process of your new VDI-in-a-box virtual will then begin.

After a few minutes, your virtual machine will have been cloned, and you will then be ready to install the desktop agent on the virtual machine. The desktop agent is just a little application that runs on every virtual machine in the desktop virtual infrastructure. It allows the virtual machines to communicate their statuses back to the connection broker.

To install, you should connect to the image by clicking on the Connect button. Once you're there, you're supposed to paste a specified URL into that image's browser. The URL should be visible from the current screen, so copy it first into the clipboard before connecting.

After you click the Connect button, you'll find yourself in the virtual machine desktop. Launch the Web browser and paste the URL you copied earlier.

You're then supposed to verify the following before proceeding:

• The image is a member of the correct domain or workgroup. If it isn't, you need to add the image to the correct domain/workgroup. Once you do that, you will be asked to reboot the image before proceeding, so save the URL of this page.
• Windows firewall or an anti-virus is not blocking TCP ports 1494, 2598, 3389, and 8080.
• Remote desktop access is enabled for the desktop users. This can be achieved by adding the desktop users to the Remote Desktop Users' group.
• No other versions of Citrix VDI-in-a-Box Desktop Agent, Citrix Virtual Desktop Agent, or Citrix Port ICA are currently installed on the image.

After verifying all that, click the Install button and follow the instructions on the screen.

As soon as the installation process completes, click the checkbox that says Launch Citrix VDI-in-a-Box Desktop Agent and then click Finish.

You will then be automatically logged out of the Remote Desktop connection and brought back to the administrative console. A connection to the newly created virtual desktop will then be initiated.

With your agent successfully installed, the next step would be to download and install the Citrix Receiver. You will need it in testing the desktop you just created. Click the link for downloading the Citrix Receiver.

Once you're on the Citrix website, select the platform you'll be working on.

For example, since we selected Windows, we're brought to its corresponding download page. Click the Download link for the Receiver for Web Access.

That will launch the Citrix Download Manager. Click the Download Now button.

Specify a location for the downloaded .exe file (or simply accept the default) and then click Save.

The Download Manager will then take care of downloading and installing the file.

When the installation completes, click OK.

That's all there is to it for this part. You can now go back to the window you were on earlier. Click Test port to test the HDX port. If you get a notice saying the test succeeded, you may proceed to the next step by clicking the Next button.

Now that you have a working virtual machine, you can make that the golden image for all your end users to connect to. In other words, your end users' desktops will be cloned off of this image. So, not only will you want the operating system to be ready to go, you'll also want applications installed on the image as well.

Although adding applications is marked as an optional step, it no longer will be once you start working in a production environment. In such an environment, you will want to install commonly used apps like MS Office, QuickBooks, and all the other applications your end users use on a regular basis.

One thing that you really need to do in this step is to verify the accuracy of certain information. To view all the information that requires your verification, click the View button.

In a real world production environment, you would like to make sure the answer to all those questions outlined below is Yes. Assuming you've already verified each of the items mentioned above, click Done.

Once you're back to the Edit Image screen, click Next.

Preparing the image simply entails filling up the form shown on this screen. You'll need to enter information such as: the domain name, domain administrator name, domain admin password, the Organization Unit (optional), the time zone, a computer name prefix, and so on (scroll down to see the other items).

When you're done filling that up, click the Prepare button.

Click Confirm.

The image preparation process will then begin.

Once the desktop image is already prepared, the next step is to test it and see whether it is functioning correctly. Click Connect to connect to the desktop and start testing.

Select a suitable connection method. For example, in our case, we chose Citrix HDX. Click Connect.

Put in your login credentials and click Log in.

Once inside the virtual desktop, you might want to check out some basic information. For instance, you might want to check out the desktop's CPU, RAM, OS version, and so on. You can go to the Start menu button, right-click Computer, and then select Properties to view those.

Another place to look at is the Start > Programs menu. See whether the applications you wanted installed are actually there.

Basically, you want to inspect and try out everything that has to do with the end user experience. Make sure everything that you'd like your end users to do on their desktop can actually be done.

If you see no problems, you can go back to the VDI-in-a-Box administrative console and click the Save button.

Click the Confirm button. Note that if you have more than one server in your grid (e.g. for high availability and scalability) this image will be distributed to all those servers.

At this juncture, the system will start shutting down the VM and then get it ready for end users to connect.

With that, you will have completed all the steps for generating a base desktop image. You're now ready to create desktop templates from it.

Creating Desktop Templates from the Base Image

This step entails coming up with names and descriptions for the desktop templates you create, specifying the number of user desktops you want for each template, and refreshing policies for user desktops. Click Continue to proceed.

In the succeeding screen, enter the name you want this template to have. Next, select the image you created earlier from the drop-down list. Enter an appropriate description and then leave everything else to their defaults. Click Next.

Specify the maximum number of desktops you want for this template. Also specify the number of pre-started desktops before clicking Save.

Assuming everything goes smoothly, you should receive a notification declaring that the template was saved successfully. Click Close.

That now brings us to our last set of steps, and that is to assign users to the desktops. Click Continue.

Here, you can define users, user groups, or IP addresses that can access specific templates of a base image. To define a user, user group, or IP address, just click their respective Add link.

You’ll then be asked to enter an Active Directory ID and then select a specific template that it can access.

Here’s a newly added user.

After defining users, user groups, and/or IP addresses, go to the Desktops tab to see whether you’re all set to test this out on a real end user using your newly cloned template.

At the top of that page, you’ll see some relevant information regarding the Capacity of the grid. Here’s what the colored bars mean:

• Green bars (not visible on the screenshot) - capacity of desktops in use and on hold
• Yellow bars - desktops that are still new, starting, or on-hold
• Dark gray bars - potential consumption of the grid resources by the maximum configured desktops
• Light gray bars - unused capacity of the entire grid

Below that, in the section named Desktops, you’ll find information regarding the default template such as the maximum number of desktops to be generated (Max), the number of desktops that will be pre-started and ready for connection at any point in time (Prestart), the number currently being used (In Use), the number preserved for subsequent use (On Hold), and so on.

At this point, you should be able to test things out. There are multiple ways of doing this, but here’s one way.

If you’re an end user who wants to connect to your designated VDI-in-a-Box virtual desktop, you can point your Web browser to the IP address of the VDI-in-a-Box server, enter your login credentials and log on.

Your designated desktop will then load and you’ll be automatically logged in using your Active Directory username and password.

You can then go on and do what you normally do on a regular desktop.

Before we end, let’s go to the vSphere Client and see the virtual machines that were created courtesy of VDI-in-a-Box. In our screenshot below, you can see the original VDI-in-a-Box virtual machine as well as the Windows 7 virtual machines that were created off of it.

Conclusion

The connection to my virtual desktop and the performance was fast, wasn't it? I was impressed with VDI-in-a-Box. I am awaiting a price quote now. My only recommendation for Citrix is to put pricing online instead of making you request a quote.

I suggest that you try out VDI-in-a-Box for yourself using the free 30 day eval. I think you'll see that it can make desktop virtualization super-easy!

One of the great new features of vSphere 5 allows you to roll out pre-configured VMware ESXi hosts, "en masse." This is the absolute fastest way to have a large vSphere infrastructure up and running, in no time. As part of the VMware vSphere 5 Training I created with Elias Khnaser, Elias created a one hour video on Auto Deploy (yes, there is a lot to know). By the way, if you are preparing for your VCP5, then learning Auto Deploy is on the blueprint and something to be studied.

VMware vSphere 5 Video Training

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• use PowerCLI to create a deployment rule
• boot host via PXE to install ESXi
• view that newly installed host in a vCenter staging profile
• create a cluster & add the host to a cluster
• attach a host profile to the host to configure it
• move a host from a staging folder to the production cluster with PowerCLI

What is Auto Deploy?

Auto Deploy is one of the coolest features that comes with VMWare vSphere 5. It enables admins to significantly cut down time they usually spend in provisioning vSphere servers. It makes a very substantial impact when you need to provision hundreds or thousands of physical hosts with ESXi.

To use Auto Deploy, you will need:

• A PXE Boot Infrastructure comprised of DHCP and TFTP servers for network booting
• An ESXi image profile created using Image Builder, which is a new vSphere 5 tool for creating and maintaining custom ESXi images
• vCenter Server to configure hosts using vCenter host profiles. Host configuration is usually done after ESXi has been installed, the host has been added to vCenter, and the host profile has been applied.
• Auto Deploy Server to install ESXi on the hosts after the PXE boot. It is also used in adding hosts to vCenter, and applying host profiles.

In this post, we'll jump into the portion wherein you'll actually get to see Auto Deploy in action. To get into the details of the preceding steps, watch our videos!

Step 1: Use PowerCLI to Create a Deployment Rule

Ok, let's assume you've created a new rule. You now have to add that new rule to the Active Set Rules. Otherwise, it won't take effect. To do that, you go to the vSphere PowerCLI and execute this command:

Add-DeployRule -DeployRule "Staging"

wherein "Staging" is the name of the rule you just created.

Step 2: Boot Host via PXE to Install ESXi

Once you're done with that, the next step would be to reset your host. If everything goes well, it should PXE-boot right into ESXi and start the installation. During the PXE boot process, Auto Deploy will obtain an IP address via DHCP and then redirect the host to a TFTP server. In turn, the TFTP server will stream an ESXi image into the physical host's memory.

Remember, this is all done over your network.

Step 3: View that Newly Installed Host in a vCenter Staging Profile

After that, the ESXi host will reboot and make itself available in vCenter inside a folder you should have created earlier.

In our case, the folder we created was named "Staging”. That folder serves as the staging location of the ESXi host before it is moved into a production cluster. Inside the panel at the bottom of the screen, you can monitor the progress as the ESXi host is added into the folder.

All other processes that you'll be doing inside vCenter can be monitored inside that panel as well.

Step 4: Create a Cluster and Add the Host to a Cluster

After having added the ESXi host into the Staging folder, the next step would be to create a profile from that particular host. Let's assume of course you already made all the necessary configuration changes and the server is already exactly the way you want it.

To proceed with creating a host profile from that host, right-click on the host and, in the context menu, navigate to Host Profile > Create Profile from Host.

Give the profile a Name and a Description and click Next.

Click Finish.

Step 5: Attach a Host Profile to the Host to Configure it

You also need to attach that particular host profile to this server. To do that, you have to put the server to maintenance mode first. Again, right-click on the host and then click Enter Maintenance Mode.

Confirm that you want to enter maintenance mode by clicking Yes.

The moment the server enters maintenance mode, right-click on it and navigate to Host Profile > Apply Profile.

Click Finish.

Wait until the system finishes applying the host configuration.

So at this point, you would have already PXE-booted, created an image profile entry for that host in vCenter, as well as created a host profile entry for it. Therefore, you could easily reboot that host and do whatever it is you need to do to it.

But first, you need to take it out of maintenance mode. Right-click the host and select Exit Maintenance Mode.

Step 6: Move a Host from a Staging Folder to the Production Cluster with PowerCLI

One thing you will want to do is move the host from staging into production. Let's say you have a production cluster named "Prod," which is where you'll be moving the host into. To proceed, bring back PowerCLI.

Now, take note. You can't modify a rule that is already active. You have to copy that rule and then make the modifications and changes you want on that copy. To do that, execute the command:

Copy-DeployRule -DeployRule Staging - ReplaceItem Prod

Wherein Staging is the name of the rule you want to modify and Prod is the name of the item that will replace the original item, which in this case is also named Staging.

You"ll see that particular item change as soon as you execute the command.

After that, if you want to verify whether the host is actually accessible (i.e., whether it is possible to attach to that particular host), execute this command:

Get-VMHost -Name esx6.wiredbraincoffee.com

wherein esx6.wiredbraincoffee.com is just the FQDN (fully qualified domain name) of the host that you want to verify.

If everything’s running perfectly, it should show in the results that appear after you execute the command.

Once you see that the results are good, you’ll be ready to test that particular configuration. Testing can be done by executing this command:

$tr = Test-DeployRuleSetCompliance esx6.wiredbraincoffee.com

wherein $tr is an environmental variable which you’ll be using in the command that’s about to follow.

If the command above executes without any issues, that means you’re ready to proceed.

Meaning, your configuration is valid and you’re allowed to make the change. The last command you need to execute, which as mentioned earlier will be using the environmental variable $tr, is this:

Repair-DeployRuleSetCompliance $tr

Although it uses the term ‘repair,’ it really isn’t doing any repairs. This is just VMWare’s way of telling you that you’re about to modify this.

Again, if there are no issues after execution, then you’re good to go.

Once you check vCenter, you’ll notice that the host has already been moved from the staging folder to your designated production folder.

Conclusion

I just showed you how to use Auto Deploy to easily move your hosts back and forth between your folders and apply any kind of particular profile on those hosts.

For the full one hour training video on Auto Deploy, check out our 16 hour VMware vSphere 5 Training course from TrainSignal.com.

What is virtualization? What are the different types of virtualization? And most importantly, what are the benefits of virtualization? In this guide, designed specifically for IT professionals who are new to virtualization, we’ll take a detailed look at the different types of virtualization as well as the benefits of each:

• Hardware Virtualization
• Software Virtualization
• Memory Virtualization
• Storage Virtualization
• Data Virtualization
• Network Virtualization

What I hope you get out of this article is that virtualization is not just for the datacenter, and it's not just for large organization. Same thing applies to it's benefits; virtualization has a lot to offer to IT professionals and in many cases, to end users. If you're new to the concept of virtualization, or you're unfamiliar with the different shapes virtualization can take, this article is the perfect place to start.

What is Hardware Virtualization?

Historically, there has been a 1-to-1 relationship between physical servers and operating systems. Low CPU, memory, and networking requirements matched nicely with the limited hardware resources available. As this model continued, however, the costs of doing business rose. The amount of power, physical space, and hardware required meant that costs were adding up.

Virtualization is all about abstraction. Hardware virtualization is accomplished by abstracting the physical hardware layer by use of a hypervisor (aka - a Virtual Machine Monitor). The hypervisor handles sharing the physical resources of the hardware between the guest operating systems running on the host. Physical resources become abstracted versions in standard formats, so regardless of the hardware platforms, the hardware is presented as the same model. The virtualized operating system is able to hook into these resources as though they are physical entities. Learn About SolarWinds Virtualization Manager.

Various levels of hardware virtualization exist that perform various levels of abstraction:

Full - The guest OS is unaware that it is being virtualized. The hypervisor will handle all OS-to-hardware requests on demand and may cache the results for future use. In this instance, the virtualized OS is completely isolated from the hardware layer by the hypervisor. This provides the highest level of security and flexibility as a broader range of operating systems can be virtualized.

Hardware assisted - Hardware vendors have seen value in virtualization and have tailored their devices to enhance performance or functionality. This is most evident in the AMD-V and Intel Virtualization Technology processor enhancements. In the case of the AMD and Intel processors, specific CPU calls are not translated by the hypervisor, and are sent directly to the CPU. This reduces the hypervisor load and increases performance by removing the translation time from operating system calls.

Paravirtualized - The guest OS needs to be engineered in such a way that it knows that it is virtualized. The kernel of the operating system is adjusted to replace instructions that cannot be virtualized with methods that interact directly with the hypervisor. Value for paravirtualized environments comes in the form of lower overhead and optimized operations. Paravirtualization is typically seen in Linux environments with the Xen kernels included, although it is more and more common to find Full Virtualization vendors, including some paravirtualization drivers, in their latest products.

Hypervisors can also be categorized into one of two primary categories:

Type I – Type I hypervisors are installed directly on to the hardware, similar to how a regular operating system may be installed on a single server. There is very low overhead associated with this technique and performance is greater. VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Citrix XenServer are all examples of Type I hypervisors.

Type II – Type II hypervisors are installed onto an existing operating system environment. There is higher overhead, as the entire operating environment resources are managed by the operating system, which may result in lower performance. VMware Workstation, Microsoft Virtual PC, and Oracle VirtualBox are examples of Type II hypervisors.

Benefits of Hardware Virtualization

The main benefits of hardware virtualization include more efficient resource utilization, lower overall costs, and higher ROI, as well as increased uptime and IT flexibility. Let’s take a look at each of these benefits in more detail.

• More Efficient Resource Utilization: Physical resources can be shared amongst virtual machines. Unused resources, although allocated to a virtual machine, can be used by other virtual machines if the need exists.
• Lower Overall Costs Due to Server Consolidation: Now that it is possible for multiple operating systems to coexist on a single hardware platform, the sheer number of servers, rack space, and power consumption drops significantly.
• Higher ROI: Servers can be expensive: By running multiple independent and isolated environments on a single hardware platform, IT is making better use of the purchase and getting the biggest bang for their buck.
• Increased Uptime Due to Advanced Hardware Virtualization Features: The modern hypervisor providers are able to provide highly orchestrated operations that maximize the abstraction of the hardware and help ensure maximum uptime. These functions include the ability to migrate a running virtual machine from one host to another dynamically, as well as maintain a running copy of the virtual machine on another physical host in case the primary host fails.
• Increased IT Flexibility: Hardware virtualization allows for quick deployment of server resources in managed and consistent ways. This results in IT being able to adapt quickly and provide the business with resources needed in an expedited time frame.

What is Software Virtualization?

Managing applications and distribution becomes a very steep task for IT departments. Installation mechanisms differ from application to application. Some programs require certain helper applications or frameworks, and these applications or frameworks may conflict with existing applications or new applications. Additionally, one-off applications exist for special users.

But how are virtual desktops handled? How are laptops handled? How do you update the software? Plus, which mechanism are you using to deploy the software? The considerations are quite daunting.

Software virtualization, like virtualization in general, is able to abstract the software installation procedure and create virtual software installations. Virtualized software is an application that has been "installed" into its own self-contained unit. In Windows environments, this unit contains virtual registry, %TEMP% directories, and storage locations. An application becomes a single unit that can be deployed as easy as copying a file to a location. Plus, the application can be allowed to interact with local system resources or stay in the unit.

The installation of the software into the self-contained unit becomes a "diff" style operation. A clean operating system is configured, a snapshot is taken of the environment, the application is installed and configured, and a new snapshot of the environment is taken. The difference between the snapshots is the virtualized application.

Benefits of Software Virtualization

This methodology provides some fairly significant benefits to application managers:

• Client Deployments Become Easier: copying a file to a workstation or linking to a file in a network share can install Virtual applications. Existing deployment methodology can be leveraged to automate this functionality.
• Added Security: Many software virtualization providers include the ability to link to LDAP/Active Directory group membership to ensure that you are able to run the software. This ensures approved users are granted access, and the software cannot be run on a machine that does not have access to the LDAP/Active Directory domain. Plus, time bomb functions may exist that expire the software after a specified amount of time.
• Ease of Management: Managing updates becomes a much simpler task. Update one place; deploy the updated virtual application to the clients. If the update breaks something, just copy the original file back in place. Suddenly, it becomes possible to have a library of updated software for versioning and roll back functionality.
• Software Migrations: Moving users from one software platform to another takes much time and consideration for deploying, and impact on end user systems. By running a virtualized software environment, the migration can be as simple as replacing one file with another.
• Conflict Mitigation with Existing Software: Due to the fact that software is housed in virtualized containers, applications that do not play nicely with each other can co-exist on the same system. This is very useful for developers testing different software versions or running multiple versions of web browsers to verify application functionality.

What is Memory Virtualization?

In the most basic form, memory virtualization is seen as virtual memory, or swap, on servers and workstations. Conceptually, swap exists as a way to handle memory-full systems without having to halt, or even kill, processes. Swap is a portion of the local storage environment that is designated as memory to the host system. The host sees the local swap as additional addressable memory locations and does not delineate between RAM and swap. However, the swap file is addressed at the upper bounds of the memory addressing, so the physical memory will be consumed before the swap is consumed. Using swap imposes a major performance degradation on the host system. The read/write speed of local storage, and even solid-state storage (SSD), is much slower than RAM. Plus, disk contention becomes a major issue as the read/write rates to the local storage is high, and impacts the ability of system operations to read from the same disk.

High bandwidth, low latency environments are making use of memory virtualization as well. This can be seen in technologies like InfiniBand and high performance cluster environments. Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) is used to provide remote access to another host's memory without interfering with that host. Again, to the host utilizing the RDMA functionality, this becomes another section of addressable memory locations. However, the speed is much faster than that of the swap file as it is running over high bandwidth, low latency connections. As converged networking over 10Gb links becomes more and more prevalent, RDMA is going to become more and more of an option, as Ethernet standards for RDMA are being developed. Download a FREE 30-Day Trial of SolarWinds Virtualization Manager.

Server virtualization vendors are taking advantage of their ability to abstract the memory resources of a given host, and are providing some interesting memory related functions. These functions include:

• The ability to share common memory pages across multiple virtual machines. This is great for when a host is running  multiple copies of the same operating system. There is no need for multiple copies of the same pages to exist. Sharing the pages frees up memory to use elsewhere.
• The ability to snapshot a memory state and revert back if the new state is not optimal.
• The ability to transmit the memory state across the network to another host in order to move virtual machine operations to the new host.
• Compress physical memory contents in order to save the physical host from utilizing swap.
• Releasing unused, but allocated, memory for other virtual machines to utilize.

 Benefits of Memory Virtualization

Benefits to using memory virtualization include:

• Higher memory utilization by sharing contents and consolidating more virtual machines on a physical host.
• Ensuring some memory space exists before halting services until memory frees up.
• Access to more memory than the chassis can physically allow.
• Advanced server virtualization functions, like live migrations.

What is Storage Virtualization?

Historically, there has been a strong link between the physical host and the locally installed storage devices. However, that paradigm is changing drastically, almost to the point that local storage is no longer needed. As technology progresses, more advanced storage devices are coming to the market that provide more functionality, and serve to obsolete local storage.

Storage virtualization is a major component in storage best practices for servers, in the form of controllers and functional RAID levels. Operating systems and applications with raw device access prefer to write directly to the disks themselves. The controllers configure the local storage in RAID groups and present the storage to the operating system as a volume (or multiple volumes, depending on the configuration). The operating system issues storage commands to the volumes, thinking that it is writing directly to the disk. However, the storage has been abstracted and the controller is determining how to write the data or retrieve the requested data for the operating system.

Storage virtualization is becoming more and more present in various other forms:

• File servers: The operating system is writing to a remote location with no need to understand how to write to the physical media.
• pNFS: A component of NFS v4.1, pNFS involves making a request for data over an NFS share. However, the data is stored in a large variety of disparate locations and medium. The requester has no idea where the data exists; that is handled by the NFS server.
• DFS: Similar in concept to pNFS, DFS, Distributed File System, creates a filesystem-like view of data. However, the composition of the filesystem is differing file shares on the network. The filesystem appears to be a single volume, but it is comprised of multiple locations.
• WAN Accelerators: Rather than send multiple copies of the same data over the WAN environment, WAN accelerators will cache data locally and present the re-requested blocks at LAN speed, while not impacting the WAN performance.
• NAS and SAN: Storage is presented over the Ethernet network to the operating system. NAS presents storage as file operations (like NFS and CIFS). SAN technologies present storage as block level storage (like iSCSI and Fibre Channel). SAN technologies receive operating instructions as if the storage was a locally attached device.
• Storage Pools: Enterprise level storage devices can aggregate common storage devices, in the form of like disk types (speeds and capacity), to present an abstracted view of the storage environment for administrators to handle. The storage device handles which disks to place the data upon, versus the storage administrator deciding how to divide the available disks. This usually leads to higher reliability and performance as more disks are used.
• Storage Tiering: Utilizing the storage pool concept as a stepping stone, storage tiering analyzes most commonly used data and places it on the highest performing storage pool. The lowest used data is placed on the weakest performing storage pool. This operation is done automatically and without any interruption of service to the data consumer.

Benefits of Storage Virtualization

Benefits to storage virtualization include:

• Data is stored in more convenient locations away from the specific host. In the event of a host failure, the data is not necessarily compromised.
• The storage devices are able to perform advanced functions like deduplication, replication, thin provisioning, and disaster recovery functionality.
• By abstracting the storage level, IT operations can become more flexible in how storage is partitioned, provided, and protected.

What is Data Virtualization?

Data exists in many forms in our environments. Sometimes the data is static or dynamic. Sometimes the data is stored in a database or in a flat file. Sometimes the data resides in the accounting system or the operations system. Sometimes the data is in Asia or Europe. Sometimes the data is integer based or string based.

Managing data location and availability can be difficult when trying to pull from many sources to analyze the data. Data virtualization deals with the ability to abstract the actual location, access method and data types, and allow the end user to focus on the data itself. This is typically seen in corporate/IT Dashboards, BI tools, and CRM tools.

The dashboard and BI/CRM tools are responsible for handling the abstraction of data locations. These tools are configured with various data sources that can aggregate the data into a single point for analysts to utilize. Data sources may include database connectors, APIs, website data, sensor data, file repositories, and application integrations. The analysts do not need to know where the data comes from, only that it exists and is correct.

Benefits of Data Virtualization

Benefits to data virtualization include:

• Less end user domain knowledge of where the data is. Techniques for connecting to various sources may require higher technical skills, security levels, and understanding of how the data is stored.
• Focus on correctly analyzing the data. The end user is spending their time focusing on their specific role or function and not worrying about how the data arrives, just that it does.

What is Network Virtualization?

Virtualization can be seen as abstraction and creation of multiple logical systems on a single physical platform. For network virtualization this remains true, although not so clearly as server virtualization. Networking devices utilize both paravirtualization and hypervisor techniques.

The first is loosely based on the idea of paravirtualization, where the underlying software is creating a separate forwarding table for each virtual network, such as is done by MPLS within each VRF. In MPLS, the OS creates a single routing and forwarding database for each VRF, but marks each entry in the database with the tag for ownership. BGP is used to update the database, and shares the routes AND the tags to distribute the data throughout the network.

In the second type of hypervisor, the network device OS instantiates multiple instances of the OS. Perhaps the most common example of this might be Cisco ASA firewalls, with the use of Virtual Contexts. Each context appears as a totally separate ASA instance and shares access to the physical interfaces. No communication between contexts is possible within the ASA OS, and all traffic must pass on physical interfaces.

Benefits of Network Virtualization

Benefits to network virtualization include:

• Service Orientation: As each business service is added to your IT infrastructure, some parts of the infrastructure are shared resources, and others are dedicated resources. For example, Ethernet switches are regarded as shared resources, and VLAN configuration can be a dedicated resource on the shared switching resource.
• Better Change Control: Virtualization improves Change Management by separating functions into many areas. Changes to the configuration within a virtualized area will have no impact to another area, thus making change approval easier.
• Cost Savings: The cost of deploying and maintaining network equipment is high, and it can be cost effective to share firewalls, switches, and load balancers between services, instead of buying new physical equipment each time.
• Security: Because the systems are logically separate, many security issues and risks can be easily addressed. Topics such as limiting access and limiting knowledge are simpler to handle.

Summary

Virtualization overall, irrespective of the type, helps improve scalability and resource utilization. In most cases, the main benefit to IT professionals is the ease of management, as virtualization helps to centralize administrative tasks, whether they involve day-to-day updates or large scale deployments and migrations.

But there's a lot more to virtualization than what we've covered here. This guide was meant to help you get your head wrapped around the concept of virtualization, the main types of virtualization and their benefits. What we didn't cover are the disadvantages, challenges and complexities of virtualization, but we'll save that for another article.