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EA2631 Virtualizing Exchange 2007 session recap

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

Deja vu.  Well, almost.  I sat in on a simliar session last year and I wondered what has now changed with vSphere being available and what new expectations could be had for virtualizing Exchange and I found answers.  First of all, as the speaker put it – VMware has eaten their own dogfood and virtualized Exchange 2007 for their internal consumption.  With approximately 55,000 mailboxes, that is an impressive feat itself.

Beyond internal consumption, all data points to Exchange evolving into a better workload to run within virtualization.  Much of that can probably be attributed to Microsoft’s own virtualization technology, but Exchange on ESX benefits just the same.  Performance gains out of ESX 4 make for a good combination with the improved I/O for Exchange 2007.   Initial data for Exchange 2010 continues the trend of making Exchange a better workload in general and making it more appropriate to virtualize.

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DatacenterStorageVirtualization

BC2142 VMware Data Recovery session recap

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

VMware Data Recovery is a new feature introduced with vSphere 4 which attempts to be a full-featured backup solution for the ESX lineup.  There are some limitations to the software that limit it more towards small to medium business – not really enterprise customers, however, I’d consider my company a small enterprise user and we plan on implementing the technology when we upgrade to vSphere soon.

Data Recovery, like VCB, is an agentless backup technology used to grab either full VM image or file level backups of virtual machines in ESX.  Data Recovery also includes de-duplication technology and backup to disk, where VCB is just a method of obtaining the thin VMDK file to be backed up by a third party solution.  Data Recovery also makes use of innovation in the virtual hardware version 7 which allows for block level change tracking.  Although, Data Recovery can apparently (not 100% sure) backup earlier versions of virtual hardware, it won’t be nearly as fast because they lack the block level changes.

Data Recovery deploys in two parts – a virtual appliance and a plug-in for vSphere client.  The virtual appliance is imported from OVF format and with some basic configuration is ready to begin backups.  An IP must be configured and a VMDK must be added to the virtual appliance as a target for the de-duplicated data.  You may have two destination storage locations of up to 1TB each for a total of 2TB per virtual appliance.

Creating jobs for back are pretty simple.  A nice feature for this is that you may choose folders, hosts or clusters as part of backup jobs – meaning that any new VM’s included in that folder will automatically be backed up in addition to the existing VM’s.  This is a nice function for future-proofing your backup strategy.

Backup jobs are scheduled with a backup window to work and there can be up to 8 jobs at a time running, but the virtual appliance does all the scheduling and deciding of when to run the backups.  After an initial backup is run with all data, incremental backups are run from that point on – grabbing on change blocks.  Retention policies are also set for your backup stores and then enforced to keep a number of versions for your backups so that you can go back to a point in time backup.

Destination storage may be unmounted and exported, backed up or otherwise saved, though this is a manual process.

As another note, this is only available on vSphere hosts and cannot backup ESX 3.5 or vCenter 2.5 infrastructures.

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DatacenterStorageVirtualization

TA3105 Long Distance VMotion session recap

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

Long Distance VMotion is by far the best session I’ve attended and the most exciting news for me of the VMworld week this far.  The session was a presentation of a research project performed by VMware, EMC and Cisco.  The session presented four options for performing a long distance VMotion using stock vSphere and existing technologies, well, almost.  Three of the four include technologies currently available.

Why would you want to do a long distance VMotion?  In my case, we have two data-centers – geographically close to one another.  We currently stretch our cluster between the two locations and it allows us to float VM’s using VMotion between the two.  The problem is that if we lose our primary datacenter, all storage is presented from here.  Long Distance VMotion is the notion of having two separate clusters, one in each datacenter, and being able to VMotion between them.

What was really news to me from this session (I’ll get to what was presented) was that we can present the same data stores to two different clusters and have them recognized on both clusters.  I am pretty sure I tried this way back in the 3.0 days and it failed to work.  This must have been added in 3.5 or 4.0 – I have not tried in recent years.

So, what was presented?  The three companies worked together to identify and trial a solution to allow for long distance VMotion.  At this point, there is a very narrow set of criteria must be satisified to be support and for this to occur.  Much of the restriction comes on the storage side, but network also presents some problems.  Apparently, everything you need in vSphere is there, if you separate each datacenter into its own set of hosts.

Requirements

  • Distance between datacenters must be less than 200 km
  • A single instance of vCenter to control both clusters
  • Each site must be configured in it’s own cluster – the cluster cannot be stretched
  • Dedicated gigabit ethernet network
  • A single VMware Distributed Switch stretched across both clusters (ok, didn’t know we could that either)
  • Same IP subnet configured on both clusters for the VM to run
  • Cisco DCI (Datacenter Interconnect) type technology – if you have something similiar by another vendor, you’ll be supported – this means that you should have a core network that can handle routing traffic to either location for the IP – the VM networks must be stretched between datacenters
  • Datacenter storage should be R/W on both sides
  • VMFS Storage is presented to both clusters – VM’s in each datacenter are run from the local storage LUNs.
  • Must have less than 5 ms latency and at least 622 mbps bandwidth (OC12)
  • No FT across sites!

Surprisingly, we have most of this configured in our environment and its been status-quo for us for several years.  The biggest difference between our environment and this spec configuration is that we run a stretched cluster to achieve this.  Our datacenters are very close to one another and we only present storage from our primary datacenter so that we don’t have a split-brain scenario.  But, it does give me new things to think about and talk about with co-workers.  We currently don’t run two clusters or SRM because we like the flexibility to VMotions between datacenters – with that now a possiblity, we may have something new to investigate…

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Virtualization

VM4061 Generate reports from vCenter Database session recap

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

Session had a pretty simple purpose – expose us to how you can leverage SQL Server Reporting Services (a free Microsoft product accompanying Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and 2008) to produce reports for information contained in the vCenter Database.  Its a concept I had not thought of, but made perfect sense when I saw the session listed.

The session went through some of the canned reports that VMware has produced that leverage both the vCenter Database Schema and vCenter Database Views that VMware has produced.  The database views are a supported and document method to access this information and the schema will provide you access to all information, but is unsupported and may change from release to release as changes to the underlying schema occur.  In other words, if you code your report against the schema – your reports may break when you update vCenter and its database.  Database view documentation can be found at http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/759.

Primarily, VMware has released reports which meet some of the basic needs customers were asking for – such as Inventory and Configuration reports, Auditing reports (for accounts and VMotions for instance) and Utilization reports for hosts, vm’s, datastores and clusters.

I realize now that I didn’t write down the URL of where to get these canned reports so that I can deploy them when I return home, so I will have to search for that.  I will post an update once I find it.

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ComputeDatacenterStorageVirtualization

HP announces new offerings for VMware

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

Two of the announcements not getting much press from the floor of VMworld this week were announced during Paul Martiz keynote on day 1 by HP.  HTC is primarily an HP shop, so it looks like an area of interest for me and one that might be getting neglected elsewhere, so here goes some news coverage.

HP is busy working on new technology to integrate vCenter and the HP hardware giving administrators greater visiblity into the hardware state and ease of management from a central pane of glass. This software is part of the Insight Control suite of products which HP already produces.  The new plug-in will sit on a Virtual Center client and will talk directly to the ILO, OA, and other agents on HP hardware to report back things like temperature, processor state, memory errors, etc. into the vCenter console.  HP reps also told me that the software goes bidirectional and can send information from vCenter over into HP SIM.

Power control also gets integrated as we continue to see HP work on power management in its rack mount and blade enclosures.  Power and heat were major issues addressed with the C7000 chassis and the functionality is being extended into the view from vCenter.  Today, if you enabled VMware Distributed Power Management (DPM) and it shuts down a host because the virtual machines are idle, HP SIM sees this as an error state and begins to alert administrators due to a failure of a host.  In the future, the two-way communication will allow for HP SIM to be smart enough to recognize that the host is offline due to DPM and not to a critical error.  We’ll gain insight (sorry, had to)  into vCenter from the HP tools.

HP also touted its new VDI hardware package which includes Proliant server along with a Lefthand SAN solution to provide for a very flexible, single-rack solution for deploying VDI.  The press release touts it as the first sub-$1000 per seat solution for deploying VDI.

For those who haven’t heard of HP’s Lefthand technology – Lefthand Networks was a start-up SAN provider who used commodity hardware to create iSCSI SANs with advanced snapshotting and replication features.  HP acquired this company last year and is steadily working to bring their iSCSI solution into their Storageworks lineup.  This solution seemed to use a purpose built Lefthand solution with what appeared to be a 3 to 5 U enclosure with two or three sliding shelves housing multiple mini SAS drives to accommodate terrabytes of data.  The disk enclosure shown during the presentation looked more like HP’s SFS enclosures than the Lefthand SAN offerings – the P4000, etc. – but we were told it was Lefthand powered.

For more information, see the original press release: http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2009/090901a.html

For information about the Insight Control for VMware, see: http://h18013.www1.hp.com/products/servers/management/integration.html

Required Disclosure:
The opinions expressed here are strictly personal opinions authored by Philip Sellers, an employee of HTC (Horry Telephone Cooperative, Inc.) and/or its subsidiaries.  Any reference to, discussion of, or content regarding HTC and/or its subsidiaries has not been reviewed, approved, or authorized by HTC and/or its subsidiaries before such content is posted and does not represent HTC and/or its subsidiaries or its views and opinions in any way.

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Virtualization

Lab Day at VMworld 2009

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

Day 0 for VMworld was a bit of a bust for me.  I had two labs scheduled for the day – one which dealt with the upgrade from VI3 to vSphere 4 and the second with troubleshooting VMware View deployments.  Unfortunately, the first lab was plauged by technical issues and the lab was never able to get off the ground.   But the morning wasn’t a complete bust.  I actually ended up in line with a consultant I’d previously worked with from one of our partners, Logicalis, for the second lab.  So, he and I were able to talk about different things in the virtualization space.

The second lab was pretty good – still plauged with a few technical difficulties.  This lab largely worked, albeit slowly, because all of the lab environment was running from a single LUN (not a great idea). The lecture portion of this lab was quite good, so here a few notes:

  • VMware View contains the ability to prevent certain classes or hardware ID’s of USB devices from being able to attach to virtual desktops
  • We were exposed to a tool called USBlyzer which allows you to get the hardware, vendor ID and other needed information for masking away these devices from the View desktops
  • The USB limiting functionality is coordinated by registry entries and by the View tools loaded in the virtual desktop.
  • There are command line tools which allow for mapping default VM mappings for users and the ability to point user data disks back to the correct VMDK if you have to purge or redeploy a virtual desktop
  • We discussed the problems with User Data Disks and the mistaken notion that these were somehow roaming profiles for users
  • We talked about basic troubleshooting which often relies on DNS resolution – when in doubt, check DNS, if all else is working, check DNS again.
  • We talked about some of the things during a View deployment that could come into play – such as vCenter pointing to one Domain Controller and the View Desktops pointing to another (thanks to configuration in AD Sites and Services).  Because replication takes 15 minutes to occur, by default, in this configuration, View Desktops will try and join the domain, but computer accounts won’t exist.
  • Dynamic DNS is almost an necessity and even in environments where BIND or other DNS is used, most people setup a Windows DNS instance for Dynamic registration if only for the  virtual desktops – then including a forwarder to the primary BIND DNS or other.
  • And in case I didn’t say it already (I know I did, but here goes) – Problems with View deployments are almost always DNS.
  • We were exposed to two command lines:
  • vdmadmin – used to map users to default virtual desktops – vdmadmin -D -d desktop-pool -m machine -u domain\userid – can also be used to list user information, show entitlement or policies
  • sviconfig – used to backup or restore databases for View Composer – also used to create a View Composer database
  • See http://www.vmware.com/pdf/viewmanager_cl_tool.pdf for more information.

The afternoon was a partner session, which although I could have attended (nice little “Partner” tag on my credentials), but I chose not to.  Last year, the partner session was mostly how to sell and sales related marketing, but was interesting only because of the early access to the vSphere release information.   From other coverage online, the main announcements centered around cloud initiatives, which we heard about the following morning during the first general keynote.

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CloudVirtualization

VMworld 2009 First Day keynote notes

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

Notes and things of interest from first day keynote:

  • 12,448 attendees at this year’s VMworld – down from last year in Las Vegas
  • Tod Nielson, VMware COO, challenged partners last year to try and recruit any of the 40 Fortune 1000 companies not using VMware to purchase VMware – 10 companies were recurited and those partners were rewarded with free passes to this year’s VMworld – not a bad challenge.  The same offer is extended to partners who can recruit any of the remaining 30 Fortune 1000 companies not using VMware.
  • Paul Maritz, President and CEO, takes the stage – talking about cloud initiatives
  • Martiz talks about how VMware has been driving capital expenditure savings and now also operational expenditure savings.
  • Talks about the growing family of vCenter products, including Chargeback, Capacity IQ, Orchestrator, SRM, ConfigControl, etc.
  • Commitment to small business – showed off the IT in a Box solution targeted at small business.
  • Also targeted it small to medium business – VMware Go announced – service offering for users of the free ESXi product to quickly configure and deploy ESXi for their uses – a way to engage the community which is tapping into free ESX offering.
  • vCloud Express – a service offering from cloud providers (like Terramark, who demo’d) to quickly and easily provision VM’s in the cloud all based on VMware’s vSphere platform.  At rates starting at about 3 cents per hour – or about $40 per month, its a good cost judging from my web hosting days…  and its all protected like any other vSphere cluster.  I’d certainly pay those prices!  I have a friend who runs a hosting company in mind that I may mention this offering to…
  • We also saw a demo of the PC over IP technology that has been developed.  TELUS demo’d and discussed their company all over a PCoIP connection – and it looked flawless.
  • Last, but not least, Martiz addressed the recent acquisition of SpringSource.  As soon as the demo began for this and source code appeared on screen, the flood gates open and people began leaving in mass.
  • SpringSource’s Rod Johnson took the stage for the demo and showed off SpringSource’s customized Eclipse framework which now offers a Deploy to internal cloud, Deploy to external cloud or Deploy to the local – aka the “very private cloud”.
  • The integration to deploy to cloud looked, to me, like Macromedia’s half-baked solutions for deploying code in Dreamweaver – it never really does the best job you could on your own – and probably not what a developer really wants – but good for a novice without a sys admin.
  • Glossed over was SpringSource’s Hyperic offering, though Martiz did remark that he thought this is what monitoring will look like in the future – and I agree.  If only they could do it agentless – somehow leveraging ESX instead of agents – fingers crossed.
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Virtualization

VMworld 2009 coverage notes

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

I decided not to try and join the legions of bloggers who were attempting to cover the conference in real-time.  This year, my family made the trip out with me and so my evenings are filled with family activities as we try to see and as much as possible while we are in San Francisco.  So instead of live updates, I’m trying to digest and then make a few notes of the things that stuck out most form the sessions that I’m attending and the announcements that are made.  The posts over the upcoming days will be what I’d consider the best of the best after the dust settles from the things I’ve participated in.   For many who know me, you know how I loathe 24×7 CNN and MSNBC coverage of stuff, so I’m taking an old-school approach to VMworld 2009…

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Virtualization

Planning to update VCP for vSphere 4

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

Its only been a matter of weeks that I’ve gotten my VCP3.  I did it in anticpation that I’d need it to update my skills and certification for vSphere 4 and today, I found confirmation that I did the right thing.  I found a page on VMware’s site that details the upgrade path for existing VCP’s – both for VCP2’s and VCP3’s.

I had attended both of the VI3 classes and knew that the classes were a pre-requisite for the VCP certification.  And although I’d waited for too long between class and testing, I was still able to pass the exam with a little studying.  But, the same might not be true with vSphere 4 with budget constraints and considerations.  So, if I didn’t want to lose my education investment, I needed by VCP3.

The good news for existing VCP3’s is that VMware is offering the vSphere 4 exam for you until December 31 without the requirement of taking any additional classes.  For anyone who has taken the VI3 classes, you still need to attain the VCP3 first before being able to take the VCP4 test.

VMworld attendees should also note that the test is available at a discount during the conference.

For more information on specifics for your situation, take a look here on VMware’s site.

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AppleVirtualization

WMworld and the week ahead

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

August is quickly drawing to a close and the last day of the month kicks off the first day of VMworld in San Francisco.  The past week has been really busy as I prepare for my trip and try and bring my co-workers up-to-date with what is going on and things that might come up while I’m away.

I’m very excited to be attending VMworld again this year and I’m looking forward to soaking up just as much as possible from the conference.  I plan on blogging about some of the sessions and topics I encounter.  Last year’s conference in Las Vegas was great and I think my company greatly benefited from the information I was able to get and bring back.  We had information months in advance about the then upcoming vSphere version and its capabilities.  For anyone who is seriously invested in ESX, its well worth the money to attend.

One thing we’ve been seriously looking at is virtual host management software — something in addition to Virtual Center and something to alert us of what is going on inside of our ESX hosts.  In a pipe dream, we’d love a product that is also cross platform, since we’ve added XenServer to our mix this year.  We’re looking for software that can do some level of network monitoring and notification about traffic from ESX hosts, that allows us to alert on a wider variety of problems in the ESX environment, but also something to help us answer questions when the arise.

I hope to spend some time in the vendor expo area looking at what solutions are available.  We have seen demos and installed evaluations from several companies, but I think we are down to two options – Hyper9 or vFoglight from Vizioncore.  Those are two very different products, but each has its own strengths.  Ideally, I think both would fit into our environment quite well and both would be useful, but I doubt we get to buy both.  Neither fits that bill, but it sounds like both are moving in that direction in the future.

The week after VMworld, a rumored Apple event may happen.  Unfortunately, the event is scheduled for 9/9/09, after I leave San Fran – darn it.   AppleInsider is rumoring the event will be iPod related – including adding point-and-shoot camera capabilites to the iPod lines.  iTunes 9 is also expected to be announced with some social networking tie-in’s.  Years past, as AppleInsider reports, the event has been held at the Yerba Buena Center – and that is just a couple blocks from the hotel in the city – oh well…

So, its an exciting week for me coming up.  I’m looking forward to the trip and to VMworld.

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