VMware

VMware vExpert meeting at VMworld 2011 Las Vegas

Posted by Brian on Aug 29, 2011 in VMware, VMworld | 0 comments

I was very lucky to be awarded the vExpert award for 2011. This is an award that is presented to community members for helping to evangelize VMware and help others with VMware related issues. There are many different ways to earn this award. A few things that people do is write books, blog, write scripts or tools, lead a VMUG or be very active in the VMware forums. There are other ways also but these are some of the common things that gain people status within the VMware world.

For 2011 there are 332 vExperts in the program. This is a global program so it’s a big honor to be part of such an elite and small group. I hope to be able to continue to be productive and earn the award in future years.

On the day prior to VMware 2011 a meeting was held for the current crop of vExperts. The meeting was lead by John Troyer the main man over at VMworld social media. The session offered an overview of the expanding features of the vExpert program.

As part the meeting a couple of people from the VMware Product Marketing team came to give use some futures and NDA info. There was a lot of talk about the Virtual Data Center (VDC) and how things might have changed from it’s announcement back at VMworld 2008. The people in attendance had a bunch of questions and while it gut pulled down in the trenches for awhile it was good to hear various takes on the challenges of watching Cloud technologies mature into a product.

There was talk about what people thought would be the driving factors for companies to move workloads into a Cloud model. Many thought that similar factors that first drove the move to Virtualization would be a factor in this. So those are things like cost savings and some of the first things to move would be Test and Dev workloads. Also there was a lot of talk about the difference between how an enterprise and an SMB would adopt cloud.

 

read more

Walk through of new vSphere 5 web client interface

Posted by Brian on Jul 16, 2011 in vCenter Server, VMware, vSphere | 6 comments

In this post I will cover the new Web Interface that is available in vCenter 5 that was announced this past Tuesday. This is something that should be welcomed by non Windows users. With growing number of admins using Apple computers these days they have been long waiting for a way to manage their vSphere environment without having a Windows VM running also. The vCenter Web Interface is a Flex based console that is not fully featured yet but does offer many of the things you would need on a daily basis.

You definitely will not be using it to setup hosts and networks and that type of setup & configuration work. But you can create VMs and other daily functions as well as look at performance charts.

To get started point your browser to your vCenter server using a link similar to below. If you pint straight to the vCenter without the port and trailing string you will get a page similar to what your used to seeing in the past. It will allow you to download the regular vSphere Client and will also have a link to the web client.

Below you can see the login screen for the Web Client, nothing earth shattering from this view. Only thing to point out is at the bottom of the screen there is a download link for the Client Integration Plug-in. This is necessary to view the console of a VM through the web client. So download and install to get all of the functions opened up to you.

Manage a Virtual Machine with Web Client

The image below shows the summary view of a virtual machine. Its got pretty much all of the same details were used to seeing in the thick client. You get power status and details about VM hardware and storage. From this view you can control the power of the VM and edit its settings like in the past. At the end of this section I have included images of all the options located in the menu for a VM.

 

 From the next image we can see that the Monitor section includes sections for Tasks, Events, Performance and Alarms. These are all things you should be used to seeing also and are easily accessible in the Web Client also. I was pretty impressed with the performance chart options that are available with this being the first attempt by VMware. They have had practice by  using the Flex client model for View manager and vCloud director now.

The last section of the VM menu is resource management. You can have a look at the familiar looking CPU and Memory bar charts that we use in the regular client.

The group of images below show the menu options that are available to you when managing a virtual machine. You have the normal power options. Under configuration you can edit settings and upgrade Tools and virtual hardware. The Inventory menu allows you to Migrate or Clone. And the Snapshot menu give you the normal options you would expect.

 

Migrate a Virtual Machine with Web Client

This is a really nice feature to have available in the web client. This is something that in the past you would have had to fire up the full vSphere client to do. All the normal options seem to be available for this process.

 

 Edit VM properties in Web Client

This section is pretty straight forward and you can see form the two images below that all of the normal options are available to you in the Web Client. You can edit and add virtual hardware to you VMs.

This second image shows the normal VM Options that you can edit also.

Creating a Virtual Machine with Web Client

I’m not sure how much I will use this to start, but its pretty awesome that this feature is there at the beginning. You can create a VM from the Web Client, using all the same choices that you would normally.

Simple screen that allows you to name your virtual machine and select the folder location in the datacenter.

The next image shows you the ability to select the resources that it will run on. For example you can choose a host or cluster to place the VM on to start.

The next screen shows you available storage options. The Web Client provides you with plenty of detail to make educated decisions.

This section allows you to choose from available Virtual Machine hardware versions. It also explains the options for both so people can make educated decisions.

Next up in the process is to choose the guest operating system.

The last screen before the review allows you to adjust any of the virtual hardware that you want in your VM. There are plenty of options here and at first look I don’t see anything missing from the regular client.

ESXi 5 Host management from Web Client

From the image below you can see the summary screen that shows information about a ESXi host. All the normal details appear to be here and are presented in a easy to consume manor. From the right side of the screen you can see recent tasks and running tasks to keep an eye on what is happening in your environment.

The image below shows the monitoring screen so that you can view Tasks, Events, Alarms and Performance data on the vSphere host. This is also really nice to have in the Web Client so that you can see what is going on.

 

Cluster views form vSphere Web Client

The next image is the Cluster Summary view from the Web Client. These are not much different form the host views, they just present you with higher level details.

This image shows you cluster services to be able to view DRS information within the cluster. You can see History, Faults and Recommendations form this area.

 The last screen that I have shown here gives you Resource management details for the cluster. You can view whats happening cluster wide on CPU, Memory, Storage and utilization details.

 

read more

First look at VMware vCenter 5 appliance setup and management console

Posted by Brian on Jul 15, 2011 in vCenter Server, VMware | 5 comments

I thought that I would not dwell on all of the licensing craziness and wanted to start writing about some of the cool new stuff that VMware announced. In this post I will cover the install and setup of the new vCenter 5 server appliance from VMware.

The vCenter appliance is exactly that a Virtual Appliance built and maintained by VMware. It is based on SLES 11 linux and now offers an option to IT shops that are not bound to Windows. From my point it looks like VMware is continuing to build it’s management tools with no need for Windows or at least the option of choosing your OS that the tool will run on. This is something that I’ve heard complaints about for years and will certainly make some people very happy.

The install of the appliance is very straight forward just like most virtual appliances are. You must first download the package from VMware which is just shy of 4GB in size. The package is a OVF so the next step was to deploy the OVF and power it on afterward.

Once the appliance boots if you open up a console to the VM you will see a screen like the one below. The device will grab an IP from DHCP if its available. Once you have an IP you can open up a browser and point it to https://appliance_IP_address:5480.

Once you browser connects to the appliance you will be presented with the screen below. This screen is the management console for the appliance. This is where you can enter in settings that control the appliance its self and not virtual machines. I will cover the web console in a separate post. The default login for the appliance is listed below.

User – root

Password – vmware

Once you log in to the appliance you will be presented with a screen shown below. This gives you some basic information about the appliance. You can see from the screen shot that this appliance has already been connected to an Oracle DB hosted on a separate server. The appliance supports Oracle and DB2 databases currently, which allows you to be totally Microsoft free. You can also stop/start the vCenter from this screen.

 The next step in setting up the appliance would be to point it to the database. In this step you can see the details of the Oracle DB that we are using in the lab.

 The next screen shown below is the Settings section that shows you the default Ports that the appliance uses and allows you to make changes. You can also select the inventory size for the vCenter Appliance, this is based on how many virtual machines it will manage. There are RAM recommendations listed based upon the inventory size that you select. The appliance comes built with 8GB RAM and 2 vCPUs.

The Administration section is pretty straight forward. You can change the admin password and Enable or Disable SSH access to the appliance.

The last section under the vCenter Server area is the storage section. This allows you to store log files off on a NFS share rather than withing the appliance.

 In the image below you are now looking at the Services menu which allows you to control services like Syslog, NetDump and Autodeploy that run on the appliance. I did not take screen shots of each sub menu to keep this from getting too long. This screen allows you to start and stop the services and the individual sub menus allow you to change the IP ports that they function on.

Next up is the Authentication section. This allows you to setup NIS or Active Director based logins. From the image below you can see we have already setup the appliance for AD logins.

From the Active Directory sub menu you can point the appliance to the AD domain that you wish to use for authentication. All you need is the Domain name and an Admin user and password. The setup was very easy the only thing is that you must restart the appliance before you will be able to login with AD credentials. As a note once setup I was able to log into this console without a reboot, but connecting to manage VMs required the reboot before it would work.

The Network section is up next which is also very simple. You can manually provide all network related configuration settings from this section.

The System menu does not have many options that you can see from the image below. It shows you some appliance version information and host name. There is a sub menu to set the Time Zone. The main function here is the ability to Reboot or Shutdown the appliance with the buttons on the right.

The image below shows the update section that appears to allow you to setup automatic updates of the appliance. There is not a lot of details around this area yet so I will continue to watch.

The last menu section of the appliance is the upgrade area. Now from first look I figured this would be a way to apply a version upgrade to the appliance. But from further looking it appears to be a way to link a source and destination vCenter appliance. And then import the configuration in the destination one. I’m guessing that you could download the latest version of the appliance and then import your configuration over. If someone has more details around this drop me a comment below.

 

read more

Facts about VMware vSphere 5 License changes

Posted by Brian on Jul 12, 2011 in vCenter Server, VMware, vSphere | 3 comments

In case you were sleeping today VMware announced vSphere 5 and all of its 150 plus glorious new features. I’ve been lucky enough to be using it for sometime in the Beta program and its really a big step forward. There are tons of new features that people have been waiting for.

But with all of the new stuff it seams a licensing change has kind of put a cloud over the shinny new features. Along with the new version VMware has change the licensing model that vSphere 5 will use, moving towards a vRAM pooled model that I will attempt to explain further. Now for some organizations this will be great and for others it will add additional cost.

There has been a lot of banter on twitter today about the licenses changes and in the VMware forums. I am holding back making a decision until I can digest this further. But from what it looks like is building a scaled up design model would be more expensive with the new licensing model.

Here is some highlights from the vSphere 5 license white paper that VMware release. You can download the full paper here.

 vSphere 5.0 will be licensed on a per-processor basis with a vRAM entitlement. Each vSphere 5.0 CPU license will entitle the
purchaser to a specific amount of vRAM, or memory configured to virtual machines. The vRAM entitlement can be pooled across
a vSphere environment to enable a true cloud or utility based IT consumption model. Just like VMware technology offers
customers an evolutionary path from the traditional datacenter to cloud infrastructure, the vSphere 5.0 licensing model allows
customers to evolve to a cloud-like “pay for consumption” model without disrupting established purchasing, deployment and license management practices and processes.

 

You will still be buying your licenses based on sockets but there is now the vRAM amount to factor in.

Licensing Unit: Per Processor (CPU)
vSphere 5.0 is still licensed on a per-processor basis, allowing customers to continue leveraging established purchasing,
deployment and license-management processes.

So what is a vRAM Entitlement
We have introduced vRAM, a transferable, virtualization-based entitlement to offer customers the greatest flexibility for vSphere configuration and usage. vRAM is defined as the virtual memory configured to virtual machines. When a virtual machine is created, it is configured with a certain amount of virtual memory (vRAM) available to the virtual machine. Depending on the edition, each vSphere 5.0-CPU license provides a certain vRAM capacity entitlement. When the virtual machine is powered on, the vRAM configured for that virtual machine counts against the total vRAM
entitled to the user. There are no restrictions on how vRAM capacity can be distributed among virtual machines: a customer can configure many small virtual machines or one large virtual machine. The entitled vRAM is a fungible resource configured to meet customer workload requirements.

What is Pooled vRAM Capacity in vSphere 5?
An important feature of the new licensing model is the concept of pooling the vRAM capacity entitlements for all processor licenses (see Figure 1). The vRAM entitlements of vSphere CPU licenses are pooled—that is, aggregated—across all CPU licenses managed by a VMware vCenter instance (or multiple linked VMware vCenter instances) to form a total available vRAM capacity (pooled vRAM capacity). If workloads on one server are not using their full vRAM entitlement, the excess capacity can be used by other virtual machines within the VMware vCenter instance. At any given point in time, the vRAM capacity consumed by all powered-on virtual machines within a pool must be equal or lower than the pooled vRAM capacity.

How would I monitor the Pooled vRAM Capacity
Available and consumed vRAM capacity can be monitored and managed using the licensing-management module of VMware vCenter Server. Customers can create reports and set up alerts to obtain automated notification of when the level of vRAM consumption surpasses a specified level of the available pooled capacity.

So if I run out of Pool vRAM how would I increase the Pooled vRAM Capacity
If necessary, the easiest way to expand pooled vRAM capacity is to add more vSphere CPU licenses of the same edition to the vRAM pool. Alternatively, customers can upgrade all CPU licenses in the vRAM pool to a vSphere edition with a higher base vRAM entitlement.

Some Licensing Examples

 vSphere 5 License pricing

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

read more

Whats new in VMware vSphere ESXi 5

Posted by Brian on Jul 12, 2011 in VMware, vSphere | 2 comments

Following up on today’s announcement from VMware about vSphere 5 the next step towards building the cloud on VMware. I have gathered up some of the more important new and updated features on vSphere 5. There will be other posts written over the next weeks and months diving deeper into these features. But for now this will wet your appetite.

• Convergence. vSphere 5.0 is the first vSphere release built exclusively on the vSphere ESXi 5.0 hypervisor architecture as the host platform. VMware will not include ESX hypervisor architecture-based releases in this vSphere release or later releases. The vSphere 5.0 management platform, vCenter Server 5.0, provides support for ESXi 5.0 hosts as well as ESX/ESXi 4.x and ESX/ESXi 3.5 hosts.
• VMware vSphere Auto Deploy. Combining the features of host profiles, Image Builder, and PXE, VMware vSphere Auto Deploy simplifies the task of managing ESXi installation and upgrade for hundreds of machines. New hosts are automatically provisioned based on rules defined by the user. Rebuilding a server to a clean slate is as simple as a reboot. To move between ESXi versions, you update a rule using the Auto Deploy PowerCLI and perform a test compliance and repair operation.
• Unified CLI Framework. An expanded and enhanced esxcli framework offers a rich set of consistent and extensible commands, including new commands to facilitate on-host troubleshooting and maintenance. The framework allows consistency of authentication, roles, and auditing, using the same methods as other management frameworks such as vCenter Server and PowerCLI. You can use the esxcli framework both remotely as part of vSphere CLI and locally on the ESXi Shell (formerly Tech Support Mode).
• New Virtual machine capabilities. ESXi 5.0 introduces a new generation of virtual hardware with virtual machine hardware version 8, which includes the following new features:

o    32-way virtual SMP. ESXi 5.0 supports virtual machines with up to 32 virtual CPUs, which lets you run larger CPU-intensive workloads on the VMware ESXi platform.

o    1TB virtual machine RAM. You can assign up to 1TB of RAM to ESXi 5.0 virtual machines.

o    Nonhardware accelerated 3D graphics for Windows Aero support. ESXi 5.0 supports 3D graphics to run Windows Aero and Basic 3D applications in virtual machines.

o    USB 3.0 device support. ESXi 5.0 features support for USB 3.0 devices in virtual machines with Linux guest operating systems. USB 3.0 devices attached to the client computer running the vSphere Web Client or the vSphere Client can be connected to a virtual machine and accessed within it. USB 3.0 devices connected to the ESXi host are not supported at this time.

o    UEFI virtual BIOS. Virtual machines running on ESXi 5.0 can boot from and use the Unified Extended Firmware Interface (UEFI).

• Graphical User Interface to configure multicore virtual CPUs. You can now configure the number of virtual CPU cores per socket in the Virtual Machine Properties view in the vSphere Web Client and the vSphere client. Previously this feature was only configurable through advanced settings.
• Client-connected USB devices. USB devices attached to the client computer running the vSphere Web Client or the vSphere Client can be connected to a virtual machine and accessed within it.
• Smart card reader support for virtual machines. Smart card readers attached to the client computer running the vSphere Web Client or the vSphere Client can be connected to one or more virtual machines and accessed within them. The virtual machine remote console, available in the vSphere Web Client and the vSphere Client, supports connecting smart card readers to multiple virtual machines, which can then be used for smart card authentication to virtual machines.
• Expanded support for VMware Tools versions. VMware Tools from vSphere 4.x is supported in virtual machines running on vSphere 5.0 hosts. Additionally, the version of VMware Tools supplied with vSphere 5.0 is also compatible with ESX/ESXi 4.x.
• Apple Mac OS X Server guest operating system support. VMware vSphere 5.0 adds support for the Apple Mac OS X Server 10.6 (“Snow Leopard”) as a guest operating system. Support is restricted to Apple Xserve model Xserve3,1 systems. For additional information, see the vSphere 5.0 RC Release notes.
• Host UEFI boot support.vSphere 5.0 supports booting ESXi hosts from the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI). With UEFI you can boot systems from hard drives, CD-ROM drives, or USB media. Booting over the network requires the legacy BIOS firmware and is not available with UEFI.
• Support for up to 512 virtual machines. vSphere 5.0 supports up to 512 virtual machines totaling a maximum of 2048 virtual CPUs per host.
• Support for larger systems. vSphere 5.0 supports systems with up to 160 logical CPUs and up to 2TB RAM.
• Improved SNMP support. vSphere 5.0 adds the capability to convert CIM indications to SNMP traps. Check with your hardware vendor to see whether their CIM provider supports this functionality. In addition, vSphere 5.0 now supports the Host Resources MIB (RFC 2790) and allows for finer control over the types of traps sent by the SNMP agent.
• Storage DRS. This feature delivers the DRS benefits of resource aggregation, automated initial placement, and bottleneck avoidance to storage. You can group and manage similar datastores as a single load-balanced storage resource called a datastore cluster. Storage DRS makes VMDK placement and migration recommendations to avoid I/O and space utilization bottlenecks on the datastores in the cluster.
• Policy-driven storage delivery. This solution allows you to have greater control and insight into characteristics of your storage resources. It also enables virtual machine storage provisioning to become independent of specific storage available in the environment. You can define virtual machine placement rules in terms of storage characteristics and monitor a virtual machine’s storage placement based on these administrator-defined rules. The solution delivers these benefits by taking advantage of the following items:

Storage

o    Integrating with Storage APIs – Storage Awareness to deliver storage characterization supplied by storage vendors.

o    Enabling the vSphere administrator to tag storage based on customer-specific descriptions.

o    Using storage characterizations to create virtual machine placement rules in the form of storage profiles.

o    Providing easy means to check a virtual machine’s compliance against these rules.

As a result, managing storage usage and choice in vSphere deployments has become more efficient and user-friendly.

• VMFS5. VMFS5 is a new version of vSphere Virtual Machine File System that offers improved scalability and performance.
• Accelerator. An accelerator has been delivered for specific use with View (VDI) workloads. With this option configured in ESXi, a read cache is constructed in memory that is optimized for recognizing, handling, and deduplicating VDI client images. The cache is managed from within the View Composer and delivers a significant reduction, as high as 90% by early estimates, in IOPS from each ESXi host to the storage platform holding client images. This reduction in IOPS enables large scaling of the number of clients in case multiple I/O storms, typical in large VDI deployments, occur.
• iSCSI UI support. Usability improvements in this release include the ability to configure dependent hardware iSCSI and software iSCSI adapters along with the network configurations and port binding in a single dialog box using the vSphere Client. Full SDK access is also available for these configurations.
• Storage I/O Control NFS support. vSphere 5.0 extends Storage I/O Control (SIOC) to provide cluster-wide I/O shares and limits for NFS datastores.
• Storage APIs – Array Integration: Thin Provisioning. Offers an ability to reclaim blocks of a thin provisioned LUN on the array when a virtual disk is deleted.
• Swap to SSD. vSphere 5.0 provides new forms of SSD handling and optimization. The VMkernel automatically recognizes and tags SSD devices that are local to ESXi or are on the network. In addition, the VMkernel scheduler is modified to allow ESXi swap to extend to local or network SSD devices, which enables memory overcommitment and minimizes performance impact.
• 2TB+ LUN support. vSphere 5.0 provides support for 2TB+ VMFS datastores.
• Storage vMotion snapshot support. Allows Storage vMotion of a virtual machine in snapshot mode with associated snapshots. You can better manage storage capacity and performance by leveraging flexibility of migrating a virtual machine along with its snapshots to a different datastore.
• Enhanced Network I/O Control. vSphere 5.0 builds on network I/O control to allow user-defined network resource pools, enabling multi-tenancy deployment, and to bridge virtual and physical infrastructure QoS with per resource pool 802.1 tagging.
• vNetwork Distributed Switch Improvements. vSphere 5.0 provides improved visibility into virtual machine traffic through Netflow and enhances monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities through SPAN and LLDP.
• ESXi Firewall. The ESXi 5.0 management interface is protected by a service-oriented and stateless firewall, which you can configure using the vSphere Client or at the command line with esxcli interfaces. A new firewall engine eliminates the use of iptables and rule sets define port rules for each service. For remote hosts, you can specify the IP addresses or range of IP addresses that are allowed to access each service.
• Next-generation browser-based vSphere Client. A browser-based, fully-extensible, platform-independent implementation of the vSphere Client based on Adobe Flex. The vSphere 5.0 release includes both the new browser-based client and the Windows-based client available in prior releases. In this release, the browser-based client includes a subset of the functionality available in the Windows-based client, primarily related to inventory display and virtual machine deployment and configuration.
• vCenter Server Appliance. A vCenter Server implementation running on a pre-configured Linux-based virtual appliance. This appliance significantly reduces the time required to deploy vCenter Server and associated services and provides a low-cost alternative to the traditional Windows-based vCenter Server.
• Inventory Extensibility. VMware customers and partners can extend vCenter Server in multiple ways, including the inventory, graphical user interface, and agents. vCenter Server includes a manager to monitor the extensions. By deploying extensions created by VMware partners, you can use vCenter Server as a unified console to manage your virtualized datacenter.
• Solution Installation and Management. The vCenter Solutions Manager provides a consistent interface to configure and monitor vCenter-integrated solutions developed by VMware and third parties. It provides a simpler installation, configuration, and monitoring interface for managing solutions. Using the new vSphere ESX Agent Manager, you can deploy, update, and monitor vSphere agents on ESXi hosts. vSphere agents inter-operate efficiently with other vSphere features such as maintenance mode and distributed power management.
• Enhanced logging support. vSphere 5.0 adds several enhancements to system message logging. All log messages are now generated by syslog, and messages can now be logged on either local and/or one or more remote log servers. A given server can log messages from more than one host. Log messages can be remotely logged using either the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or TCP connections. The vSphere syslog listener is available as an optional plug-in to vCenter on Windows; in the vCenter Virtual Appliance (VCVA), logging is accomplished using the native syslog-ng facility. With vSphere 5.0, log messages from different sources can be configured to go into different logs for more convenience. Configuration of message logging can also be accomplished using ESXCLI in addition to the vSphere client.
• Fault Domain Manager — VMware High Availability has been transformed into a cloud-optimized availability platform. With Fault Domain Manager, VMware HA is more reliable in operation, more scalable in its ability to protect virtual machines, and can provide better uptime than before. All hosts in the cluster can now be primary nodes while the cluster also uses shared storage as a channel for host heartbeat detection. This enables VMware HA to react accurately and efficiently to host failures, allowing customers to grow their vSphere cluster.

Networking

• Enhanced Network I/O Control. vSphere 5.0 builds on network I/O control to allow user-defined network resource pools, enabling multi-tenancy deployment, and to bridge virtual and physical infrastructure QoS with per resource pool 802.1 tagging.
• vNetwork Distributed Switch Improvements. vSphere 5.0 provides improved visibility into virtual machine traffic through Netflow and enhances monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities through SPAN and LLDP.
• ESXi Firewall. The ESXi 5.0 management interface is protected by a service-oriented and stateless firewall, which you can configure using the vSphere Client or at the command line with esxcli interfaces. A new firewall engine eliminates the use of iptables and rule sets define port rules for each service. For remote hosts, you can specify the IP addresses or range of IP addresses that are allowed to access each service.

VMware vCenter Server

• Next-generation browser-based vSphere Client. A browser-based, fully-extensible, platform-independent implementation of the vSphere Client based on Adobe Flex. The vSphere 5.0 release includes both the new browser-based client and the Windows-based client available in prior releases. In this release, the browser-based client includes a subset of the functionality available in the Windows-based client, primarily related to inventory display and virtual machine deployment and configuration.
• vCenter Server Appliance. A vCenter Server implementation running on a pre-configured Linux-based virtual appliance. This appliance significantly reduces the time required to deploy vCenter Server and associated services and provides a low-cost alternative to the traditional Windows-based vCenter Server.
• Inventory Extensibility. VMware customers and partners can extend vCenter Server in multiple ways, including the inventory, graphical user interface, and agents. vCenter Server includes a manager to monitor the extensions. By deploying extensions created by VMware partners, you can use vCenter Server as a unified console to manage your virtualized datacenter.
• Solution Installation and Management. The vCenter Solutions Manager provides a consistent interface to configure and monitor vCenter-integrated solutions developed by VMware and third parties. It provides a simpler installation, configuration, and monitoring interface for managing solutions. Using the new vSphere ESX Agent Manager, you can deploy, update, and monitor vSphere agents on ESXi hosts. vSphere agents inter-operate efficiently with other vSphere features such as maintenance mode and distributed power management.
• Enhanced logging support. vSphere 5.0 adds several enhancements to system message logging. All log messages are now generated by syslog, and messages can now be logged on either local and/or one or more remote log servers. A given server can log messages from more than one host. Log messages can be remotely logged using either the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or TCP connections. The vSphere syslog listener is available as an optional plug-in to vCenter on Windows; in the vCenter Virtual Appliance (VCVA), logging is accomplished using the native syslog-ng facility. With vSphere 5.0, log messages from different sources can be configured to go into different logs for more convenience. Configuration of message logging can also be accomplished using ESXCLI in addition to the vSphere client.

Availability

• Fault Domain Manager — VMware High Availability has been transformed into a cloud-optimized availability platform. With Fault Domain Manager, VMware HA is more reliable in operation, more scalable in its ability to protect virtual machines, and can provide better uptime than before. All hosts in the cluster can now be primary nodes while the cluster also uses shared storage as a channel for host heartbeat detection. This enables VMware HA to react accurately and efficiently to host failures, allowing customers to grow their vSphere cluster.

 

read more

Very proud to be name a VMware vExpert for 2011

Posted by Brian on Jul 1, 2011 in VMware | 0 comments

It is a great honor to announce that I have been name a vExpert for 2011 by VMware. It was in the middle of the night last night that the email arrived in my box and when reading email this morning I received the great news.

This is a huge honor to me to be recognized by my peers and VMware for helping to raise awareness about VMware. I will continue to try and raise the bar going forward. I am working on a few projects privately of which one will arrive in book form sometime this year on a yet to be released product.

I would like to congratulate all the fellow vExperts for 2011 on their hard work. And most of all I would like to say that the community and social media teams over at VMware are the best in any industry!!!! These people are fronted by John Troyer and their access to us is unmatched by any company that I’ve worked with and willing to get you the answers that cannot be found. They create great events and access to products and details about upcoming releases is second to none.

 

read more