VirtualPro

This weekend I finally had the chance to catchup on some of the new storage features released as part of vSphere 4.0,  there are quite a few changes to cover,  some of them quite exciting.

VMFS Upgrade

Once of the good pieces of news to come out is that the VMFS changes in vSphere are minimal.  vSphere 4.0 introduces a minor point release (3.3.0 to 3.3.1) with some subtle changes,  so much so that it’s not really been documented anywhere.  Most of the changes with VMFS are actually delivered within the VMFS driver at the VMKernel level,  this is where most of the I/O improvements and features such as thin provisioning have been delivered as part of vSphere.

Upgrading VMFS was a major step in the upgrade from VMFS 2 to VMFS 3,  good to hear that there are no major drivers to upgrade VMFS as part of your vSphere upgrade.  Any new VMFS datastores created with the new vSphere hosts will of course be VMFS 3.3.1 however this is backwardly compatible with earlier versions of ESX 3.x.  If you really want to move onto the new version of VNFS, format some new datastores and use Storage vMotion to move your VM’s onto the new VMFS 3.3.1 datastores. 

Thin Provisioning

Thin provisioning is one of the areas that excites me most about the new vSphere release.  I conducted a very quick survey of my employers development and system test ESX environments recently and found that currently we were only utilising 48% of virtual storage that had been provisioned.  It’s easy to see where immediate savings can be made simply by implementing vSphere and thin provisioning.  I’ll be using that in the cost benefits case for sure!

Thin provisioning is nothing new,  it has been available at the array level for a while now, so one of the big questions is where should I thin provision?  Well that really depends what kind of environment you have I suppose.  Smaller customers will benefit greatly from VMware thin provisioning as they probably don’t own arrays capable of TP.  Bigger companies on the other hand might well benefit from carrying out both as they have both the skill sets and the equipment to full utilise it at both levels. 

Chad Sakac has written a superb article entitled “thin on thin where should you do thin provisioning vsphere 4.0 or array level” which goes deep into the new thin provisioning features and the discussions around what’s the best approach. I strongly suggest people give it a read,  it explains pretty much all you need to know.

Storage VMotion

The Storage vMotion in ESX 3.5 had a few limitations which vSphere addresses.  It’s now fully integrated with vCenter as opposed to being command line based in the previous version,  it allows for the moving of a VM between different storage types, i.e. FC, ISCSI or NFS.  One excellent usage of Storage vMotion is the ability to migrate your thick vm’s and change them to thin VM’s.  Perfect for reclaiming disk space and increasing utilisation without downtime, brilliant!
 
Storage vMotion has also been enhanced from an operational perspective. Previously storage vmotion involved taking a snapshot of a disk,  copying the parent disk to it’s new location and then taking the child snapshot and re-parenting the child disk with the parent.  This process required the 2 x the CPU and memory of the VM being migrated in order to ensure zero downtime.  In vSphere 4.0 Storage vMotion uses change block tracking and a process very similar to how vMotion deals with moving active memory between hosts.  The new Storage vMotion conducts an iterative process scanning what blocks have been changed, each iterative scan should result in smaller and smaller increments and when it gets down to a small enough size it conducts a very quick suspend / resume operation as opposed to using the doubling up resources method that it previously needed to.  Making it faster and more efficient than it was in it’s previous incarnation.

Para Virtualised SCSI

Para Virtualised SCSI (PVSCSI) is a new driver for I/O intensive virtual machines. VMware compare this to the vmxnet adapter,  which is an enhanced and optimised network driver providing higher performance.  PVSCSI is similar, it’s a specific driver that offers higher I/O throughput, lower latency and lower CPU utilisation within virtual machines. Figures discussed by Paul Manning on the recent Vmware community podcast included 92% increase in IOPS throughput and 40% decrease in latency when compared to the standard LSI / BUSLogic virtual driver.

A caveat of this technology is that the guest OS still has to boot from a non PVSCSI adapter (LSI / Buslogic),  you would look to add your PVSCSI adapter for your additional data virtual disks.  Currently only Windows 2003, Windows 2008 and RH Linux 5 have the software drivers to take adavantage of this new adapter.

Update  - Chad Sakac has posted a new EMCWorld I/O Performance comparison of the vSphere PVSCSI adpater vs the LSI SCSI adapter, check out the link for more details.

VMware Storage Book

Paul Manning mentioned on the recent podcast that VMware are planning a book dedicated to Virtualisation and storage in an attempt to consolidate the amount of documentation out there on Storage configuration and best practice.  Currently users need to look through 600 pages of the SAN Config guide and vendor guidelines. VMware would hope to try boil this down to a much more manageable 100 - 150 pages.

If you can’t wait that long, Chad Sakac has written the storage chapter in Scott Lowe’s new vSphere book which I believe is available for pre-order on Amazon

vSphere Storage WhitePaper

Paul Manning who I’ve mentioned in this blog post has written a great 10 page white paper explaining all of these features in more detail along with some of the more experimental features I haven’t mentioned. 

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/VMW_09Q1_WP_vSphereStorage_P10_R1.pdf

Gestalt-IT, New Products, Storage, VMware, vSphere esx, Storage, Storage vMotion, Thin Provisioning, VSphere

The guys over at Bluebear have released version 0.0.3 of their Kodiak management tool, aptly named the boisterous bruin.  You can download your copy here if your a member of the private beta program and you can view the full release notes here. 

I’ve installed it and had a quick look, appears to be a lot of new additions so will wade through them all and post back with a more detailed update later tonight.

This version of Kodiak represents a significant change in our server-communication architecture.

We’ve added a schema-compliant request/argument builder engine that populates requests based on known information. This makes building requests much easier.

A lua scripting engine. Each server connection gets its own independent Lua script.

Independent object pools.

Improved mapping response and control.

Map connection node & link display control.

We’ve created a “plugin api” where a user may build a plugin to communicate with any kind of data service. We’ll be publishing information on this on our wiki.

We’ve added a number of “boilerplate” features that will become more apparent in the next few releases as we push Kodiak towards our goal of creating an “IT IDE”.

Access for users to create their own scripts. Kodiak’s UI/inspector controls are driven by a “global schema” that allows a user to create their own customized scripts for management. Please visit the bluebear wiki for further information regarding customizing the script engine. As yet, we don’t have a full UI for managing user scripts, but we will shortly.

The remote event log has been removed for this release.

For Windows users who experience the dreaded “SSL certificate bug”, we’ve added a preferences option to bypass the windows SSL stack. This option is accessible from the Preferences menu.

Password vault & credentials storage. Kodiak now has the ability to save username/password pairs in an encrypted password vault, locked with a master password.

Server object creation is disabled while we migrate the control components into the VMWare plugin, we will re-enable these in a couple of days.

ESX, New Products bluebear, ESX management, kodiak

A lot of you will have used Jing in some shape or form for recording actions on a screen.  If you haven’t check out the link and get yourself a copy,  it’s superb for documentation and how to video’s.

The other day I was catching up with Shannon Ma’s blog when I spotted a demo video he’d done using GoView.  I decided to take a look and found out that it was actually a service being offered by Citrix online, I’ve had a little play around with it and have to say it’s pretty good. 

Sign up for your free account complete with 1GB of storage and it will prompt you to install the Go View agent.  This actively streams the audio and video back to the Citrix GoView servers during recording.  Once your done you just click the agent and select stop recording,  your immediately taken to a web page so you can save your recording with a title, notes and a password if necessary.  

On the next screen you can view your recording, get a link to the video or get the code to embed the video in a website.  You also get the option to edit your video,  where you can easily cut out sections of the video and insert title pages,  a great way of breaking a demo into sections. You can see a very quick demonstration of what it can do below.

So in summary it’s free, it’s easy to record, easy to edit and easy to share,  a good alternative to the more expensive Camtasia. It is a Beta and that has to be remembered,  when I first started using it I couldn’t play or edit my videos. Sometimes it goes slow and other times I get a message saying “Our servers need to take a rest, try again later” I suppose it is a beta after all. To Sign up for your free account or to view the Citrix demo video, just click on the links.

Citrix, New Products Citrix

I read today on Microsoft’s virtualisation team blog site that the free version of Hyper-V 2008 R2 has now reached release candidate and can be downloaded by clicking on the link below.

Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Release Candidate

The interesting news is that Live Migration, Clustered Shared Volumes and High Availability will be available as part of this free version when it reaches RTM. What isn’t clear is whether these features are included in this release candidate.

So what strings are attached I hear you ask?  Well according to Microsoft absolutely none,  they genuinley appear to be giving away these features for nothing.  I myself thought that the management for Live migration and HA would require a cost as you’d need an implemetnation of System Centre Operations Manager (SCOM) and System Centre Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM).  However this is not the case,  I actually verified this today with a Microsoft Employee at an event I was at this morning.

The following extract from the Microsoft Virtualisation team blog tells you how you can manage these features.  The first requires a Windows 2008 box so there is a licence cost,  the second requires SCVMM which will obviously cost you money.  The third option however is free,  as long as you have Windows 7.

Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Live Migration and High Availability can be managed in a few different ways:

1. Failover Cluster/Hyper-V Manager from a Windows Server 2008 R2 Server OR,
2. System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 OR,
3. Using the FREELY (there’s that word again) available Failover Cluster Manager/Hyper-V Manager for Windows 7.

 

So, as you can see, there are a few different options depending on your needs and option three gives you Live Migration and High Availability at zero cost.

Will this be serious competition for ESXi?  well I’d say in the home lab and SMB Sector it probably will.  VMware have come in for some criticism following the launch of their new vSphere product and licensing.  A lot of people feel SMB’s are not well covered for some of the more advanced features such as vMotion in the vSphere essentials offering.  Microsoft have probably picked up on this fact, after all they’re not daft.  They probably see this as the perfect oppurtunity to win some of that SMB market and get a stronger foothold in the virtualisation market, from there they can start up-selling SCOM and SCVMM.

Hyper-V, Microsoft, New Products hyper-v server 2008, Microsoft

Been busy putting together a case on why its a good idea to take advantage of VMware’s current vSphere  upgrade deal. For those who are not aware, you can upgrade Standard to Advanced for $795 per CPU. This roughly a 50% discount over the normal upgrade price and is only available until the 15th December this year.

So, as I was putting the benefits case together I was busy drafting out the description of the new fault tolerance feature and selling it as one of the big bonuses. Now I’m very much into the technical aspects of what I do and sometimes get bogged down in the details when trying to make a benefits case. So I went looking for a video which would undoubtley explain it better at management level. So here it is, VMware CTO Steve Herrod explains VMware Fault Tolerance in relatively plain english.

Now for those like me, who do want to know the technical detail, the following link Fault Tolerance 800 x 600 Demo is to a high quality video demonstration of the new Fault Tolerance feature in vSphere.

A word of warning though,   I found a significant caveat on VMware’s Fault Tolerance web page!  It only supports VMs with a single virtual CPU.  This is bad news because I was looking at this as a potential solution to protect an  exchange server which I very much doubt will have a single vCPU.  You can find said Caveat at the bottom of the Fault Tolerance feature page. I’m busy trying to find out from the community at large if there are any timelines on increasing the limit on this.

New Products, VMware, vSphere VMware, VSphere

 Just having a little look through the videos on VMwareTV on YouTube and noticed that they’ve posted a new video on the new vSphere Data Recovery feature, I’ve included it below for your viewing pleasure.

New Products, VMware, vSphere VMware, VSphere

You may have already read in numerous places about the release of the new Windows Server 2008 R2 beta.  Well on a quieter note a week after that release, Microsoft have now released the R2 version of their bare metal Hyper-V server.  Now as you probably already know,  Hyper-V Server 2008 is free and is comparable to VMware’s free hypervisor ESXi (well in that it’s free)

You can grab your copy by clicking the following link Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Beta and there is an accompanying overview document which you can also download.

Now the good news is that Hyper-V server 2008 R2 matches the features of the Enterprise edition of Windows Server 2008.  This means support for 8 CPU sockets (32 core count with quad core) and 1TB of memory, it also supports clustering and both quick and live migration features.  Thanks to the guys at Virtualization.info for the information in the following table which demonstrates perfectly, the feature synergy between the bare metal and the full fat windows offerings.

You will note that SVCMM 2008 SP1 is being mentioned in this table. The overview document details the fact that at present Hyper-V server 2008 cannot be managed using the SCVMM as it is not supported.  Microsoft are however working on update, likely to be called SCVMM 2008 SP1 to allow for management of Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 using the virtual machine manager.

Hyper-V, Microsoft, New Products hyper-v server 2008

It would appear that some new products have appeared on the VMware product page under the “Coming in 2009 ” banner.  Although these products were demonstrated at VMWorld 2008 in Las Vegas,  they weren’t publicly announced through the usual communication channels, i.e. the customary VMware press release.  They just seem to have appeared on the site !?

Credit to Stu over at Vinternals for the picture, my screen capture was rubbish in comparison.

The majority of the products listed above you will have heard of before such as Fault Tolerance, AppSpeed and VMSafe.  The new ones that catch the eye are highlighted above with links to the introductory data sheets listed below.

VMware vCenter CapacityIQ
VMware vCenter Data Recovery
VMware vCenter ConfigControl

Now unfortunately I didn’t get the chance to go to VMWorld 2008 in Las Vegas so never had the chance to see any of the demonstrations of the products. However I’ve seen some videos and had a quick look at the product information and as always have a few observations.

VMware vCenter CapacityIQ
VAC partners have had access to the VMware capacity planner tool for some time now.  One of the things that always frustrated me was that normal customers had no access to this tool.  Customers would have to turn to products like PlateSpin PowerRecon in order to examine those “what if” scenarios that may require scaling up your virtual environment.

I like the idea of proactive capacity management,  helping to combat the constant under and over provisioning you invariably get in virtual environments. Combine this with the capacity forecasting and your in a position to better utilise your current investments as well as budget better for future procurement.  This is going to be a key factor in 2009,  squeezing more out of what you got and only buying when absolutely necessary. Ahhh the good old credit crunch!!!

VMWare vCenter Data Recovery
I really like the look of this one and am presuming it is the VCB replacement.  What I like about this over VCB is that it is a virtual machine deployed within your infrastructure, as opposed to the SAN attached windows storage server that was required for VCB.  managing it all from the single interface that is vCenter is great news, slowly but surely vCenter is maturing into the centralised management tool it should be.

This is the one that I’ll be keeping an eye out for in the near future.  Wondering what the licensing and pricing will be for this one,  will it be free or is it intended as a competitor to products such as vRanger, Veeam backup and esxpress. One has to presume that full support for ESX 3.5i will be included as currently only vRanger does that, as announced on Eric Sloof’s blog post today

VMware vCenter Config Control
Not sure how much I can comment on this one as I don’t run that big a VMware environment so configuration control isn’t such an issue for me.  That is until something goes wrong :o)

One area of Config Control that I have seen previously is host profiles,  you can see a video demonstrating host profiles by clicking on the link.

Although it’s not to important for me, I can see how configuration control could be a massive issue in large scale environments.  I’m thinking back to the VMworld 2007 talk that I saw on HSBC’s virtualisation setup in the UK and the sheer size of their implementation.  Due to the current lack of configuration control software out there a lot of these companies have likely put in place strict processes and policies to govern configuration management.  Will they need something like this in their setup? maybe not desperately but I’d imagine anything that can lessen the load on red tape and control processes will be welcomed with open arms.  Depending on the price that is!!!

For those looking to do manual configuration control on the cheap could take a look at Hugo Peeters scripts on comparing ESX configurations with powershell.  Credit to Duncan Epping for posting about this first

New Products, VMware, vCenter Virtual Infrastructure, VMware, VSphere

My employer has been a user of PlateSpin PowerConvert for about 2 years now,  following a successful trial by myself and a colleague. A couple of weeks back I received an email from Novell about a webinar for PlateSpin Protect.  This initially confused me but I eagerly clicked on some of the links to learn more and it appeared that they had split the PowerConvert product in two. 

So PowerConvert now becomes PlateSpin Migrate and PlateSpin Protect, but what new features and functionality does this product change bring?

Well on closer inspection, not an awful lot appears to have changed.  Platespin Migrate can be likened to the project version of PowerConvert whereby you pay based on usage.  It’s sole purpose is for migration whether that be physical to physical, physical to image, physical to virtual, virtual to image and finally virtual to physical.

PlateSpin Protect appears to be a re-branded version of PowerConvert.  It concentrates more on workload protection for BCP and DR purposes, including file and block level replication as well as support for incremental updates.  If you have PlateSpin Protect you will however have access to the Migration features mentioned above, so if it is a longer term replication / migration tool you’re looking for then you won’t go wrong with this one.

I love the PlateSpin product,  it has changed the way we protect our workloads for BCP and DR purposes.  It simplifies how we test our recovery plans and it allows us to say for certain that in the event of an outage, we have a way of being back up and running in minutes.

Now this split may be a simple product re-branding, but the positive I see in this is that the PlateSpin Protect software is likely to show itself as the stronger offering that ultimately generates more revenue. With this in mind, I’m hopeful PlateSpin can dedicate more resource and add more features to this product.  One I would really like to see is the ability to have the same target server protected and sent to two different locations, one a local data centre BCP copy and the other the remote data centre DR copy.

Click here if you would like to read more about the PlateSpin product family

General, New Products Platespin

Some time ago long before I started my blog I used an application called Trip Wire Config Check on some of my employers ESX Hosts. We are primarily a Microsoft software house so our technical experience of Linux / Unix was minimal before the introduction of ESX into our server estate. The config check application checks the current host configuration against the VI3 Security hardening guidelines reporting back any vunerabilities.

A some of the configuration parameters being checked include:

- Virtual network labeling
- Port Group settings
- Network isolation for VMotion and iSCSI
- NIC Mode settings / Layer 2 Security settings
- VMWare ESX Service Console security settings
- SAN resource masking and zoning

The results that the tripwire config check returned showed that we had a number of areas that needed to be addressed with our host security configurations. The results provided a great checklist of everything that was right and wrong with our current build procedures.  Some of the items that came up we would never have even considered,  some of them we felt were minor and could be ignored,  others needed to be addressed immediately.  I highly recommend taking a look at this free tool and running it against one of your standard host builds to see if you need to change it, hopefuly you won’t need to revist all your hosts.

Download your free copy of Tripwire - Config Check and check out the following blog post for installation and usage instructions.  

Tripwire® ConfigCheck^TM is a free utility that rapidly assesses the security of VMware ESX 3.0 and 3.5 hypervisor configurations compared to the VMware Infrastructure 3 Security Hardening guidelines. Developed by Tripwire in cooperation with VMware, Tripwire ConfigCheck ensures ESX environments are properly configured—offering immediate insight into unintentional vulnerabilities in virtual environments—and provides the necessary steps towards full remediation when they are not.

ESX, New Products, VMware esx, security