Virtualization Tips » vSphere

Why the upcoming vCenter Operations Management Suite has me excited

Brian — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 13:21:48 +0000

I would like to start off by saying that it’s nice to see VMware starting to bundle up some of their offerings into more complete packages. Many of these tools were acquired recently and it takes time to integrate them with their own applications. I have not looked recently to see if there is any price advantage to buying the bundle versus the apps separately. The main thing is that they continue to add functionality by tightly integrating the apps to work together.

The new vCenter Operations Management Suite has 4 versions available for the package, you can view the table here to compare versions. The highest version available is the Enterprise Plus, it looks like maybe VMware is starting to standardize on their version naming to match what vSphere has been using for years. This version offers the performance monitoring of vCOPs, Infrastructure Navigator, Chargeback manager and Configuration Manager. Until recently you would normally have to purchase these all separately and the cost was per VM based and could be pretty expensive for large environments.

One of the features that has me most excited was the integration between configuration manager and vCOPs. I saw a demo and cannot find it again right now. It showed that when viewing a host for example that is experiencing a performance issue you can correlate the change in performance with any configuration changes that took place at the same time the issue started. So if another team member or maybe yourself was updating a value on network cards and it did not produce any noticeable errors during the change. But vCOPs was tracking a change in performance the new suite will help brings these 2 separate tracks of information together to help fix issues and find root causes faster. Once I can find the screen shot again I will try to remember to update this post with it.

About Brian

Brian is a Technical Architect for a VMware partner and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and is helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. This blog Virtualize Tips was started to document and remember things that I come across while working with tech.

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VMware needs to integrate Orchestrator into vCloud Director more to improve Cloud automation

Brian — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 13:04:59 +0000

In working on several Cloud related projects one of the items that sticks out to me is the need for deeper automation within the vCloud Director product. I understand this is still just version 1.5, but with how hard VMware is pushing the “Your Cloud” journey. I think that some parts are just not ready for what some companies need to do in the way of automation.

If self-service is suppose to be such a big part of Cloud, then the need for automation is going to play a big part. Not everything can be accomplished from creating templates and using customization to change the identity of the new VM. In server virtualization this worked great and saved time for most IT shops. But there were still manual processes that some shops needed to do. This breaks the idea of self-service IT, if a user still relies on someone to execute a manual process to have a VM or application provisioned from vCloud.

I guess what this mostly deals with is private cloud. Many IT shops are trying to automate the creation of as many servers and platforms as possible, to reduce their work load in provisioning new servers. But there are still some manual processes that need to take place and I think that being able to tie vCenter Orchestrator more tightly with vCloud Director could go a long way in help this issue.

Other cloud software companies such as DynamicOps are already doing this type of thing. By making the workflow or automation part of their offerings built into the same admin console. This allows for tight integration and opens up the options for what you are allowed to automate.

If you listen to rumors and in dark alleys you might hear that this type of integration is coming from VMware in a future release. Nobody knows if it will be the next release or even when that will happen.

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HP updates CIM drives with more visability

Brian — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 13:37:50 +0000

Since vSphere 4 came along VMware has been working with CIM (Computer Information Model) drivers to try and present up details about the underling hardware that vSphere is running on. Initially this was things like health of CPU, Memory and errors like a failed fan and such. But something that I always thought was missing is visibility into locally configured RAID volumes.

For example if you are running ESX(i) on a mirrored pair of local drives, if you are a shop that does not have very good hardware monitoring you might have no idea of the health of this mirror that vSphere is running on. So this becomes even more important with more shops experimenting with running certain workloads on local disk. With VMware and storage companies creating Virtual Storage Appliances that can run on these local disks and still provide the benefits of shared storage, this becomes a must to understand what is happening in your local disks environment.

With the latest batch of CIM drivers from HP they are now exposing some of these details. You can now see the drive configurations and status. The image below shows that a drive is rebuilding in the RAID config. This should be a feature that many HP shops will be happy to see. If you have noticed any other good features from this update leave a note in the comments for others.

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Running vSphere 4.0 ESXi embedded Hypervisor on IBM x3690 servers

Brian — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 18:50:55 +0000

I’ve been working with a client lately on a datacenter move and they have selected IBM x3690 servers. The 3690′s will be the ESXi hosts for the new site and are running ESXi embedded. I have not had the opportunity to work with many different clients that choose the embedded route, so it was cool to see how IBM setup the servers.

The servers came with ESXi 4.0 installed on a USB stick from the factory and installed in one of the two internal USB ports that the server offers. Upon turning on the servers some of them booted right to VMware and some did not. After some further looking into the boot order in the BIOS I noticed that the Embedded Hypervisor option was not added to the boot order on a couple of the servers. A quick add and they were running just like the rest, guess someone at the factory missed that one.

The servers took a very long time to post and boot up, part of this was due to the 128 GB of RAM installed. We turned off some of the non-essentials and modified the boot order to go right to ESXi and cut the post time down some. You can see from the image below it’s just another x-series server.

I snapped the image below with the cover over showing off all the sticks of memory installed.

The last image below is a close up to the two USB ports that are internal to the server. The lower one as the USB stick from the factory with ESXi embedded on it.

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Installing network card drivers in VMware ESXi after install with vihostupdate

Brian — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 18:14:04 +0000

This is not something that I’ve had to do very often. But on a recent customer engagement I was working with the client on setting up some new hosts that were recently purchased. These hosts were purchased with Embedded ESXi on them and additional PCI NICs were added to the config. The additional NICs did not have drivers available in the base ESXi build. Shortly after bringing the first host online we noticed that only the onboard NICs showed up in the list.

A quick search on Google for the Intel part number for the NIC lead me to the family name for the adapter. Then a search over at VMware lead me to the download page for VMware that provided the .ISO file to load the drivers into ESXi for the family of adapters. The process took only a few minutes and since this is something that does not come up that often I thought a short write up might help someone.

There are a few ways that this could be done, since we happened to be running ESXi the options were to use the vMA or vCLI. Since this was a new install and a vMA was not setup yet I just quickly tossed vCLI on a server. Then a quick download of the driver .ISO from VMware and unzip the package into a folder on the server with vCLI installed on it. If you wanted to use the vMA you could mount the .ISO to the virtual CD-ROM of the VM and issue the command against it.

Since I was using vCLI all I needed to do was point the command to a local folder. Here is a sample of the command used to perform the patch.

vihostupdate –server HOSTNAME –install –bundle c:\folder\name_of_file.zip

To run this command your host must be in Maintenance mode and it will then take just a couple of minutes to execute. After the update completes a reboot of the host is needed and then the cards should be available for use.

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VMware Forum 2011 dates and locations announced

Brian — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 18:42:38 +0000

VMware Forum 2011 is a free, interactive, full-day event where you will learn about accelerating IT, so that your business can respond more effectively to markets, competitors and customers. Hear VMware, industry analysts and IT professionals discuss virtualization and how it helps organizations to reduce capital and operating expenses, improve agility, ensure business continuity, strengthen security and go green. You will also hear how to enable “your cloud” to meet your company’s specific business needs, while dramatically lowering costs and enabling a flexible, agile IT service delivery model. Engage with speakers from companies of all sizes as they share best practices for preserving existing investments as they move to virtualization and develop a cohesive, secure and compliant cloud strategy in three core areas: infrastructure, applications and end-user computing.

VMware Forum 2011 Cities

Washington, DC – May 3
New York – May 11
Anaheim – May 19
Atlanta – June 2
Houston – June 8
Chicago – June 15
Toronto – June 23
Minneapolis – July 21

Check out this LINK to register and get further details.

Sample of the Agenda for the day.

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How to balance VMware ESX hosts paths on HP EVA arrays

mike — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 03:30:27 +0000

Here at 64k, in our smaller cube near the vending machines, we storage-oriented folks like to mull over ideas big and small, 4k at a time. We also deal in a great number of puns, so consider yourself warned. Today, in our maiden voyage, I’d like to talk about some of my experience with HP’s line of EVA storage arrays. As many of our readers know, the EVA line is a middle tier offering from HP. Though likely to be usurped in the near future by 3PAR’s goodies, I am not here to begin that debate. Rather, let us delve into a few common gotcha’s that can be overlooked in environments where EVAs live.

ONE]

The tight rope act begins with the storage array, our bright and shiny EVA. At a fundamental level, an EVA is comprised of two controllers. The operating environment of the EVA is such that it can, in a semi-intelligent fashion, manage vdisk ownership between the two controllers itself. By default, vdisks are set to no preference for a failover/mode setting at the time of creation. This means the EVA will decide which controllers get which vdisks when it (the EVA itself) boots. Every vdisk is assigned to a controller (and only one controller). If the non-owning controller is receiving the IO for a server(s) talking to a vdisk, it will after a period of time change the ownership of the vdisk. This will reduce the load crossing the mirror ports. While the EVA can run in this fashion, it is sub-optimal.

The other side of the tight rope of this balancing act is the hosts. IO can walk many paths from host to array, some optimal and others not. The start of such begins at the host’s adapter. If it is a dual port (or multiple single port) host, then you have all the more paths to choose from. Even in the case of a single port host, you can still cover multiple paths to arrive at the vdisk. The handling of the proper path comes in the form of multipathing software. From HP for Microsoft operating systems, we have Device Specific Module (DSM), which uses MS’s MPIO stack as its basis. HP makes specific DSM’s for each of its line of arrays. Without the MPIO stack, the host will see a drive presented once for each host port. In an 8×00 series array, that is 8! So clearly the MPIO software and HP’s DSM is needed for correct operation. The default install does not enable Adaptive Load Balance (ALB). This hampers read operations by not passing through the correct controller for a vdisk. Note that non-MS based operating systems (like VMware) have their own multipathing stacks. In the case of VMware ESX(i) 3.x, the options are fixed and mru. In the case of vSphere, we get round robin added to the mix. In pre-vSphere environments, the fixed path does not by default balance load across the host ports. You can end up with all your VM traffic running over one host port! Yikes!

TWO]

Now, to balance things out, let me start with the array. A good habit to get into involves understanding your environment from an IO perspective. You need to understand the profile, or workload, of your IO, so that you can balance between the controllers (among other things!). Make sure to capture your performance data using evaperf (or other tools) to allow you the view of your controller’s current load. As you add new vdisks, you can balance them by setting the failover/mode setting to the controller with failover + failback. This will allow the balancing to remain should you lose and regain a controller. Further, this specifies the controller for the vdisk in terms of mastership. This helps from the host side as the controller it needs to talk through is clearly defined. One thing to keep in mind also is the need to accept all load on one controller should failure occur. This should be something you are aware of via your performance data. A good rule of thumb is a controller should be no more than 30% ideally (at least in my experience). And as always, have the latest Command View and XCS code. One other thing to check for balance is to make sure the host ports are set to their top speed (4GB, except the very old EVA models) as well as properly balanced on the fabric (equal ports on both sides). One customer I came across had all ports from controller A on fabric A and all ports of controller B on fabric B! Definitely a big problem there!

For the host side, there is a bit more that can be done. There is some work to be done on the array as well, which I will address. The hosts should have the latest firmware, drivers, and software for their HBAs. Additionally, make sure you have the latest HP DSM software. Within the DSM software, you will want to enable Automatic Load Balancing. As I stated before, this is not enabled by default. To enable, just right click on each LUN (listed by WWN) that is listed and choose Enable ALB.

So, as a quick explanation: write requests from hosts will hit the controller that owns the vdisk in question, but that write will propagate over the mirror link into both controllers’ cache. This is in case a controller is lost, the write can still be committed. Read requests will hit whichever controller, and if it is the wrong controller, will have to travel over the mirror ports to the correct controller. This is sub-optimal, but is alleviated by enabling ALB. ALB communicates with the array and will always communicate its read requests through the owning controller. Very handy!

Now, from a VMware standpoint, let’s talk about fixed and then round robin (two most common multipathing situations found today). For Fixed, you will need to balance IO to your datastores over the host ports of the controllers. Also keep in mind which controller you selected at the array. As an example, if I have 8 datastores of average IO (no virtualized heavy apps) then I would want 4 datastores on each controller. To further balance, I would have each datastore talking over one of the host ports for each of the controllers (4 ports per controller x 2 controllers). The IO is evenly balanced. To set this, simply go into each datastore properties (via the VI Client) and pick the WWN for the corresponding host port). Under heavy IO circumstances, you may not be able to move your traffic to a different host port. Just try again at a later date. When it comes to round robin, the IO works a bit differently. Round Robin will send IO to each host port in turn after a certain amount of IOPS. In the HP best practices for vSphere on the EVA, it states to change this value to 1 (and thus pushing even IOPS over every host port visible). There was a bug which would, after a reboot of the ESX(i) host, reset this to a very high number. I have found in my experience that leaving it as-is seems to work fairly well. I would guess there is good reason that HP came up with that figure, and so at this point, with vSphere 4.1, I would suspect you could set this without issue.

Summary

Presented here are some of the findings I have come across in working with different customers. I figure that having these kinds of storage discussions can help to make for a very engaging conversation. Let me know what you think (and if I make any errors, which being human, am prone to!

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An interview with Kendrick Coleman about his VMware vSphere home lab

Brian — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 02:15:27 +0000

These days it’s almost a necessity that if you want to continue to increase your technical skills you will need to build a home lab. With a lab at home you can learn new technology that you might not get the chance to work with at the office. In the safety of your Lab you can break things and fix them without any worries.

I was able to sit down and talk with Kendrick Coleman this month about his newly created home lab. I thought that Kendrick would be a great first victim for this column, since he just built his lab. Some of the choices that he picked for his equipment intrigued me and I wanted to learn more. In case you don’t know Kendrick he is a vArchitect for VCE and works with Service Providers in his role evangelizing the benefits of the VCE stack. I hope to find other interesting home lab stories for upcoming issues.

Why did you create your home lab?

To keep myself up to date with all things related to vSphere. Since joining VCE as a vArchitect my role is more of a Pre-Sales function. I don’t have that daily access to servers in a datacenter to test out features.

How long did it take you to assemble?

I really took about a month to do research on the parts that I purchased for the lab. I spoke with people online and read a lot of blogs that others wrote on their labs. I needed to decide if I was going to go with one really large server or two servers with shared storage model.

What do you want to test in the lab?

I’ve been working with the Uber Celerra VSA that Nick created and the Cisco UCS emulator. I will also be checking out the Uber UIM VM that Nick setup. A lot of my time at VCE will be centered around architecting VDI and vCloud Director solutions. So I will be working with these products to test out different solutions that will help me in my designs.

What type of equipment is on your wish list for future lab upgrades?

The one thing that I would really like to upgrade in the future would be to get another NAS device and add SSD’s into it so that I could test the difference in performance.

How often have you been using the lab?

I’ve been using it a ton lately but I also just finished building it. So my wife has already been complaining about my time spent with the lab.

Do you keep it running all of the time?

Yes it’s just a few feet from me as we are speaking and I can barely hear it. That was my goal by looking for products that are green. By selecting these parts I was able to keep the power consumption low and also build a lab that is very quiet. I built the shuttle systems without hard drives or optical drives this kept the cost down and I can barely hear them running.

Will you be running anything other than VMware products in the lab?

I only plan on running things that related to what I’m doing as a vArchitect. So things like a Nexus 1000V virtual switch, VMware products and EMC / Cisco offerings that tie in with VCE. I don’t think that I’ll be running anything else. I don’t plan on becoming an SQL DBA or a Microsoft guru or anything like that.

What is the best thing that you have learned so far?

The best thing so far was to take your time and make sure that you do your research on the products that you buy. You will want to make sure that the motherboard and parts will work with vSphere. I highly recommend that you choose a network card that is on the VMware HCL, while I was able to do some driver injection to get the onboard Nic to work I still have some issues with it.

You choose to run ESXi on both servers why?

I went with ESXi on both because it allowed me to go diskless on both servers and boot from USB sticks.

What method are you using to connect to the shared storage?

Right now I am using both iSCSI and NFS. This allows me to play with both methods and I recently setup CHAP authentication for the iSCSI. That’s something that I never did in the past. During this I encountered an error with the iSCSI and was able to take the time and correct it rather than just starting over.

Kendrick also wrote up an extensive post on his blog that talks about some of the technical setup steps that he went through. It’s a great read and I suggest you give it a look also at this link.

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My list of New Years Virtual Resolutions

Brian — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 17:24:28 +0000

I thought instead of putting together a wrap up post for 2010 I would write up a list of New Years Resolutions that are on the minds of many in the Virtualization community. Many of these are created to get people to smile but also are realities in the life that we live. So enjoy the list and I thank everyone that read and visited us in 2010. Also if you have any more ideas to add to the list drop us a comment.

Be nicer to my storage administrator – He may be grumpy, frown alot, and have an affinity for spreadsheets, but he is in charge of the blocks. So let’s throw out a nice comment or two, give him a pat on the back, and maybe share a bacon-enthused recipe. We are on the same team after all!
Automate more tasks using Orchestrator – Those tasks may be discordant now what with all the manual labor (and who likes labor?!). It’s time for some syncopation! Plus this will be a great way to dig more into an underrated product piece of vSphere!
Develop a better method for documentation – Right now, my documentation is scattered amongst analog (notebooks) and digital (intarwebs, onenote, google docs, dropbox) sources. It’s time to cull that together to be more organized, up to date, and concise.
Blog more! – While blogging isn’t known for it’s ability to have the ladies come a callin’, it is a great way to help out the community. After all, I have taken some much from the community in terms of helpful knowledge, it’s time I gave back more than I do now!
Run that VMware health script each day – Sure you’ve been meaning to schedule it to be delivered to your inbox each morning so you can attack potential issues before they ruin your day.
Get out and attend your local VMUG in 2011 – This is one I would like to see more people honor this coming year. The VMUG meetings are a great resource to network with others in your field.
Learn something new each day – Could be as little as a new command for CLI or how to script a ESXi install.
Work more in the home lab – This goes along with the previous entry about learning new things. If you have not yet setup a home lab I would highly recommend that you work on creating one.

So thanks again to everyone that I met in 2010 and read the blog and best of luck in 2011.

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Top 10 Christmas wish list for VMware admins

Brian — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 17:15:08 +0000

With the holiday season upon us again I was inspired to write up this wish list of items most VMware nuts would like under the tree this year. Sure some of these are pretty crazy but you gotta have dreams, and some of the other ones could happen. I through this together pretty fast so if you have some other suggestions leave a comment.

1. VMware mgmt application for iPad

2. a Vblock for your home lab

3. VMware vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS Technical deepdive book by Duncan and Frank

4.VMworld 2010 labs be made available all year round

5. Booked travel plans for VMworld 2011 ( Vegas baby! )

6. To have Chad Sakac play Santa at your December VMUG meeting

7. An SSD and more memory for your laptop

8. To take the VMware Express Truck on a road trip

9. Collection of VMUG and VMworld Shirts

10. Gift certificate to VMware training class of your choice

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