A really quick blog post, VMware have announced some exciting news, that they will soon be offering Labs Online.
Previously to use these labs you had to attend a VMware event of some description, but now they will be available online.
The purpose behind this is to give end users the ability to use and explore the latest VMware products.
For more information see VMware Hands on Labs Online – Beta
I feel really fortunate to be able to go to VMworld 2012 Barcelona, it’s my first time, so looking forward to breaking my VMworld virginity.
I finally put aside some time to compile my draft schedule, I have to say so many amazing sessions I want to see, but as I’m not fault tolerant (yet) I can’t be in two places at once.
The schedule seems quite full, I’m wondering how I’m going to be able to spend anytime with vendors such as Cisco, EMC, HP and Veeam to see what they have going on.
You can see that I’m heavily focused on the design and performance in vSphere, which reflects on my day to day work activities.
I’m looking forward to meeting some great people during VMworld, if you see me come say hi.
With the release of vSphere 5.1, it’s been tough keeping up with all the tweets and information from VMworld 2012 San Francisco.
With the plethora of data, I thought it would be handy to blog about what the key features that will have the biggest impact on my every day life.
Licensing
vRAM – It’s gone, licensing is back to per physical processor.
vSphere Essentials Plus – Now includes vSphere Storage Appliance and vSphere Replication.
vSphere Standard – Now includes vSphere Storage Appliance, vSphere Replication, Fault Tolerance, Storage vMotion and vCentre Operations Manager Advanced.
Beneath The Hood
Monster Virtual Machines
Virtual Machines, can now have the following hardware features:
1TB RAM
64 vCPUs
> 1 Million IOPS per VM
Wonder if I will continue to have those we need a physical SQL server conversation?
This is made possible by Virtual Machine Format 9.
vMotion
vMotion no longer requires shared storage. This has been achieved by combining vMotion and Storage vMotion into a single operation. So when a VM is moved, it moves the memory, processing threads and disk over the network to it’s target.
Now what is really, cool it maintains the same performance levels as the older vMotion with shared storage!
Note, I recommend that you use multiple NIC’s for vMotion as per my post High Availability for vMotion
vSphere Replication
Enables virtual machine data to be replicated over LAN and WAN. Previously to achieve 15 minutes a-synchronous replication you need sub 2 ms latency.
vSphere Replication integrates with Microsoft’s Volume Shadow Copy (VSS) ensuring that applications such as Exchange and SQL will be in a consistent state if DR was implemented.
vSphere Replication can be used for up to 500 virtual machines.
The initial seed can be done offline and taken to the destination to save bandwidth and time.
VMware Tools
No more downtime to upgrade VMware Tools.
vSphere Web Client
This is going to be the tool for administrating vCentre. Some pretty cool features like vCenter Inventory Tagging, which means you can apply meta data to items and then such on them e.g. group applications together for a particular department or vendor.
We now have the ability to customise the web client to give it ‘our look and feel’.
Always getting called away when you are half way through adding a vNIC to a VM, well we can now pause this and it appears in ‘work in progress’ so we never forgot to complete an action.
For the pub quiz fans, you can have 300 concurrent Web Client users.
Link Aggregation Control Protocol Support
Used to ‘bind’ several physical connections together for increased bandwidth and link failure (think Cisco Port Channel Groups), this is now a supported feature in vSphere 5.
Memory Overhead Reduction
Every task undertaken by vSphere has an overhead, whether this is a vCPU or a vNIC, it requires some attached memory. A new feature allows upto 1GB of memory back from a vSphere host which is under pressure.
Latency Sensitivity Setting
vSphere 5.1 makes it easier to support low latency applications (something which I have encountered with Microsoft Dynamics AX). The ability to ‘tweek’ latency for an individual VM is great.
Storage
We now have 16Gb Fiber Channel support and iSCSI Storage Driver has been upgraded. Some very impressive increases in performance.
Thin provisioning has always been an issue unless your array supported T10 UNMAP. With vSphere 5.1 a new virtual disk has been introduced the ‘sparse virtual disk’ AKA SE spare disk. It’s major function is to reclaim previously used space in the guest OS. This feature alone is worth the upgrade.
In the previous post setting up and configuring alarms in vCenter 5 Part 1 we looked at the initial configuration. We are now going to run through some of the default alarms, with some suggested thresholds.
Cannot Connect To Storage why would we want to configure this? Well essentially this is a per host setting. If the host loses connection to the storage then the VM’s will be restarted using HA. Big deal you say, I can see that in vCentre. Well it also manages ‘lost storage path redundancy’ and ‘degraded storage path redundancy’ so if you have an if your ESXi host has multiple connections to it’s storage, you will be notified if one of these is lost.
Datastore Usage On Disk quite an important one. From the presented LUN how much space has been provisioned as a Datastore. I recommend always asking for slightly more than need e.g. if you need 1TB for a Datastore, ask for an extra 25%. Then when the Datastore is provisioned only use 1TB so you have room for expansion quickly and easily if needed. With this in mind, I set the Warning to 90% and Critical to 95% so I have some room to either more VM’s around either by Storage vMotion or Cold Migration.
Host CPU Usage with this alarm, I generally alert at Warning 75% for 15 mins and then Critical for 10 mins. The rational behind this is that I would want to investigate the VM’s CPU utilisation to see if it is a one off event causing the high usage or if we need to look at introducing more processing power into the cluster.
Host Error perhaps the most important one, this is what vCentre relies on to monitor host alarms!
Host Memory Usage similar to CPU usage, I generally set Warning to 90% for 15 mins and Critical for 10 mins. Again I would want to investigate the host memory usage to ensure that we have sufficient resources for a host failure.
Host Memory Status not be confused with ‘Host Memory Usage’ this monitors the physical DIMMS.
Host Process Status again not to be confused with ‘Hot CPU Usage’ this monitor the physical processor hardware.
License Capacity Monitor I like this alarm, it’s great for items such as Site Recovery Manager or Operations Manager. It lets you know if you are trying to protect or manage more VM’s than you are licensed for.
Virtual Machine CPU Usage I use the same alarms settings for ‘Host CPU Usage’ so that if a VM is using more than 75% of it’s CPU capacity for over 15 minutes, I would want to identify if this is a one off or if extra resources are required.
vSphere HA Failover In Progress this resides on the nice to have. If for some reason none of your other alarms work then at least you know that a VM has been restarted by HA.
vSphere HA Virtual Machine Monitoring Error this alarm works in conjunction with Virtual Machine Monitoring. I tend to leave VM Monitoring Only and Medium and then change individual VM’s monitoring to High if required. If you have this set to high for all servers then it can cause alarms when backup software rolls back snapshots depending on how big the VM is.
Hopefully these alarms shouldn’t need any explanation, as they should ALWAYS be enabled.
Host Battery Status
Host Connection And Power State
Host Connection Failure
Host Hardware Fan Status
Host Hardware Power Status
Host Hardware System Board Status
Host Hardware Temperature Status
Insufficient vSphere HA Failover Resources
Network Connectivity Lost
Network Uplink Redundancy Degraded
Network Uplink Redundancy Lost
Naturally, this isn’t a complete list of alarms, however it is the default alarms that I would configure in most, if not all environments. Every environment is different and you may use more or less alarms than I have mentioned.
Don’t forget that depending on which vSphere licenses you have might see extra default alarms for items such as FT. Also when you install additional components e.g. SRM you will get even more alarms to have a play around with.
I’m pretty pleased to say that I will be attending my first VMworld this year at Barcelona between 9th and 11th October 2012.
Can’t wait to check out the latest, greatest and also best practice seminars. Plus spend some time meeting fellow VMware enthuasiasts.
Hopefully, I should get some time this week to sit down and use the VMworld Schedule Builder
A particular area of interest for me is vCloud Director, I haven’t used this product before, however it is something that I’m really keen to understand and progress onto the VCP-IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service).
Look forward to seeing you there 🙂
VMFocus 