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/.

 

VMworld TV - An in-depth demo of VMware Mirage - Eric Sloof - NTPRO.NL

VMworld TV - An in-depth demo of VMware Mirage - Eric Sloof - NTPRO.NL

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VMworld TV - Behind the scenes at the VMware hands-on labs - Eric Sloof - NTPRO.NL

VMworld TV - Behind the scenes at the VMware hands-on labs - Eric Sloof

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VMworld 2012: VMware + EMC Storagethe best gets better

Wikibon just refreshed their study (2 years in a row, so it's not quite "annual" yet) on VMware and Storage – and one thing they do is reach out to the vendors, and analyze their relative VMware integration. I'd encourage you to check it out yourself<http://wikibon.org/wiki/v/VSphere_5_Storage_Integration_chips_away_at_Management_Overhead> (come to your own conclusion), but here's the summary – EMC = #1! Also – amazingly this was a count of the degree of integration – but when the respondents were asked "who is the best", EMC was highlighted as the best by 3x times more than the next closest!

If you think this is "one analyst" kind of thing – check out the latest Goldman Sachs Strategic IT spending study (July), which also showed EMC being selected 2.5x more than the next closest competitor when the use case is VMware centric – that's materially more EMC's general market share).

Here's the results for the major unified storage players:

[image]<http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/.a/6a00e552e53bd28833017c318ddf2d970b-pi>

Here are the results for the major block-only players (or Unified players, counting block integration points).

[image]<http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/.a/6a00e552e53bd288330177446b8376970d-pi>

So… The best is getting even better.

Not only do we have a native vCenter Operations VNX connector now GA, with VNX Storage Analytics Suite in early adopter stage (more on that here), but there are two BIG additions in vSphere 5.1 that VNX and VNX customers will benefit from: 1) VAAI NFS Fast Copy for VMware View and vCloud Director use cases; 2) Native multipathing enhancements.

For more on these two things… Read on…

In vSphere 5.0, the first set of VAAI API calls for NFS arrived. vSphere 5.1 adds a new API – NFS Fast Clone – which can be used to accelerate VMware View and vCloud Director use cases. It requires that the NFS server is able to take file-level snapshots, and be able to do "snap of snap" (to accelerate the "base replica+snapshot" behavior used in these cases). This API is supported in EMC VNX (in the currently shipping code – VNX OE 32, aka "Inyo") and the upcoming EMC Isilon "Mavericks" code (which is the first release where Isilon NAS will be expressly targeted at VMware use cases). BTW – notice how coordinated we try to be – the feature shows up in the EMC array release that preceeds the corresponding vSphere release. Hint – there are already VM Granular Storage – more here – giblets in there.

Check it the new VAAI NFS Fast Copy in the demo below:

You can download a high-rez version of the demo here in MP4 format<https://vspecialist.emc.com/human.aspx?Username=Bloglink&Password=vgeekb1og&arg01=%20832817271&arg05=0/[DownloadAs_Filename]&arg12=downloaddirect&transaction=signon&quiet=true> and WMV format<https://vspecialist.emc.com/human.aspx?Username=Bloglink&Password=vgeekb1og&arg01=%20832758918&arg05=0/[DownloadAs_Filename]&arg12=downloaddirect&transaction=signon&quiet=true>.

BTW – It's worth restating - NFS is a great choice for customers using vSphere – I generally recommend using it in conjunction with VMFS. In the Virtual Geek annual survey I asked what protocols people use – here's the result:

[image]<http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/.a/6a00e552e53bd28833017c318ddfd7970b-pi>

Wikibon also asked the same question – and this is what they found:

[image]<http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/.a/6a00e552e53bd288330177446b841c970d-pi>

The other improvement is one of those "little things that means so much" – dramatically improved and simplified native multipathing for VMware and EMC VNX customers using block storage and VMFS.

This takes a bit of explanation. Note that these are "internals" in the sense that most customers don't muck around with this level of detail – but hey, it's good to know.

* EMC VNX is an array that uses an "active/passive LUN ownership" model (for now) – but is active/active (both storage processors support a load at any time). This is pretty common architectural model in arrays of it's generation and target market. A feature called "Asymmetric Logical Unit Access" aka "ALUA" is also pretty common of arrays of this type. What it does it present the LUN via both storage processors, where one set of paths is "non-optimal" because it has to cross the internal interconnect between "brains".
* EMC VNX also has for a long time had the ability to tresspass (move a LUN from one brain to another) non-disruptively. This is dependent on how fast it happens and how well the host multipathing works. LUN Tresspass and ALUA doesn't make VNX the same as true "active/active" models like EMC VMAX – but can come close. In recent VNX OE releases – LUN tresspasses are now super fast at scale.
* Like other implementations of this sort of architectural model – there are internal things (like metadata) that get owned by one storage processor or the other – so every LUN has:
* A "Default Owner" – this is the storage processor with all the metadata in "steady state". When the LUN is actually owned by it's default owner, the overall system load lowers, and performance is generally better.
* A "Current Owner" – while every LUN starts with being service by the "default owner" storage processor, the current owner can change after a trespass, which can be due to host failure, HBA failure, network failure, storage processor failure – or by an non-disruptive upgrade (where all LUNs move to one storage processor, the other gets upgraded, and then they tresspass the other way and get updated).
* Front-end-ports on the "Current Owner" – which, if ALUA is configured, show up as "optimized" paths in vSphere, and the other storage processor ports show up as "non-optimized" paths. vSphere sends I/O down non-optimized paths.

So… With all that said – a lot comes down to what the host multipathing does. For example, after a tresspass, does it eventually issue a restore command that will tresspass the LUN back to it's original "Default Owner"?

VMware and EMC found this was an area where we could make things better. In vSphere 5.0 and earlier – the NMP PSP for Fixed and MRU issue this auto-restore, but Round-Robin PSP does not. Also we found that in versions of the VNX OE that are earlier, we wouldn't respond to the vSphere issued auto-restore properly in all cases (corner case).

… So – in vSphere 5.1 this was improved, and we made some fixes that showed up in VNX OE 32. Here's a comparison (thanks for the work on this Clint) of vSphere 5.0, 4.x and vSphere 5.1 with VNX arrays running VNX OE 31 and 32:

You can download a high-rez version of the demo here in MP4 format<https://vspecialist.emc.com/human.aspx?Username=Bloglink&Password=vgeekb1og&arg01=%20832616805&arg05=0/[DownloadAs_Filename]https://vspecialist.emc.com/human.aspx?Username=Bloglink&Password=vgeekb1og&arg01=%20832616805&arg05=0/[DownloadAs_Filename]&arg12=downloaddirect&transaction=signon&quiet=true> and WMV format<https://vspecialist.emc.com/human.aspx?Username=Bloglink&Password=vgeekb1og&arg01=%20832767820&arg05=0/[DownloadAs_Filename]&arg12=downloaddirect&transaction=signon&quiet=true>.

Net? In vSphere 5.1 and VNX OE 5.1, we've worked to make the native multipathing work better – eliminating the need for tools, scripting, or anything like that. Heck – the Round Robin PSP has become the native PSP selected when you use EMC VNX and VMAX arrays. Simple.

EMC VNX customers – what do you think?

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Technical White Paper - What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1 – Platform

VMware vSphere 5.1 provides many new features and enhancements that further extend the core capabilities of the VMware vSphere platform. Included among these are notable improvements in the areas of host security, logging, monitoring, and deployment; new VMware vSphere vMotion (vMotion) capabilities that enable virtual machines to be migrated between hosts and clusters with no shared storage; and support for the latest processors and guest operating systems (OS).

This paper provides an overview of the new features and capabilities being introduced with vSphere 5.1. This paper is organized into the following four sections:

vSphere Platform Enhancements

- User Access- Auditing- Monitoring- vMotion Enhancements
- Extended Guest OS and CPU Support
- Agentless Antivirus and Antimalware

Virtual Machine Enhancements

- New Virtual Machine Features- Introducing Virtual Machine Compatibility

Auto Deploy

- Stateless Caching Mode- Stateful Install Mode- Remote Logging and Dump Collection- Improved Scalability

[image]<http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/uploads/vSphere_Platform.png>

Technical White Paper - What's New in VMware vSphere 5.1 – Platform.pdf<http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/uploads/WhatsNewvSphere5.1.pdf>

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Technical White Paper - VMware vSphere Data Protection - Eric Sloof

With VMware vSphere 5.1, VMware is releasing a new backup and recovery solution for virtual machines called vSphere Data Protection (VDP). This solution is fully integrated with VMware vCenter Server and provides agentless, disk-based backup of virtual machines to deduplicated storage.

Benefits of VDP include the following:


* It ensures fast, efficient protection for virtual machines even if they are powered off.
* It uses patented deduplication technology across all backup jobs, significantly reducing disk space consumption.
* VMware vSphere APIs – Data Protection (VADP) and Changed Block Training (CBT) are utilized to reduce load on the vSphere host and minimize backup windows requirements.
* It performs full virtual machine and File-Level Restore (FLR) without installing an agent in every virtual machine.
* Installation and configuration is simplified using an appliance form factor.
* Management is performed utilizing the VMware vSphere Web Client.
* The VDP appliance and its backups are protected using a checkpoint and rollback mechanism.
* Windows and Linux files can easily be restored by the end user without a Web browser.

This paper presents an overview of the architecture, deployment, configuration, and management of VDP.

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Technical White Paper - Introduction to VMware vSphere Replication - Eric Sloof

A fundamental part of protecting IT is ensuring that the services provided by virtual machines are resilient, and robust at all levels of the compute stack, from hardware through to the application. vSphere Replication is a feature introduced with VMware vSphere 5.1. It is designed to augment the recovery capabilities of the VMware vSphere platform by providing a built-in capability to continually replicate a running virtual machine to another location.

Replication creates a copy of a virtual machine that can be stored locally within a cluster or at another site, providing a data source to rapidly restore a virtual machine within minutes. vSphere Replication augments offerings in the vSphere availability protection matrix. It provides a solution that enables recovery time better than that of restoring from backup, without introducing the complexity of a complete storage array–based replication configuration.

vSphere Replication also enables configuring replication on a per–virtual machine basis and significantly rounds out the capabilities of protection offered by vSphere. This paper will help you understand what vSphere Replication is and some of the benefits of its features. It will also discuss how it works to protect your virtual machines against failure.

http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/2109-Technical-White-Paper-Introduction-to-VMware-vSphere-Replication.html

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Enhanced vMotion with vSphere 5.1 - Eric Sloof

Enhanced vMotion allows you to combine a vMotion and Storage vMotion into a single operation. Effectivly enabling a "shared nothing" vMotion. Use cases can be found in large datacenters and SMB markets; Cross host and datastore vMotion allows VM migration between clusters in a large datacenters, which may not have a common set of datastores between them.
Cross host and datastore vMotion allows simpler setup and use of local disk, by removing the shared storage requirement, it lowers the barrier to entry for use of non-disruptive migrations and will be very useful for the SMB market.
[image]
Enhanced vMotion will count against the concurrent limitations of both vMotion and Storage vMotion. Today, one cannot perform more than 2 concurrent Storage vMotions per host. As a result, no more than 2 concurrent enhanced vMotions will be allowed.
Since these count against Storage vMotion limits, running 2 concurrent Enhanced vMotions will cause all attempted SvMotions to remain queued until one of the active Enhanced vMotions complete. Similarly, Enhanced vMotions also count against vMotion limits, at most 8 concurrent vMotions per host. If there are 2 active Enhanced vMotions, then, we will only allow at most 6 concurrent vMotions at the same time.
If there are 8 active vMotions, any new Enhanced vMotion attempts will be queued until one of the active vMotions complete. Enhanced vMotion will behave exactly the same as vMotion, with respect to support multi-NICs. Likewise, it will support either shared swap or unshared swap migrations just as vMotion does, with VM home directory movement becoming an unshared swap migration.
Enhanced vMotions are more expensive and thus that must be factored in when making migration decisions. Neither DRS and SDRS leverage Enhanced vMotion technology in 5.1. Even though neither DRS nor SDRS will recommend Enhanced vMotion migrations, users will still be able to perform manual Enhanced vMotions within or across SDRS or DRS clusters.
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VMworld 2012: Introducing the New VMware vSphere Storage Appliance 5.1 for SMBs - VMware SMB Blog

Exciting times here at VMworld 2012 as we finally, can talk publicly about some of the product developments we have been working on in this past year. With today's announcement of VMware vSphere® 5.1 solutions to help small and midsize businesses (SMBs), we unveiled VMware vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) 5.1.

For those of you not familiar with VMware vSphere Storage Appliance, it enables you to transform the local storage within your servers into a shared storage resource that runs your virtualized applications. VSA allows you to achieve business continuity and eliminates any single point of failure within your IT environment. Let's dive into some of the new features behind today's announcement:

* Deployment on existing ESXi environments
If you have a virtualized environment already, you can still install VSA 5.1 on up to three VMware vSphere hosts. This enhancement allows our existing customers to take advantage of shared storage and enable application availability features, such as HA and vMotion, for the first time.

* Run vCenter within the VSA cluster
With VSA 1.0, an instance of vCenter Server was required to run outside the VSA cluster. Now, with this enhancement, you can install a vCenter Server instance in a VM on a local datastore within one of your VSA nodes, and then migrate the vCenter Server to shared storage. This allows you to save on deploying that extra server to run vCenter Server.

* Support for additional disk drives and increase of storage capacity online
VSA 5.1 now allows you to add more hard disk drives, including JBOD expansion. For 3TB in a RAID 6 configuration (no hot spare), you can add up to 8 disks. For 2TB drives in a RAID 6 configuration, you can add up to 12 local disks (no hot spare) and up to 16 external disks (with hot spare). As you add more hard disk drives to your VSA cluster post-deployment, you can include the additional hard disk capacity provided by increasing your storage capacity online. Remember, VSA 5.1 supports RAID 5, 6, and 10.

* Centralized management of multiple VSA clusters from one vCenter Server (AKA ROBO Support)
With VSA 5.1, multiple VSA clusters can be managed by a single instance of vCenter Server residing on a different subnet. Now, every small environment can provide shared storage to enable application availability, from SMBs to enterprises with a distributed network of branch offices.

[http://blogs.vmware.com/smb/files/2012/08/8-VMware-vSphere-Storage-Appliance-ROBO-configuration.jpg]<http://blogs.vmware.com/smb/files/2012/08/8-VMware-vSphere-Storage-Appliance-ROBO-configuration.jpg>

VSA 5.1 supports centralized management of multiple VSA clusters through one instance of vCenter Server, allowing ROBO environments to take advantage of shared storage.

If you're looking to deploy in a ROBO environment, VSA 5.1 now offers three installation and upgrade methods:

* Offline install – Configure the VSA 5.1 cluster at the main datacenter, box these servers up, and ship to the remote offices where these clusters can be added back into the main datacenter's vCenter Server.

* Unattended remote install – Upgrade an existing VSA 1.0 cluster at a remote office through the main datacenter. The bits can be sent over the wire, requiring no intervention at the remote office.

* Attended remote install – Similar to the unattended remote install/upgrade process, this method uploads the OVFs from the remote office. An IT admin at the remote office plugs in a removable storage device (e.g., USB stick) which contains the OVF.

To learn more about the other new enhancements within VSA 5.1, click here<http://www.vmware.com/go/vsa>.





By Manoj Jayadevan

I am very pleased to officially announce<http://bit.ly/Rjzn5h> the new-and-improved VMware Go Pro, another step forward in our commitment to provide simple and cost-effective solutions for growing SMBs to adopt and extend virtualization, and to improve the protection, scalability and reliability of their IT infrastructure.

[http://blogs.vmware.com/smb/files/2012/08/Easy-Virtualization-Choice-B.jpg]<http://blogs.vmware.com/smb/files/2012/08/Easy-Virtualization-Choice-B.jpg>

VMware Go Pro<http://bit.ly/Rjzg9O> is a Cloud-based virtualization deployment and management solution hosted by VMware that makes it easier and faster to virtualize, and simpler to manage and optimize a growing infrastructure across virtual and physical machines and software. Cloud-based delivery ensures an "anytime anywhere" IT management solution since all that a user needs is an Internet connection and a web browser to manage and monitor his entire IT infrastructure. Now with an even more streamlined look and feel, IT admins can start managing their virtual infrastructure right away and easily migrate to other VMware tools like the versatile vSphere Client. The terminology, concepts, even icons are consistent – VMware Go Pro just makes it all simpler and easier to understand.

With VMware Go Pro, we are uniquely positioned to deliver exceptional value to our customers and partners by simplifying virtualization and IT for SMBs. The new release further helps our customers keep up with the growth of their virtualized infrastructure by enabling the deployment of VMware vCenter for centralized management.



Here are the top 3 benefits VMware Go Pro offers:

Simplified Virtualization for SMBs
The common barriers to virtualization are lack of expertise and initial upfront costs. VMware Go Pro is an affordable subscription based solution delivered over the cloud. Its step-by-step wizards guide novices and experienced virtualization administrators alike through deploying and managing virtualization. And the web-based interface allows virtual and physical infrastructure management with anytime, anywhere access. With this new release, users will now be able to deploy VMware vCenter via a web browser for centralized management of their virtualized infrastructure. Even IT generalists can get started with virtualization in 30 minutes or less.

Enhanced Uptime and Reliability
VMware Go Pro's unified IT management console has built-in monitoring capabilities with unique, one-click IT assessments that automatically identify performance, security and downtime risks and make tailored recommendations to address them. The new release of VMware Go Pro uses the addition of VMware vCenter to improve uptime and reliability even further by enabling round-the-clock monitoring of your virtual infrastructure's health. Now customers will know of any potential issues even when they are not logged-into Go Pro.

Comprehensive Infrastructure Protection
VMware Go Pro offers automated patch management across physical and virtual machines for both Microsoft and third-party applications to ensure that organizations are up-to-date with all of the latest software upgrades, thus mitigating the organization's vulnerability to the latest IT threats. An integrated Help Desk with built-in analytics also helps improve IT productivity and service, automatically prioritizing issues by level of severity. Go Pro also offers a rich asset management capability, which provides control over all software and hardware assets.



Looking forward in 2013, users will also be able to implement and test business continuity plans in minutes with cloud-based VM backup and disaster recovery.

I invite you take the VMware Go Pro for a test drive and discover for yourself the power of virtualization and the simplification of IT.

blogs.vmware.com [X] <http://blogs.vmware.com/smb/2012/08/newvsa_smb.html> |by VMware SMB on August 27, 2012
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Infographic: Who are SMBs? - VMware SMB Blog

As you may have noticed by today's announcements, solutions for small and midsize businesses are in the spotlight at VMworld 2012. In the first of a series of SMB focused infographics we look at the people, demographics and IT characteristics of today's small and midsize businesses.

[http://blogs.vmware.com/smb/files/2012/08/SMBInfographic.png]<http://blogs.vmware.com/smb/files/2012/08/SMBInfographic.png>

In the summer of 2008, MLB Network was started with the vision to provide baseball fan with HD access to the game like never before. To do this, the MLB Network IT team had to merge existing infrastructure with cutting-edge technology for both the back office and the broadcast environments in just six months.

The solution: With a small team of IT pros, MLB Network needed to build out a highly reliable, agile and resilient IT environment in just a matter of weeks. That meant first to virtualize its business critical applications, allowing the IT team to manage a single environment. With the infrastructure beginning to work for the business — rather than diverting time and attention the core goals of the team — MLB Network was then able to virtualize additional, custom applications, creating more dynamic on air-experience for its viewers.

The impact: Since the build out, MLB Network has leveraged virtualization to expand its capabilities and reduce the number of servers in its server room. MLB Network's virtual infrastructure today runs more than 10 mission critical applications, supporting more than 18,000 hours of broadcast a season.

For more details, please visit: http://bit.ly/PL76BF



By Mike Adams, Group Product Line Marketing Manager, Infrastructure Product Marketing, VMware

Great effort has gone into the newly announced VMware vSphere 5.1, the foundation of the VMware vCloud Suite, to build out capabilities that help businesses of all sizes and varying IT resources and skill sets to get more out of their virtualized and cloud environments. With the blog we're focused on how VMware vSphere 5.1 solutions will help small and midsized businesses (SMBs) simplify and protect IT with industry-leading virtualization, business continuity and automated management capabilities.

VMware vSphere 5.1 delivers a breadth of new and improved capabilities to ease daily administrative tasks. Out of the gate administrators will notice the new, browser-based VMware vSphere Web Client. The Web Client is highly scalable enabling administrators to manage more objects and 3x more sessions than before. The Web Client will also allow administrators to pause and resume even the most complex task or workflow without losing their place if interrupted — by storing workflow and state on the server. VMware vCenter Single Sign-On further streamlines VMware vSphere 5.1 operations by enabling administrators to log-in once and access all instances or layers depending on their profile and rights. No more logging in multiple times to carry out basic activities.

[http://blogs.vmware.com/smb/files/2012/08/VMware-vSphere-Web-Client.png]<http://blogs.vmware.com/smb/files/2012/08/VMware-vSphere-Web-Client.png>

Together these new and enhanced capabilities ease the deployment and administration of VMware vSphere 5.1 environments significantly by automating previously manual tasks to deliver time savings and reduced complexity.

Improved IT Availability via New and Enhanced Backup and Recovery, Replication Capabilities

SMBs will be able to further protect and secure their IT systems with VMware vSphere 5.1. VMware vSphere Data Protection is a new backup and recovery solution delivering complete data protection for virtual machines. It is integrated with VMware vCenter Server to simplify set up and on-going management of backup and recovery tasks.

VMware vSphere 5.1 introduces VMware vSphere Replication. This new feature offers powerful and affordable virtual machine level replication allowing customers to use of lower tier storage at their failover site.

VMware vSphere Storage Appliance 5.1 delivers functionality to more easily and cost-effectively deploy a shared storage software environment, enabling high availability in SMB and Remote Office/Branch Office (ROBO) environments.

To secure virtual machines, VMware vSphere 5.1 now features the newly integrated VMware vShield Endpoint. VMware vShield Endpoint helps businesses strengthen security for virtual machines while delegating antivirus and anti-malware agent processing to a dedicated secure virtual appliance delivered by VMware partners. The solution allows customers to take advantage of existing investments by relying on the same management interfaces used to secure physical environments.

VMware vSphere 5.1 delivers new features and enhancements across administration, compute, backup and recovery, among other areas, to help SMBs simplify and protect their IT environments.

To learn more about VMware vSphere 5.1 based solutions for SMBs, join us this afternoon at the VMworld SMB Spotlight Session at 1:00 p.m. PDT (located at the Lam Research Theater, Yerba Buena Center) or if you are not at VMworld go to: http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vmw-vmworld-smb-082712.html.

By Julia Lee, product marketing manager, Infrastructure Products, VMware

Exciting times here at VMworld 2012 as we finally, can talk publicly about some of the product developments we have been working on in this past year. With today's announcement of VMware vSphere® 5.1 solutions to help small and midsize businesses (SMBs), we unveiled VMware vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) 5.1.

For those of you not familiar with VMware vSphere Storage Appliance, it enables you to transform the local storage within your servers into a shared storage resource that runs your virtualized applications. VSA allows you to achieve business continuity and eliminates any single point of failure within your IT environment. Let's dive into some of the new features behind today's announcement:

* Deployment on existing ESXi environments
If you have a virtualized environment already, you can still install VSA 5.1 on up to three VMware vSphere hosts. This enhancement allows our existing customers to take advantage of shared storage and enable application availability features, such as HA and vMotion, for the first time.

* Run vCenter within the VSA cluster
With VSA 1.0, an instance of vCenter Server was required to run outside the VSA cluster. Now, with this enhancement, you can install a vCenter Server instance in a VM on a local datastore within one of your VSA nodes, and then migrate the vCenter Server to shared storage. This allows you to save on deploying that extra server to run vCenter Server.

* Support for additional disk drives and increase of storage capacity online
VSA 5.1 now allows you to add more hard disk drives, including JBOD expansion. For 3TB in a RAID 6 configuration (no hot spare), you can add up to 8 disks. For 2TB drives in a RAID 6 configuration, you can add up to 12 local disks (no hot spare) and up to 16 external disks (with hot spare). As you add more hard disk drives to your VSA cluster post-deployment, you can include the additional hard disk capacity provided by increasing your storage capacity online. Remember, VSA 5.1 supports RAID 5, 6, and 10.

* Centralized management of multiple VSA clusters from one vCenter Server (AKA ROBO Support)
With VSA 5.1, multiple VSA clusters can be managed by a single instance of vCenter Server residing on a different subnet. Now, every small environment can provide shared storage to enable application availability, from SMBs to enterprises with a distributed network of branch offices.

[http://blogs.vmware.com/smb/files/2012/08/8-VMware-vSphere-Storage-Appliance-ROBO-configuration.jpg]<http://blogs.vmware.com/smb/files/2012/08/8-VMware-vSphere-Storage-Appliance-ROBO-configuration.jpg>

VSA 5.1 supports centralized management of multiple VSA clusters through one instance of vCenter Server, allowing ROBO environments to take advantage of shared storage.

If you're looking to deploy in a ROBO environment, VSA 5.1 now offers three installation and upgrade methods:

* Offline install – Configure the VSA 5.1 cluster at the main datacenter, box these servers up, and ship to the remote offices where these clusters can be added back into the main datacenter's vCenter Server.

* Unattended remote install – Upgrade an existing VSA 1.0 cluster at a remote office through the main datacenter. The bits can be sent over the wire, requiring no intervention at the remote office.

* Attended remote install – Similar to the unattended remote install/upgrade process, this method uploads the OVFs from the remote office. An IT admin at the remote office plugs in a removable storage device (e.g., USB stick) which contains the OVF.

To learn more about the other new enhancements within VSA 5.1, click here<http://www.vmware.com/go/vsa>.





By Manoj Jayadevan

I am very pleased to officially announce<http://bit.ly/Rjzn5h> the new-and-improved VMware Go Pro, another step forward in our commitment to provide simple and cost-effective solutions for growing SMBs to adopt and extend virtualization, and to improve the protection, scalability and reliability of their IT infrastructure.

[http://blogs.vmware.com/smb/files/2012/08/Easy-Virtualization-Choice-B.jpg]<http://blogs.vmware.com/smb/files/2012/08/Easy-Virtualization-Choice-B.jpg>

VMware Go Pro<http://bit.ly/Rjzg9O> is a Cloud-based virtualization deployment and management solution hosted by VMware that makes it easier and faster to virtualize, and simpler to manage and optimize a growing infrastructure across virtual and physical machines and software. Cloud-based delivery ensures an "anytime anywhere" IT management solution since all that a user needs is an Internet connection and a web browser to manage and monitor his entire IT infrastructure. Now with an even more streamlined look and feel, IT admins can start managing their virtual infrastructure right away and easily migrate to other VMware tools like the versatile vSphere Client. The terminology, concepts, even icons are consistent – VMware Go Pro just makes it all simpler and easier to understand.

With VMware Go Pro, we are uniquely positioned to deliver exceptional value to our customers and partners by simplifying virtualization and IT for SMBs. The new release further helps our customers keep up with the growth of their virtualized infrastructure by enabling the deployment of VMware vCenter for centralized management.



Here are the top 3 benefits VMware Go Pro offers:

Simplified Virtualization for SMBs
The common barriers to virtualization are lack of expertise and initial upfront costs. VMware Go Pro is an affordable subscription based solution delivered over the cloud. Its step-by-step wizards guide novices and experienced virtualization administrators alike through deploying and managing virtualization. And the web-based interface allows virtual and physical infrastructure management with anytime, anywhere access. With this new release, users will now be able to deploy VMware vCenter via a web browser for centralized management of their virtualized infrastructure. Even IT generalists can get started with virtualization in 30 minutes or less.

Enhanced Uptime and Reliability
VMware Go Pro's unified IT management console has built-in monitoring capabilities with unique, one-click IT assessments that automatically identify performance, security and downtime risks and make tailored recommendations to address them. The new release of VMware Go Pro uses the addition of VMware vCenter to improve uptime and reliability even further by enabling round-the-clock monitoring of your virtual infrastructure's health. Now customers will know of any potential issues even when they are not logged-into Go Pro.

Comprehensive Infrastructure Protection
VMware Go Pro offers automated patch management across physical and virtual machines for both Microsoft and third-party applications to ensure that organizations are up-to-date with all of the latest software upgrades, thus mitigating the organization's vulnerability to the latest IT threats. An integrated Help Desk with built-in analytics also helps improve IT productivity and service, automatically prioritizing issues by level of severity. Go Pro also offers a rich asset management capability, which provides control over all software and hardware assets.



Looking forward in 2013, users will also be able to implement and test business continuity plans in minutes with cloud-based VM backup and disaster recovery.

I invite you take the VMware Go Pro for a test drive and discover for yourself the power of virtualization and the simplification of IT.

blogs.vmware.com [X] <http://blogs.vmware.com/smb/2012/08/whoaresmbs.html> |by VMware SMB on August 27, 2012
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VMworld 2012: What does SDDC mean for Storage?

While VMworld will contain many surprises*, but one thing I don't think will be a surprise is the new "phrase du jour" will be the "Software Defined Datacenter" (SDDC). The blog post<http://cto.vmware.com/interop-and-the-software-defined-datacenter/> that Steve Herrod did on the topic (and the subsequent one post Nicira acquisition<http://cto.vmware.com/vmware-and-nicira-advancing-the-software-defined-datacenter/>) has become the place for "definition" of the term. It's a formalization of stuff VMware has been saying, driving, and innovating around for some time – so isn't new, but is a new way of putting it all together.

In my own mind, the SDDC involves several key principles:

* That the policy is enforced in a software layer that abstracts all hardware into compute, networking and storage services which are consumed by all applications. This can be the vCloud Suite, it can be OpenStack – but it's something like that.
* That the control plane of infrastructure (the thing that is the interface for that policy and tells the hardware what to do) – gets decoupled from the data plane of infrastructure (the stuff that actually does the business of doing whatever the hardware is there to do). This control plane will run on commodity hardware, as pure software, be completely programmable, and is likely to be something pretty open. For Software Defined Networking (SDN) – this is OpenFlow. What will be the decoupled, software, programmable (and run on commodity hardware and likely pretty open) layer for the Software Defined Storage (SDS) world?
* That this decoupling changes what people look to at the data plane of infrastructure. This is the layer that does the business of the hardware itself. For CPU, it computes. For memory, it stores and recalls – but doesn't retain. For networking, it forwards frames and packets. For storage it persistently stores information. The change that the SDDC movement demands of the data plane creates pressure to run on commodity hardware, and changes the relative priority of features and architectures – with a distinct shift to architectures becoming more important, not less.

I've made this the center of SPO3338 (will post including the presentation) – but for the crux, read on!

1. The storage community will need to create a model where policy can be applied at a VM-level of granularity. To see what VMware and EMC is doing around that – check out this post on VM Granular Storage<http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2012/08/vmworld-2012-vm-granular-storagewhat-were-working-on.html>. EMC is investing heavily here, and I would argue leading the way.
2. The storage community needs to create an abstracted, and decoupled "Control Plane" for storage. Think of an "OpenFlow" of storage. This has been attempted in the past (think WideSky – shudder), but never quite right. I would argue that the two parts that got mangled was either that there was no place to put this (now there is – in the "Datacenter OS" layer), or that people tried to wrap in data plane abstraction (aka "storage virtualization") – which is a very, VERY hard problem – and also creates crazy vendor dynamics. EMC is investing heavily here, and I would argue leading the way. We've hinted at "Project Bourne" for a while, and I'm staying quiet for now, but suffice it to say there is more to come.
3. The attributes of value, and where they show up will evolve.
* Control/administration of things like storage, backup, security and more will move UP. They will move to the "SDDC layer", and even up to the application layer. This is about embedding things like vSphere Data Protection, or RSA DLP, or controls like SDRS, or using vFabric Data Director and just embedding DDBoost. Even further up the stack, this is about using RMAN for Oracle backup in an integrated way, or SAP LVM. If someone shows you their great admin UI for whatever – I would ask: "what are you doing so there is NO UI?"
* Fundamental infrastructure attributes will shift in priorities. In certain use cases – the "utility/swiss-army knife" model wins (think EMC VNX-ish) based on simplicity, efficiency, scale. I would call out that that "scale" these days can be enormous by many people's standards – the VNX successor will approach a million IOps and huge capacity scale. In cases where "purpose built" is warranted – the fundamental values of "scale-out" will be very critical (think EMC XtremeIO/Isilon-ish) – and as people are realizing, it's REALLY, REALLY hard to "bolt on" scale-out. It's an architectural approach that pervades all parts of an architecture. In all cases – things like deep policy integration like VM Granular Storage APIs will really matter. Also – programmability is VERY important. In every case – people not running as software on x86 architectures that leverage the commoditization of hardware – well, suffice it say that I disagree with them.

I think that people that say the SDN movement and the SDS wave to come mean that people who make infrastructure (think EMC et all) are in strategic peril miss the point. Everyone in high-tech is perpetually in strategic peril :-) The real risk is that you get yourself into a position where either for cultural reasons, or business reasons – you cannot adapt/move, and cannibalize yourself as the world changes – and cannot lead that change in some way yourself. I'm glad to say that at EMC, I know this isn't the case, and I don't think it's the case at VMware either!

Will be a great, fun VMworld!!!

*personal editorial: One thing I think people will be surprised at is the change in the vCloud Suite pricing – moving to a no-limitations model. People will come up with all sorts of philosophies about why, why not, how, good/bad, etc – I've actually been looking forward to seeing the general reaction. IMO, I always thought the changes with the vSphere 5.0 launch were good – but perception IS reality. I'm impressed that VMware listened, and responded – twice. The first was to increase the original vRAM allocations, and now to move to an unlimited model. Everyone makes mistakes. The biggest mistake is being too arrogant and not listening to your customers. [added] – double that for the fact that they made upgrades free for Enterprise Plus customers.

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VMworld 2012: VM Granular storagewhat were working on

I hinted at this last year for VMworld 2011… This concept – tentatively called "VM Granular Storage" is a real twist, and has immense potential. It won't materialize in any significant way for some time to come – so it's more about airing out the idea, sharing what VMware and EMC (and the broader storage community too) are thinking.

I was sworn to secrecy (this was an NDA-only topic), but VMware is opening up on the topic a bit more…

Duncan blogged about it here:http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2012/08/07/vmware-vstorage-apis-for-vm-and-application-granular-data-management/

And, you can watch VSP3205 from VMworld 2011 for the key concepts here:

Since VMware has outed it a little more – I've made a YouTube video EMC made in 2011 that shows these concepts in more detail (EMC made it to help when Vinay and Satyam were producing the content for VSP3205 – and you can see bits of it in that session) also public here:

To understand what this idea means, and also some of the other use cases we're showing at VMworld 2012 read on!

What is VM Granular Storage all about?

* The "Datastore" is a clumsy concept in the world of virtualization. It means that the storage hardware layer can only apply policy at that level rather than the more natural level – which is a Virtual Machine, or grouping of Virtual Machines. All the things that do "VM-level" operations today are good (examples include the VM-level visibility in EMC Unisphere or the new VAAI NFS Fast Copy supported by EMC VNX and Isilon), but fundamentally a little bit of a hack. The storage subsystem – even when it's NAS doesn't really KNOW that a given file or set of blocks is a Virtual Machine, and there is no API to communicate that policy to the storage.
* The management model of storage is… off. Don't get me wrong, we're all working to make this more integrated, easier, more automated – but man, managing multipathing and configuration of datastores at scale is kind of sucky. Ideally – the management complexity wouldn't be linked to the number of VMs and Datastores.
* The current storage policy layer (SDRS/SIOC) and policy communication vehicle (VASA) and hardware acceleration (VAAI) are a step in the right direction, but insufficient. If you think of it, these are all modelled around the datastore, and necessitate all sorts of "place and move" logic that if the storage could respond and adapt to changing policy requests at the VM level of granularity – you would be able to do it all much more efficiently.
* It would need to be able to work on all sorts of different storage models – from Block, NAS – anything transactional (Object storage models would implement VM granularity easily, but tend to be bad for transactional workloads) – and would need to be something people and partners could "step into". This is an important idea. I've said it before, and I bet I will say it again – people underestimate the impact of "persistence" into storage innovation. Since data persists on storage (as opposed to memory state, or contents of CPU registers, or network buffers which are all transient) – it means that storage hardening is tough. It also means that migrations are hard. These are all things that all the storage vendors live and die by – and it means that "cut-over disruptions", or things that completely invalidate mature stacks in a single step typically struggle. So… VM Granular Storage would need to be an idea the storage community would need to be able to step into.

The concepts VM Granular Storage introduces – IO Demultiplexers (both block and NAS), Virtual Volumes (vVols – another shorthand for the concepts of VM Granular Storage), Capacity Pools are all new ideas. Watch the videos to get the idea. The names are ones only an engineer could like :-) I personally hate the "Capacity Pool" one the most – it's actually a IO/GB/Policy pool. It turns the idea of LUNs/Filesystems on it's head – and says "hey, storage admin, carve the infrastructure into pools that can deliver a pool of IOps, a pool of capacity, and various capabilities from snaps, dedupe, encryption, whatever.

BTW – SDRS, VASA, VAAI are all ideas that are "versioning" us to this future state. SDRS will be the policy control later. VASA today describes datastores, but ultimately will communicate the capabilities of Capacity Pools. VAAI of today will turn into the vVol-level VAAI operations of tomorrow.

This topic can also be considered part of "Software Defined Storage" in the "Software Defined Datacenter" vision – it's only missing the analagous idea of decoupling the control plane from the infrastructure and running that in software on commodity via an open API model (ala OpenFlow) – and yes, we're working on that too.

Now – everyone starts thinking about this in terms of primary VM storage attributes today…but it could enable more.

Not only could this make performance/availbility policy on a per-VM basis, but also could integrate with other things too. Wondering how we might be able to do EMC VPLEX Geo on a per-VM basis? Wondering how we could auto-configure things like HA, Host Affinity by the storage layer communicating whether this VM can be stretched between places? You can see how this might start to work. We're aiming to show this at VMworld 2012 in Barcelona (hinges on getting the latest engineering drop of code over the next couple of weeks).

Another thing it could be used for would be to integrate and offload VM-level activities across integrated use cases. This is the example we showed at VMworld 2012 in San Francisco this week. Please bear in mind – this is pure technology preview – but pretty darn cool if you ask me! Thanks to Chris Horn and others in the EMC BRS team for helping pull this together.

This example shows:

1. vSphere Data Protection (jointly developed and leveraging EMC Avamar technologies) asking to take a backup. This process requires a VM-level snap as part of the process.
2. The storage used is an EMC VNXe – which is running prototype code that supports this VM Granular Storage (note how nicely this is integrated in the Unisphere build – you can see the progress made since 2011)
3. The VM lives on a "Capacity Pool" and in a "Virtual Volume" with a set of data services, including VM-accelerated snaps.
4. the engineering build of vSphere uses a VM Granular Storage API call to ask for a Virtual-Volume level snapshot, which is used, accelerates the backup

Check it out below:

You can download the demo in high-rez MP4 format<https://vspecialist.emc.com/human.aspx?Username=Bloglink&Password=vgeekb1og&arg01=832744847&arg05=0/[DownloadAs_Filename]&arg12=downloaddirect&transaction=signon&quiet=true> and WMV format<https://vspecialist.emc.com/human.aspx?Username=Bloglink&Password=vgeekb1og&arg01=832723617&arg05=0/[DownloadAs_Filename]&arg12=downloaddirect&transaction=signon&quiet=true>.

The whole thing is, in effect, invisible – but that's good. IMO, this highlights how infrastructure will innovate around the changes that the Software Defined Datacenter will drive, and the things that will be of value in the future. Remember that we can hack at it today on VNX and Isilon, and do management integration – but all storage operating at this VM-level is a big change demanding a lot of engineering.

BTW – this concept of VM-granular storage is something we're fully invested in (as you can judge for yourself – look at the demos we have done in 2011 and now) – I can say that for VMAX, VNX, Isilon, XtremeIO, BRS – heck pretty well everything, it's something where VMware and EMC are working very, VERY closely together.

What do you think? Are we off our rockers?

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Setting the record straight on VMware vSphere Data Protection - VMware vSphere Blog

There has been a fair amount of unsubstantiated speculation and noise around the new VMware virtual machine backup and recovery solution called vSphere Data Protection (VDP). Some of the most inaccurate statements I have read about were along the lines of – and I am paraphrasing – "EMC embeds its storage technology in vSphere" or "VDP is EMC Avamar Virtual Edition". I thought it might be good to take a few moments and set the record straight by providing more context as to why VMware introduced VDP, what it is and what use cases it serves.

Let's first talk about why VMware is replacing VMware Data Recovery (VDR) with VDP. VDR was a first generation solution for the rapidly growing backup market that was first bundled with vSphere 4, and experienced rapid adoption by VMware customers. However, in the constant effort to deliver more value to customers, VMware has been actively working on improving data protection and disaster recovery with enhanced backup and replication solutions. This led VMware to introduce a new, more robust product in the form of VDP. To maximize customer value, VMware decided to collaborate with the EMC Avamar team who has world-class industry leading expertise in backup and recovery technology to build the underlying foundation for VDP.

Just like VDR, VDP is ideally suited to protect small environments with enterprise-class backup and de-duplication technology. VDP scales to up to 2TB of de-duplicated storage or 100 VMs and leverages a variable-length de-duplication algorithm to deliver de-duplication rates of as much as 99%. VDP is easy to use and is managed directly from the vSphere Web Client, allowing administrators to quickly setup their backup policies and manage backups from a single pane of glass along with their entire virtual infrastructure.

Now on to the hot question at hand: Is VDP a "re-packaged" version of Avamar Virtual Edition (AVE)? The answer is no. VDP is an entirely new VMware product co-developed by VMware and EMC. It was designed specifically to be integrated with vSphere and packaged with vSphere 5.1 (Essentials Plus and above). VDP does leverage Avamar technology "under the hood" to provide a robust and mature solution, but it is an entirely different product from AVE. VDP is only sold as a VMware product, available in the vSphere platform, and is not sold by EMC.

It is important to highlight that VMware continues to foster innovation in the backup space for the virtual environments market, supporting a broad partner ecosystem. VMware is fully committed to continuing investment in the vSphere Storage APIs for Data Protection (VADP) to enable seamless integration of third-party backup and recovery with VMware vSphere.

So there you have it. VDP replaces functionality of VDR with new robust features and is geared toward protecting small environments. It may not have some of the elements found in other backup and recovery solutions in the enterprise market today, but keep in mind it is bundled with most editions of vSphere 5.1 – i.e. you did not have to pay extra for it. Please give VDP a try and let us know what you think.

@jhuntervmware

blogs.vmware.com [X] <http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/08/setting-the-record-straight-on-vmware-vsphere-data-protection.html> |by Jeff Hunter on August 27, 2012
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vSphere 5.1 New Storage Features - VMware vSphere Blog

vSphere 5.1 is upon us. The following is a list of the major storage enhancements introduced with the vSphere 5.1 release.
VMFS File Sharing Limits

In previous versions of vSphere, the maximum number of hosts which could share a read-only file on a VMFS volume was 8. The primary use case for multiple hosts sharing read-only files is of course linked clones, where linked clones located on separate hosts all shared the same base disk image. In vSphere 5.1, with the introduction of a new locking mechanism, the number of hosts which can share a read-only file on a VMFS volume has been increased to 32. This makes VMFS as scalable as NFS for VDI deployments & vCloud Director deployments which use linked clones.

Space Efficient Sparse Virtual Disks

A new Space Efficient Sparse Virtual Disk aims to address certain limitations with Virtual Disks. The first of these is the ability to reclaim stale or stranded data in the Guest OS filesystem/database. SE Sparse Disks introduces an automated mechanism for reclaiming stranded space. The other feature is a dynamic block allocation unit size. SE Sparse disks have a new configurable block allocation size which can be tuned to the recommendations of the storage arrays vendor, or indeed the applications running inside of the Guest OS. VMware View is the only product that will use the new SE Sparse Disk in vSphere 5.1.

vSphere Storage APIs – Array Integration

vSphere 5.0 introduced the offloading of snapshots to the storage array for VMware View via the VAAI NAS primitive 'Fast File Clone'. vSphere 5.1 will allow VAAI NAS based snapshots to be used for vCloud Director in addition to being used for VMware View, enabling the use of hardware/native snapshots for linked clones.

5 Node MSCS Cluster

Historically, VMware only ever supported 2 Node MSCS Clusters. With vSphere 5.1, we are extending this to 5 nodes.

All Paths Down Enhancements

In vSphere 5.1, the objective is to handle the next set of APD use cases involving more complex transient APD conditions. This involves timing out I/O on devices that enter into an APD state. When the timer expires, any I/O sent to the device will be immediately 'fast failed' meaning that we do not tie up hostd waiting for I/O. Another enhancement is introducing PDL for some of those iSCSI arrays which present one LUN per target. This was problematic in the past since an APD removed the target as well as the LUN. We are now addressing this scenario.

Storage Protocol Enhancements

FCoE: The Boot from Software FCoE feature is very similar to Boot from Software iSCSI feature which VMware introduced in ESXi 4.1. It allows an ESXi 5.1 host to boot from an FCoE LUN using a NIC with special FCoE offload capabilities and VMware's software FCoE driver.

iSCSI: We are adding jumbo frame support for all iSCSI adapters in vSphere 5.1, complete with UI support.

Fibre Channel: VMware introduced support for 16Gb FC HBA with vSphere 5.0. However the 16Gb HBA had to be set to work at 8GB. vSphere 5.1 introduces support for 16GB FC HBAs running at 16Gb.

Advanced IO Device Management (IODM) & SSD Monitoring

IODM introduces new esxcli commands to help administrators troubleshoot issues with I/O devices and fabric. This covers Fibre Channel, FCoE, iSCSI, SAS Protocol Statistics and SMART attributes. For SSD monitoring, a new smartd module in ESXi 5.1 will be used to provide Wear Leveling and other SMART details for SAS and SATA SSD. Disk vendors also have the ability to install their own SSD plugins to display vendor specific SSD info.

Storage I/O Control Enhancements

The latency thresholds for the SIOC can now be automatically set. The benefit is that SIOC now figures out the best latency threshold for a datastore as opposed to using a default/user selection for latency threshold. SIOC is now also turned on in 'stats only mode' automatically. It doesn't enforce throttling but does gather more granular statistics about the datastore. Storage DRS can leverage this as it will now have statistics in advance of a datastore being added to a datastore cluster.

Storage DRS Enhancements

vCloud Director will use Storage DRS for the initial placement of linked clones during Fast Provisioning & for managing space utilization and I/O load balancing. Storage DRS also introduces a new datastore correlation detector which means that if a source and destination datastores are backed by the same physical spindles, Storage DRS won't consider it for migration. Storage DRS also has a new metric (VMobservedLatency) for I/O latency which will be used for more granular I/O load balancing.

Storage vMotion Enhancements

In vSphere 5.1 Storage vMotion performs up to 4 parallel disk migrations per Storage vMotion operation.

That completes the list of storage enhancements in vSphere 5.1. Obviously this is only a brief overview of each of the new features. I will be elaborating on all of these new features over the coming weeks and months.

Get notification of these blogs postings and more VMware Storage information by following me on Twitter: [Twitter] <http://twitter.com/#%21/VMwareStorage> @VMwareStorage<http://twitter.com/#%21/vmwarestorage>

blogs.vmware.com [X] <http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/08/vsphere-5-1-new-storage-features-2.html> |by Cormac Hogan on August 28, 2012
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VMworld 2012: and a little more on Project X

"Project X" (XtremeIO) is FACE-MELTING + MIND BLOWING. I know that I use funny turns of phrase ("chadisms") – but wow, check this out, and then tell me if you think I'm being hyperbolic.

* Insane performance and latency. Think 250K IOps per X-Brick, delivering a consistent 500 microsecond (that's 0.5 ms) latency.
* Insane in-line data deduplication. Think that every single IO gets deduped on ingest. For EMC Data Domain customers – this is how Data Domain behaves. It's not a post-process (put data in, and dedupe it on some scheduled basis), but happens in real time. In this case, however, it happens while maintaining that crazy 500 microsecond response time. This means that a) you don't actually need to write it (so effective IOps and Bandwidth can be insane), and for use cases with high degrees of commonality, like general purpose VMware, vCloud Director, and VDI use cases. In VDI example – it means that regardless of persistent/non-persistent deployment models – you can be simple, and space efficient.
* Insane snapshots and thin behavior. In fact, like the dedupe – this is just "how it works".
* X-Bricks which are (like all EMC hardware) leveraging commodity x86 hardware – so the magic is software.
* Insanely… all that works in a scale-out fashion.

Chuck talks here<http://chucksblog.emc.com/chucks_blog/2012/08/when-flash-changed-storage-xtremio-preview.html> about some of the hardware in the platform.

Want to know more? See some killer demos? Read on!

Here are the demonstrations we're showing at VMworld. The config is the one below (this one details the vCD use case) – the servers were the only ones we we could get on short notice, and unfortunately they were not even close to being able to load the 4 X-bricks :-)

[image]<http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/.a/6a00e552e53bd288330176177bdab4970c-pi>

1. Demo: Creating a OLTP workload on 4 X-Bricks – and getting to ~1M IOps, with sub-millisecond response times.
2. Demo: Creating a 1000 VM "cloud" using vCloud Director (with huge acceleration through flash, inline dedupe, and also a great VAAI implementation), and then generating a nutso load.
3. Demo: Creating 500 persistent and 500 non-persistent 500GB VMware View instances – and consuming only a few hundred GB because of inline dedupe.

Check out the demos (product of a joint XtremeIO and EMCer effort – thanks guys!) below:

Also – VMware will be sharing their own testing results (thank to Itzik and Garrett – vSpecialists who have been working with VMware on this project) for their and EMC's own internal VMware View use. This will be discussed in EUC-EUC1190: VMware View 5.1 Reference Architecture, Monday Aug 27 11:00-12:00 PM and Thursday, Aug 30 12:30-1:30 PM – and the session is FILLED with the testing results.

So – was I right? FACE-MELTING? MIND-BLOWING?

So… before you get too excited (or have I done that already) :-)

* Yes, Xtreme IO is that cool, and that is all real – but not GA yet. I've had analysts and customers respond "it seems very mature". It is, and does everything we push at it. But, it's important to know that "mature" is relative to their development cycle. EMC acquired XtremeIO relatively early compared with the acquisitions we do. Why? Well – customer feedback was a huge part. Another huge part is the engineering team is very strong. Another part is that their technology – particularly that they STARTED with a presumption of scale-out was really unique. We're using time to carefully identifying customers that are a fit, and making sure that we spend time to get the hardware right (merging with EMC's hardware team – go back and watch Chad's World Episode 12 – the IB SLIC is for the next gen Isilon and XtremeIO hardware), hardening and testing the availability (both HA and NDU) to get it up to "EMC Logo" expectations our customers will have. Those availability things take time – because (remember I've said this before) storage is persistent – so if you have a bad day, it's a really bad day. All that said – if you're an all-flash array startup – how do you stack up to those demos and capabilities? … Oh and I really, really hope for your sake you've started your engineering presuming that scale-out needs to be built-in from day one… right?
* When it is GA - is it right for you? That will vary customer to customer. While XtremeIO is as sexy as Isilon (both examples of how you architect when you can start from fundamentally different assumptions) – the mass market continues to be "swiss army knife" storage aka VNX. Don't get me wrong – VNX is growing, Isilon is growing like it's on fire, and we expect XtremeIO to be… very popular :-)

So… Hybrid array configurations (Flash + magnetic media with something like EMC FAST) coupled with a sprinkling of server-side flash will remain the dominant storage model for a while (for reasons I discuss in this post here).

Still – it shows the power in flash-land of starting with a blank piece of paper. Cool, eh? What do you think? Do you have a fit for this sort of technology?

virtualgeek.typepad.com [X] <http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2012/08/vmworld-2012-and-a-little-more-on-project-x.html>
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VMworld 2012: Flash, Flash, everywhere!

Flash is changing the world.

* It's changing the world of consumer devices – from my Macbook Pro Retina (which I love), iPhones, iPads and more.
* It's redefining the world of server-side caching using PCIe-based server caches, led by Fusion-IO, EMC VFcache and others.
* It's creating new categories of "networked server-side caches", led by EMC Project Thunder.
* It has made a new storage storage requirement mandatory – the "Hybrid Array" – with some mechanism to leverage some Flash as cache, as a tier, and be able to use that as transparently and easily as possible.
* It has created one of the hottest areas in storage startup land – the "All Flash Array" (AFA) – with folks like Nimble, Pure, Tintri, Violin, etc. all playing. It is a fact that if you assume that EVERYTHING will write eventually to flash media, you can create whole new categories of capability. EMC selected what we think is the "pick of the litter" in XtremeIO – and are proudly showing it at VMworld. We listened to feedback from customers, and did a lot of engineering diligence in making our selection. We also think that scale-out will become a critical requirement in this space, and have learnt, as others have, that "bolting on" scale-out is really, REALLY hard.

Time will tell what happens in the AFA category, but I fully suspect that just like EMC's entry into the server-side cache space with VFCache triggered actions at EMC's competitors, I suspect that XtremeIO will trigger a second wave of acquisitions of the remaining players.

For detail, updates on what is the latest on VFcache, and secretive stuff on "Project X" – read on!

I'm sure that like always, at VMworld there will be ton of noise from people in one part of this pantheon or another that their part/implementation is the only one that matters! It will be said with vigor, with passion, and heck, in some cases even with grains of truth and moderate conviction :-) It is possible that over time, these things will shift – but for the foreseeable future – at least EMC's view, and my personal view – is that Flash will appear all over the place in the datacenter and beyond.

[image]<http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/.a/6a00e552e53bd288330176177bd81d970c-pi>

I think the EMC strategy of trying to innovate and provide value in each of the distinct use cases is right – they are so distinct, they are almost orthogonal.

[image]<http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/.a/6a00e552e53bd28833017c3184bbf4970b-pi>

We're seeing huge acceleration of customer interest and acquistion of VFCache – and in the category of PCIe-based flash in general. At VMworld we're showing the latest coolness that is in VFcache (v1.5 – which is now GA) – and it's very impressive:

* Orchestrated vMotion – in fact, I believe this is an industry first in a way that VMware supports, and works with a ton of guest OSes.
* Cache Deduplication
* Multi-card support
* Larger configurations (700GB card)
* UCS blade support
* Support for active/passive clusters like SQL Server 2012 using WSFC

Check out the new code in action in the demo below:

You can download this demo in high-rez here in MP4 format<https://vspecialist.emc.com/human.aspx?Username=Bloglink&Password=vgeekb1og&arg01=832763115&arg05=0/[DownloadAs_Filename]&arg12=downloaddirect&transaction=signon&quiet=true> and WMV format<https://vspecialist.emc.com/human.aspx?Username=Bloglink&Password=vgeekb1og&arg01=832816358&arg05=0/[DownloadAs_Filename]&arg12=downloaddirect&transaction=signon&quiet=true>.

…That said – the one where there is the most overlap are the use cases for the All-Flash Array (AFA) and the Hybrid Array . If you look at the demonstrations I covered in SPO3338 and you can see in this Project X blog post here – it is REALLY compelling.

So – let's put it on the table? Why not just go all Isilon/Xtreme IO if you're EMC? Or put another way - why do I think that the AFA market will be still relatively small in 2013?

Well – it's pretty straightforward:

* It's impossible. Here's some math: in 2011, ~ 1.8 Zettabytes of information was created. In 2011, the total flash fab capacity globally was 21 Exabytes (~100 times less). Oh, and 19 Exabytes got sucked up by consumer devices like iPhones, iPads, and Samsung Galaxy phones :-) That means that the GLOBAL flash manufacturing capacity could cover, oh… about 0.01% of the total information storage need that was created (not to mention info that was created in years past). Now, the AFA folks like XtremeIO can do some amazing things to optimize around their unique assumptions – like inline deduplication – but even if you assumed a nuts dedupe ratio like 100:1 (which is nuts for general purpose data – where 5-20:1 is more normal), you're still talking about 1% of the total data that needs storage – that was created in year. Therefore – hybrid arrays will continue to dominate by share/market etc, even while AFA become more an more prevalent. Even over time – there will be a need for huge TB dumps, often in backup and NAS land.
* AFA will continue to demand a price premium. The largest, fastest growing market is what we call the "S75" (sub $75K) market segment. In this segment, people have very generalized requirements. They need a swiss-army knife, because that's all they will have. If people are wondering why the VNX is doing well – its' because it is a killer "swiss army knife". In that market segment, simple, efficient, general purpose/"do it all", and frankly a set of entry price configurations leads to things that "look and feel" like EMC VNX or NetApp FAS 7-mode (this isn't the post to battle out pros and cons) platforms to be the thing of choice. Why couldn't AFA arrays get into this segment? Well, for some use cases, they can be economically viable right now – specifically those where all the data is hot (some weird database use cases) and PCIe read caches and array tiering don't cut it, or latencies need to be really low (finance vertical), or deduplication is overwhelming (VDI). I still expect that over years (2015?) flash manufacturing capacity, chip density, or alternate memory technologies will come into play – and at that point AFA will start to eat materially into the Hybrid array use cases. Why couldn't it happen faster? Well, that's easy: increased scale manufacturing isn't easy or cheap. The new technologies (phase-change, etc) aren't ready yet, and the mature technologies (flash) have a steep price tag. The price tag of a 3.75 Exabyte Flash Fab is oh, about $10 Billion. That means if someone decided they wanted to manufacture the world need for flash – it would cost $5 Trillion. Will it happen eventually? You bet. Tomorrow? Nope.
* Storage stacks "burn in" time to mature. I'll hit on the specifics for XtremeIO in a separate post here<http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2012/08/vmworld-2012-and-a-little-more-on-project-x.html>.

That said – the emergence of Flash is changing everything, and is pervasive in the datacenter… just like x86, just like virtualization, just like low-cost memory, just like merchant silicon in networking, just like mass automation, just like new database and data management models…

Interesting times we live in, eh?! I'm curious – what do YOU think about all this? How are YOU using Flash and what are you seeing? What are you hearing from the new players in the market?

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VMworld 2012: vCenter Operations, EMC Storage Analytics, and more

At EMC World – we previewed the deep vCenter Operations integration with a VNX Connector that would deliver unparalleled storage visilibility and analytics into health and performance. That is now GA and included with vCenter Operations!

Furthermore – VMware and EMC want to bring this capability to more people. The EMC Storage Analytics Suite is based on a customized version of the latest vCenter Operation with that same VNX Connector. This is available now in an early customer access program, with a GA target in Q4.

I don't know how to say this politically, so I'll just come out and say it: it's priced to have nearly a 100% attach rate when a customer chooses VNX. And, if customers conclude they want everything – the full version of vCenter Operations Enterprise edition is a simple step up.

To understand more (and see in action) what you get from all this vCenter Operations + EMC goodness… Read on!

The abilities you get in this are awesome – and the VNX connector is more than just a bunch of basic integration. The VNX connector has a whole set of internal logic that helps in the analytics and relationships of components. You can dive deep (seeing individual VNX component stats) – and each level has nice unique icons and other visual representation – which is nice. Check out the demo below:

You can download the high-rez version of this demo here in MP4 format<https://vspecialist.emc.com/human.aspx?Username=Bloglink&Password=vgeekb1og&arg01=%20832546311&arg05=0/[DownloadAs_Filename]&arg12=downloaddirect&transaction=signon&quiet=true> and WMV format<https://vspecialist.emc.com/human.aspx?Username=Bloglink&Password=vgeekb1og&arg01=%20832545394&arg05=0/[DownloadAs_Filename]&arg12=downloaddirect&transaction=signon&quiet=true>.

Beyond the VNX Connector (which is official, supported, tested, QA'ed, etc), the incredible innovation machine that is the duo of vSpecialists Clint Kitson and Matt Cowger have whipped up other vCOPS integration. These are (for now), in the category of "fast and dirty" – and therefore not supported, but you can see the pattern. These vCOPs integrations include:

* with EMC Watch4Net – that broadens the reporting capabilities of vCOPS, along with the number of supported devices, including Vblocks.
* Support for other EMC Platforms (Isilon, VMAX, Data Domain, Avamar, etc).
* … Even a dashboard and connectors for the relatively cool use case of a stretched vSphere Cluster (vMSC) using EMC VPLEX.

That last one I showed in the session on stretched clusters that Vaughn Stewart and I co-presented (BCO2982). I particularly dig that this leverages the VNX connector when you get down to the infrastructure behind the VPLEX! Check it out below:

You can download the high-rez version of this demo here in MP4 format<https://vspecialist.emc.com/human.aspx?Username=Bloglink&Password=vgeekb1og&arg01=%20832348708&arg05=0/[DownloadAs_Filename]&arg12=downloaddirect&transaction=signon&quiet=true> and WMV format<https://vspecialist.emc.com/human.aspx?Username=Bloglink&Password=vgeekb1og&arg01=%20832366388&arg05=0/[DownloadAs_Filename]&arg12=downloaddirect&transaction=signon&quiet=true>.

What do you think – cool, or what?

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SRM 5.1 and vSphere Replication as a Standalone Feature - VMware vSphere Blog

Today at VMworld we announced a bunch of very exciting technologies, for this article I'll be talking first about Site Recovery Manager 5.1, and then about vSphere Replication as a standalone feature of the vSphere platform.

Protection of your systems is a critical aspect of running a virtual infrastructure, and with these announcements (and that of vSphere Data Protection) we've really rounded out the business continuity functions of vSphere.

Site Recovery Manager 5.1

This is a fairly small release with some great features that continue to deliver on the changes we introduced with 5.0. At a high level, the changes are:

* Improved VSS integration for quiescent applications with vSphere Replication
* Improved storage handling for quicker and more consistent responsiveness and behaviour
* Forced recovery with vSphere Replication
* Reprotect and fallback with vSphere Replication
* A move to a 64 bit process
* Support for Essentials Plus environments.

Now a little more detail about a few of these items.

VSS

VMware Tools has the ability to issue commands to the operating system such as to set up VSS snapshots. With 5.1 we have the ability to do a little more than we have in the past, and ask the OS to flush application writers as well as make the OS itself quiescent. This means for things like databases, messaging platforms, and other applications that have VSS writers, we can ensure a higher level of application recoverability. When using vSphere Replication we can flush all the writers for the apps and the OS ensuring data consistency for the image used for recovery.

It's completely transparent to the OS, and a simple drop down that is chosen when setting up replication for a Windows VM.

Forced Recovery

In SRM 5.0.1 we introduced the forced failover ability: If your primary site is down or responding inconsistently sometimes we might have timeouts and errors waiting for results. This option for failover ensures that only recovery-side operations take place, and we don't timeout waiting for commands to return from the protected site. This was, at the time, only possible to use with array replication. With 5.1 it is now supported for vSphere Replication as well.

Reprotect and Failback

We can now, after failing over, simply click the "reprotect" button and the environment that has moved to the secondary site will be fully protected back to the original site, irrespective of type of replication you're using. Reprotect for vSphere Replication is fantastic – it'll use the existing policies of replication, protection groups, do a full sync back to the primary, and you are then ready to recover or migrate back to the primary location!

Essentials Plus support

One of the most numerous requests we've received over the years is to make SRM more accessible to the small and midsize business market. This step to make SRM compatible with Essentials Plus makes disaster recovery more accessible than ever for the SMB customers who have as much need for business continuity as every other customer!

Now on to vSphere Replication

vSphere Replication was introduced with SRM 5.0 as a means of protecting VM data using our in-hypervisor software based replication. It was part of SRM 5.0, and continues to be, carrying forward, but now we are offering the ability to use this technology in a new fashion.

Today's announcement about vSphere Replication is a big one: We have decoupled it from SRM and released it as an available feature of every vSphere license from Essentials Plus through Enterprise Plus.

Every customer can now protect their environment, using vSphere Replication as a fundamental feature of the protection of your environment, just like HA.

VR does not include all the orchestration, testing, reporting and enterprise-class DR functions of SRM, but allows for individual VM protection and recovery within or across clusters. For many customers this type of protection is critical and has been difficult to attain short of buying into a full multisite DR solution with SRM. Now most of our customers can take advantage of virtual machine protection and recovery with vSphere Replication.

Check out an introduction to vSphere Replication at http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/Introduction-to-vSphere-Replication.pdf

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