How Do I Get VMware vSphere Licenses For My Home Lab/Test Environment?

Posted on by Craig

I was talking to several colleagues recently who mentioned it was a real pain having to rebuild his home lab vCentre environment every sixty days.

They did not know that VMware offer NFR (not for resale) licenses, which are available if the company you work for is a VMware Partner.

VMware provides partners with access to a number of VMware software products to enable a successful VMware virtualization practice. Not for Resale (NFR) software is available to partners for product demonstration and training purposes only. One year of subscription services is included with NFR software as long as the partner remains in good standing within the parameters of the VMware Partner Program.

How Does My Company Receive NFR?

NFR licenses are automatically delivered by VMware to the headquarter location upon membership progression (such as Registered to Professional or Professional to Enterprise) and release of new products. Licenses that are provided as part of the NFR offering are delivered to the License Administrator via ESD (Electronic Software Distribution) or to the primary contact if a license administrator has not been identified

Before we move on, a little disclaimer, I don’t know what criteria VMware use to accept or validate requests for NFR licenses, nor do I know any hacks or cracks to gain free VMware licenses.

To put forward a case for NFR licenses you have to register for VMware Partner Central by entering the company you work for and having these details validated by a representative from your company.

Once logged into VMware Partner Central, select ‘Partner University’ from the top menu bar

From the left hand side select ‘Contact Us’
On the right hand side select ‘Submit a Case Now’
Under Reason select Question/Inquiry
Under Issue Category select Benefit / Entitlement
Under Issue Type select Not for Resale Licenses (NFR)
You will need to enter a subject and explain the reasons/business case for the request for any extra NFR licenses.

My experience submitting cases via Partner Central has been extremely positive, normally you receive a response within 24 hours and an answer within 48 hours.

Setting Up & Configuring Alarms in vCenter 5 Part 1

Posted on by Craig

vCenter has some great inbuilt alarms which can trigger alerts via email or SNMP to the IT administrator   I have seen quite a few environments, where alarms haven’t been configured!  The obvious question is, is this due to lack of knowledge or do the administrators really check every item manually within vSphere? My guess is the earlier.

With this in mind, I thought I would go over the basic settings and then also what alarms/alerts I generally put in place along with some rational over the triggers.

The first thing we have to do is configure vCentre to send out email and SNMP alerts.  Go to Home > vCenter Servers Settings or to Top Menu Bar > Administration > vCenter Server Settings

Select Mail from the left hand side and enter your SMTP Server details.  Note that VMware does not support email authentication, so if you are using an Exchange 2003/2007/2010 I recommend you create a new receive connector called ‘vmware’.

Select SNMP from the left hand side and enter either the IP Address or DNS Name of your SNMP Server along with the community string needed to validate if any different from ‘public’

If you need the MIBS (Management Information Base) these can found at %ProgramFiles%VMwareInfrastructureVirtualCenter ServerMIBS if the default installation path has been used.

Alarms can be configured at a few different levels which are:

Root these alarms will encompass Datacentre, Cluster, ESXi Hosts, Resource Pools and VM’s

Datacentre these alarms will encompass Cluster, ESXi Hosts, Resource Pools and VM’s

Cluster these alarms will encompass ESXi Hosts, Resource Pools and VM’s

ESXi Hosts these alarms will encompass Resource Pools and VM’s

Resouce Pools these alarms will encompass the VM’s that reside within them.

VM these alarms are only specific to the virtual machine

Generally speaking, nearly all the alarms which I create are done at the root level which means that whatever actions are performed by the vCentre administrator, they should be covered.

vCentre allows you to configure actions for alarms based around set criteria.  When the alarm is triggered it can be configured to alert once or repeat

When the alarm triggers, it will do so when it enters a warning state e.g. Datastore Disk Usage Is Above 90% and then again when it hits a critical state e.g. Datastore Disk Usage Is Above 95%

So following this through, alarms can be triggered by the following events:

Normal Condition > Warning Condition
Warning Condition > Critical Condition
Critical Condition > Warning Condition
Warning Condition > Normal Condition

Alarms can be triggered if they meet ‘any’ of the conditions or ‘all’ the conditions you have set.

If you are a savy VMware Administrator you may ask the storage team for a 2TB LUN, but you only really need 1TB. So you provision a datastore at 50% capacity so you want to create a warning alarm when it reaches 75% provisioned and then critical at 90% provisioned, so you know when to ask for some extra space from the storage team.

With this in mind, imagine you had a single alarm which covered both Datastore Disk Usage (%) and Datastore Disk Provisioned (%).  However, I would always recommend using ‘trigger if any of the conditions are satisfied  unless you have a compelling reason not to do so.

So now we have configured vCenter to be able to send alerts, we need to configure some for it too send!  Hold fire until Part 2.

Backing Up vCentre Using Veeam 6.1

Posted on by Craig

Veeam is a great product, I use it regularly to meet customers RTO (Restore Time Objectives) and RPO (Restore Point Objectives).  As I’m sure you know Veeam’s functionality is extremely diverse with DR, CDP and Backup capabilities.

One of the issues we have had with Veeam has been when you are backing up a virtual vCentre or SQL server that is responsible for the vCentre database.  Essentially what happens is that Veeam sends a ‘snapshot’ command to vCentre for creation of a VSS snapshot, but then cannot communicate with vCentre as it’s database is frozen.

To get around this issue you would add the ESXi host that held vCentre and your SQL database manually meaning that Veeam would communicate with the ESXi host directly and your backup would complete.

This caused issues where if you had DRS enabled and your vCentre or SQL moved your backups would fail.  So more often than not you would have to tie vCentre or SQL to a particular host which kind of defeated the purpose of HA.

So, whats changed, well in our environment, we recently upgraded to Veeam 6.1 with the following configuration.

Veeam Backup & Replication Enterprise v6.1

Veeam is a virtual server with 8 vCPU’s broken down into 2 virtual sockets and 4 cores per socket with 12GB of RAM

vCentre Server Standard v5.0.1

vCentre Server is again a virtual server with 2vCPU’s and 4GB RAM.

This has SQL 2008 R2 Standard installed locally holding the following databases:

– vCentre
– VMware Site Recovery Manager
– VMware Update Manager

SQL 2008 R2 Enterprise

SQL is a virtual machine and holds four instances.  A single instance contains the databases for:

– Veeam

Now you have an overview of the environment, lets create a couple of fresh Veeam jobs.

Backup Job 1 – vCentre

This contains vCentre directly added via the vSphere 5 Cluster, with Proxy Selection ‘Automatic’ and Advanced Settings left as default.

To avoid any confusion, ‘The Backup Proxy’ is this server.

Enable application-aware image processing is NOT selected.

Result is a success.

So what does this mean?  Well we don’t have ‘enable application-aware image processing’ selected.  This means that your SQL database might not be transactionally consistent which could result in data loss and that Veeam does not commit the transaction logs.  However, this can be overcome by creating a SQL maintenance plan, not elegant, but effective!

So essentially, the choice is yours, keep vCentre physical or tie vCentre to a particular ESXi host.  Both mean that vCentre isn’t protected by high availability.  Or do what I have explained and have to use a SQL maintenance plan.

For more information on Veeam Backup & Replication 6.1 please visit Veeam ESX Backup

Virtual Machine Restart Priority

Posted on by Craig

We are all guilty of doing this, we design and install a beautifully crafted vSphere 5 environment following best practises for HA, host isolation responses and we setup our admission control to meet the clients requirements.  When then pass the VMware environment back to the client to manage and maintain themselves.

The client has a hardware failure and the VM’s are restarted on an alternative host, excellent we say.  However the client is far from happy as we didn’t mention or configure ‘virtual machine restart priority’ and they encountered complications as the VM’s came up in the wrong order.

In essence virtual machine restart priority enables selected virtual machines to start before other virtual machines over riding the clusters default settings.  To configure virtual machine restart priority:

– Right Click Cluster
– Edit Settings
– Virtual Machine Options
– Virtual Machine Settings > VM Restart Priority

Lets look at the following scenario.

Scenario A

Client has VMware Standard licensing, which means they don’t have DRS.  They have two Exchange 2010 email servers, one running the CAS/Hub role and the other running Mailbox role.  They reside on the same host as someone thought this would a ‘good idea’.

The physical host fails and it’s a free for all for the VM’s to restart, as a result the CAS/Hub server comes up before the Mailbox server.  As a result Outlook Client connectivity, OWA and Active Sync take longer than anticipated to connect resulting in an extended downtime.

Scenario B

Same client has configured virtual machine restart priority with the following settings:

Mailbox server – High
CAS/Hub server – Medium

The VM’s restart in the right order and the client has less downtime.

Best Practices

Naturally every environment is different, but as a general rule of thumb, I recommend using the following guidelines.

Exchange

– CAS/Hub – High Priority
– Mailbox – Medium Priority

Domain Controllers

– If FSMO role holder – High Priority
– If Global Catalogue – High Priority

SQL

– SQL Server – High Priority
– Applications relying on SQL e.g. BES – Medium Priority

Citrix

– Data Collector – High Priority
– Web Server – Medium Priority
– License Server – Medium Priority
– Farm Members – Low Priority (as you want everything else to be up and running before users login).

My VCP5 Exam Experience

Posted on by Craig

Before I start this entry, I would like to point out that this isn’t for anyone who wants to know the answers to the exam questions as I won’t be disclosing any information about the content except for pointing you towards the VCP 510 exam blueprint.

What sort of experience do I have with vSphere 5? Well in the first half of this year, I have been fortunate enough to have performed a few installs:
  

  • 3 x Enterprise License installs
  • 2 x Essentials Plus installs
  • 3 x HP 3PAR F400 installations
  • 2 x HP P2000 iSCSI installations
  • 3 x Fabric installations using Brocade HBA’s and HP Fabric switches
  • 26 x ESXi5 host installs

I had also designed another seven VMware vSphere 5 environments ranging from Essentials Plus to Enterprise.

With this in mind, I felt I could handle the VCP510 with my real world experience and I foolishly just booked the exam.  First time round I failed with 285, which was quite frustrating as 300 is the pass mark.

Why did I fail, well, lack of preparation and I misread some of the questions (I know this as some appeared second time round).

I felt the exam was alot harder than the VCP410 as it tests such a broad technical skill base, from networking to storage to ESXi5.  So you need to know your ‘onions’ in every area.
So after my failure, I decided to do things the right way.  I purchased Scott Lowes – Mastering vSphere 5 and Duncan Epping’s – vSphere 5 Clustering Technical Deepdive on Amazon Kindle.  I can’t recommend these books highly enough if you are looking to pass the VCP510 exam.  Each night I went over the chapters and built a nested ESXi5 environment to go over areas that are not my strong point e.g. Distributed Switches and Data Recovery to try increase my technical understanding as our customers normally use Veeam and Enterprise for licenses.

Second time round, I passed with 461, which I was really pleased with.

I always approach exams the same way, I get to the examination centre round 30 minutes early, so you can go over the sign in process and hand over your valuables.  I then make three signs on the plastic sheet you are given

Tick – these are for questions I know I have definitely know the answers too.

Question Mark – these are questions I’m 80% plus sure on

Cross – these are questions I’m making an educated guess or generally haven’t got a clue on!

I try to aim for 30 seconds per question to give myself enough time to review questions at the end.  If I find I have spent over a minute on a question, I will mark it for review and then come back to it.  At the end of the exam, I only review questions I have marked for review not all of them.

Then when I’m finally ready to click the submit button, I always cover my eyes and then peek through my hands at the results.  I’m really not sure why I do this, but as they say habits die hard!