Virtual Architect

A couple of day’s ago Veeam sent some emails saying they would reveal a free Christmas gift on 22 December 2008. You could register to receive an email with a special link on that date. Today Veeam revealed it’s ‘secret’ Christmas gift, it turned out to be Veeam Monitor 3.0.2.

If you’re interested you can register to download it at Veeam’s website:

http://www.veeam.com/download.asp?step=2&license_type=36

Vmworld Europe 2009 is around the corner. The period of time we live in right now is difficult (Credit-crisis etc.). People might find it difficult to write a good business case to justify their attendance.

I like to share some items you can use in your motivation, here is a short list so you can wrtie your own motivation.

1. THE event
   VMworld Europe 2009 is THE virtualization event in Europe
   Multi-vendor approach, all important virtualization vendors are present.
2. News aggregation
   New innovations & technology announced/presented.
3. Network
   The networking event to get in touch (meet personally) with vendors, specialists from VMware, current & past customers and of course fellow bloggers.
4. Partner
   When your company is recognized as a partner you will have the opportunity to attend the partner day. More info at the partner site
5. Education/Career
   In one week you have the opportunity to consume an enormous amount of knowledge which exceeds any available training. Also mention the hands-on labs that will be available. Besides that adding the attendance of such an event to your resume may be benificial too.
6. Knowledge management
   Knowledge management is an important subject a lot of companies are struggling with, as a blogger you can participate in sharing knowledge from vmworld to both insiders(employees) as well as outsiders(the rest of the world) by giving live coverage of the event. Organizing technology update events (internal/external) afterwards is an option too.
7. Third party
   As a consultant you’re expected to know what the market offers you. Internet is a helpful resource, but at this event all important third party vendors are present and most of them are most willing to give demonstrations and answer questions about their products. So attending this event broadens your scope and mind.

So far the benefits. The next part is about the costs. If you’re lucky enough you will be sponsored by VMware for the event. In this part you will have to make the costs visible. Break it up in parts:
- event fee
- travel expenses
- accomodation

Technorati Tag’s: VMworld,BusinessCase,VMware,Virtualization

VKernel just released Capacity Analyzer 3.0. In addition to showing bottlenecks in hosts, clusters, and resource pools, it now shows bottlenecks in VMs — both inside and outside of VMs. Even small environments have hundreds of VMs, causing ongoing monitoring and finding problems in each individual VM to be very time consuming.

Capacity Analyzer 3.0 sorts through them to show the most problematic VMs first, so you can quickly see which VMs are having current performance problems. With predictive analytics, we also identify which VMs will have performance problems and when, so that you can take necessary proactive measures. Download and try Capacity Analyzer 3.0 here in your environment.

We have also made over 20 improvements and fixes in Capacity Analyzer 3.0. For example, the new UI is now tabbed-based making it easier and faster to find the information you need.

The 14-day free trial of the fully functional, production ready Capacity Analyzer 3.0 is now ready for download

A couple of months ago Veeam acquired nworks. Nworks is known for its agentless connectors for managing an VMware ESX (also ESXi !!) environment in SCOM and HP Operations Manager (Openview). Veeam just released version 4.0 of the management connectors.

Nworks is one of the few connectors which integrates with SCOM & HPSOM. Especially in larger organizations where SCOM or HPSOM is the main monitoring tool, integration with the mentioned monitoring tools is more or less mandatory when introducing a new system (in this case VMware).

Using plugin’s like nWorks in one way makes life easy for administrators, they don’t have to write their own management packs and or scripts (in case of MOM), in the other way you have a challenge filtering the right events, because it generates a lot of events. But as they say better too much than too little.

Of course there are more monitoring tools like Veeam’s own Monitor product and of course Vizioncore’s vFoglight (formerly vCharter Pro), but with one monitoring solution in place introducing a second tool for monitoring is a political challenge in most cases, unless there is a very good integration with the company ’standard’ tool.

The new release 4.0 is a major release, which means that you will have to upgrade all components (for existing users ).

What’s new in this release:

• Hardware monitoring is now available through VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure SDK
• Changes to performance metrics (changed and new ones)
• Improved VirtualCenter 2.5 API support
• VMware tools version events
• VMware datastores are now displayed in a separate branch of the topology
• The collection interval for the collector is now adjustable (can be increased)
• suppression of events in case of unknown previous state, which is great in larger environments so your monitoring tool will not be ’spammed’ with events
• A single collector install file is now used for both the Microsoft MP and HP SPI
• The list of ESX hosts managed by the VirtualCenter is updated every collection cycle. In previous versions, the list of hosts in the Configuration UI was only updated when a user clicked “Validate”; now, the list of hosts under a VC server connection is updated as soon as the collector detects a change. The change is actually in the collector service, but the effect is visible in the Configuration UI.
• and more…
  Microsoft SC Operations Manager:
  http://veeam.com/vmware-esx-monitoring-ms-operations.html
  HP Software Operations Manager:
  http://veeam.com/vmware-esx-monitoring-hp-operations.html

Lefthand Networks – John Spiers

John Spiers co-founder of Lefthand Networks (LHN) elaborated about Virtual SAN’s in the Virtual Data Center. He started to mention the acquisition of Lefthand Networks by HP and showing a HP branded presentation. LHN was founded in 1999 and it was then they started selling ISCSI-based storage, even before the protocol was formally standardized, according to John Spiers.

LHN addresses problems like the fact that servers nowadays are mapped to static resources and the demand of virtual performance for ports, zones and RAID groups is rising, etc. How does LHN address these problems.
LHN has five (5) main features:

1. Storage Clustering
2. Network Raid
3. Thin Provisioning
4. Snapshots
5. Remote Copy (Disaster Recovery)

I was sitting next to a former colleague/customer, and while listening I remembered we recently discussed the concept of High Available an physically separated  Sites (+50 km) and the ability to vMotion a VM from one site to another. Almost every requirement was met to make it work except for the storage.

And I mean really high available and not a DR solution. When the first DC fails the other DC has to take over using HA or the new Fault Tolerance feature.

The discussion focused on the storage side and questions like how to make the storage high available in a way that the storage is available instantly in the other datacenter without having to act on it.

First another colleague mentioned Storage vMotion. We concluded that using Storage vMotion creates a low available solution (takes time to copy data with SvMotion) and you will end up failovering by hand if you’re lucky to be able to do that in case of failures. So for this scenario it’s a no go.

Site Recovery Manager (with underlying storage replication) is not a solution either, using SRM you still have to get the LUN out of replication mode to use it (make it active). Besides this, SRM is not an High Available solution it is a Disaster Recovery Solution and it takes downtime as granted. Someone has to push the button to failover with SRM, so another manual factor.

During this session another option popped up. Lefthand Networks offers a so called Network Raid, with the Network Raid it is possible to use a single SAN across (physically separated) sites. RAID 0 mirroring might be a worth a shot. Downside of this can be the network latency, this must be less than 5 ms. Also hardware dependency may be something to keep in mind

VirtualGeek wrote an interesting article about Storage vMotion partly related to the discussion mention above: http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2008/12/real-world-experiences-using-storage-vmotion.html#more

Then the session and the discussion ended… 

Comments are welcome.

Opening

Victor van den Berg opened the 2008 Dutch VMUG meeting by welcoming the crowd. With over 600 attendees a sold out event again. Victor showed some statistics about the VMUG activities and web site usage over the past year.

Keynote

Richard Garsthagen continued with the keynote, in which he gave an overview of the solutions offered by VMware today and in the near future.
Some topics which were already covered by VMworld 2008 were mentioned.
Topics like vCloud, Appspeed and Fault tolerance are some new features where I personally am very excited about. I saw Richard at previous conferences, but this was the first time I attended one in Dutch language by Richard

A couple of highlights:
Appspeed: This VMware function is the result of the recent acquisition of BHive by VMware. AppSpeed monitors the performance of specific applications that run inside a VM and automates the actions necessary to resolve certain detected performance issues. For example adding extra web servers in case of heavy load.

Fault tolerance: Creates a mirror VM on an other host, which undisrupted can be activated when an host becomes unavailable.

With the vCloud initiative vendors have agreed to use a unified communication protocol. In this way every system reports in the same way wether it’s on-premise or off-premise.

Comments: This makes it much easier for companies to hire extra capacity externally, or even have extra capacity standby in case of emergency. Commercial web sites for example have to deal with extra orders and visitors a couple of weeks before Christmas, in this period it may be convenient and cost effective to have some extra web and transaction servers standby. Using this kind of ‘on-demand’ extra capacity and give the capacity back when not needed can save lot’s of money. From a IT-audit point of perspective this vCloud ‘thing’ can bring some extra complexity regarding external connections. I won’t be surprised when some sort of certification is introduced regarding this vCloud to certify that the (cloud-service) supplier meets certain criteria, and that as a (cloud-service) customer you can be sure that it’s secure.

Main focus of VMware:
1. Virtual Datacenter OS (VDOS) – Flexibility and efficiency
2. Federation Cloud – Scalability
3. Desktop

Richard also mentioned there is a slight possibility of having VMsafe Hands On Labs at VMworld Europe 2009 in Cannes, France.

Video recording

Eric Sloof at NTPRO.nl has uploaded a video impression of the event at his site:

Video Impression of Dutch VMUG Meeting 2008

And guess what, I’m on it too: 1′59:

At VMworld 2008 in the US VMware announced the new names for the different products in her portfolio.

I can imagine that these new names can be confusing, so I’m glad that after reading Arne Fokkema’s post who quoted blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2008/12/do-they-smell-a.html that I’m not the only one for who it’s dazzling sometimes. However some of the products are new, most of the presented names are like the old Dutch saying “Oude wijn in nieuwe zakken” (translated: old wine in new bags).

From now on current releases of the application and management products along with the VDI products will be presented in their new “Couture” on VMware’s website.

An overview:

VMware vCenter
Brand name for all infrastructure and application management products from VMware

VMware VirtualCenter  → VMware vCenter Server
The central management product for VMware Infrastructure
VMware Lifecycle Manager → VMware vCenter Lifecycle Manager
Workflow automation product for creation, deployment and decommissioning of virtual machines
VMware Converter → VMware vCenter Converter (for the version integrated into vCenter)
VMware vCenter Converter Standalone (for the separately downloadable version); comes in two flavors: Enterprise and Starter
Physical to virtual (P2V) conversion product
VMware Lab Manager → VMware vCenter Lab Manager
Automation product for application development environments
VMware Stage Manager → VMware vCenter Stage Manager
Automation product for application staging and deployment environments

VMware Update Manager → VMware vCenter Update Manager
Host and virtual machine patch management product integrated with vCenter Server
VMware Site Recovery Manager → VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager
Disaster recovery orchestration product
VirtualCenter Foundation → vCenter Server Foundation
Node limited version of vCenter Server
VMFS → VMware vStorage VMFS
VMware’s cluster file system

VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure → VMware View
VMware’s integrated desktop virtualization solution that delivers enterprise-class control and manageability
Virtual Desktop Manager (VDM) → VMware View Manager
Enterprise class server which manages connections from end points to virtual desktops or hosted desktops while helping rapidly provision desktops

VMware Administrator Interface → VMware View Administrator
Administrator Interface for View Manager
VDM Agent → VMware View Manager Agent
Agent for View Manager to talk to the virtual desktop

VDM Web Access → VMware View Portal
Access to virtual desktops through web browser
VDM Client for Windows → VMware View Client for Windows
Client used to install on Win 32 PC or Win XP embedded thin client to connect to View Manager for virtual desktop access

VDM Client for Linux → VMware View Client for Linux
Client used to install on Linux thin clients to connect to View Manager for virtual desktop access

VMware released VMware View 3, a new product? Yes and no, the number tells us it’s version 3, but the name is new. Let’s examine that. VMware View is a VDI product and it does offline and online desktops/laptops, maybe you recall two previous products of VMware: ACE (manager) – offline portable/virtual desktop management) – and VDM 2 (yes here it is the predecessor of version 3) a VDI Broker/management software for VDI solutions. Combine these two and add some extra features from the Lab Manager product (linked clones) and you have VMware View 3 with the VMware View Composer.

Why View?
It’s the users perspective that’s responsible for it. In the database world a view is a simplified representation of a data structure, translating this into the virtualization language you may call it a simplified representation of an infrastructure, to be more specific it is just that part of the (desktop) system that counts to organizations nothing more and nothing less.

Nice to see that this solution moves up towards the expectations the market has. Also the possible combination of ThinApp which is stimulated by the enterprise edition is one to watch!

Too bad Softgrid (or as it officially is called Microsoft Application Virtualization) already has a strong position in the current market. Some evangelism is needed in favor of ThinApp I believe. That reminds me of the upcoming Virtual Friday in the Netherlands…

Several clients I spoke with recently are really optimistic regarding to VDI but didn’t want to buy two different solutions to manage their on- and offline desktops (ACE/VDM 2). With this product convincing them will get much easier, I’m glad it’s here and will give it a try soon.

The official talk from VMware’s website:

With VMware View 3, IT organizations can “decouple” a desktop from specific physical devices or locations to create a personalized view of a user’s desktop, applications, and data – called “myView” – that is securely accessible from almost any device, at any time. By hosting these virtual desktop images in the datacenter using the industry-leading virtualization and management platform, VMware Infrastructure 3, VMware View 3 enables IT personnel to provision and manage thousands of virtual desktops simply, securely, and with substantially lower operating costs.

VMware View 3 is a major step in VMware’s vClient Initiative, announced at VMworld 2008 in September, to solve the “desktop dilemma.” As described by VMware President and CEO Paul Maritz, the desktop dilemma is the business choice of whether to provide thick or thin clients for employees. Thick clients, or fully loaded PCs, give employees a rich set of applications in their desktop environment, but are a management nightmare because applications can be distributed across thousands of PCs that must be provisioned, updated, patched and secured individually. Thin clients are cheaper, more secure, and more cost-effective to manage, but traditionally have not been able to deliver the richness, flexibility, or compatibility of a thick client. Most businesses provide thin clients only for employees such as call center staff who can be productive in a more stripped-down environment. VMware View 3 solves this dilemma by combining the benefits of both approaches – delivering rich, personalized virtual desktops to any device (whether thick or thin), while simplifying management and securing endpoints with virtual desktops hosted in the datacenter.

VMware View 3 is a family of products available in two editions:

• VMware View 3, Enterprise Edition: includes VMware Infrastructure Enterprise Edition and VMware View Manager 3, a flexible desktop management server enabling IT administrators to quickly provision and tightly control user access.
• VMware View 3, Premier Edition: includes VMware Infrastructure Enterprise Edition, VMware View Manager 3, VMware ThinApp for agentless application virtualization and VMware View Composer, a new product that enables IT staff to create multiple virtual desktops from a single image, increasing the speed of provisioning desktops and reducing storage requirements.

A little more than a week and the Dutch VMware Usergroup (VMUG) Event 2008 will set off. The current registered number of attendees exceeds 500 already.

A sneakpreview for what is going to happen on the 12th of December at Nieuwegein (near Utrecht in the Netherlands):

• 18 different breakout sessions;
• Appealing subjects like: servervirtualization, storage, VMware virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), VMware site recovery manager (SRM), programming/scripting and 3rd party tools;
• VMware/Powershell workshop;
• I love VMware sticker contest (send in a photo of the "I love VMware" sticker to vmugfoto <at> vmug.nl have a change of winning a Wii!)
  
• An extended sponsor exhibition: the VMUG exchange;
• The opportunity to speak to fellow VMUG members;
• Closing and a drink;

More info: VMUG Site. Seats are limited, there are only a few left. Register  here

VKernel today released version 2 of SearchMyVM, the free “Google-like” search utility that quickly helps you find information within your rapidly expanding VMware ESX environments. This new version includes the #1 feature you asked for — the ability to export searches to CSV format reports that you can print, email, and use to quickly document your infrastructure.

SearchMyVM instantly deploys exactly like each one of VKernel’s virtual appliances. With a “Google-like” search interface, you can quickly run queries to find the info you are looking for. Some examples include:

• Show me all VMs that have snapshots – important because snapshots can take up a huge amount of disk space
• Show me all VMs that have a CD-ROM drive attached – VMotion and DRS will not work if a CD drive is mounted
• Show me all VMs that have old versions of VMtools installed – extremely hard to keep track of in growing environments

It’s free and available for download here