It is 9am Pacific Time on Tuesday, July 12th 2011 and I sure hope you’re tuned into the vmware Mega Launch so greatly titled “Raising the Bar, Part V”. If you’re not watching the live broadcast, stop right here and tune into it by clicking this link, then come back and read this post.

Spoiler alert… reading beyond this point talks about amazing updates and new features from vmware!

This by far has to be the most exciting launch in the history of vmware, not only are we getting an update to the vSphere product suite that has hundreds if not thousands of enhancements and new features, we’re also getting updates to other great products like vCloud Director, vShield and SRM.

In fact, there are so many changes and so much new great things to talk about I can’t do it all in one post. So I’ve decided that I will need to break these up into multiple posts, each with deep detail. I’ll release this posts as quickly as I can write them, but until I have them completed I want to provide you with some of the great core details from this mega launch.

So first off get ready for another new term from vmware, Cloud Infrastructure and Management. To sum it up, CIM basically includes vSphere (ESXi), vCenter, vShield and vCloud Director as a single package/methodology called CIM. These are all of the building blocks necessary to build a robust, elastic and efficient hybrid cloud. I have a feeling we’re going to hear a lot about how vSphere 5 along with the other above mention products are the industry best pieces for running a Cloud Infrastructure.

On a side tangent, there is so much discussion on the cloud you wouldn’t believe it. On an almost daily basis I’m meeting with customers to discuss their “Cloud Strategy”. Customers want Hybrid Cloud computing and with these latest updates that I’m going to discuss I think we’re finally at a place where we truly can have application and data mobility, moving our workloads fluidly across our own data-centers in an automated load balanced fashion, from compute to now storage, as well as being pushed out to external hosting (cloud) providers for extreme elasticity as well as fault tolerant (BC/DR) infrastructure.

Ok, so lets get started on all of these updates!

vSphere 5 (including ESXi 5.0)
First off, everyone should already know but if you do not, there is no longer Classic ESX with the traditional Service Console. vmware stated that version 4.1 would be their last release of the Classic ESX install and now with version 5.0 there is only ESXi.

Performance - There have been a number of enhancements to the core vmware enterprise hypervisor, in this latest release we’ll see huge performance improvements to the vmkernel but as well as in Virtual Machine density. ESXi hosts can support up to 512 virtual machines on 160 logical CPUs with up to 2TB of RAM, while Virtual Machines can now scale to 32 vCPUs with 1000GB of Memory and have been tested to push 1,000,000 IOPs. What this basically means is there shouldn’t be any performance related reason why you cannot virtualize any workload. The most demanding workloads are being virtualized such as Oracle RAC, Microsoft SQL, SAP and Exchange 2010.

Image Builder - this is a new utility built upon PowerCLI that allows you to create custom ESXi builds, it allows you to inject ESXi VIBs, Driver VIBs and OEM VIBs to create an installable or PXE boot-able (I’ll explain why shortly) ESXi image. If you’re unaware of what a VIB is, it stands for vmware Infrastructure Bundle and you can think of it almost as a RPM bundle.

Auto Deploy - Think UCS Service Profile but at the O/S level. There isn’t any hardware abstraction for moving an existing ESXi image between different hardware, but with Auto Deploy you can quickly and easily create stateless ESXi servers with no disk dependency. To sum it up, you PXE boot your server, the ESXi image is loaded into host memory from the Auto Deploy server, its configuration is applied using an answer file as well as host profile and that host is then connected/placed into vCenter. Hose something? A simple reboot will give you a fresh ESXi image in a matter of minutes. Need to expand your cluster? Bring up another host and add it to the cluster within minutes.

vCenter Virtual Appliance (VCVA) - Whoo Hoo! Looks like that Tech Preview of vCenter Server on Linux finally hit GA! vmware has released with vSphere 5 a virtual appliance of vCenter Server that is based on Linux! This also includes a feature rich browser based vSphere Client completely built on Adobe Flex, this is not a replacement for the traditional installed vSphere Client but it is a nice move forward in vSphere management. Ahhh, do you remember the MUI? :)

High Availability (HA) Completely Rewritten - Way too much to discuss here, but a complete rewrite to the core HA functionality has happened. HA can now leverages multiple communication paths between agents (referred to as FDM or Fault Domain Manager) including network and storage (datastore). HA agents no longer use a Primary/Secondary methodology, during cluster creation a single Master is chosen and each remaining host is a Slave.

VMFS5 - Oh my! 64TB datastores anyone with a single easy to use 1M block size? You got it! Along with VAAI 2.0 which includes two new block primitives, Thin Provision Stun (finally!) and Space Reclaim. NFS also doesn’t need to feel left out because we now have Full Clone, Extended Stats and Space Reservation for NFS datastores. We also have a new API called VASA, vStorage APIs for Storage Awareness which will provide a number of enhancements such as profile-driven storage (think EMC FAST-VP being integrated with vSphere). Quickly back to VAAI 2.0, Thin Provision Stun will protect your virtual machines if your datastore runs out of space and Space Reclaim will use SCSI UNMAP instead of WRITE ZERO to remove space, this will allow the array to release those blocks of data back to the free pool.

Storage DRS (SDRS) - DRS load balancing Virtual Machines across hosts is to SDRS performing Storage vMotion on VMDKs for better performance, capacity utilization, etc. This also includes initial placement as well as allowing affinity based rules for VMDKs. SDRS can monitor for capacity utilization as well as I/O metrics (latency) and dynamically balance your VMDKs across multiple datastores.

Storage vMotion - Snapshot support!  As well as being able to move around Linked Clones. There has also been some core enhancements to make things faster and more consistent.

vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) - It is what it sounds like, a virtual storage appliance that allows SMB customers to use local disk on the ESXi host presented out as an NFS datastore to the vSphere Cluster. There is replication technology behind it so if you do lose an ESXi host you will not lose data nor will you lose connectivity to your virtual machines. This is meant for up to 3 ESXi hosts and is really tailored for the SMB or ROBO market.

There is so much more in vSphere 5, but like I said I wanted to just give a brief overview at this time.

Site Recovery Manager 5
Host Based Replication - New feature within SRM5, no longer is SAN storage/replication required for SRM. You can now replicate your data host based for disaster recovery scenarios in your virtual environment. Key takeaways, replication between heterogeneous datastores and it is managed as a property of the virtual machine. Powered-off VMs are not replicated, non-critical data (logs, etc) are not replicated. Physical RDMs are not supported. Snapshots work, snapshot is replicated, but VM is recovered with collapse snapshots. Fault Tolerant, Linked Clones and VM Templates are not supported.

Automated Failback - Replication is automatically reversed and with a single click you can failback your virtual machines from your disaster site to your production site. This is huge! You have no idea how much of a pain it is to failback a site with SRM, unless you’re using the EMC plug-in :)

Misc - Completely new interface, still within the vSphere Client as a plug-in but now you can manage it all from a single UI, no need to use two clients or a linked mode vCenter.

vCloud Director 1.5
Tons of new APIs within vCloud Director 1.5, including vCloud Orchestration via a vCenter Orchestrator module. Supported for Linked Clones is a huge leap forward, you can now deploy vApps in a matter of seconds with minimal storage consumption. Microsoft SQL is now supported as a back-end database which will make standing up a vCD instance in your lab a lot easier because you won’t need to worry about an Oracle database :). There is also support for federated multi-vClouds by linking vCD instances as well as enhanced vShield integration specifically around IPSec VPN.

Are you still awake? 1170+ words into this post and I’m still not complete….and this is just the brief overview! Whew!!  vmware you really outdid yourself!

vShield 5
vShield Edge - provides us with true multi-tenant site separation complete with VPN capabilities, DHCP, Stateful Firewall and now Static Routing within vShield Edge 5.0.

vShield App - gives us layer2/3 protection with VM-level enforcement now with group based policies found in vShield App 5.0 as well as enabling multiple trust zones on the same vSphere cluster. Layer 2 protection coupled with APIs enable automatic quarantining of compromised VMs.

vShield Data Security - is a new member of the vShield family that allows you to monitor virtual machines continuously and completely transparent to the VM for compliance such as PCI, PHI, PII and HIPAA to name a few.

vShield Manager - Enterprise roles found in Manager 5.0 now provide the separation of duties required by some security and compliance standards.

So there you have it…. a brief 1706 word blog post covering just the high-level details of the vmware mega launch. Like I said earlier, I’m going to try to focus in on some deep-dive details on some of the major topics above. But until then, read up as much as you can on the vmware website and hopefully relatively soon the bits will be available for public consumption so you can get all of this great fresh new code in your lab!

Posted under Cloud, SRM, Security, Storage, VMware HA, vCenter, vSphere

Another one of those posts today that most likely will not affect most, however there is a known issue with the vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) mixed together with EMC VMAX Storage Arrays. My best bud, Chad Sakac, wrote about this last week (over here).

Long story short, if you’re running a VMAX with Enginuity 5875.135.91 or 5875.139.93 along with ESX(i) 4.1 hosts you may see some slowness when trying to do things like Storage vMotion, Deploy from Template, etc…basically things that leverage HardwareAcceleratedMove.

So how do you fix it?  First thing is you need to disable HardwareAcceleratedMove, instructions on how to do this can be found in VMware KB1033665. Next thing is to contact EMC Support and have the ePack that engineering released for this problem installed on your VMAX. Then finally, contact VMware support for their hotfix…rumor has it that a VMware support bundle should be released sometime soon. After you have the patch for VMAX as well as vSphere you should have no problem turning HardwareAcceleratedMove back on.

So to wrap this up….VAAI issue when mixed with VMAX, but it doesn’t affect all VAAI functionality, just XCOPY (HardwareAcceleratedMove) and even then it doesn’t affect every single operation. Get the patches, get them installed and get back on schedule!

Posted under Storage, vSphere

EMC is running a webcast hosted by Chad Sakac next Thursday and the topic should be of an interest to any VMware or Storage administrator.  If you haven’t heard about VAAI and it’s great offloading capabilities I strongly urge you to register for this webcast.

Thursday, June 24, 2010, 11:00 am ET

Host: Chad Sakac, VP VMware Technology Alliance, EMC

Register Now by Clicking Here

During this discussion, you can learn about vStorage API for Array Integration (VAAI). There are some functions that your storage system can handle more efficiently than your virtual servers and their hosts can. VAAI are a set of APIs that allows VMware vSphere to offload specific operations to the storage system improving VMware performance and freeing up resources on your virtual servers by leveraging more efficient array-based operations as an alternative to VMware host-based operations.

Join EMC Virtual Geek, Chad Sakac on June 24 to get key updates and honest answers to your most demanding questions.

Register Now by Clicking Here

Posted under EMC, Storage, vSphere

Just a little teaser of what we’re working on here at EMC. This is the next version of the EMC Celerra Plug-in for VMware which is v1.1 and offers great new VMware View integration. Below in the video you will see that it has a new wizard based interface for common tasks, as well as the ability to place clones (Full and Fast) of Virtual Machines into a VMware View pool which then can be entitled to users for access.

What does this mean?  Well, with Fast Clones you are now offloading the great ability to do Linked Clones back to the storage array. You can ultimately have hundreds of copies of a single virtual machine which only using minimal disk space, and now with the plug-in have those automatically provisioned into VMware View.

Fast, Easy and Efficient…just how we like it!

Download the high-rez versions here: WMV and MOV

Posted under Celerra, Storage, View

Last month at EMC World we released a storage virtualization product unlike any other. EMC VPLEX not only virtualizes back-end storage from other vendors it also allows shared storage to be presented active/active over long distances. This capability makes it possible for long distance vMotion and brings a new technical term to disaster planning, Disaster Avoidance.

Imagine you’re planning a datacenter shutdown due to a power outage or building maintenance, or perhaps that wildfire is making its way to your office location. Now you have the flexibility to be able to avoid major downtime by simply swinging your workloads to an off-site datacenter.

VMware has taken notice and has officially released a KB article detailing out full support for long distance vMotion with the EMC VPLEX product. More information on this KB article can be found at http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1021215. Perhaps you want to know more about VPLEX or even see a demo of it in action? Chad Sakac posted a great breakdown of how it works along with some videos on his website, check it out now.

Posted under Backup & Recovery, Storage, vCenter, vSphere

I had a very fun weekend. It started at 4am Saturday with a migration of ~125 virtual machines from an old AMD based environment to a new Intel Nehalem based environment. Who could’ve known that within a few hours all hell would’ve broken loose.

Enter in problem of network flooding from the NetXen based HP branded NC522SFP.  Because all of the 10GbE ports from the (9) new ESXi servers were creating thousands of pause frames on the Cisco Nexus 5020 switches, I thought originally that it was an issue on the switch.  Talks with Cisco revealed nothing.  We attempted to disconnect one of the connected ports (each ESXi host is dual connected into a pair of N5Ks using vPC) to remove a potential spanning tree loop….no dice.

A reboot of the host resolved the problem, things appeared to be running normally and we decided to let it be and wait until Monday.

10 hours goes by, it is now Sunday morning and the problem returns.  First host loses storage (we’re doing NFS over 10GbE here), then two more…until all 9 in this cluster are pretty much toast.  I decide to open a ticket with VMware.  Wouldn’t you know, there is a potential known bug and resolution.

Bug 496013

Description: Some NetXen based 10GbE cards using the unm_nic and nx_nic drivers sometime flood the network with pause frames causing the port to become disabled.

Resolution: NetXen believes upgrading the firmware to version 4.0.516 will resolve the problem.

I’ve gone ahead and patched 4 of the hosts with this new firmware, so far it has been stable (knock on wood).   I’ll let you know if something happens.

Checking which version of the firmware you’re running is simple. From a command-line (ESX or ESXi hidden CLI), type ethtool -i <vmnic#> (replace vmnic# with the alias to the vmnic you’d like to check).  You should see output similar to:

driver: nx_nic

version: 4.0.301

firmware-version: 4.0.406

bus-info: 0000:07:00.0

Update - Utility CD with firmware patch now included…

As you can see above, the firmware is out of date. To update the firmware you will need to boot from a Linux utility CD that has the appropriate driver, you then run a firmware update utility provided by HP.  To make this process easy I have created a bootable SLAX utility CD with the drivers pre-loaded. You can download the ISO from here (file temporarily removed). Once booted run the installer located in the root filesystem (ie: ./CP011471.scexe).

Let me know if you have any questions.

Posted under ESX 3.5 Tips, ESXi 3.5 Tips, Networking, Storage, vSphere

I’m proud to say that HP has full support for ESXi 4 installed on SD or USB Flash memory.  They even offer the installable ISO pre-built with their CIM providers, available here. There is a catch though, they only support their approved SD or USB Flash memory….sorry, but you cannot BYOF (Bring Your Own Flash).  This is reflected on their download page:

HP VMware ESXi 4.0 solution requires the following:

VMware ESXi 4.0 free downloadable product. To upgrade your license to Enterprise Plus, purchase HP VMware ESXi 4 product 571979-B21.

HP ESXi 4 CIM Providers.

Registration on VMware ESXi hypervisor web page to obtain permanent license serial number.

Acquire your choice of HP supported and qualified media - any HP supported hard drive, USB or SD Flash devices listed below.

Please note that all devices will need to be imaged for ESXi 4.0.

Information about HP supported SD card and USB Flash drive:

• Supported SD card**:
  HP 4GB SD Flash Media
  HP Part Number 580387-B21
  [spare kit part number 583306-001]
• Supported USB Flash Drive**:
  HP 4GB USB Flash Media Drive Key
  HP Part Number 580385-B21
  [Spare kit part number 583307-001]

*Must be purchased separately.
**HP VMware ESXi 4.0 does not support any other USB or SD flash devices

Seems simple, doesn’t it?   Actually it works great and I have put a few dozen servers into production with this method, the best part is no more local HDD which saves even more power!

One question I often get is,  why do you need a 4GB drive, I though ESXi was only 32MB?  Well, even though it is true that ESXi is only 32MB you still need adequate space for the VI Client, VMware Tools (all Operating systems) and upgrade space (for future ESXi patches and releases).  Using a 4GB drive ensures that you’ll have enough space for everything.

There is one problem currently that I am facing, HP has both the SD Card and USB Flash Drive on back-order and there is no expected ETA for either of them!  This has delayed a major project I’m working on and I’ve had to resort to using temporary “junk” USB drives to get the customer by in the mean time.

If someone from HP is reading this, PLEASE get your OEM to produce some new ones ASAP!

Posted under Storage, vSphere

For those of you using NetApp for your back-end virtual machine storage, there is a new version of their SnapManager for Virtual Infrastructure (SMVI) tool that was recently released. SMVI 2.0 will include a number of enhancements that really push the bar when it comes to NetApp/VMware integration.

Some of the enhancements to the 2.0 product include;

• Autosupport Integration
• Backup Enhancements & GUI Re-design
• Snapshot Naming Changes
• Scripting
• Restore Enhancements
• Single File Restore
• Self-Service Restore
• Limited Self-Service Restore
• Administrator-Assisted Restore
• Restore Agent

What really excites me with this new version is the ability for an end-user to do a single file restoration, this will dramatically decrease the labor required at the server administration level for these types of requests.  Most of us already using the 1.0 product have seen the benefits of the VMware/NetApp snapshot integration, how NetApp utilizes VMware Tools to quiesce the virtual machine(s) within a datastore then do a NetApp level snapshot. Then there is also the ability to tie this all into SnapMirror, which works great.

Check out this video demonstrating some of the new features in SMVI 2.0

For those of you using NetApp, I’d strongly recommend adding SMVI to your FY11 budget!

Posted under Backup & Recovery, NetApp, Storage

Today Scott Lowe wrote a post on his blog explaining how Cisco UCS lacks Northbound FCoE connectivity, explained here;

I’m about halfway through the first day of Unified Computing System (UCS) training in San Jose, CA, and I’ve learned of what I think is a fairly significant limitation. The issue centers around what Cisco refers to as “northbound” traffic and how Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) is handled with northbound traffic.

Recall that a central part of UCS is the UCS 6100 series fabric interconnect. The 6100 series fabric interconnect has connectivity in two directions:

• Southbound connectivity is connectivity aimed back at the fabric extenders in the blade chassis themselves.
• Northbound connectivity is connectivity headed outside the UCS to other systems and networks.

All southbound traffic is 10Gbps Ethernet with FCoE. Northbound traffic can be 10Gbps Ethernet or Fibre Channel, but not FCoE. Based on the information I’ve been given (and if I’m incorrect please let me know in the comments), you cannot directly connect an FCoE-enabled storage array to a UCS. Even if your storage array has native FCoE interfaces, you can’t plug them into the UCS 6100 series fabric interconnects because that’s considered northbound traffic and you can’t use FCoE with northbound traffic.

I have a feeling customers who have purchased storage arrays with FCoE interfaces with the intention of hooking the arrays up directly to a UCS are going to be a bit upset when this information becomes more widely known.

If I’m working from incorrect or incomplete information, please feel free to speak up in the comments.

At first I was extremely shocked to hear this, this is pretty big news and I would be upset as a customer if I wasn’t able to directly attach my FCoE-enabled storage array directly to the UCS Fabric Interconnect.

After doing some research of my own I found the following;

Read More…

Posted under Good Reading, Storage

During my trip to Palo Alto for the VMware vSphere Launch I met with some NetApp engineers at their Executive Briefing Center in Sunnyvale.  This was perhaps one of my favorite meetings while in the Bay Area that week.

There are going to be a lot of exciting things coming with the GA release of vSphere, one of the biggest in my opinion will be with vStorage API’s, which will allow vSphere to offload tasks to the storage subsystem.

I was told by NetApp that in vSphere when you initiate a Clone of a Virtual Machine or Deploy from Template, this process will be sent to your FAS system to process, rather than it happening at the ESX host level as it traditionally was done.

Other things that will be sent to the storage system include De-Duplication (if your storage supports it), commands sent by VMware Data Recovery and also automated provisioning in VMware View can be offloaded.  For VMware View, NetApp provided the example of their Rapid Cloning Utility and how it already integrates with the VI Client - the new release will be a lot more streamlined since it will use vStorage API calls.

So, what does all of this mean?  It shows that VMware is working close with the hardware vendors to truly build a Virtual Eco-System, and it shows a lot of exciting new potential that vSphere will bring. Pushing storage related processes back to the storage subsystem will not only increase the speed of these transactions, but it will also relieve a lot of CPU and I/O from the ESX hosts.

Posted under NetApp, Storage, vSphere