[No Flash] It seems that for many years , actually probably forever, security professionals have behaved in a totally reactive way when it come to data breaches. For example, if a breach was identified and it was determined that it was an issue with user education then the team would try to educate the user. This whole model is flawed as we are behaving and acting like victims because we really can't see the who, what, when, where and why of attacks that we are going to be targeted with. We need to move from defense to offence when it comes to protecting ourselves.
To be in the mindset of an attacker you need to have answers to the following fundamental questions:
1. What are you most valuable assets? Where are these assets? How can they be accessed?
2. If you were the attacker how would you spread malware? And who are the most 'vulnerable' targets in the organization?
3. Do you have a view on the 'normal' behavior of your organization (people, behavior, locations and systems)?
As outlined in my previous blogs these questions aren't new questions, they are the absolute basics of any sound security program yet we seem to get them wrong all the time and fall victim to attacks. So, it's time to get on the offensive….
Here's a quote from Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese warrior general who even in those days understood really sound security strategies:
'It has been said before that he who has known both sides has nothing to fear in a hundred fights; he who is ignorant of the enemy, and fixes his eyes only on his own side, conquers, and the next time is defeated, he who not only is ignorant of the enemy, but also of his own resources, is invariably defeated.
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Sunday, December 30, 2012
Sunday, December 16, 2012
Free e-learning course - vCenter Operations Manager for View Fundamentals
The vCenter Operations Manager for View Fundamentals course<http://mylearn.vmware.com/mgrreg/courses.cfm?ui=www_edu&a=one&id_subject=40846> covers the key features and benefits of vCenter Operations Manager for View, how to install and configure the product, and how to work with the vCenter Operations Manager for View dashboards.
The course has three modules:
Module 1
Introduction – This module discusses the vCenter Operations Manager for View architecture, business challenges, problems vCenter Operations Manager for View solves, and key features of vCenter Operations Manager for View. In addition, you will learn about the vCenter Operations Manager for View user interface and dashboards, how vCenter Operations Manager for View is packaged and licensed, and about how vCenter Operations Manager for View collects data and metrics.
Module 2
Installing and Configuring vCenter Operations Manager for View – This module covers the vCenter Operations Manager for View design considerations, installation process, and configuration tasks.
Module 3
Working with the vCenter Operations Manager for View Dashboards –This module describes the function of each of the dashboards and how to use the dashboards to troubleshoot system issues.
________________________________
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The course has three modules:
Module 1
Introduction – This module discusses the vCenter Operations Manager for View architecture, business challenges, problems vCenter Operations Manager for View solves, and key features of vCenter Operations Manager for View. In addition, you will learn about the vCenter Operations Manager for View user interface and dashboards, how vCenter Operations Manager for View is packaged and licensed, and about how vCenter Operations Manager for View collects data and metrics.
Module 2
Installing and Configuring vCenter Operations Manager for View – This module covers the vCenter Operations Manager for View design considerations, installation process, and configuration tasks.
Module 3
Working with the vCenter Operations Manager for View Dashboards –This module describes the function of each of the dashboards and how to use the dashboards to troubleshoot system issues.
________________________________
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Monday, December 10, 2012
Network Core Dump Collector Check with ESXCLI 5.1 - VMware vSphere Blog
The ESXi Dump Collector service is an extremely useful feature to have enabled, this is especially important in a stateless environment where there may not be a local disk for storing core dumps generated during a host failure. By configuring ESXi hosts to send it's core dumps to a remote vSphere Dump Collector<http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2011/07/setting-up-the-esxi-50-dump-collector.html>, it still allows you to collect core dumps which will help VMware Support analyze and determine the root cause of the failure.
In addition, by leveraging the vSphere Dump Collector, it allows you centrally manage core dump collection in your vSphere environment in the rare occasion a host may generate a PSOD (Purple Screen of Death) without having to go out to the host and manually copying the core dump file. A potential challenge that may come up when configuring the ESXi Dump Collector service is how do you go about validating the configuration is correct and that everything will work if a host crashes?
In the past, there was not a very user friendly way of validating ESXi Dump Collector configurations, you had to either resort to triggering an NMI<http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1014767> (Non-Maskable Interrupt) to force a PSOD or even using an unsupported command in the ESXi Shell to forcefully crash a host. In both scenarios, it required a user to crash a host to test the network core dump feature which is not very ideal in my opinion. This can especially be a challenge if you need to validate hundreds if not thousands of ESXi hosts in your environment.
With the release of ESXi 5.1, we have added an enhancement to ESXCLI which now supports the ability to check and validate the dump collector configurations on your ESXi host. This new command is available under:
esxcli system coredump network check
The check operation is not a simple network ping test, but it actually goes out and communicates with the configured vSphere Dump Collector to ensure that it can successfully send core dumps over the network. Let's take a quick look at how this new command works:
vi-admin@vMA51:~> esxcli –server vcenter51 –vihost pod23-esx-01a.pml.local –username root system coredump network set -v vmk0 -i 10.24.140.65 -o 6500<tel:6500>
Enter password:
vi-admin@vMA51:~> esxcli –server vcenter51 –vihost pod23-esx-01a.pml.local –username root system coredump network set -e true
Enter password:
vi-admin@vMA51:~> esxcli –server vcenter51 –vihost pod23-esx-01a.pml.local –username root system coredump network get Enter password: Enabled: true Host VNic: vmk0 Network Server IP: 10.24.140.65
Network Server Port: 6500<tel:6500>
vi-admin@vMA51:~> esxcli –server vcenter51 –vihost pod23-esx-01a.pml.local –username root system coredump network check
Enter password:
Verified the configured netdump server is running
In the above example, the first two commands is just demonstrating a regular network core dump configuration<http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2002955> and after that I perform a "get" operation to display the current configuration on the ESXi host. The final command is using the new check operation and we can see from the output that we have successfully verified the dump collector service is properly configured and running. In case there is an error in your configuration, you may see the following message:
Attempt to contact configured netdump server failed: Configured netdump server did not respond in a timely manner
So how do we go about verifying that there was actual communication between the ESXi host and the vSphere Dump Collector as mentioned earlier and not just a pretty print message? For this, we will need to take a look at the Sphere Dump Collector logs. In this example I am using the VCSA (vCenter Serer Appliance) which already has the vSphere Dump Collector pre-installed. The logs are stored in /var/log/vmware/netdumper/netdumper.log and if you tail the log while performing the checking operation, you should a message similar to this:
2012-12-10T17:33:19.328Z| netdumper| I120: Posting back a status check reply to 10.24.137.77
We can see there is an acknowledgement from the vSphere Dump Collector that it can properly communicate with the ESXi host and it is posting a reply back to the host. Hopefully with this new check command in ESXi 5.1, you no longer have to crash your host to just verify that dump collector service on ESXi is properly configured and working.
If you would like to get more details on how the ESXi Dump Collector service works, you can watch this video here:
For more details on configuring the ESXi network core dump, please refer to this VMware KB<http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2002955> article which also provides links to the ESXCLI documentation.
Get notification of new blog postings and more by following VMware Automation on Twitter: [https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/zhM0tNt5R5_R5eywlKztykwzWKS5Z8l6I6FWfc4-O4G8BNf6eq41NHkCf6Dxt6G7aF6Vq4xC4RXu4NS1aNKDq4PICxx0IzhdZmmHx08Sg00eur4kzPc] @VMWAutomation<http://twitter.com/vmwautomation>
blogs.vmware.com [X] <http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/12/network-core-dump-collector-check-with-esxcli-5-1.html> |by William Lam on December 10, 2012
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Original Page: http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/12/network-core-dump-collector-check-with-esxcli-5-1.html
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In addition, by leveraging the vSphere Dump Collector, it allows you centrally manage core dump collection in your vSphere environment in the rare occasion a host may generate a PSOD (Purple Screen of Death) without having to go out to the host and manually copying the core dump file. A potential challenge that may come up when configuring the ESXi Dump Collector service is how do you go about validating the configuration is correct and that everything will work if a host crashes?
In the past, there was not a very user friendly way of validating ESXi Dump Collector configurations, you had to either resort to triggering an NMI<http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1014767> (Non-Maskable Interrupt) to force a PSOD or even using an unsupported command in the ESXi Shell to forcefully crash a host. In both scenarios, it required a user to crash a host to test the network core dump feature which is not very ideal in my opinion. This can especially be a challenge if you need to validate hundreds if not thousands of ESXi hosts in your environment.
With the release of ESXi 5.1, we have added an enhancement to ESXCLI which now supports the ability to check and validate the dump collector configurations on your ESXi host. This new command is available under:
esxcli system coredump network check
The check operation is not a simple network ping test, but it actually goes out and communicates with the configured vSphere Dump Collector to ensure that it can successfully send core dumps over the network. Let's take a quick look at how this new command works:
vi-admin@vMA51:~> esxcli –server vcenter51 –vihost pod23-esx-01a.pml.local –username root system coredump network set -v vmk0 -i 10.24.140.65 -o 6500<tel:6500>
Enter password:
vi-admin@vMA51:~> esxcli –server vcenter51 –vihost pod23-esx-01a.pml.local –username root system coredump network set -e true
Enter password:
vi-admin@vMA51:~> esxcli –server vcenter51 –vihost pod23-esx-01a.pml.local –username root system coredump network get Enter password: Enabled: true Host VNic: vmk0 Network Server IP: 10.24.140.65
Network Server Port: 6500<tel:6500>
vi-admin@vMA51:~> esxcli –server vcenter51 –vihost pod23-esx-01a.pml.local –username root system coredump network check
Enter password:
Verified the configured netdump server is running
In the above example, the first two commands is just demonstrating a regular network core dump configuration<http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2002955> and after that I perform a "get" operation to display the current configuration on the ESXi host. The final command is using the new check operation and we can see from the output that we have successfully verified the dump collector service is properly configured and running. In case there is an error in your configuration, you may see the following message:
Attempt to contact configured netdump server failed: Configured netdump server did not respond in a timely manner
So how do we go about verifying that there was actual communication between the ESXi host and the vSphere Dump Collector as mentioned earlier and not just a pretty print message? For this, we will need to take a look at the Sphere Dump Collector logs. In this example I am using the VCSA (vCenter Serer Appliance) which already has the vSphere Dump Collector pre-installed. The logs are stored in /var/log/vmware/netdumper/netdumper.log and if you tail the log while performing the checking operation, you should a message similar to this:
2012-12-10T17:33:19.328Z| netdumper| I120: Posting back a status check reply to 10.24.137.77
We can see there is an acknowledgement from the vSphere Dump Collector that it can properly communicate with the ESXi host and it is posting a reply back to the host. Hopefully with this new check command in ESXi 5.1, you no longer have to crash your host to just verify that dump collector service on ESXi is properly configured and working.
If you would like to get more details on how the ESXi Dump Collector service works, you can watch this video here:
For more details on configuring the ESXi network core dump, please refer to this VMware KB<http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2002955> article which also provides links to the ESXCLI documentation.
Get notification of new blog postings and more by following VMware Automation on Twitter: [https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/zhM0tNt5R5_R5eywlKztykwzWKS5Z8l6I6FWfc4-O4G8BNf6eq41NHkCf6Dxt6G7aF6Vq4xC4RXu4NS1aNKDq4PICxx0IzhdZmmHx08Sg00eur4kzPc] @VMWAutomation<http://twitter.com/vmwautomation>
blogs.vmware.com [X] <http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/12/network-core-dump-collector-check-with-esxcli-5-1.html> |by William Lam on December 10, 2012
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________________________________
Original Page: http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/12/network-core-dump-collector-check-with-esxcli-5-1.html
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Sunday, December 9, 2012
Video - vCenter Operations Manager Foundation
vCenter Operations Manager Foundation will give you insights and visibility into performance and health of your vSphere infrastructure and is now included free with VMware vSphere. VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite provides automated operations management using patented analytics and an integrated approach to performance, capacity and configuration management.
vCenter Operations Management Suite enables IT organizations to get better visibility and actionable intelligence to proactively ensure service levels, optimum resource usage and configuration compliance in dynamic virtual and cloud environments. vCenter Operations Manager Foundation is the new, entry-level edition of the vCenter Operations Management Suite. It gains deep operational insights and visibility to improve the performance and health of your vSphere environment. vCenter Operations Manager Foundation<http://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/vcenter-operations-manager/buy.html> is included with every vSphere edition free of charge.
________________________________
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vCenter Operations Management Suite enables IT organizations to get better visibility and actionable intelligence to proactively ensure service levels, optimum resource usage and configuration compliance in dynamic virtual and cloud environments. vCenter Operations Manager Foundation is the new, entry-level edition of the vCenter Operations Management Suite. It gains deep operational insights and visibility to improve the performance and health of your vSphere environment. vCenter Operations Manager Foundation<http://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/vcenter-operations-manager/buy.html> is included with every vSphere edition free of charge.
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Monday, December 3, 2012
VMware vSphere: Install, Configure, Manage V5.1
About to start the VMware VCP course, and I’m pretty pumped about it...
Sunday, December 2, 2012
Free e-learning course - VMware vCloud Director Fundamentals [V5.1]
The VMware vCloud Director Fundamentals [V5.1] self-paced course<http://mylearn.vmware.com/mgrReg/courses.cfm?ui=www_edu&a=det&id_course=158926> introduces students to the components, architecture, functions, and benefits of vCloud Director.
The course<http://mylearn.vmware.com/mgrReg/courses.cfm?ui=www_edu&a=det&id_course=158926> consists of the following self-paced modules:
* VMware vCloud Director Overview: In this module, you will learn about cloud and cloud implementations. You will also learn about VMware vCloud Director and its benefits and functions.
* VMware vCloud Director Architecture and Components: This module provides an overview of vCloud Director components, illustrates the vCloud Director architecture, defines vCloud Director component functions, and describes how VMware vShield Edge and VMware vCenter Chargeback are integrated with vCloud Director.
* VMware vCloud Director Installation and Configuration: In this module, you will review vCloud Director components and learn about the prerequisites for vCloud Director installation. You will also learn about the procedure to install and configure vCloud Director. Additionally, you will learn about the post-installation steps.
* VMware vCloud Director Administration: This module covers vCloud Director administration tasks, which include how to create and manage organizations, catalogs, cells, users, roles, and compute resources.
* Network Administration in VMware vCloud Director: In this module, you will learn about vCloud Director network administration tasks such as creating and managing different types of networks. You will also learn about the requirements and constraints of different types of network pools.
* VMware vCloud Director User: In this module, you will learn about deployment and maintenance of vCloud Director that includes understanding how organizations and roles give access to different functions, how to work within the catalogs, and how to use vApp templates.
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The course<http://mylearn.vmware.com/mgrReg/courses.cfm?ui=www_edu&a=det&id_course=158926> consists of the following self-paced modules:
* VMware vCloud Director Overview: In this module, you will learn about cloud and cloud implementations. You will also learn about VMware vCloud Director and its benefits and functions.
* VMware vCloud Director Architecture and Components: This module provides an overview of vCloud Director components, illustrates the vCloud Director architecture, defines vCloud Director component functions, and describes how VMware vShield Edge and VMware vCenter Chargeback are integrated with vCloud Director.
* VMware vCloud Director Installation and Configuration: In this module, you will review vCloud Director components and learn about the prerequisites for vCloud Director installation. You will also learn about the procedure to install and configure vCloud Director. Additionally, you will learn about the post-installation steps.
* VMware vCloud Director Administration: This module covers vCloud Director administration tasks, which include how to create and manage organizations, catalogs, cells, users, roles, and compute resources.
* Network Administration in VMware vCloud Director: In this module, you will learn about vCloud Director network administration tasks such as creating and managing different types of networks. You will also learn about the requirements and constraints of different types of network pools.
* VMware vCloud Director User: In this module, you will learn about deployment and maintenance of vCloud Director that includes understanding how organizations and roles give access to different functions, how to work within the catalogs, and how to use vApp templates.
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Free e-learning course - vSphere Data Protection and Recovery Fundamentals [V5.1]
The vSphere Data Protection and Recovery course<http://mylearn.vmware.com/mgrReg/courses.cfm?ui=www_edu&a=det&id_course=158916> provides information about vSphere Storage APIs and the Data Recovery backup and recovery solution for virtual machines and describes the technologies used by Data Recovery. The course<http://mylearn.vmware.com/mgrReg/courses.cfm?ui=www_edu&a=det&id_course=158916> consists of the following self-paced modules:
* VMware Data Recovery Overview: This module provides information about vSphere Storage APIs and the Data Recovery backup and recovery solution for virtual machines. In addition, the module explains the components of the Data Recovery tool and their installation and configuration.
* Working with VMware Data Recovery: This module describes the technologies used by Data Recovery. In addition, the module explains the steps to create backup and restore jobs, as well as the requirements and guidelines for using Data Recovery.
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* VMware Data Recovery Overview: This module provides information about vSphere Storage APIs and the Data Recovery backup and recovery solution for virtual machines. In addition, the module explains the components of the Data Recovery tool and their installation and configuration.
* Working with VMware Data Recovery: This module describes the technologies used by Data Recovery. In addition, the module explains the steps to create backup and restore jobs, as well as the requirements and guidelines for using Data Recovery.
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Free vCenter Operations Manager General Available - Eric Sloof
vCenter Operations Manager Foundation will give you insights and visibility into performance and health of your vSphere infrastructure and is now included free with VMware vSphere. VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite provides automated operations management using patented analytics and an integrated approach to performance, capacity and configuration management.
vCenter Operations Management Suite enables IT organizations to get better visibility and actionable intelligence to proactively ensure service levels, optimum resource usage and configuration compliance in dynamic virtual and cloud environments. vCenter Operations Manager Foundation is the new, entry-level edition of the vCenter Operations Management Suite. It gains deep operational insights and visibility to improve the performance and health of your vSphere environment. vCenter Operations Manager Foundation<http://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/vcenter-operations-manager/buy.html> is included with every vSphere edition free of charge.
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vCenter Operations Management Suite enables IT organizations to get better visibility and actionable intelligence to proactively ensure service levels, optimum resource usage and configuration compliance in dynamic virtual and cloud environments. vCenter Operations Manager Foundation is the new, entry-level edition of the vCenter Operations Management Suite. It gains deep operational insights and visibility to improve the performance and health of your vSphere environment. vCenter Operations Manager Foundation<http://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/vcenter-operations-manager/buy.html> is included with every vSphere edition free of charge.
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Thursday, November 29, 2012
Technical White Paper - VMware vSphere VMFS Technical Overview and Best Practices
VMware vSphere VMFS is a high-performance cluster file system (CFS) that enables virtualization to scale beyond the boundaries of a single system. Designed, constructed and optimized for the virtual infrastructure, VMFS increases resource utilization by providing multiple virtual machines with shared access to a consolidated pool of clustered storage. And it offers the foundation for virtualization spanning multiple servers, enabling services such as virtual machine snapshots, VMware vSphere Thin Provisioning, VMware vSphere vMotion, VMware vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (vSphere DRS), VMware vSphere High Availability (vSphere HA), VMware vSphere Storage DRS and VMware vSphere Storage vMotion.
VMFS reduces management overhead by providing a highly effective virtualization management layer that is especially suitable for large-scale enterprise datacenters. Administrators employing VMFS find it easy and straightforward to use, and they benefit from the greater efficiency and increased storage utilization offered by the use of shared resources.
This paper provides a technical overview of VMFS, including a discussion of features and their benefits. It highlights how VMFS capabilities enable greater scalability and decreased management overhead and it offers best practices and architectural considerations for deployment of VMFS.
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vmfs-best-practices-wp.pdf
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VMFS reduces management overhead by providing a highly effective virtualization management layer that is especially suitable for large-scale enterprise datacenters. Administrators employing VMFS find it easy and straightforward to use, and they benefit from the greater efficiency and increased storage utilization offered by the use of shared resources.
This paper provides a technical overview of VMFS, including a discussion of features and their benefits. It highlights how VMFS capabilities enable greater scalability and decreased management overhead and it offers best practices and architectural considerations for deployment of VMFS.
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vmfs-best-practices-wp.pdf
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Wednesday, November 28, 2012
From the Bloggers Bench: Is VMware Site Recovery Manager Really Worth It? - VMware SMB Blog
Let's start off with a cheery fact 'the U.S. Department of Labor estimates over 40% of businesses never reopen following a disaster. Of the remaining companies, at least 25% will close within 2 years. Over 60% of businesses confronted by a major disaster close by two years, according to the Association of Records Managers and Administrators (information source<http://sbinformation.about.com/od/disastermanagement/a/disasterrecover.htm>).
A question I'm asked a lot is do I really need DR? Well reading the above statement, I hope the answer is yes, but in all reality the actual answer is, it depends. OK that is probably the most 'woolly' thing anyone in IT can say, we like hard and fast, black and white rules as engineers dammit!
For example, you may work for a company that has no on premise IT, you use a cloud based platform for your accounts, CRM and HR packages and you use hosted Exchange, SharePoint and Lync as your communication pieces, would you need DR, well the answer is probably not.
What about if you work for a company with a vSphere environment which can cater for two host failures and has redundancy on every level. This is then housed in a Tier 5 Datacenter offering 99.999% uptime, with the usual battery backed generators, diverse internet links, fire suppression systems and environmental monitoring. Connectivity is provided by diverse links to the datacentre, would you need DR then? Possibly as it depends on how the company views risk, if I was a betting man, I would say in most scenarios DR wouldn't be necessary.
Both of the above are extremes and most SMB require on premise solutions to facilitate how they work and often they don't have the budget to use datacentres and prefer to use remote offices for any DR activity.
So what does DR being with? Well two terms that you often hear banded about RTO and RPO, (great, I hear you say just what we need, more abbreviations in IT).
* Recovery Point Objective is the term used to describe how much data loss can be accepted. Let's imagine you have been working on an awesome vSphere design for the past week and you had finally nailed it, but before you hit save you get a BSOD. You are a good boy/girl scout and perform backups on a daily basis, which means that your RPO is daily.
* Recovery Time Objective is the term used to describe how long you are prepared to wait to restore data. So in the above scenario, you probably swear a bit, and then you go back to your backup, perhaps it's a USB hard drive and you find the file and restore it. RPO is the time taken to perform this procedure.
Now when it comes to DR for a business it's just on a larger scale. Don't just think that a DR event is a natural disaster more often than not; DR is instigated due to an outage of some type of connectivity, whether this is an inter site link between two offices or the main internet feed.
So what choices do we have as engineers to help us facilitate DR?
Traditional
Traditional disaster recovery plans leave organizations exposed to significant risk of extended downtime because they are laborious to setup, time consuming to maintain as they often require manual duplication of changes, and most importantly are extremely difficult to test.
Let's look at this scenario, Bob needs to update his ten front end web servers with a new patch released by the application vendors which resolves countless issues, Bob does this at Production site. He then needs to do the same thing for the ten front end web servers in the DR location; however Bob thinks you know what, I will do that after lunch. Bob gets back from lunch and has a critical issue to deal with, which takes the rest of the day. Bob resolves the critical issue, but forgets to patch the ten front end web servers in DR.
What's the net result, we have an imbalance between what's at Production and DR.
Also, how do we get the data from our Production site to our DR site? This is when we look at the next scenario software.
Software
Software replication and clustering technologies are great; would I use them for DR? Nope. Why's that you ask Craig, well the simple answer is overhead and cost.
I think this needs a little more explanation. Microsoft provides some great technology right out of the box, DFS R, SQL Replication and Exchange 2010 DAG. However, this actually means that you have to license multiple copies of the software and perhaps more importantly, configure, manage and maintain multiple copies.
Let's look at Exchange 2010, a great bit of kit; however we sometimes forget what's required to facilitate email flow at a DR site. First of all we need an anti-spam provider, with a secondary route pointing to our DR site, unless you are going to rely on a secondary MX record. We then need to have a second CAS/Hub Server at the DR site, but hold on a minute we cannot automatically fail over mail flow as the client connections are specific to a CAS server, we need to introduce a load balancer, but hey, it' can't be a single site load balancer as we need to use different internet breakouts in DR, so we need 'up the ante' and go for a global server load balancer. I think this has now entered the realms of being slightly complicated.
So what would my RPO be? Honest answer is you don't know, with the current wave of software replication and clustering technologies its best endeavours. So in the event of DR, you don't know how much data is going to be lost.
Perhaps a better question to ask is how do I even know it's working correctly? Most of the time it's let's check it manually, open up SQL to check replication, drop a file on a DFS share and check it replicates
Software replication technologies provided by Microsoft only work on a best efforts basis as you are unable to confirm how much data has been transferred across to DR site. So in the event of a DR, you do not know how much data you could potentially lose.
Another question is how do I protect my servers that are not able to use Microsoft replication technologies; the general answer is to use a software replication application. These essentially replicate a virtual machine on a pre-set schedule to the DR site on a scheduled basis.
Software replication is susceptible to application and service failures when updates or changes are applied. Often they work on snapshots which have a rather annoying fact of not getting committed and you then having to monitor your datastores on a daily basis to check for any rogue snapshots.
What about failing back once we have failed over to DR? Is it possible? Yes however, depending on the reason for the outage could mean that failback won't be possible for weeks or perhaps months. You might have to manually rebuild your entire Production infrastructure with your Domain Controllers, Exchange DAG, SQL Replication, DFS R File Replication.
With all of this in mind, I was introduced to VMware Site Recovery Manager just under two years ago, and without being biased what an awesome product.
VMware Site Recovery Manager
So why is Site Recovery Manager (SRM) so much different to traditional and software based replication? Well the answer is in its simplicity and also its ability to allow you to report on your disaster recovery effectiveness to management/directors.
We can perform a test failover whenever you like with whatever services you choose (as long as you have designed your storage layer correctly). Let's expand on this a bit.
SRM utilises either vSphere Replication<http://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/vsphere/replication> (included with most vSphere licenses) or Storage Based Replication. Essentially, what SRM does is allows you to take a replicated volume for example your file server which is read/write and production and read at DR. When you perform a test failover SRM sends commands to the storage layer using the Storage Replication Adapter<http://www.vmware.com/support/srm/srm-storage-partners.html> to initiate a snapshot of the Read only volume in DR. It then transforms this volume into Read/Write to allow the VM to boot and then perhaps the most important thing is that you as the 'vSphere Administrator' can choose what network the VM connects to in DR. This means that you can access the VM and make sure it works, that's pretty awesome!
So what else does SRM allow us to do?
* Change the IP Address of virtual servers on failover and failback.
* Start VM's in priority order, ensuring that subsequent VM's do not start until the higher priority VM's VMTools have started.
* Pause workflows to allow for manual user intervention.
* Run custom scripts or executable during failover or failback.
* Allow re protection and failback with ease.
This last point 'allow re protection and failback with ease' is key. Why's that, well in many SMB environments we don't always have the luxury of a dedicated SAN engineer, a dedicated vSphere engineer, a dedicated Exchange engineer, more often than not, that role belongs to you, the dedicated 'IT Engineer'
Depending on your experience you may or may not feel comfortable in taking your entire storage infrastructure and reversing its replication, I know that I for one definitely would be earning my 'bacon' if I had to do this.
SRM uses the SRA to send all of these commands essentially taking the onus away from us as the 'IT Engineer' and automates it, I mean how cool is it to be able to re protect your environment from DR to Production in three mouse clicks?
If you want to find out more about how to implement SRM and perhaps more importantly some of the key things to take into consideration, hop over to http://vmfocus.com<http://vmfocus.com/> where I have a section dedicated to this subject. Or get in touch via Twitter @vmfcraig.
Get to know Craig – Read 10 Questions With…Craig Kilborn<http://blogs.vmware.com/smb/2012/11/10-with-craig.html>
blogs.vmware.com [X] <http://blogs.vmware.com/smb/2012/11/is-srm-worth-it.html> |by VMware SMB on November 28, 2012
◆
________________________________
Original Page: http://blogs.vmware.com/smb/2012/11/is-srm-worth-it.html
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A question I'm asked a lot is do I really need DR? Well reading the above statement, I hope the answer is yes, but in all reality the actual answer is, it depends. OK that is probably the most 'woolly' thing anyone in IT can say, we like hard and fast, black and white rules as engineers dammit!
For example, you may work for a company that has no on premise IT, you use a cloud based platform for your accounts, CRM and HR packages and you use hosted Exchange, SharePoint and Lync as your communication pieces, would you need DR, well the answer is probably not.
What about if you work for a company with a vSphere environment which can cater for two host failures and has redundancy on every level. This is then housed in a Tier 5 Datacenter offering 99.999% uptime, with the usual battery backed generators, diverse internet links, fire suppression systems and environmental monitoring. Connectivity is provided by diverse links to the datacentre, would you need DR then? Possibly as it depends on how the company views risk, if I was a betting man, I would say in most scenarios DR wouldn't be necessary.
Both of the above are extremes and most SMB require on premise solutions to facilitate how they work and often they don't have the budget to use datacentres and prefer to use remote offices for any DR activity.
So what does DR being with? Well two terms that you often hear banded about RTO and RPO, (great, I hear you say just what we need, more abbreviations in IT).
* Recovery Point Objective is the term used to describe how much data loss can be accepted. Let's imagine you have been working on an awesome vSphere design for the past week and you had finally nailed it, but before you hit save you get a BSOD. You are a good boy/girl scout and perform backups on a daily basis, which means that your RPO is daily.
* Recovery Time Objective is the term used to describe how long you are prepared to wait to restore data. So in the above scenario, you probably swear a bit, and then you go back to your backup, perhaps it's a USB hard drive and you find the file and restore it. RPO is the time taken to perform this procedure.
Now when it comes to DR for a business it's just on a larger scale. Don't just think that a DR event is a natural disaster more often than not; DR is instigated due to an outage of some type of connectivity, whether this is an inter site link between two offices or the main internet feed.
So what choices do we have as engineers to help us facilitate DR?
Traditional
Traditional disaster recovery plans leave organizations exposed to significant risk of extended downtime because they are laborious to setup, time consuming to maintain as they often require manual duplication of changes, and most importantly are extremely difficult to test.
Let's look at this scenario, Bob needs to update his ten front end web servers with a new patch released by the application vendors which resolves countless issues, Bob does this at Production site. He then needs to do the same thing for the ten front end web servers in the DR location; however Bob thinks you know what, I will do that after lunch. Bob gets back from lunch and has a critical issue to deal with, which takes the rest of the day. Bob resolves the critical issue, but forgets to patch the ten front end web servers in DR.
What's the net result, we have an imbalance between what's at Production and DR.
Also, how do we get the data from our Production site to our DR site? This is when we look at the next scenario software.
Software
Software replication and clustering technologies are great; would I use them for DR? Nope. Why's that you ask Craig, well the simple answer is overhead and cost.
I think this needs a little more explanation. Microsoft provides some great technology right out of the box, DFS R, SQL Replication and Exchange 2010 DAG. However, this actually means that you have to license multiple copies of the software and perhaps more importantly, configure, manage and maintain multiple copies.
Let's look at Exchange 2010, a great bit of kit; however we sometimes forget what's required to facilitate email flow at a DR site. First of all we need an anti-spam provider, with a secondary route pointing to our DR site, unless you are going to rely on a secondary MX record. We then need to have a second CAS/Hub Server at the DR site, but hold on a minute we cannot automatically fail over mail flow as the client connections are specific to a CAS server, we need to introduce a load balancer, but hey, it' can't be a single site load balancer as we need to use different internet breakouts in DR, so we need 'up the ante' and go for a global server load balancer. I think this has now entered the realms of being slightly complicated.
So what would my RPO be? Honest answer is you don't know, with the current wave of software replication and clustering technologies its best endeavours. So in the event of DR, you don't know how much data is going to be lost.
Perhaps a better question to ask is how do I even know it's working correctly? Most of the time it's let's check it manually, open up SQL to check replication, drop a file on a DFS share and check it replicates
Software replication technologies provided by Microsoft only work on a best efforts basis as you are unable to confirm how much data has been transferred across to DR site. So in the event of a DR, you do not know how much data you could potentially lose.
Another question is how do I protect my servers that are not able to use Microsoft replication technologies; the general answer is to use a software replication application. These essentially replicate a virtual machine on a pre-set schedule to the DR site on a scheduled basis.
Software replication is susceptible to application and service failures when updates or changes are applied. Often they work on snapshots which have a rather annoying fact of not getting committed and you then having to monitor your datastores on a daily basis to check for any rogue snapshots.
What about failing back once we have failed over to DR? Is it possible? Yes however, depending on the reason for the outage could mean that failback won't be possible for weeks or perhaps months. You might have to manually rebuild your entire Production infrastructure with your Domain Controllers, Exchange DAG, SQL Replication, DFS R File Replication.
With all of this in mind, I was introduced to VMware Site Recovery Manager just under two years ago, and without being biased what an awesome product.
VMware Site Recovery Manager
So why is Site Recovery Manager (SRM) so much different to traditional and software based replication? Well the answer is in its simplicity and also its ability to allow you to report on your disaster recovery effectiveness to management/directors.
We can perform a test failover whenever you like with whatever services you choose (as long as you have designed your storage layer correctly). Let's expand on this a bit.
SRM utilises either vSphere Replication<http://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/vsphere/replication> (included with most vSphere licenses) or Storage Based Replication. Essentially, what SRM does is allows you to take a replicated volume for example your file server which is read/write and production and read at DR. When you perform a test failover SRM sends commands to the storage layer using the Storage Replication Adapter<http://www.vmware.com/support/srm/srm-storage-partners.html> to initiate a snapshot of the Read only volume in DR. It then transforms this volume into Read/Write to allow the VM to boot and then perhaps the most important thing is that you as the 'vSphere Administrator' can choose what network the VM connects to in DR. This means that you can access the VM and make sure it works, that's pretty awesome!
So what else does SRM allow us to do?
* Change the IP Address of virtual servers on failover and failback.
* Start VM's in priority order, ensuring that subsequent VM's do not start until the higher priority VM's VMTools have started.
* Pause workflows to allow for manual user intervention.
* Run custom scripts or executable during failover or failback.
* Allow re protection and failback with ease.
This last point 'allow re protection and failback with ease' is key. Why's that, well in many SMB environments we don't always have the luxury of a dedicated SAN engineer, a dedicated vSphere engineer, a dedicated Exchange engineer, more often than not, that role belongs to you, the dedicated 'IT Engineer'
Depending on your experience you may or may not feel comfortable in taking your entire storage infrastructure and reversing its replication, I know that I for one definitely would be earning my 'bacon' if I had to do this.
SRM uses the SRA to send all of these commands essentially taking the onus away from us as the 'IT Engineer' and automates it, I mean how cool is it to be able to re protect your environment from DR to Production in three mouse clicks?
If you want to find out more about how to implement SRM and perhaps more importantly some of the key things to take into consideration, hop over to http://vmfocus.com<http://vmfocus.com/> where I have a section dedicated to this subject. Or get in touch via Twitter @vmfcraig.
Get to know Craig – Read 10 Questions With…Craig Kilborn<http://blogs.vmware.com/smb/2012/11/10-with-craig.html>
blogs.vmware.com [X] <http://blogs.vmware.com/smb/2012/11/is-srm-worth-it.html> |by VMware SMB on November 28, 2012
◆
________________________________
Original Page: http://blogs.vmware.com/smb/2012/11/is-srm-worth-it.html
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Is vSphere Replication storage agnostic even when using SRM? - VMware vSphere Blog
In short: Yes, it sure is!
In this post I'll show 6 VMs being protected with vSphere Replication. 2 VMs each will reside on fibre channel data stores (EMC CX4), iSCSI data stores (Falconstor NSS Gateway), and an NFS datastore (EMC VNX5500). I'll replicate them onto different datastores, fail them over, reprotect, and fallback.
I'm always grateful to the sponsors of my storage platform for these labs – not everyone has the luxury of these setups for their lab environments! Obviously both Falconstor and EMC have great replication options on their platforms (and I use them as well!) but for these purposes I'll be using vSphere Replication to show the heterogenous support.
[NewImage]
So let's have some fun, and make sure that each VM is replicating to a completely different type of storage. In fact, let's throw in a twist and use local disk on the recovery site!
* Server1-iSCSI will be replicated to FC
* Server2-iSCSI -> NFS
* Server3-FC -> iSCSI
* Server4-FC -> NFS
* Server5-NFS -> iSCSI
* Server6-NFS -> local server disk.
Setting up the replication and the target datastore is something I've covered at length here before, so let's take that as done and just show the results. I chose each VM on each type of storage and specifically landed the target on a datastore using a different protocol as you can see here:
[NewImage]
So replication is going great – mixing and matching not only different storage vendors but utterly different protocols for the data stores as well.
This works because vSphere Replication works above the storage layer and is in fact unaware of what the storage subsystem is. It's not aware of it, doesn't care about it, and won't interact with it beyond sending blocks to a VMDK to be written.
But how does SRM handle this? With great ease and no complaints. I created a single, simple protection group and recovery plan for all these VMs together. All on different source datastore types, all with different target datastore types:
[NewImage]
And ran a test recovery against it to make sure the isolated test snapshots will work on all our VMs on all storage types. As you can see, the storage synched correctly, snapshots were all created happily, and the test run went off smoothly with VMs all over the place, on all types of data stores, using all types of storage protocols.
[NewImage]
"Test" you say? I don't trust a test, that's just a snapshot, I want to see a *real* failover! Fine, after cleanup I ran a real failover. One picture says 1000 words:
[NewImage]
So, this is great. We've taken a bunch of VMs that were scattered across a lot of different types of data stores, and failed them over to another site on different types of data stores. Let's have even more fun, and reprotect them back to the primary site. This should now set up our VMs, ready to be recovered, *back on their original storage*. I click on reprotect, and then go check out the status in the VR tab of the SRM plugin:
[NewImage]
Indeed, if you look, you can see the the iSCSI VMs are being protected to the Falconstor (which is iSCSI), the FC VMs to the CX4 (FC) and the NFS servers (one of which is currently on FC, one of which is on local disk) are being replicated back to their original location on the VNX NFS mount. vSphere Replication is smart enough to leave the original VMs behind during a failover and then use them as a target seed for reprotection when we want to fallback. In fact the reprotect will use the exact same VMDKs that were left in place in the first place, as well as the exact same replication schedule and options that we used to protect for the initial failover.
Once the reprotect is done, a fallback will put the VMs back to their original homes, on their original data stores! Replicate between different storage vendors and types, failover happily between sites (even onto local storage) then reprotect and failback to their original homes. Of course, after we fail back, I click reprotect once more and… it will again use the replicas that were already at the recovery site from our very first protection of the VMs, in the same directories, on the same data stores as before.
[NewImage]
blogs.vmware.com [X] <http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/11/vr-srm-storage-agnostic.html> |by Ken Werneburg on November 27, 2012
◆
________________________________
Original Page: http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/11/vr-srm-storage-agnostic.html
Sent from Feeddler RSS Reader
In this post I'll show 6 VMs being protected with vSphere Replication. 2 VMs each will reside on fibre channel data stores (EMC CX4), iSCSI data stores (Falconstor NSS Gateway), and an NFS datastore (EMC VNX5500). I'll replicate them onto different datastores, fail them over, reprotect, and fallback.
I'm always grateful to the sponsors of my storage platform for these labs – not everyone has the luxury of these setups for their lab environments! Obviously both Falconstor and EMC have great replication options on their platforms (and I use them as well!) but for these purposes I'll be using vSphere Replication to show the heterogenous support.
[NewImage]
So let's have some fun, and make sure that each VM is replicating to a completely different type of storage. In fact, let's throw in a twist and use local disk on the recovery site!
* Server1-iSCSI will be replicated to FC
* Server2-iSCSI -> NFS
* Server3-FC -> iSCSI
* Server4-FC -> NFS
* Server5-NFS -> iSCSI
* Server6-NFS -> local server disk.
Setting up the replication and the target datastore is something I've covered at length here before, so let's take that as done and just show the results. I chose each VM on each type of storage and specifically landed the target on a datastore using a different protocol as you can see here:
[NewImage]
So replication is going great – mixing and matching not only different storage vendors but utterly different protocols for the data stores as well.
This works because vSphere Replication works above the storage layer and is in fact unaware of what the storage subsystem is. It's not aware of it, doesn't care about it, and won't interact with it beyond sending blocks to a VMDK to be written.
But how does SRM handle this? With great ease and no complaints. I created a single, simple protection group and recovery plan for all these VMs together. All on different source datastore types, all with different target datastore types:
[NewImage]
And ran a test recovery against it to make sure the isolated test snapshots will work on all our VMs on all storage types. As you can see, the storage synched correctly, snapshots were all created happily, and the test run went off smoothly with VMs all over the place, on all types of data stores, using all types of storage protocols.
[NewImage]
"Test" you say? I don't trust a test, that's just a snapshot, I want to see a *real* failover! Fine, after cleanup I ran a real failover. One picture says 1000 words:
[NewImage]
So, this is great. We've taken a bunch of VMs that were scattered across a lot of different types of data stores, and failed them over to another site on different types of data stores. Let's have even more fun, and reprotect them back to the primary site. This should now set up our VMs, ready to be recovered, *back on their original storage*. I click on reprotect, and then go check out the status in the VR tab of the SRM plugin:
[NewImage]
Indeed, if you look, you can see the the iSCSI VMs are being protected to the Falconstor (which is iSCSI), the FC VMs to the CX4 (FC) and the NFS servers (one of which is currently on FC, one of which is on local disk) are being replicated back to their original location on the VNX NFS mount. vSphere Replication is smart enough to leave the original VMs behind during a failover and then use them as a target seed for reprotection when we want to fallback. In fact the reprotect will use the exact same VMDKs that were left in place in the first place, as well as the exact same replication schedule and options that we used to protect for the initial failover.
Once the reprotect is done, a fallback will put the VMs back to their original homes, on their original data stores! Replicate between different storage vendors and types, failover happily between sites (even onto local storage) then reprotect and failback to their original homes. Of course, after we fail back, I click reprotect once more and… it will again use the replicas that were already at the recovery site from our very first protection of the VMs, in the same directories, on the same data stores as before.
[NewImage]
blogs.vmware.com [X] <http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/11/vr-srm-storage-agnostic.html> |by Ken Werneburg on November 27, 2012
◆
________________________________
Original Page: http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/11/vr-srm-storage-agnostic.html
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Wednesday, November 21, 2012
VMware Innovate magazine edition available for download!
Internally at VMware we have this cool magazine called "Innovate". I am part of the team which is responsible for VMware Innovate. I noticed this tweet from Julia Austin and figured I would share it with all of you. This specific edition is about RADIO 2012, which is a VMware R&D innovation offsite. (So looking forward to RADIO 2013!)
Check out #VMware<https://twitter.com/search/%23VMware>'s Innovate Magazine.Usually internal only, but we wanted to share this one with our community! ow.ly/fijfP<http://t.co/3zntpFLE>
— Julia Austin (@austinfish) November 14, 2012<https://twitter.com/austinfish/status/268825473021255682>
There is some cool stuff to be found in this magazine in my opinion. Just one of the many nuggets, did you know VMware was already exploring vSphere FT in 2001? Just a nice reminder of how long typical engineering efforts can take. Download the magazine now<http://t.co/3zntpFLE>!
Ganesh Venkitachalam presented "Hardware Fault Tolerance with Virtual Machines" (or Fault Tolerance, for short) at the "Engineering Offsite 2001." This was released as a feature called Fault Tolerance for vSphere 4.0.
Be Sociable, Share!
[image]
yellow-bricks.com [X] <http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2012/11/19/vmware-innovate-magazine-edition-available-for-download/> |by Duncan Epping on November 19, 2012
◆
________________________________
Original Page: http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2012/11/19/vmware-innovate-magazine-edition-available-for-download/
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Check out #VMware<https://twitter.com/search/%23VMware>'s Innovate Magazine.Usually internal only, but we wanted to share this one with our community! ow.ly/fijfP<http://t.co/3zntpFLE>
— Julia Austin (@austinfish) November 14, 2012<https://twitter.com/austinfish/status/268825473021255682>
There is some cool stuff to be found in this magazine in my opinion. Just one of the many nuggets, did you know VMware was already exploring vSphere FT in 2001? Just a nice reminder of how long typical engineering efforts can take. Download the magazine now<http://t.co/3zntpFLE>!
Ganesh Venkitachalam presented "Hardware Fault Tolerance with Virtual Machines" (or Fault Tolerance, for short) at the "Engineering Offsite 2001." This was released as a feature called Fault Tolerance for vSphere 4.0.
Be Sociable, Share!
[image]
yellow-bricks.com [X] <http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2012/11/19/vmware-innovate-magazine-edition-available-for-download/> |by Duncan Epping on November 19, 2012
◆
________________________________
Original Page: http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2012/11/19/vmware-innovate-magazine-edition-available-for-download/
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Free Elearning Course - VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5.1 Fundamentals
The SRM Essentials free elearning (self-paced, 3 Hours) training course equips experienced VMware vSphere administrators with the knowledge to install, configure, and manage VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 5.1. This elearning also equips vSphere administrators with the knowledge to assist in disaster planning and test disaster recovery plans with SRM. This course introduces different storage replication options and focuses on vSphere Replication.
After completing the course, you should be able to:
* Install SRM 5.1
* Connect the sites
* Configure inventory mappings in SRM
* Configure placeholder datastores
* Configure datastore mappings
* Configure vSphere Replication-based protection groups in SRM
* Create, edit, execute, test, and remove a recovery plan in SRM
* Discuss reprotect and failback
* Describe SRM alarms
* List administrative tasks
The course consists of three modules:
Introduction to VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) provides an overview of the challenges that organizations face when a disaster occurs, and how SRM acts as the best disaster recovery product. This module also discusses the benefits that organizations can realize by utilizing the new features that SRM 5.1 provides.Setting up Protection is the second module, that demonstrates how to install VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager and set up the protected site. This module discusses how to prepare for an SRM deployment; install SRM; configure SRM; configure vSphere Replication; and create protection groups. Managing Disaster Recovery is the last module that demonstrates how to create, configure, test, and run disaster recovery plans. This module discusses features that are new in version SRM 5.0 and later, such as reprotection and automated failback. Finally, this module also discusses SRM alarms and some administrative tasks.
http://mylearn.vmware.com/mgrReg/courses.cfm?ui=www_cert&a=det&id_course=154960
◆
________________________________
Original Page: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Ntpronl/~3/8656VlERFak/2223-Free-Elearning-Course-VMware-vCenter-Site-Recovery-Manager-5.1-Fundamentals.html
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After completing the course, you should be able to:
* Install SRM 5.1
* Connect the sites
* Configure inventory mappings in SRM
* Configure placeholder datastores
* Configure datastore mappings
* Configure vSphere Replication-based protection groups in SRM
* Create, edit, execute, test, and remove a recovery plan in SRM
* Discuss reprotect and failback
* Describe SRM alarms
* List administrative tasks
The course consists of three modules:
Introduction to VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) provides an overview of the challenges that organizations face when a disaster occurs, and how SRM acts as the best disaster recovery product. This module also discusses the benefits that organizations can realize by utilizing the new features that SRM 5.1 provides.Setting up Protection is the second module, that demonstrates how to install VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager and set up the protected site. This module discusses how to prepare for an SRM deployment; install SRM; configure SRM; configure vSphere Replication; and create protection groups. Managing Disaster Recovery is the last module that demonstrates how to create, configure, test, and run disaster recovery plans. This module discusses features that are new in version SRM 5.0 and later, such as reprotection and automated failback. Finally, this module also discusses SRM alarms and some administrative tasks.
http://mylearn.vmware.com/mgrReg/courses.cfm?ui=www_cert&a=det&id_course=154960
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Thursday, November 1, 2012
Considering VSA for ROBO? Please read this! - VMware vSphere Blog
After fielding a number of questions around this topic recently, its come to my attention that there is a misunderstanding on how to implement the vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) for certain ROBO solutions. The requirement around the tie-breaker code (VSA Cluster Service) is either misunderstood or misinterpreted when it comes to 2 node VSA deployments at remote office/branch office (ROBO) sites.
Let's be clear about it now – the VSA needs 3 votes in order to function correctly as a cluster. In a 3 node VSA deployment, this is not an issue since each node gets a vote. In a 2 node VSA deployment, the third vote is handled by the VSA Cluster Service aka the tie-breaker code.
Now, in standard (non ROBO) 2 node VSA deployments where the vCenter is located in the same datacenter as the VSA, the VSA Cluster Service can exist on the vCenter server. During VSA installation, you simply provide the IP address of the vCenter server for the VSA Cluster Service.
However, in ROBO deployments, things are a little different. In these deployments, the vCenter server is typically located at a central office, and the 2 node VSA is deployed at a remote office. The third vote (tie-breaker code) must also be located at the remote office/branch office. To cater for this, we allow the VSA Cluster Service to be decoupled from vCenter and installed in a VM. The VM can be running on a non-VSA ESXi host or Workstation at the branch office. We cannot have it run on the ESXi hosts involved in the VSA cluster because if we lost the host on which the tie-breaker VM was running, we lose 2 votes, and thus the cluster quorum. So it must exist outside of the VSA.
[http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/files/2012/10/diag-1024x339.png]<http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/files/2012/10/diag.png>
VMware provides VSA Cluster Service installation documentation for the different platforms that we support. Currently there is Standalone VSA Cluster Service for Linux and a Standalone VSA Cluster Service for Windows. The VSA Cluster Service platform must be on the same subnet as the VSA cluster members.During the install, then installer will ask for details of which host has the tie-breaker code, so the VSA Cluster Service must be installed first. The VSA Installation wizard will then audit this, making sure that it can reach and communicate to the VSA Cluster Service code.
Please make sure you take into account the requirement for the VSA Cluster Service at the remote office/branch office site when designing or achitecting 2 node VSA ROBO solutions.
Get notification of these blogs postings and more VMware Storage information by following me on Twitter: @VMwareStorage<http://twitter.com/#%21/vmwarestorage>
blogs.vmware.com [X] <http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/11/considering-vsa-for-robo-please-read-this.html> |by Cormac Hogan on November 1, 2012
◆
________________________________
Original Page: http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/11/considering-vsa-for-robo-please-read-this.html
Let's be clear about it now – the VSA needs 3 votes in order to function correctly as a cluster. In a 3 node VSA deployment, this is not an issue since each node gets a vote. In a 2 node VSA deployment, the third vote is handled by the VSA Cluster Service aka the tie-breaker code.
Now, in standard (non ROBO) 2 node VSA deployments where the vCenter is located in the same datacenter as the VSA, the VSA Cluster Service can exist on the vCenter server. During VSA installation, you simply provide the IP address of the vCenter server for the VSA Cluster Service.
However, in ROBO deployments, things are a little different. In these deployments, the vCenter server is typically located at a central office, and the 2 node VSA is deployed at a remote office. The third vote (tie-breaker code) must also be located at the remote office/branch office. To cater for this, we allow the VSA Cluster Service to be decoupled from vCenter and installed in a VM. The VM can be running on a non-VSA ESXi host or Workstation at the branch office. We cannot have it run on the ESXi hosts involved in the VSA cluster because if we lost the host on which the tie-breaker VM was running, we lose 2 votes, and thus the cluster quorum. So it must exist outside of the VSA.
[http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/files/2012/10/diag-1024x339.png]<http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/files/2012/10/diag.png>
VMware provides VSA Cluster Service installation documentation for the different platforms that we support. Currently there is Standalone VSA Cluster Service for Linux and a Standalone VSA Cluster Service for Windows. The VSA Cluster Service platform must be on the same subnet as the VSA cluster members.During the install, then installer will ask for details of which host has the tie-breaker code, so the VSA Cluster Service must be installed first. The VSA Installation wizard will then audit this, making sure that it can reach and communicate to the VSA Cluster Service code.
Please make sure you take into account the requirement for the VSA Cluster Service at the remote office/branch office site when designing or achitecting 2 node VSA ROBO solutions.
Get notification of these blogs postings and more VMware Storage information by following me on Twitter: @VMwareStorage<http://twitter.com/#%21/vmwarestorage>
blogs.vmware.com [X] <http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/11/considering-vsa-for-robo-please-read-this.html> |by Cormac Hogan on November 1, 2012
◆
________________________________
Original Page: http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/11/considering-vsa-for-robo-please-read-this.html
Thursday, October 25, 2012
Nested ESXi 5.1 - vhv.enable = "TRUE"
I just wanted to put out a quick post to help others get their nested ESXi 5.1 labs running.
There are a pile of great articles out there on building nested environments, but the one portion I missed in building mine was the difference in the vhv.*** command between ESXi 5.0 and ESX1 5.1
So here is the simple breakdown:
ESXi 5.1 – You need to add the following line to the /etc/vmware/config file:
vhv.enable = “TRUE”
ESXi 5.0 – You need to add the following line to the /etc/vmware/config file:
vhv.allow = “TRUE”
I hope this saves you some time and eliminates the pain I suffered trying to get 5.1 working in my home lab J
Big thanks to William Lam for his #NotSupported vInception presentation and post at:
http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2012/09/vinception-notsupported-slides-posted.html
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
Monday, October 22, 2012
VMware Mirage Available for Download Now - Eric Sloof
VMware Mirage offers a unique solution for endpoint management and recovery that combines image centralization and local execution. The images of the endpoints are cloned into the datacenter to enable the benefits of centralized management and recovery while leaving cached copies of the image on each endpoint for local (and offline) execution thereby preserving an uncompromised user experience.
Mirage centralizes the full desktop contents at the datacenter for management and protection purposes, distributes the execution of desktop workloads to the endpoints for superior user experience, and optimizes the synchronization in between. Mirage conceptually splits the PC into six layers, divided into two groups: IT centrally managed and user managed. The first group consists of a Base Image Layer, a Driver Library Layer, and a Departmental Application Layer (experimental). The second group consists of User-Application Layer, Machine Identity Layer and User Data Settings Layer.
These layers form an individually managed, centrally stored Centralized Virtual Desktop (CVD). CVDs are hardware-agnostic and can be easily migrated from one desktop (physical or virtual) to another, creating a wide range of use cases. The Mirage Client runs a copy of this CVD directly on the end point, so users can work offline, use processor-intensive applications, and enjoy predictable, native PC performance regardless of network connectivity.
[image]
The Mirage architecture includes VMware Mirage Server in the datacenter to centralize desktop management and protection; Mirage Client to create a local cache for optimal user experience at the endpoint, and advanced WAN optimization technology to speed bi-directional synchronization over the WAN.
http://www.vmware.com/products/desktop_virtualization/mirage.html
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Mirage centralizes the full desktop contents at the datacenter for management and protection purposes, distributes the execution of desktop workloads to the endpoints for superior user experience, and optimizes the synchronization in between. Mirage conceptually splits the PC into six layers, divided into two groups: IT centrally managed and user managed. The first group consists of a Base Image Layer, a Driver Library Layer, and a Departmental Application Layer (experimental). The second group consists of User-Application Layer, Machine Identity Layer and User Data Settings Layer.
These layers form an individually managed, centrally stored Centralized Virtual Desktop (CVD). CVDs are hardware-agnostic and can be easily migrated from one desktop (physical or virtual) to another, creating a wide range of use cases. The Mirage Client runs a copy of this CVD directly on the end point, so users can work offline, use processor-intensive applications, and enjoy predictable, native PC performance regardless of network connectivity.
[image]
The Mirage architecture includes VMware Mirage Server in the datacenter to centralize desktop management and protection; Mirage Client to create a local cache for optimal user experience at the endpoint, and advanced WAN optimization technology to speed bi-directional synchronization over the WAN.
http://www.vmware.com/products/desktop_virtualization/mirage.html
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Monday, October 15, 2012
Free vCenter Operations Manager Now Included with vSphere - Eric Sloof
vCenter Operations Manager Foundation will give you insights and visibility into performance and health of your vSphere infrastructure and is now included free with VMware vSphere.
VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite<http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vcenter/VMware-vCenter-Operations-DS-EN1.pdf> provides automated operations management using patented analytics and an integrated approach to performance, capacity and configuration management.
vCenter Operations Management Suite enables IT organizations to get better visibility and actionable intelligence to proactively ensure service levels, optimum resource usage and configuration compliance in dynamic virtual and cloud environments.
vCenter Operations Manager Foundation<http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vcenter/VMware-vCenter-Operations-DS-EN1.pdf> is the new, entry-level edition of the vCenter Operations Management Suite. It gains deep operational insights and visibility to improve the performance and health of your vSphere environment. vCenter Operations Manager Foundation is included with every vSphere edition free of charge.
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VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite<http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vcenter/VMware-vCenter-Operations-DS-EN1.pdf> provides automated operations management using patented analytics and an integrated approach to performance, capacity and configuration management.
vCenter Operations Management Suite enables IT organizations to get better visibility and actionable intelligence to proactively ensure service levels, optimum resource usage and configuration compliance in dynamic virtual and cloud environments.
vCenter Operations Manager Foundation<http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vcenter/VMware-vCenter-Operations-DS-EN1.pdf> is the new, entry-level edition of the vCenter Operations Management Suite. It gains deep operational insights and visibility to improve the performance and health of your vSphere environment. vCenter Operations Manager Foundation is included with every vSphere edition free of charge.
◆
________________________________
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vSphere Data Protection (VDP) and vSphere Replication (VR) Interoperability - VMware vSphere Blog
We have been getting a fair number of questions regarding interoperability of vSphere Data Protection (VDP) and vSphere Replication (VR) both of which are included with vSphere 5.1 (Essentials Plus and higher). I spent some time in my lab with these questions and decided to focus on the two most common questions: 1. Does VDP and VR interfere with each other? 2. Can I use VR to replicate VDP to another site?
For the first question/scenario, I set up replication for three virtual machines (VMs). With VR, you can set the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) within the range of 15 minutes to 24 hours. I chose 15 minutes for all three VMs to maximize the frequency of VR operations against the VMs. I also made sure that one of the VMs was performing an initial sync. The initial sync in VR is when the entire VM is being replicated from the source to the target location for the first time. Once the initial sync is complete, only the changes to the VM are replicated to minimize bandwidth usage and maintain RPO policy compliance. Having VMs with VR performing an initial sync and regular (lightweight delta) syncs allowed testing against both replication status types. Having both replication status types running in the environment, I then ran several manually backup jobs using VDP. These jobs consisted of both the initial full (entire VM) backup and the subsequent synthetic full (changed blocks) backups. VDP and VR performed well together. The only hint of an issue that I saw was a warning message stating that replication for a VM is not active. This occurred when I manually started a replication cycle and a backup at the same time. The warning went away within a minute or two and I found no evidence that either job had any failures. VDP reported a successful backup and VR reported "OK" for the replication status a few minutes later suggesting VR simply retried replication. I also let the environment "simmer" for a few days leaving the RPO setting for the VMs at 15 minutes and VDP running its scheduled backup jobs for the same VMs once per day. Again, no evidence of issues.
For the second question/scenario, I configured VR to replicate the VDP appliance and set the RPO to its most aggressive setting of 15 minutes. I configured replication during the middle of the day. At that time, the backup window was closed and scheduled to open at 8:00 PM. The initial sync completed fine, as expected. However, once the backup window opened and the scheduled backups started, a warning message was logged: "System has paused replication for virtual machine vSphere Data Protection on host in cluster Cluster in Datacenter: Disk added to VM". As part of the backup process, VDP (along with several other backup and recovery solutions) utilizes the SCSI HotAdd functionality of vSphere to improve backup job efficiency and to keep backup traffic off of the network. The .vmdk being backed up is dynamically attached to the VDP appliance while the backup is occurring. VR detected the addition of the .vmdk file and paused. Replication of the VDP appliance was paused indefinitely and required manual intervention to reconfigure replication for the VDP appliance. This issue occurred every time the backup window opened. The RPO could be changed to make the replication occur less frequently – perhaps a RPO policy somewhere between 18 and 24 hours – thus reducing the chance replication will occur when backup jobs are running. This still does not guarantee that VR will not attempt to replicate changes to the VDP appliance at the same time backup jobs are running.
In summary, there appears to be no issues with both VR and VDP protecting a VM. In contrast, it is not recommended to use VR to replicate a VDP appliance. In an upcoming article, I will look at recovering VDP from a (non-VR) replicated or cloned copy of the VDP appliance. Stay tuned…
blogs.vmware.com [X] <http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/10/vdp-and-vr-interoperability.html> |by Jeff Hunter on October 15, 2012
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________________________________
Original Page: http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/10/vdp-and-vr-interoperability.html
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For the first question/scenario, I set up replication for three virtual machines (VMs). With VR, you can set the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) within the range of 15 minutes to 24 hours. I chose 15 minutes for all three VMs to maximize the frequency of VR operations against the VMs. I also made sure that one of the VMs was performing an initial sync. The initial sync in VR is when the entire VM is being replicated from the source to the target location for the first time. Once the initial sync is complete, only the changes to the VM are replicated to minimize bandwidth usage and maintain RPO policy compliance. Having VMs with VR performing an initial sync and regular (lightweight delta) syncs allowed testing against both replication status types. Having both replication status types running in the environment, I then ran several manually backup jobs using VDP. These jobs consisted of both the initial full (entire VM) backup and the subsequent synthetic full (changed blocks) backups. VDP and VR performed well together. The only hint of an issue that I saw was a warning message stating that replication for a VM is not active. This occurred when I manually started a replication cycle and a backup at the same time. The warning went away within a minute or two and I found no evidence that either job had any failures. VDP reported a successful backup and VR reported "OK" for the replication status a few minutes later suggesting VR simply retried replication. I also let the environment "simmer" for a few days leaving the RPO setting for the VMs at 15 minutes and VDP running its scheduled backup jobs for the same VMs once per day. Again, no evidence of issues.
For the second question/scenario, I configured VR to replicate the VDP appliance and set the RPO to its most aggressive setting of 15 minutes. I configured replication during the middle of the day. At that time, the backup window was closed and scheduled to open at 8:00 PM. The initial sync completed fine, as expected. However, once the backup window opened and the scheduled backups started, a warning message was logged: "System has paused replication for virtual machine vSphere Data Protection on host in cluster Cluster in Datacenter: Disk added to VM". As part of the backup process, VDP (along with several other backup and recovery solutions) utilizes the SCSI HotAdd functionality of vSphere to improve backup job efficiency and to keep backup traffic off of the network. The .vmdk being backed up is dynamically attached to the VDP appliance while the backup is occurring. VR detected the addition of the .vmdk file and paused. Replication of the VDP appliance was paused indefinitely and required manual intervention to reconfigure replication for the VDP appliance. This issue occurred every time the backup window opened. The RPO could be changed to make the replication occur less frequently – perhaps a RPO policy somewhere between 18 and 24 hours – thus reducing the chance replication will occur when backup jobs are running. This still does not guarantee that VR will not attempt to replicate changes to the VDP appliance at the same time backup jobs are running.
In summary, there appears to be no issues with both VR and VDP protecting a VM. In contrast, it is not recommended to use VR to replicate a VDP appliance. In an upcoming article, I will look at recovering VDP from a (non-VR) replicated or cloned copy of the VDP appliance. Stay tuned…
blogs.vmware.com [X] <http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/10/vdp-and-vr-interoperability.html> |by Jeff Hunter on October 15, 2012
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Friday, October 5, 2012
Building VMware End-User Computing Solutions with VMware View Book - RTFM Education – Virtualization, VMware, Citrix
Phew. I know it's a long title. But I wanted to shoehorn the word "end-user computing" and Barry wanted "VMware View" in the title – so this is the mash-up we can up with.
It's our joint pleasure to finally make available the end-user computing book that myself, and fellow vExpert, Barry Coombs – have been work in on for sometime. We never thought when we embarked on the project that it would take this length of time. That was partly caused by us both having other projects on the table, and the review process colliding with the release of VMware View 5.1 and ThinApp 4.7.2. It was also delayed by my sojourns into other complementary technologies such as vShield, Teradici APEX, ThinApp Factory and Horizon Application Manager.
I do I'd like to thank my co-author, Barry Coombs. It was Barry who approached me shortly after completing my SRM 5.0 book with the idea to update my old View 4.5 guide to be View 4.6 piece. Back then it was small under-taking to retro fit the book with the new support for the "PCoIP Gateway Mode". Then quite quickly it became clear that with View 5.0 being released we might as well go the whole hog. Anyway, without Barry's interested I might have not even bothered with this book. Also I wanted to recognise that where I have the luxury of bags of free time during the day to write – Barry has to hold down a proper job, and house move at the same time. Well done, Barry!
We'd both like to take this opportunity to thank everyone one who has assisted in bringing this text to the Community.
We spent many long dark nights toiling away in our man-caves to complete this project. Barry would like to thank his wife Laura Coombs, and I would like to thank his long-term partner, Carmel Edwards – for all their support and patience during this time.
From VMware would like to thank – Spencer Pitts, Peter von Oven, Peter Björk, Christoph Harding and Matthew Northam. Additionally I would like to thank Aaron Black, Jared Cook, Alejandro Guzman, Alan LaMielle and Deam Flaming who helped greatly with the ThinApp Factory and Horizon Application Manager chapters.
We would also like to thank Paul Pindel of F5 Networks, Andrei Valentin of BitDefender and Elcio Mello of Teradici.
Finally, we would like to thank all the people in the vExperts Community and elsewhere who assisted in the review process including: Duco Jaspars, Gabrie Van Zantan, Chris Mohn, Jonathan Medd, Rick Al Eqesem, Bas Raayman, Jane Rimmer, Stu McHugh, Ivo Beerens, Chris Deardon, Bilal Hashmi, James Bowling, Brian Jordon, Shane Williford, Andrew Hancock, Brian Suhr, Alex Muetstege, Dan Berkowitz, Matt Murray, Ryan Makamson, Julian Wood, Tim Myers, Matthew Northam, Alan Renouf, Michael Letschin and Kong L. Yang.
As special thanks goes to Christian Mohn who wrote the forward to the book.
For the now the book is only available on LULU as both a hard-copy or as PDF format. Given the length of the book and shipping costs incurred from LULU we would recommend downloading the PDF. Remember most e-readers support PDF or you can find tools that convert PDF into the format from your selected e-reader. The PDF is $10 to download – and there's a $10 royality charge on the hard-copy. These royalties will be paid to UNICEF as charitable donation after 1 year. It doesn't matter what you buy – the royality charge is the same. Of course the PDF isn't secured – but if people do see this winding up on other website. Let us know and we apply the usual community pressure.
We are also working on getting the book into the iBookStore, and via my contacts with Pearson Publishing – we are hoping to get it distributed on Safari Books Online too. That's very much a "work in progress"…
This may well be my last book for sometime. Believe it or not I've been solidly writing in the long form ever since I published my first "Admin" guides to ESX 2.x and VirtualCenter 1.x back in 2003/4. We'd would love to be able to keep this book up to date – we'd love to add AppBlast and Octopus when they are released. I'm sure Barry would be more than interested in working again with another author when View 6.0 rolls around the corner. As Barry and I are the sole copyright owners we are very flexible on this – I personally would love to see the book go online and be maintained and developed by the community. I think the days of technical material in paper books that are sealed in amber are rapidly drawing to a close.
Lastly, I recognise that there maybe people who are interested in ThinApp Factory<http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-20095> and Horizon Application Manger<http://communities.vmware.com/thread/413086> – who have no interest in VMware View. I've decide to let these chapters be available separately as free download as well.
The book both in PDF is available NOW. The hard-copy will be online once me and Barry have recieved our personal copy and we are happy with the production quality.<http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/rtfm>
As with the VMware Site Recovery Manager 4.0 books all royalities will be donated to our chosen charity of UNICEF.
Enjoy!
[http://go.techtarget.com/activity/activity.gif?activityTypeId=24&dgtaxid=&tagid=0&r=1868265132]
itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com [X] <http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/rtfm/building-vmware-end-user-computing-solutions-with-vmware-view-book/> |by MikeLaverick
◆
________________________________
Original Page: http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/rtfm/building-vmware-end-user-computing-solutions-with-vmware-view-book/
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It's our joint pleasure to finally make available the end-user computing book that myself, and fellow vExpert, Barry Coombs – have been work in on for sometime. We never thought when we embarked on the project that it would take this length of time. That was partly caused by us both having other projects on the table, and the review process colliding with the release of VMware View 5.1 and ThinApp 4.7.2. It was also delayed by my sojourns into other complementary technologies such as vShield, Teradici APEX, ThinApp Factory and Horizon Application Manager.
I do I'd like to thank my co-author, Barry Coombs. It was Barry who approached me shortly after completing my SRM 5.0 book with the idea to update my old View 4.5 guide to be View 4.6 piece. Back then it was small under-taking to retro fit the book with the new support for the "PCoIP Gateway Mode". Then quite quickly it became clear that with View 5.0 being released we might as well go the whole hog. Anyway, without Barry's interested I might have not even bothered with this book. Also I wanted to recognise that where I have the luxury of bags of free time during the day to write – Barry has to hold down a proper job, and house move at the same time. Well done, Barry!
We'd both like to take this opportunity to thank everyone one who has assisted in bringing this text to the Community.
We spent many long dark nights toiling away in our man-caves to complete this project. Barry would like to thank his wife Laura Coombs, and I would like to thank his long-term partner, Carmel Edwards – for all their support and patience during this time.
From VMware would like to thank – Spencer Pitts, Peter von Oven, Peter Björk, Christoph Harding and Matthew Northam. Additionally I would like to thank Aaron Black, Jared Cook, Alejandro Guzman, Alan LaMielle and Deam Flaming who helped greatly with the ThinApp Factory and Horizon Application Manager chapters.
We would also like to thank Paul Pindel of F5 Networks, Andrei Valentin of BitDefender and Elcio Mello of Teradici.
Finally, we would like to thank all the people in the vExperts Community and elsewhere who assisted in the review process including: Duco Jaspars, Gabrie Van Zantan, Chris Mohn, Jonathan Medd, Rick Al Eqesem, Bas Raayman, Jane Rimmer, Stu McHugh, Ivo Beerens, Chris Deardon, Bilal Hashmi, James Bowling, Brian Jordon, Shane Williford, Andrew Hancock, Brian Suhr, Alex Muetstege, Dan Berkowitz, Matt Murray, Ryan Makamson, Julian Wood, Tim Myers, Matthew Northam, Alan Renouf, Michael Letschin and Kong L. Yang.
As special thanks goes to Christian Mohn who wrote the forward to the book.
For the now the book is only available on LULU as both a hard-copy or as PDF format. Given the length of the book and shipping costs incurred from LULU we would recommend downloading the PDF. Remember most e-readers support PDF or you can find tools that convert PDF into the format from your selected e-reader. The PDF is $10 to download – and there's a $10 royality charge on the hard-copy. These royalties will be paid to UNICEF as charitable donation after 1 year. It doesn't matter what you buy – the royality charge is the same. Of course the PDF isn't secured – but if people do see this winding up on other website. Let us know and we apply the usual community pressure.
We are also working on getting the book into the iBookStore, and via my contacts with Pearson Publishing – we are hoping to get it distributed on Safari Books Online too. That's very much a "work in progress"…
This may well be my last book for sometime. Believe it or not I've been solidly writing in the long form ever since I published my first "Admin" guides to ESX 2.x and VirtualCenter 1.x back in 2003/4. We'd would love to be able to keep this book up to date – we'd love to add AppBlast and Octopus when they are released. I'm sure Barry would be more than interested in working again with another author when View 6.0 rolls around the corner. As Barry and I are the sole copyright owners we are very flexible on this – I personally would love to see the book go online and be maintained and developed by the community. I think the days of technical material in paper books that are sealed in amber are rapidly drawing to a close.
Lastly, I recognise that there maybe people who are interested in ThinApp Factory<http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-20095> and Horizon Application Manger<http://communities.vmware.com/thread/413086> – who have no interest in VMware View. I've decide to let these chapters be available separately as free download as well.
The book both in PDF is available NOW. The hard-copy will be online once me and Barry have recieved our personal copy and we are happy with the production quality.<http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/rtfm>
As with the VMware Site Recovery Manager 4.0 books all royalities will be donated to our chosen charity of UNICEF.
Enjoy!
[http://go.techtarget.com/activity/activity.gif?activityTypeId=24&dgtaxid=&tagid=0&r=1868265132]
itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com [X] <http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/rtfm/building-vmware-end-user-computing-solutions-with-vmware-view-book/> |by MikeLaverick
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________________________________
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Friday, September 28, 2012
Introducing the VIB Author Fling - VMware vSphere Blog
I'm very excited to announce the new vibauthor fling<http://labs.vmware.com/flings/vib-author>. This fling is hot off the press and provides the capability to create custom vSphere Installation Bundles (VIBs). Prior to this fling the VIB authoring tools were only available to VMware partners, this fling now extends this capability to everyone.
There are a couple of use cases for creating custom VIBs. For example, if you are using Auto Deploy and you need to add a custom firewall rule to your host, or you need to make a configuration changes that can't be made using Host Profiles.
One word of caution however, the ability to create custom VIBs does come with some responsibility. If you plan to create your own VIBs here are a few things to keep in mind:
1. VIBs provided by VMware and trusted partners are digitally signed, these digital signatures ensure the integrity of the VIB. Custom VIBs are not digitally signed. Be careful when adding unsigned VIBs to you ESXi hosts as you have no way of vouching for the integrity of the software being installed.
2. Before adding a custom VIB you will need to set your host's acceptance level to "Community Supported". When running at the community supported acceptance level it's important to understand that VMware support may ask you to remove any custom VIBs. Here's the formal disclaimer:
"IMPORTANT If you add a Community Supported VIB to an ESXi host, you must first change the host's acceptance level to Community Supported. If you encounter problems with an ESXi host that is at the CommunitySupported acceptance level, VMware Support might ask you to remove the custom VIB, as outlined in the support policies:"
If you are not familiar with VIBs I recommend you start with a quick review of this blog: http://blogs.vmware.com/esxi/2011/09/whats-in-a-vib.html
With that, I know several folks have been chomping at the bit to create their own custom VIBs so I've attached a short tutorial that shows how to use the vibauthor tool to create a VIB to add a custom firewall rule.
Enjoy!
vibauthor-how-to-v0.1<http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/files/2012/09/vibauthor-how-to-v0.1.docx>
blogs.vmware.com [X] <http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/09/introducing-the-vib-author-fling.html> |by Kyle Gleed on September 28, 2012
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________________________________
Original Page: http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/09/introducing-the-vib-author-fling.html
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There are a couple of use cases for creating custom VIBs. For example, if you are using Auto Deploy and you need to add a custom firewall rule to your host, or you need to make a configuration changes that can't be made using Host Profiles.
One word of caution however, the ability to create custom VIBs does come with some responsibility. If you plan to create your own VIBs here are a few things to keep in mind:
1. VIBs provided by VMware and trusted partners are digitally signed, these digital signatures ensure the integrity of the VIB. Custom VIBs are not digitally signed. Be careful when adding unsigned VIBs to you ESXi hosts as you have no way of vouching for the integrity of the software being installed.
2. Before adding a custom VIB you will need to set your host's acceptance level to "Community Supported". When running at the community supported acceptance level it's important to understand that VMware support may ask you to remove any custom VIBs. Here's the formal disclaimer:
"IMPORTANT If you add a Community Supported VIB to an ESXi host, you must first change the host's acceptance level to Community Supported. If you encounter problems with an ESXi host that is at the CommunitySupported acceptance level, VMware Support might ask you to remove the custom VIB, as outlined in the support policies:"
If you are not familiar with VIBs I recommend you start with a quick review of this blog: http://blogs.vmware.com/esxi/2011/09/whats-in-a-vib.html
With that, I know several folks have been chomping at the bit to create their own custom VIBs so I've attached a short tutorial that shows how to use the vibauthor tool to create a VIB to add a custom firewall rule.
Enjoy!
vibauthor-how-to-v0.1<http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/files/2012/09/vibauthor-how-to-v0.1.docx>
blogs.vmware.com [X] <http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/09/introducing-the-vib-author-fling.html> |by Kyle Gleed on September 28, 2012
◆
________________________________
Original Page: http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/09/introducing-the-vib-author-fling.html
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Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Announcing Exchange 2010 Service Pack 3
The Exchange Team is pleased to announce that in the first half of calendar year 2013 we will be releasing Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 3 (SP3) to our customers. With SP3, the following new features and capabilities will be included:
Coexistence with Exchange 2013: Customers that want to introduce Exchange Server 2013 into their existing Exchange 2010 infrastructure will need the coexistence changes shipping in SP3.
Support for Windows Server 2012: With Service Pack 3, you will have the ability to install and deploy Exchange Server 2010 on machines running Windows Server 2012.
Customer Requested Fixes: All fixes contained within update rollups released prior to Service Pack 3 will also be contained within SP3. Details of our regular Exchange 2010 release rhythm can be found in Exchange 2010 Servicing<http://technet.microsoft.com/library/ff637979.aspx>.
In order to support these newly added features, there will be a requirement for customers to update their Active Directory schema. We are communicating the required changes ahead of the release date in order to assist our customers with planning their upgrade path ahead of time.
We hope these announcements come as welcome news to you. It is our custom to provide ongoing improvements to features, functionality and security of Exchange Server, based largely on customer feedback, and to provide continual innovation on an already great messaging product. We look forward to receiving your comments and announcing more detailed information as we continue to develop the features that will be included in SP3.
Kevin Allison
General Manager
Exchange Customer Experience
TechNet Blogs [X] <http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2012/09/25/announcing-exchange-2010-service-pack-3.aspx> |by The Exchange Team on September 25, 2012
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Original Page: http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2012/09/25/announcing-exchange-2010-service-pack-3.aspx
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Coexistence with Exchange 2013: Customers that want to introduce Exchange Server 2013 into their existing Exchange 2010 infrastructure will need the coexistence changes shipping in SP3.
Support for Windows Server 2012: With Service Pack 3, you will have the ability to install and deploy Exchange Server 2010 on machines running Windows Server 2012.
Customer Requested Fixes: All fixes contained within update rollups released prior to Service Pack 3 will also be contained within SP3. Details of our regular Exchange 2010 release rhythm can be found in Exchange 2010 Servicing<http://technet.microsoft.com/library/ff637979.aspx>.
In order to support these newly added features, there will be a requirement for customers to update their Active Directory schema. We are communicating the required changes ahead of the release date in order to assist our customers with planning their upgrade path ahead of time.
We hope these announcements come as welcome news to you. It is our custom to provide ongoing improvements to features, functionality and security of Exchange Server, based largely on customer feedback, and to provide continual innovation on an already great messaging product. We look forward to receiving your comments and announcing more detailed information as we continue to develop the features that will be included in SP3.
Kevin Allison
General Manager
Exchange Customer Experience
TechNet Blogs [X] <http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2012/09/25/announcing-exchange-2010-service-pack-3.aspx> |by The Exchange Team on September 25, 2012
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________________________________
Original Page: http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2012/09/25/announcing-exchange-2010-service-pack-3.aspx
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Monday, September 17, 2012
Technical White Paper - Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 5.1
Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 5.1<http://www.vmware.com/pdf/Perf_Best_Practices_vSphere5.1.pdf>, provides performance tips that cover the most performance-critical areas of VMware vSphere 5.1. It is not intended as a comprehensive guide for planning and configuring your deployments.
* Chapter 1, "Hardware for Use with VMware vSphere," provides guidance on selecting hardware for use with vSphere.
* Chapter 2, "ESXi and Virtual Machines," provides guidance regarding VMware ESXi software and the virtual machines that run in it.
* Chapter 3, "Guest Operating Systems," provides guidance regarding the guest operating systems running in vSphere virtual machines.
* Chapter 4, "Virtual Infrastructure Management," provides guidance regarding infrastructure management best practices.
This book is intended for system administrators who are planning a VMware vSphere 5.1 deployment and want to maximize its performance. The book assumes the reader is already familiar with VMware vSphere concepts and terminology.
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/Perf_Best_Practices_vSphere5.1.pdf
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* Chapter 1, "Hardware for Use with VMware vSphere," provides guidance on selecting hardware for use with vSphere.
* Chapter 2, "ESXi and Virtual Machines," provides guidance regarding VMware ESXi software and the virtual machines that run in it.
* Chapter 3, "Guest Operating Systems," provides guidance regarding the guest operating systems running in vSphere virtual machines.
* Chapter 4, "Virtual Infrastructure Management," provides guidance regarding infrastructure management best practices.
This book is intended for system administrators who are planning a VMware vSphere 5.1 deployment and want to maximize its performance. The book assumes the reader is already familiar with VMware vSphere concepts and terminology.
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/Perf_Best_Practices_vSphere5.1.pdf
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Install, configure and use vSphere Replication (Back to Basics)
One of the coolest features that has been included with vSphere 5.1 in my opinion is vSphere Replication. (Make sure to read the what's new paper<http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/Introduction-to-vSphere-Replication.pdf>) The reason for it being is that it now brings "advanced" technology to everyone (Essentials Plus and upwards). I have used vSphere Replication in 5.0 and it was nice, but with 5.1 the installation and configuration process has been improved. For instance the database is now included in the appliance and it isn't as DNS sensitive as it was with 5.0. This makes installing and configuring it a matter of minutes.
I am going to assume you have "vSphere Replication" traffic enabled on a VMkernel NIC, if you do not know how to create a VMkernel NIC check this article<http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2012/09/13/back-to-basics-configuring-a-vswitch/>
Lets get started. I downloaded the vSphere Replication virtual appliance and imported and configured it in just a couple of steps using the vSphere 5.1 Web Client:
* Go to your cluster under "vCenter" —> "Hosts and Clusters".
* Right click the cluster object and click "All vCenter Actions" —> "Deploy OVF Template"
* As a source I select the ova file I downloaded, now click "Next"
* Validate the details and click "Next"
* If you agree "Accept" the EULA and click "Next"
* Select the "Name and folder" this virtual machine will needs to be placed in and click "Next"
* Select the "Datastore" it needs to be provisioned to and click "Next"
* Select the "Network" it needs to be connected to and click "Next"
* Provide an administrative "password" and enter the "Networking properties" and click "Next"
[http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8037/7971327436_c8457286c9.jpg]
* Click "Next" on the vService bindings, when the binding status is "ok"
* Click "Finish"
Now the vSphere Replication appliance is ready to be powered on. Depending on where you are replicating to there might be some additional steps required. If you are replicating to a second vCenter Server you will need to deploy a vSphere Replication appliance in that environment as well. Note that you will need to link two appliances together before you can replicate anything.
I don't have a second vCenter Server and I just want to replicate virtual machines to a secondary remote storage device as a form of backup. So I will go ahead and replicate a virtual machine.
* Go to your cluster under "vCenter" —> "Hosts and Clusters".
* Right click one of your virtual machines, I will use the vCenter Server as an example, and select "All vSphere Replication Actions" and then click on "Configure Replication".
[http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8178/7971353672_081a34da47.jpg]
* As a target site select the vCenter Server itself and click "next".
* As a target location select a datastore and click "next".
* Decide what the RPO (recovery point objective) should be, I selected 15 minutes and click "next".
[http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8461/7971355730_7f20402504.jpg]
* Click "finish".
Now replication will be configured and the virtual machine will be replicated with an RPO of 15 minutes. Next lets check on the progress of the replica:
* Click on the "Home" button.
* Click on "vSphere Replication" in the upper right.
* Click on "Sites" and then on your vCenter Server instance, in my case "vcenter-tm01".
* On the "Summary" tab you can see that a virtual machine replication is in progress.
* If you click "View details" you can see some more specifics. It is the first time it is being synced so it will do a full sync as indicated.
* When it is finished it should show a nice green check.[http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8454/7971357630_d560f1fe96.jpg]
Now if needed you can recover this virtual machine. You can also pause syncing or stop it completely. There is also the option to force an instant sync or even reconfigure the replication process. All of this can be found as follows:
* Click on the "Home" button.
* Click on "vSphere Replication" in the upper right.
* Click on "Sites" and then on your vCenter Server instance, in my case "vcenter-tm01".
* Click on the "Monitor" tab and next on "Incoming Replications".
* Right click the appropriate virtual machine.
[http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8302/7971351676_a49f88f35e.jpg]
* If you select "Recover" you will notice your virtual machine needs to be powered off before you can recover it.
* Select the "folder" you want to recover your virtual machine to and click "Next".
* Select the "cluster" and click "Next".
* Note that your virtual machine will be powered on, but with a disconnected network, click "Finish".
* Now you should see the status change to "Recovering" and when it is done to "Recovered".
That is it… Simple right
yellow-bricks.com [X] <http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2012/09/17/back-to-basics-install-configure-and-use-vsphere-replication/> |by Duncan Epping on September 17, 2012
◆
________________________________
Original Page: http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2012/09/17/back-to-basics-install-configure-and-use-vsphere-replication/
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I am going to assume you have "vSphere Replication" traffic enabled on a VMkernel NIC, if you do not know how to create a VMkernel NIC check this article<http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2012/09/13/back-to-basics-configuring-a-vswitch/>
Lets get started. I downloaded the vSphere Replication virtual appliance and imported and configured it in just a couple of steps using the vSphere 5.1 Web Client:
* Go to your cluster under "vCenter" —> "Hosts and Clusters".
* Right click the cluster object and click "All vCenter Actions" —> "Deploy OVF Template"
* As a source I select the ova file I downloaded, now click "Next"
* Validate the details and click "Next"
* If you agree "Accept" the EULA and click "Next"
* Select the "Name and folder" this virtual machine will needs to be placed in and click "Next"
* Select the "Datastore" it needs to be provisioned to and click "Next"
* Select the "Network" it needs to be connected to and click "Next"
* Provide an administrative "password" and enter the "Networking properties" and click "Next"
[http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8037/7971327436_c8457286c9.jpg]
* Click "Next" on the vService bindings, when the binding status is "ok"
* Click "Finish"
Now the vSphere Replication appliance is ready to be powered on. Depending on where you are replicating to there might be some additional steps required. If you are replicating to a second vCenter Server you will need to deploy a vSphere Replication appliance in that environment as well. Note that you will need to link two appliances together before you can replicate anything.
I don't have a second vCenter Server and I just want to replicate virtual machines to a secondary remote storage device as a form of backup. So I will go ahead and replicate a virtual machine.
* Go to your cluster under "vCenter" —> "Hosts and Clusters".
* Right click one of your virtual machines, I will use the vCenter Server as an example, and select "All vSphere Replication Actions" and then click on "Configure Replication".
[http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8178/7971353672_081a34da47.jpg]
* As a target site select the vCenter Server itself and click "next".
* As a target location select a datastore and click "next".
* Decide what the RPO (recovery point objective) should be, I selected 15 minutes and click "next".
[http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8461/7971355730_7f20402504.jpg]
* Click "finish".
Now replication will be configured and the virtual machine will be replicated with an RPO of 15 minutes. Next lets check on the progress of the replica:
* Click on the "Home" button.
* Click on "vSphere Replication" in the upper right.
* Click on "Sites" and then on your vCenter Server instance, in my case "vcenter-tm01".
* On the "Summary" tab you can see that a virtual machine replication is in progress.
* If you click "View details" you can see some more specifics. It is the first time it is being synced so it will do a full sync as indicated.
* When it is finished it should show a nice green check.[http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8454/7971357630_d560f1fe96.jpg]
Now if needed you can recover this virtual machine. You can also pause syncing or stop it completely. There is also the option to force an instant sync or even reconfigure the replication process. All of this can be found as follows:
* Click on the "Home" button.
* Click on "vSphere Replication" in the upper right.
* Click on "Sites" and then on your vCenter Server instance, in my case "vcenter-tm01".
* Click on the "Monitor" tab and next on "Incoming Replications".
* Right click the appropriate virtual machine.
[http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8302/7971351676_a49f88f35e.jpg]
* If you select "Recover" you will notice your virtual machine needs to be powered off before you can recover it.
* Select the "folder" you want to recover your virtual machine to and click "Next".
* Select the "cluster" and click "Next".
* Note that your virtual machine will be powered on, but with a disconnected network, click "Finish".
* Now you should see the status change to "Recovering" and when it is done to "Recovered".
That is it… Simple right
yellow-bricks.com [X] <http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2012/09/17/back-to-basics-install-configure-and-use-vsphere-replication/> |by Duncan Epping on September 17, 2012
◆
________________________________
Original Page: http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2012/09/17/back-to-basics-install-configure-and-use-vsphere-replication/
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Friday, September 14, 2012
What’s New with VMware vCloud Director 5.1 - Snapshots, Storage Profiles and the Elastic vDC
VMware vCloud Director<http://www.vmware.com/products/vcloud-director/overview.html> orchestrates the provisioning of software-defned datacenter services, to deliver complete virtual datacenters for easy consumption in minutes. Software-defned datacenter services and virtual datacenters fundamentally simplify infrastructure provisioning and enable IT to move at the speed of business.
Numerous enhancements are included within vCloud Director 5.1, making it the best infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solution in the marketplace today. This document highlights some of these key enhancements and is targeted toward users who are familiar with previous vCloud Director releases.
This presentation will show you what has changed in: Snapshots, Storage Profiles and the Elastic vDC.
Technical White Paper - What's New with VMware vCloud Director 5.1<http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/2107-Technical-White-Paper-Whats-New-with-VMware-vCloud-Director-5.1.html>
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Numerous enhancements are included within vCloud Director 5.1, making it the best infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solution in the marketplace today. This document highlights some of these key enhancements and is targeted toward users who are familiar with previous vCloud Director releases.
This presentation will show you what has changed in: Snapshots, Storage Profiles and the Elastic vDC.
Technical White Paper - What's New with VMware vCloud Director 5.1<http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/2107-Technical-White-Paper-Whats-New-with-VMware-vCloud-Director-5.1.html>
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Thursday, September 13, 2012
VMware Posters - VMware vSphere Blog
This page is dedicated to the VMware posters which were created by Technical Marketing and have been released at VMworld and VMUGs around the world, this is a central place to find the latest versions of the PDF versions which can be used for reference or printed off as needed.
VMware ESXi 5.1 Reference Poster
Click here to download the PDF<http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/files/2012/09/ESXi-5.1-Poster.pdf>.
[ESXi Poster]<http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/files/2012/09/ESXi-5.1-Poster.pdf>
VMware Management with PowerCLI 5.1 Poster
Click here to download the PDF.<http://blogs.vmware.com/vipowershell/files/2012/09/PowerCLI_5_1_Poster.pdf>
[PowerCLI Poster]<http://blogs.vmware.com/vipowershell/files/2012/09/PowerCLI_5_1_Poster.pdf>
VMware vCloud Networking Poster
Click here to download the PDF.<http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/files/2012/09/VMW-vCloud-Networking-Poster2.pdf>
[VMware vCloud Networking]<http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/files/2012/09/VMW-vCloud-Networking-Poster2.pdf>
VMware Hands-On Labs 2012 Poster
Click here to download the PDF.<http://communities.vmware.com/servlet/JiveServlet/download/2110117-95116/HOL_2012_Labs-Reference.pdf>
[Hands-On Labs Poster]<http://communities.vmware.com/servlet/JiveServlet/download/2110117-95116/HOL_2012_Labs-Reference.pdf>
VMware vCloud SDKs Poster (1.0 – Out of date)
Click here to download the PDF.<http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/files/2012/09/Final-vCloudApi_34x22-020111.pdf>
[vCloud SDK Poster]<http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/files/2012/09/Final-vCloudApi_34x22-020111.pdf>
blogs.vmware.com [X] <http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/09/vmware-posters.html> |by Alan Renouf on September 11, 2012
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________________________________
Original Page: http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/09/vmware-posters.html
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VMware ESXi 5.1 Reference Poster
Click here to download the PDF<http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/files/2012/09/ESXi-5.1-Poster.pdf>.
[ESXi Poster]<http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/files/2012/09/ESXi-5.1-Poster.pdf>
VMware Management with PowerCLI 5.1 Poster
Click here to download the PDF.<http://blogs.vmware.com/vipowershell/files/2012/09/PowerCLI_5_1_Poster.pdf>
[PowerCLI Poster]<http://blogs.vmware.com/vipowershell/files/2012/09/PowerCLI_5_1_Poster.pdf>
VMware vCloud Networking Poster
Click here to download the PDF.<http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/files/2012/09/VMW-vCloud-Networking-Poster2.pdf>
[VMware vCloud Networking]<http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/files/2012/09/VMW-vCloud-Networking-Poster2.pdf>
VMware Hands-On Labs 2012 Poster
Click here to download the PDF.<http://communities.vmware.com/servlet/JiveServlet/download/2110117-95116/HOL_2012_Labs-Reference.pdf>
[Hands-On Labs Poster]<http://communities.vmware.com/servlet/JiveServlet/download/2110117-95116/HOL_2012_Labs-Reference.pdf>
VMware vCloud SDKs Poster (1.0 – Out of date)
Click here to download the PDF.<http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/files/2012/09/Final-vCloudApi_34x22-020111.pdf>
[vCloud SDK Poster]<http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/files/2012/09/Final-vCloudApi_34x22-020111.pdf>
blogs.vmware.com [X] <http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/09/vmware-posters.html> |by Alan Renouf on September 11, 2012
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Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Free self-paced training - vSphere What’s New [V5.1]
The VMware vSphere - What's New [V5.1] course is designed for SEs (VMware/Partner) and customers who want to learn about the new features and components available in VMware vSphere 5.1. This training course explores new features in VMware vCenter Server 5.1 and VMware ESXi 5.1. By the end of the course, you should gain an understanding and should be able to implement the following new functions and features of VMware vSphere 5.1:
Compute and Storage
* Support for hardware version 9, the latest CPU performance counters and virtual shared graphics acceleration designed for enhanced performance.
* For better space efficiency vSphere supports storage space reclamation for VDI.
Network
* Support for VXLAN
* Enhanced vSphere Distributed Switch that supports:
* Network health check
* Backup and restore
* Rollback and recovery
* Link Aggregation Control Protocol support
* Single-root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV)
Availability
* VMware vSphere vMotion® without the need for shared storage configurations.
* VMware vSphere Data Protection for simple and cost effective backup and recovery,
* vSphere Replication enables efficient array-agnostic replication of virtual machine data over the LAN or WAN.
VMware vCenter Enhancements:
* vSphere Web Client
* vCenter Single Sign-On
* VSA enhancements
* Support for Additional Disk Drives
* Increase Storage Capacity Online
* vCenter running on the VSA Cluster
• Security: Inclusion VMware vShield Endpoint to eliminate the agent footprint from the virtual machines, offload intelligence to a security virtual appliance, and run scans with minimal impact.
• Automation: Two new methods for deploying new vSphere hosts to an environment make the Auto Deploy process more highly available than ever before.
http://mylearn.vmware.com/mgrReg/courses.cfm?ui=www_edu&a=det&id_course=149391<http://mylearn.vmware.com/mgrReg/courses.cfm?ui=www_edu&a=det&id_course=149391>
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Compute and Storage
* Support for hardware version 9, the latest CPU performance counters and virtual shared graphics acceleration designed for enhanced performance.
* For better space efficiency vSphere supports storage space reclamation for VDI.
Network
* Support for VXLAN
* Enhanced vSphere Distributed Switch that supports:
* Network health check
* Backup and restore
* Rollback and recovery
* Link Aggregation Control Protocol support
* Single-root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV)
Availability
* VMware vSphere vMotion® without the need for shared storage configurations.
* VMware vSphere Data Protection for simple and cost effective backup and recovery,
* vSphere Replication enables efficient array-agnostic replication of virtual machine data over the LAN or WAN.
VMware vCenter Enhancements:
* vSphere Web Client
* vCenter Single Sign-On
* VSA enhancements
* Support for Additional Disk Drives
* Increase Storage Capacity Online
* vCenter running on the VSA Cluster
• Security: Inclusion VMware vShield Endpoint to eliminate the agent footprint from the virtual machines, offload intelligence to a security virtual appliance, and run scans with minimal impact.
• Automation: Two new methods for deploying new vSphere hosts to an environment make the Auto Deploy process more highly available than ever before.
http://mylearn.vmware.com/mgrReg/courses.cfm?ui=www_edu&a=det&id_course=149391<http://mylearn.vmware.com/mgrReg/courses.cfm?ui=www_edu&a=det&id_course=149391>
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vSphere Replication 5.1 and Site Recovery Manager 5.1 Now Available! - VMware vSphere Blog
Make sure you read the release notes, as always, but head on over to the download pages and pick up a copy!
vSphere Replication
* Release Notes <http://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere5/doc/vsphere-replication-51-release-notes.html>
* Download<https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/info/slug/datacenter_cloud_infrastructure/vmware_vsphere/5_1>
Site Recovery Manager
* Release Notes<http://www.vmware.com/support/srm/srm-releasenotes-5-1-0.html>
* Download<https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/info/slug/infrastructure_operations_management/vmware_vcenter_site_recovery_manager/5_1>
blogs.vmware.com [X] <http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/09/vsphere-replication-5-1-and-site-recovery-manager-5-1-now-available.html> |by Ken Werneburg on September 11, 2012
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Original Page: http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/09/vsphere-replication-5-1-and-site-recovery-manager-5-1-now-available.html
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vSphere Replication
* Release Notes <http://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere5/doc/vsphere-replication-51-release-notes.html>
* Download<https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/info/slug/datacenter_cloud_infrastructure/vmware_vsphere/5_1>
Site Recovery Manager
* Release Notes<http://www.vmware.com/support/srm/srm-releasenotes-5-1-0.html>
* Download<https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/info/slug/infrastructure_operations_management/vmware_vcenter_site_recovery_manager/5_1>
blogs.vmware.com [X] <http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/09/vsphere-replication-5-1-and-site-recovery-manager-5-1-now-available.html> |by Ken Werneburg on September 11, 2012
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Original Page: http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/09/vsphere-replication-5-1-and-site-recovery-manager-5-1-now-available.html
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What’s New in vSphere 5.1 – Networking - VMware vSphere Blog
With the release of VMware vSphere 5.1, VMware brings a number of powerful new features and enhancements to the networking capabilities in the VMware vSphere platform. The following diagram provides a list of new features in different categories[http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/files/2012/09/vSphere5.1-newFeatures.jpg]<http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/files/2012/09/vSphere5.1-newFeatures.jpg>
The main thing I would like to highlight is that the operational improvements in VDS will help customers to go away from the hybrid virtual switch design approach, where management traffic is carried on vSphere Standard Switch (VSS) and all other traffic flows through vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS). The Rollback and Recovery and Configuration Backup and Restore features address some of the operational concerns customers had about VDS and thus simplifies the virtual network operational aspects. Going forward with vSphere 5.1 all things on VDS is the way to go !
For more details about all the new features please take a look at the What's New paper here<http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/Whats-New-VMware-vSphere-51-Network-Technical-Whitepaper.pdf>. In the coming weeks, I will dive down into each feature and provide more technical details. So please stay tuned.
Get notification of these blogs postings by following me on Twitter: @VMWNetworking
blogs.vmware.com [X] <http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/09/whats-new-in-vsphere-5-1-networking.html> |by Venky on September 11, 2012
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The main thing I would like to highlight is that the operational improvements in VDS will help customers to go away from the hybrid virtual switch design approach, where management traffic is carried on vSphere Standard Switch (VSS) and all other traffic flows through vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS). The Rollback and Recovery and Configuration Backup and Restore features address some of the operational concerns customers had about VDS and thus simplifies the virtual network operational aspects. Going forward with vSphere 5.1 all things on VDS is the way to go !
For more details about all the new features please take a look at the What's New paper here<http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/Whats-New-VMware-vSphere-51-Network-Technical-Whitepaper.pdf>. In the coming weeks, I will dive down into each feature and provide more technical details. So please stay tuned.
Get notification of these blogs postings by following me on Twitter: @VMWNetworking
blogs.vmware.com [X] <http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/09/whats-new-in-vsphere-5-1-networking.html> |by Venky on September 11, 2012
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VMware vCloud Networking Poster - VMware vSphere Blog
During VMworld 2012 (US) we released a brand new networking poster. This poster is a reference to all things related to vSphere Standard Switch (VSS), vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS), and Virtual Extensible Local Area Network (VXLAN) technology. It provides you information on the different components, terminologies and parameters of VSS, VDS, and VXLAN. It also explains the advanced features of VDS and discusses some best practices. You can download the pdf of this poster here<http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/files/2012/09/VMW-vCloud-Networking-Poster2.pdf>
[http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/files/2012/09/Networking-Poster.jpg]<http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/files/2012/09/Networking-Poster.jpg>
I hope you like it. As always, I would love to hear your feedback.
blogs.vmware.com [X] <http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/09/vmware-vcloud-networking-poster.html> |by Vyenkatesh (Venky) Deshpande on September 11, 2012
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[http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/files/2012/09/Networking-Poster.jpg]<http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/files/2012/09/Networking-Poster.jpg>
I hope you like it. As always, I would love to hear your feedback.
blogs.vmware.com [X] <http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/09/vmware-vcloud-networking-poster.html> |by Vyenkatesh (Venky) Deshpande on September 11, 2012
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Thursday, September 6, 2012
vSphere 5.1 networking enhancements
There are many networking enhancement in vSphere 5.1 but I want to call out a couple specifically. The reason for this is that there have been many discussions on this blog about "hybrid VSS / VDS" environments as many were not comfortable with running everything on a VDS. Although the risks were minimal I could understand where people were coming from. So what's new in this space?
1. Management network rollback and recovery
2. VDS config backup and restore
3. Network health check
Management Network rollback / recovery says it all I guess. I for whatever reason you made changes that will result in your host not being able to connect to vCenter then this change will not be committed. Even more importantly, if you ever end up in the situation where your host is not able to connect to the network while using a VDS you can now reconfigure it through the DCUI (Network Restore Options). I played around with it, and I think it is a huge enhancement. I don't see a reason to go hybrid any longer… go full VDS!
Another often heard complaint was around export/import of the VDS config or backup/restore. With vSphere 5.1 this ability is now added. Not only can you save the VDS config and use it for new VDS's but you can of course also use this feature for backup purposes (see screenshot below). Another cool feature is that if you made a change to a portgroup that was not what you intended you can actually roll it back.
[http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8012/7650164690_04cff0af09.jpg]
Last but not least is the "Network Health Check" option. I particularly like this feature as I've been in the situation many times in the past that changes were made on a physical level and people forgot to inform me about it. This will allow you to quickly identify when things changed and that will make the discussion with your networking colleagues a lot easier. In this release three things are checked:
* VLAN
* MTU
* Network adapter teaming
These checks will be done every minute, and is done by sending probing packets on the VDS uplinks. If for whatever reason these probing packets fail it could indicate that the config of the physical components have changed. Nice right… I am not going to reveal any more secrets as I am guessing Venky will be writing some deepdive stuff soon.
In the mean while, for more details around what's new I would like to refer to the great what's new paper that Venky Deshpande wrote: What's New for Network in vSphere 5.1<http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/Whats-New-VMware-vSphere-51-Network-Technical-Whitepaper.pdf>.
yellow-bricks.com [X] <http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2012/09/06/vsphere-5-1-networking-enhancements/> |by Duncan Epping on September 6, 2012
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________________________________
Original Page: http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2012/09/06/vsphere-5-1-networking-enhancements/
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1. Management network rollback and recovery
2. VDS config backup and restore
3. Network health check
Management Network rollback / recovery says it all I guess. I for whatever reason you made changes that will result in your host not being able to connect to vCenter then this change will not be committed. Even more importantly, if you ever end up in the situation where your host is not able to connect to the network while using a VDS you can now reconfigure it through the DCUI (Network Restore Options). I played around with it, and I think it is a huge enhancement. I don't see a reason to go hybrid any longer… go full VDS!
Another often heard complaint was around export/import of the VDS config or backup/restore. With vSphere 5.1 this ability is now added. Not only can you save the VDS config and use it for new VDS's but you can of course also use this feature for backup purposes (see screenshot below). Another cool feature is that if you made a change to a portgroup that was not what you intended you can actually roll it back.
[http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8012/7650164690_04cff0af09.jpg]
Last but not least is the "Network Health Check" option. I particularly like this feature as I've been in the situation many times in the past that changes were made on a physical level and people forgot to inform me about it. This will allow you to quickly identify when things changed and that will make the discussion with your networking colleagues a lot easier. In this release three things are checked:
* VLAN
* MTU
* Network adapter teaming
These checks will be done every minute, and is done by sending probing packets on the VDS uplinks. If for whatever reason these probing packets fail it could indicate that the config of the physical components have changed. Nice right… I am not going to reveal any more secrets as I am guessing Venky will be writing some deepdive stuff soon.
In the mean while, for more details around what's new I would like to refer to the great what's new paper that Venky Deshpande wrote: What's New for Network in vSphere 5.1<http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/Whats-New-VMware-vSphere-51-Network-Technical-Whitepaper.pdf>.
yellow-bricks.com [X] <http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2012/09/06/vsphere-5-1-networking-enhancements/> |by Duncan Epping on September 6, 2012
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________________________________
Original Page: http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2012/09/06/vsphere-5-1-networking-enhancements/
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Wednesday, September 5, 2012
vMotion without shared storage requirement, does it have a name? - VMware vSphere Blog
With the release of version 5.1, VMware introduced some extra functionality to the vMotion platform. One of these enhancements enables vMotion to run in environments without shared storage.
I heard a lot of names floating around the community, such as X-vMotion, Unified vMotion and enhanced vMotion, but in reality we do not brand this particular enhancement as a separate feature. To give you some background of the previous mentioned terms: X-vMotion was the internal code name for this feature, this name is still visible in the ESXi Host Advanced Setting with the rest of the internal codenames. Unified vMotion is a reference to the unified architecture which combines vMotion and parts of the Storage vMotion for this process. When a virtual machine needs to be migrated between hosts that do not share storage, vMotion copies the data across the vMotion network using some of the Storage vMotion code. A separate article will appear soon expanding on the technical bits of this process.
A separate product name usually means a separate license and that is the beauty of this enhancement. vMotion without the shared storage requirement is available in all kits and edition that have vMotion included. This means, if you are using vMotion today, the moment you upgrade to vSphere 5.1, you can migrate virtual machines between hosts without the need of shared storage and without any downtime.
blogs.vmware.com [X] <http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/09/vmotion-without-shared-storage-requirement-does-it-have-a-name.html> |by Frank Denneman on September 5, 2012
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Original Page: http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/09/vmotion-without-shared-storage-requirement-does-it-have-a-name.html
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I heard a lot of names floating around the community, such as X-vMotion, Unified vMotion and enhanced vMotion, but in reality we do not brand this particular enhancement as a separate feature. To give you some background of the previous mentioned terms: X-vMotion was the internal code name for this feature, this name is still visible in the ESXi Host Advanced Setting with the rest of the internal codenames. Unified vMotion is a reference to the unified architecture which combines vMotion and parts of the Storage vMotion for this process. When a virtual machine needs to be migrated between hosts that do not share storage, vMotion copies the data across the vMotion network using some of the Storage vMotion code. A separate article will appear soon expanding on the technical bits of this process.
A separate product name usually means a separate license and that is the beauty of this enhancement. vMotion without the shared storage requirement is available in all kits and edition that have vMotion included. This means, if you are using vMotion today, the moment you upgrade to vSphere 5.1, you can migrate virtual machines between hosts without the need of shared storage and without any downtime.
blogs.vmware.com [X] <http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/09/vmotion-without-shared-storage-requirement-does-it-have-a-name.html> |by Frank Denneman on September 5, 2012
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________________________________
Original Page: http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/09/vmotion-without-shared-storage-requirement-does-it-have-a-name.html
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Tuesday, September 4, 2012
MY Webinar Wednesday's
In an effort to educate even more people on VMware’s products, I have started a bi-weekly webinar series called “Webinar Wednesdays”
I will be focusing on VMware products and solutions that fit into the mid-market.
Please signup and view the schedule and topics at:
Thursday, August 30, 2012
What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1?
VMware vSphere is the industry-leading virtualization platform and the key enabler for cloud computing architectures. vSphere enables IT to meet SLAs for the most demanding business critical applications, at the lowest TCO. vSphere accelerates the shift to cloud computing for existing datacenters, while also underpinning compatible public cloud offerings paving the way for the only hybrid cloud model. With the support of over 3,000 applications from more than 1,650 ISV partners, VMware vSphere is the most trusted platform for any application.
So what's new in 5.1?
• Larger virtual machines – Virtual machines can grow two times larger than in any previous release to support even the most advanced applications. Virtual machines can now have up to 64 virtual CPUs (vCPUs) and 1TB of virtual RAM (vRAM).
• New virtual machine format – New features in the virtual machine format (version 9) in vSphere 5.1 include support for larger virtual machines, CPU performance counters and virtual shared graphics acceleration designed for enhanced performance.
Storage
• Flexible, space-efficient storage for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) – A new disk format enables the correct balance between space efficiency and I/O throughput for the virtual desktop.
Network
• vSphere Distributed Switch – Enhancements such as Network Health Check, Configuration Backup and Restore, Roll Back and Recovery, and Link Aggregation Control Protocol support and deliver more enterprise-class networking functionality and a more robust foundation for cloud computing.
• Single-root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV) support – Support for SR-IOV optimizes performance for sophisticated applications.
Availability
• vSphere vMotion® – Leverage the advantages of vMotion (zero-downtime migration) without the need for shared storage configurations. This new vMotion capability applies to the entire network.
• vSphere Data Protection – Simple and cost effective backup and recovery for virtual machines. vSphere Data Protection is a newly architected solution based EMC Avamar technology that allows admins to back up virtual machine data to disk without the need of agents and with built-in deduplication. This feature replaces the vSphere Data Recovery product available with previous releases of vSphere.
• vSphere Replication – vSphere Replication enables efficient array-agnostic replication of virtual machine data over the LAN or WAN. vSphere Replication simplifies management enabling replication at the virtual machine level and enables RPOs as low as 15 minutes.
• Zero-downtime upgrade for VMware Tools – After you upgrade to the VMware Tools available with version 5.1, no reboots will be required for subsequent VMware Tools upgrades.
Security
• VMware vShield Endpoint™ – Delivers a proven endpoint security solution to any workload with an approach that is simplified, efficient, and cloud-aware. vShield Endpoint enables 3rd party endpoint security solutions to eliminate the agent footprint from the virtual machines, offload intelligence to a security virtual appliance, and run scans with minimal impact.
Automation
• vSphere Storage DRS™ and Profile-Driven Storage – New integration with VMware vCloud® Director™ enables further storage efficiencies and automation in a private cloud environment.
• vSphere Auto Deploy™ – Two new methods for deploying new vSphere hosts to an environment make the Auto Deploy process more highly available then ever before. Management (with vCenter Server)
• vSphere Web Client –The vSphere Web Client is now the core administrative interface for vSphere. This new flexible, robust interface simplifies vSphere control through shortcut navigation, custom tagging, enhanced scalability, and the ability to manage from anywhere with Internet Explorer or Firefox-enabled devices.
• vCenter Single Sign-On – Dramatically simplify vSphere administration by allowing users to log in once to access all instances or layers of vCenter without the need for further authentication.
• vCenter Orchestrator – Orchestrator simplifies installation and configuration of the powerful workflow engine in vCenter Server. Newly designed workflows enhance ease of use, and can also be launched directly from the new vSphere Web Client.
For information on upgrading to vSphere 5.1, visit the vSphere Upgrade Center at:
http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/upgrade-center/overview.html.
vSphere is also available with the new vCloud suites from VMware.
For more information, visit http://www.vmware.com/go/vcloudsuite/.
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