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Posts Tagged ‘vSphere’

VMware engineer Michael White’s post 64 bit is almost here – are you ready? on the Uptime (VMware and Business Continuity) Blog foretells of the future 64 bit requirement of both vCenter and SRM (Site Recovery Manager). White writes:

“I wanted to remind everyone, of what I have already seen floating around the internet, but still important enough to remind.  Our next release of SRM is going to require a 64 bit OS.  This is the same as our next release of VC as it too will require a 64 bit host OS.  This change is required to support the increased capabilities of our products.  As we scale our products to match our customers needs, generally 1 – 2 years in advance of where they will need all the capabilities of a given product we have had to use a 64 bit OS.  This will show itself in increased numbers in things like more simultaneous vSphere client connections.”

To me these new operating system (OS) requirements mean we will see even more instances of vCenter as a VM (virtual machine). It only seems logical that a least path of resistance is to virtualize the management server in order to upgrade, especially considering all have already invested in 64 bit hardware for their hypervisors if they decided to upgrade to vSphere 4 in the first place. To go a step further, I’m willing to argue that it will be more common for an IT Department to justify the cost of additional ESX hosts, even if only dedicated for management, then it will to deploy new servers for physical instances of vCenter.

The looming transition to a console-less ESXi eventually means more management virtual appliances in the future too. Solutions which will continue to need a ESX console or similar will have to substitute their own appliance to operate with ESXi. This means even more justification for additional ESX/ESXi hosts and thus greases the decision to virtualize vCenter as well. I expect to see management clusters of ESX hosts become more common in the future than even the use of management networks today.

ESX hosts have bigger and badder hardware now than ever before allowing for higher consolidation ratios and larger applications to easily run in virtual machines, but it will be interesting to see if the vCenter as a VM best practices change over time. I personally feel that continuing to separate the database from the virtualized vCenter will continue to be a smart choice. Running a separate, and even virtualized, SQL instance ensures not only better performance of vCenter as a VM but enhances DR scenarios. In fact, those that already have the vCenter database on a remote instance will likely have a safer upgrade to the 64 bit vCenter.

The new 64 bit requirements will no doubt make for an interesting migration scenario, and I’m sure we will see some positive and negative opinions. Let me know your thoughts on a 64 bit vCenter as a VM in the future!

VMware announced the U2 (update 2) release of ESX 4.0, and unfortunately early adopters quickly discovered VMware View virtual desktop connections using the PCoIP protocol were failing. This post provides some quick info on both the new release and the new VDI problem it creates.

UPdate 2 Info

VMware ESX 4 Update 2 is available for download here. The following is a cut and paste of What’s New from the Release Notes:

• Enablement of Fault Tolerance Functionality for Intel Xeon 56xx Series processors— vSphere 4.0 Update 1 supports the Intel Xeon 56xx Series processors without Fault Tolerance. vSphere 4.0 Update 2 enables Fault Tolerance functionality for the Intel Xeon 56xx Series processors.
• Enablement of Fault Tolerance Functionality for Intel i3/i5 Clarkdale Series and Intel Xeon 34xx Clarkdale Series processors— vSphere 4.0 Update 1 supports the Intel i3/i5 Clarkdale Series and Intel Xeon 34xx Clarkdale Series processors without Fault Tolerance. vSphere 4.0 Update 2 enables Fault Tolerance functionality for the Intel i3/i5 Clarkdale Series and Intel Xeon 34xx Clarkdale Series processors.
• Enablement of IOMMU Functionality for AMD Opteron 61xx and 41xx Series processors— vSphere 4.0 Update 1 supports the AMD Opteron 61xx and 41xx Series processors without input/output memory management unit (IOMMU). vSphere 4.0 Update 2 enables IOMMU functionality for the AMD Opteron 61xx and 41xx Series processors.
• Enhancement of the esxtop/resxtop utility— vSphere 4.0 Update 2 includes an enhancement of the performance monitoring utilities, esxtop and resxtop. The esxtop/resxtop utilities now provide visibility into the performance of NFS datastores in that they display the following statistics for NFS datastores: Reads/s, writes/s, MBreads/s, MBwrtn/s, cmds/s, GAVG/s(guest latency).
• Additional Guest Operating System Support— ESX/ESXi 4.0 Update 2 adds support for Ubuntu 10.04. For a complete list of supported guest operating systems with this release, see the VMware Compatibility Guide.
• Resolved Issues – In addition, this release delivers a number of bug fixes that have been documented in the Resolved Issues section.

PCoIP Connections Issue

The following cut and paste is from the VMware KB Article Upgrading VMware Tools in a virtual desktop causes PCoIP connections to fail: Read the rest of this entry »

Tom Howarth, VMware Communities Moderator and blogger at PlanetVM.net, posted this week how he was informed by a developer of a virtualization backup vendor about a scenario involving reverting to an ESX snapshot that results in corrupted incremental backups when using vSphere’s Change Block Tracking (CBT). Howarth’s post Major issue with Change Block Tracking recounts his conversation and exploration of the problem with the developer. In summary, Howarth reported “there is a major issue with the way VMware handles the indexing of the ChangeID.”

Almost a week later and after a flurry of comments from most of the vendors leveraging CBT for virtual machine backups, VMware has published a KB article on the subject.

VMware KB: Reverting to a pre-existing snapshot under specific conditions can cause incremental backups based on CBT (Changed Block Tracking) to become inconsistent

The KB Article describes the exact scenario that causes the problem:

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With the recent news that VMware will be phasing out VMware Consolidated Backup and make the vStorage API for Data Recovery (VADR) the business continuity and full virtual machine backup enabler of the future, I want to better understand where VMware Data Recovery (vDR) fits in a virtual infrastructure today. This post outlines my notes as I explored both features and limitations of vDR in order to help explain how, where and when the product can be leveraged.

vSphere Editions needed for vDR

A great place to start is by understanding what licensed versions of vSphere 4 vDR can be used with. Using VMware’s vSphere edition comparison table you can clearly see that vDR is only available for use with the Essentials Plus, Advanced, Enterprise, and Enterprise Plus versions.

Although vDR is available in the Enterprise and Enterprise Plus editions, the limitations described in the next section present some design challenges for deploying vDR in larger environments.

Disclaimer: I am a systems engineer for Veeam Software.

Special Considerations For Using vDR

The following list of vDR limitations was taken from the VMware Data Recovery 1.1 Administration Guide:

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VMware made upgrading to vSphere 4 easy enough, but there are still a few things that can go wrong. One example is that admins must consider the patch and version levels of VirtualCenter and ESX  to begin. After the vCenter upgrade specific  compatibilities between vCenter 4 and ESX 3.x must be understood if a mixed mode environment will exist during the span of the upgrade.

vCenter 4 Pre-Upgrade Check

Although the Agent Pre-Upgrade Check Utility was introduced last Fall when VMware released vCenter 4 Update 1, I had not come across a situation where using the tool identified problems with ESX upgrades. Judging by several other blog posts that demonstrated the utility on the web already, most all of these bloggers showed “pass” scenarios as well. For me that was the same result until this week. In fact, the vCenter Pre-Upgrade Check proved it’s worth to me in a huge way.

For those not familiar how to use the Pre-Upgrade Utility, just start the autorun.exe in the vCenter 4 U1 .zip file or from the install DVD. At the bottom of the vCenter Installer menu is the option to start the pre-upgrade check. See the image to the right of this post.

Once the tool starts point it at the VirtualCenter 2.5 server. After less than 5 minutes

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VMware employee Hany Michael has started an incredibly useful series of design posts and diagrams titled VMware vSphere On Blade Servers. His first post VMware vSphere on IBM BladeCenter H delivers a multi layer .PDF that provides a template design of 4 common vSphere deployments with HS22 and the HS22V Blades. 

I’m just highlighting the iSCSI design in this post, but be sure to get a copy of Hany’s full PDF for diagrams of FC and 10GE designs as well.

Here’s an image of the BladeCenter H iSCSI design taken from the Configuration 2 layer. Click the image for a larger view.

Some things to point out why I think this diagram is so useful:

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A recent announcement from Likewise Software hints that future versions of VMware vSphere may make it easier for companies to manage ESX hosts using Active Directory (AD) credentials. vCenter, which runs on a Windows Server operating system, is commonly added to an AD domain already, but special configurations are necessary to authenticate ESX host access with domain credentials today. Here’s a clip from the announcement:

“The integration will enable VMware vSphere users to manage privileged user access with Microsoft Active Directory, providing large enterprises with a scalable means to improve authentication and access control in virtualized environments to help meet IT security audit requirements. Likewise is a member of the VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program.”

I recently ran across this announcement via virtualization.info’s article VMware to embed Likewise authentication in next vSphere, but originally read about it in the vreference.com post ESX 4.1 to include likewise AD authentication?

Likewise Open is an “open source application that joins Linux, Unix, and Mac machines to Microsoft Active Directory and securely authenticates users with their domain credentials.” The Open edition is free to download and use. Likewise also offers

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