Virtual Architect

VMware released update 4 of it’s flagship ESX 3.5.
This means the current version is:

VMware ESX Server 3.5 Update 4 | 30 Mar 2009 | Build 153875

In update 4 changes/updates have been made in the following categories:

• Enhanced vmxnet Adapter in win2003/sbs2003/xp
• Several driver updates
• Support for the Xeon processor 5500 series has been added
• Guest OS support enhanced
• Management Agents for hardware lifecycle management
• Several SATA IO devices now supported
• and more…

The complete list of what’s new and more on the updates can be found in the release notes here

Also note that not all newly added or existing improved items will work with all combinations of versions of ESX and Virtual Center and other tools like the vi-client, VCB etc. Ideally (if you want to profit from it all) they should be at the latest level. VMware created a document with a matrix which shows the compatibility between the different combinations of versions.

I noticed VMware made the Technical preview of vCenter Mobile Access available for download at http://communities.vmware.com/community/beta/vcmobileaccess

Go to the landing page of vCenter Mobile Access to download it as .zip or in .ovf format.

Eric Siebert, the owner of vmware-land.com, refreshed his website and recently added a new way to present the collection of links to VMware related websites.

The VMware vLaunchpad (http://vlp.vmware-land.com) was introduced and except from vmware reference material it also contains a list of blogs.

Just wanted to let you know that recently Virtualarchitect.nl (Gerbens Blog) was added to this list! Take a look for yourself at http://vlp.vmware-land.com.

VMware released a new virtualization costs calculator. This “Cost-Per-Application” calculator compares the acquisition cost of VMware VI3 versus HyperV with SCVMM.

It is a really easy to use calculator, which requires a minimum input from the user. It enables to download the results so you can alter more parameters to create a more specific fit to your organization.

Rich Brambley at vmetc.com published a nice article about this new virtualization calculator released by VMware.  I was thinking of posting more about it myself but having read Rich’s post I reckoned why? I like the article and it saves me some time so here is a teaser, click on the “read more” link below to read the full article at vmetc.com.

VMware has announced a new online calculator that specifically compares the total cost of implementing VI 3.X and Microsoft Hyper-V. An online tool similar to Microsoft’s competitive calculator introduced last year, the VMware Virtualization Cost-Per-Application Calculator is designed to emphasize that the cost of implementing virtual infrastructure is more than the expense of licenses. In the past many have criticized the cost of VMware’s flagship suite of VI 3.X Enterprise products as too expensive, and with both Citrix and Microsoft now claiming to offer free hypervisors, VMware’s new calculator helps illustrate the message that VM density at equal performance matters to the cost analysis bottom line.

“Following the lead of analysts and customers, VMware has adopted “cost per application” as a more accurate metric to compare costs between virtualization solutions. Going beyond a simplistic license price comparison, evaluating cost per application takes into consideration the number of virtual machines that can be run on a single server, or the ”virtual machine density” enabled by a specific virtualization solution. The higher the virtual machine density enabled, the higher the server consolidation ratio. The higher the consolidation ratio, the more an organization can reduce its infrastructure costs (including costs for servers, networking. storage, power and datacenter space), and software costs, (including guest operating system and virtualization software licenses). Following this logic, the solution that can provide the higher consolidation of servers – without an impact to performance – also provides the most value to customers.”

I decided to test the calculator with a 50 VM / application example.

Read more

About a year ago a colleague of mine created a demo about using his smart phone to manage virtual center. That’s some innovation, too bad the font size is so small you barely can read what’s on the screen.

Now VMware has something new to really profit from the power of your smart phone. vCenter Mobile Access. When doing a night shift you’ll never have to leave your bed, when you get paged just take your smart phone and restart the VM’s or vmotion some to another host.

It’s going to be released as a virtual appliance in April 2009.

Some of the benefits and a movie (from the VMTN blog post):

Also take a look at http://communities.vmware.com/community/beta/vcmobileaccess

However VMware is not the only one focusing at the mobile user with their management support. Other IT-management tools such as Microsoft’s  SCOM 2007 (Service Center Operations Manager) also offers mobile support out of the box. Use the web interface of SCOM and add “/mobile” to it and you have a simple web interface, not very sophisticated but with some basics it will do.

Besides the vendor specific solutions there are also solutions that support more than one vendor, which can be convenient when you’re not only dealing with a virtualized environment but also with the servers in it (or physical ones if you still run them). One of the suppliers is Rove IT with Mobile Admin 4.2 , currently supporting VMware vCenter, SCOM 2007 and more. For managing VMware with Mobile Admin, Rove makes use of the VMware Perl Administrative API.

Looking at the features that Mobile Admin offers for VMware they have a lot in common with the presented features of VMware’s new Mobile Access.

Mobile Admins features:

• Find VMs
• View VM properties
• Edit VM settings
• View host summaries
• Manage hosts
• and more…

For some time now I have VMware View running and with the Windows 7 BETA being available I tried to add Windows 7 to VMware View. Since I already created a VM with Windows 7 on my laptop in Vmware Workstation, I imported that VM in Virtual Center and saved some work.

After the conversion/import of the VM was completed I tried to add it to VMware View with the VMware View administrator.
Unfortunately Windows 7 was not recognized as an Client Operating System and therefore could not be added. So I asked myself how does VMware View know that it isn’t (or thinks that isn’t) an Client OS?

VMware View communicates with Virtual Center so properties of a VM are communicated from Virtual Center to VMware View. So the solution is in making VMware View think it deals with a supported OS!

To make Windows 7 available in VMware View you have to change the guest OS-type in Virtual Center/ESX to an OS that is recognized as an compatible guest client OS. For the Windows 7 VM I changed the guest type in Virtual Center from “Other” to “Windows” with version “Windows Vista 64-bit”. See screenshot:

After I changed the OS type and version I was able to add the VM to VMware View.

Just received an email with the following announcement:

Veeam just launched FastSCP 3.0 – a new version of the most popular free tool in the VMware community, used by more than 60,000 VMware administrators worldwide.

Version 3.0 fully supports ESXi and the ESXi free edition.
Other key features and benefits in FastSCP 3.0:

• Real-time or scheduled file and VM copy with e-mail notification of status
• Bulk storage copy for datacenter migration or move
• Built-in file editor for managing ESX and Linux configuration files

More info and downloads at: http://www.veeam.com/esx-fastscp.html

After the two products SearchMyVM and CompareMyVM Vkernel released another free tool called SnapshotMyVM. SnapshotMyVM is a tool to document your VM’s.

Here’s a sampling of the information you can get with SnapshotMyVM:

• VM name
• Guest operating system
• Host hardware type, manufacturer, and version
• VM resource (CPU, memory, storage, network) configuration
• VM resource utilization statistics (saves a week of historical data)

To give you an impression of how the tool works they created a demo video at youtube:

Microsoft released the BETA of SCVMM2008 R2. Another step closer to the competition.

The following significant new features are included in VMM 2008 R2 Beta:

• Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta Hyper-V host management
• Enhanced migration including Live and SAN migration in and out of clusters
• Multiple VMs per LUN using Clustered share volumes
• Hot add of VM storage

To enroll the BETA go to Connect

Vkernel announced that their product Vkernel Modeler has reached the Release Candidate state. Vkernel Modeler is a tool to simulate different scenarios regarding changes or additions to your VMware ESX data center.

So with Vkernel Modeler you can predict the impact changes in your virtual environment will have on performance.

You can download an try Vkernel Modeler here.

Gabrie van Zanten has evaluated the beta product and made a review.

I think this can be a very powerful tool in preventing issues in your virtual environment related to changes. Using modeler you get a rough idea of the impact your change (or someone else’s)  is going to have, which might influence the decision whether the change should be approved or not (given you use a decent change process of course).

Below are the release notes of this release:

Release Notes — Modeler – 1.0 RC

Improvements

• [VK–2259] — An ability to track unexpected runtime errors in UI was added
• [VK–2022] — Now users are allowed to set CPU manufacturer, model, and version
• [VK–1584] — An ability to move host into maintenance mode was added
• [VK–1779] — The host description in the inventory tree was improved
• [VK–1817] — A ‘connected/disconnected’ flag was added to model attributes
• [VK–1639] — Network storages were added to network topology
• [VK–1791] — An ability to add multiple equal VMs was added
• [VK–1793] — Dashboard view was restructured
• [VK–1467] — Dashboard is automatically refreshed with every action
• [VK–1671] — Summary reports for host in cluster now take into account enabled or disabled DRS
• [VK–1321] — Date was added to VM load graphs
• [VK–2053] — The Session Log toolbar functionality was improved
• [VK–2206] — An ability to undo a set of session actions was added
• [VK–1586] — An ability to refresh any session with new data from Virtual Center was added
• Importing objects from VE into modeling session was improved

Fixed bugs

• A number of graphs related bugs was fixed
• A number of bugs related to templates creation was fixed
• A number of UI bugs was fixed: misprints, UI hanging, etc