Virtual Architect

The VCP on vSphere4 (VCP4) certification exam will be publically available on August 8^th, 2009. It is already possible to schedule an appointment at Pearson vue.

In about a week, on July 6^th, 2009, the beta exam for VCP on vSphere4 starts and is only eligible for people who participated in the private beta program on vSphere, the candidates will be contacted by VMware.

Veeam released a new version of it’s plugin for Operations Manager monitoring products from HP or Microsoft. The plugin is a significant add-on to the monitoring products in order to keep in touch with what happens in your virtual environment within a single monitoring solution.

What’s new in version 5:

• nworks management center
  a new component that allows centralized configuration, load balancing and high availability for multiple nworks collectors
• Full (native) support for VMware vSphere 4
• a business approach (reports) for the new vSphere features like DPM, Host profiles and Fault Tolerance

Veeam released a short video at http://www.veeam.com/go/nworks5/ and offers a free trial for it’s new management pack.

When would this be interesting for your organization?

• You have or plan to have a virtual environment
• You are a current user of MOM/SCOM or HP Operations Manager
• It completely integrates with the existing monitoring solution so no new or extra monitoring solutions which require additional training etc.. Especially in large organizations with critical 24/7 business applications the response to failures in the underlying infrastructure is a critical issue regarding service levels that have to be met. These organizations depend heavily on their monitoring solutions, not having to introduce new monitoring helps in reducing complexity for maintenance etc.
• Even smaller companies can profit from the plugin if they use the Service Center Essentials package from Microsoft, if not other products are in scope like Veeam Monitor (or the special SMB-package), but vFoglight from Quest/Vizioncore and vWire from Tripwire are serious candidates as well.

These are what I believe the most important reasons to choose for the nworks, there are more but they are at feature level which changes per month. Most vendors in the monitoring market now (or in the very near future) support VMware vSphere and all are adding features (e.g. business/service level approaches/views) that enhance the tool. Unless you are specifically looking for one of these features you are not bound by a supplier from feature perspective. I’ve seen serious differences in performance between the different vendors so please first download a trial and do a proof of concept in your environment before buying. Most of the vendor’s have trials available and if one doesn’t have: request it!

Microsoft is getting closer to the competition in offering more functionality in their virtualization products with the release of Service Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 Release Candidate on the 5th of June 2009.

So what is new in this release?

Storage Migration:
Enables migration of storage for a running VM. This is especially relevant as customers upgrade to Windows 2008 R2 as it allows them to easily migrate away from their existing one VM per LUN deployments and consolidate their VMs into a single CSV. For Hyper-V, this feature enables migration of a running VM’s storage both within the same host and across hosts with minimum downtime. For VMware, this feature enables storage vMotion.

Rapid VM Provisioning:
Enables rapid creation of VMs without the need to copy VHDs over the network. Customers can now use storage technologies such as snap cloning to clone VHDs and then use the rapid provisioning feature to create VMs while continuing to take advantage of the VMM features to do OS customization and IC installation.

Host compatibility checks:
Enables checks for CPU features and enlightenment parity to ensure compatibility between a VM and a host prior to migration. A related feature to make a VM compatible with a host by limiting the use of certain CPU features is also enabled.
Queuing of Live migrations:
Enables users to do multiple live migrations within a cluster. VMM now detects the condition where live migrations fail due to collisions with in-progress live migrations and automatically performs queuing and retries in the background.

Support for 3rd party CFS:
Enables support for clustered file systems from ISVs that implement functionally similar to CSV (Clustered shared volumes). This feature allows for backwards support for CSV scenarios on Windows 2008.

Support for Custom Disk resource:
Enables support for Veritas volume manager by recognizing Veritas volume manager disks as a cluster disk resources.

Microsoft says it will ship SCVMM 2008 R2 within 60 days after the ship date of Windows Server 2008 R2.

Resources (Connect):

• Service Center Virtual Machine Manager Home
• Service Center Virtual Machine Manager Download Page