Friday 30 September 2011

VMware ESXCLI 5.0 Reference Poster

vSphere supports several command‐line interfaces for managing your virtual infrastructure including the vSphere Command‐Line Interface (vCLI), a set of ESXi Shell commands, and PowerCLI. You can choose the CLI set best suited for your needs, and write scripts to automate your CLI tasks.

The vCLI command set includes vicfg- commands and ESXCLI commands. The ESXCLI commands included in the vCLI package are equivalent to the ESXCLI commands available on the ESXi Shell. The vicfgcommand set is similar to the deprecated esxcfg- command set in the ESXi Shell.

You can manage many aspects of an ESXi host with the ESXCLI command set. You can run ESXCLI commands as vCLI commands or run them in the ESXi Shell in troubleshooting situations. You can also run ESXCLI commands from the PowerCLI shell by using the Get-EsxCli cmdlet. See the vSphere PowerCLI Administration Guide and the vSphere PowerCLI Reference. The set of ESXCLI commands available on a host depends on the host configuration. The vSphere Command‐Line Interface Reference lists help information for all ESXCLI commands. Run esxcli --server <MyESXi> --help before you run a command on a host to verify that the command is defined on the host you are targeting.

You can use this link to get your copy of the VMware ESXi 5.0 Reference Poster.








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Thursday 29 September 2011

VMware vCenter Update Manager 5.0 Performance and Best Practices

VMware vCenter Update Manager 5.0 Performance and Best Practices

VMware vCenter Update Manager (also known as VUM) provides a patch management framework for VMware vSphere. IT administrators can use it to patch and upgrade ESX/ESXi hosts, upgrade VMware Tools and virtual hardware for virtual machines, as well as upgrade virtual appliances.

A white paper that examines the performance of VUM is available. This paper includes some interesting information, including:

  • VUM deployment recommendations that maximize performance
  • A look at the latencies of common VUM operations
  • The resource consumption profile of VUM operations for CPU, network, disk, and database
  • How much time it takes to remediate a cluster sequentially vs. in parallel
  • VUM performance in a low bandwidth, high latency, or lossy network
  • How the use of bandwidth throttling affects host staging and remediation over LAN and WAN
  • Performance tips and best practices

For the full paper, see VMware vCenter Update Manager 5.0 Performance and Best Practices.
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Tuesday 27 September 2011

Broken VMUG?



Hope this is the only thing that goes wrong tonight :)
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Video - Metro vMotion in vSphere 5.0

vSphere 5 introduces a new latency-aware Metro vMotion feature that not only provides better performance over long latency networks but also increases the round-trip latency limit for vMotion networks from 5 milliseconds to 10 milliseconds. Previously, vMotion was supported only on networks with round-trip latencies of up to 5 milliseconds. In vSphere 4.1, vMotion is supported only when the latency between the source and destination ESXi/ESX hosts is less than 5 ms RTT (round-trip time). For higher latencies, not all workloads are guaranteed to converge. With Metro vMotion in vSphere 5.0, vMotion can be used to move a running virtual machine when the source and destination ESX hosts have a latency of more than 5ms RTT. The maximum supported round trip time latency between the two hosts is now 10ms. Metro vMotion is only available with vSphere Enterprise Plus license.



Related Video – Carter Shanklin's WANatronic 10001






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Monday 26 September 2011

Venue Change: Manitoba VMUG Meeting


VMware :: VMUG
 
  Venue Change: Manitoba VMUG Meeting

This is a friendly reminder that you are registered to attend the Manitoba VMUG meeting taking place this Tuesday, September 27, 2011.

Meeting Details

  • Please note, there is a venue change due to the increased registration numbers for this event.
  • Driving directions can be found here

Visit the Event Details Page for the full agenda, directions to the event and the most current information available.

For questions, please contact memberservices@vmug.com.
Tuesday, September 27, 2011

6:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.
 


Location - UPDATED
Delta Winnipeg
Ballroom A
350 St. Mary Avenue
Winnipeg, MB R3C 3J2

  

 
Thank You to Our Sponsor


 
     

 

Email ID: VMUG_Express

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**UPDATE: Manitoba VMUG Meeting - Sept 27, 2011

Manitoba VMUG Meeting
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
6:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

Delta Winnipeg
Delta Winnipeg
Ballroom A
350 St. Mary Avenue
Winnipeg, MB R3C 3J2
Directions

Join us for the upcoming Manitoba VMUG meeting taking place on Tuesday, September 27, 2011.

This is a great opportunity to come together with your fellow VMware users to discuss virtualization trends, best practices, and the latest technology!

Meeting Agenda
6:00 p.m. - Welcome
6:15 p.m. - Customer Presentation - MLCC
7:00 p.m. - VMware Presentation - vSphere 5 Overview
8:00 p.m. - VMware Presentation - Product Demos (TBA)
8:30 p.m. - VMware Presentation - vSphere 5 Licensing
9:00 p.m. - Closing Remarks / Prizes

Thank you to our meeting sponsor: VMware

Register Today to join us for this free informative event.

http://www.myvmug.org/e/in/eid=171
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Forbes Guthrie has released the VCP5 documentation notes

Fellow vExpert Forbes Guthrie has released his vSphere 5.0 documentation notes.


Here are my condensed notes for the vSphere 5.0 documentation. They're excerpts taken directly from VMware's own official PDFs.  The notes aren't meant to be comprehensive, or for a beginner; just my own personal notes.  I made them whilst studying for the VCP5 beta exam, and its part of the process I use to collate information for the vSphere Reference Card.



http://www.vreference.com/vsphere-5-notes/







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Sunday 25 September 2011

Krystaltek: How vSphere 5 Challenges Storage Design

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myvirtualcloud.net » The Right Hardware for a 10K VDI solution

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Eric Sloof's VCP5 exam experience

Last Friday I sat the vSphere 5 VMware Certified Professional aka VCP5 exam at the VUE Test/Centre Global Knowledge Nieuwegein in the Netherlands. Since I'm a VMware Certified Instructor, I've two options. The first option is to take the VCP-510 exam. I've to score 350 or higher otherwise VUE has to reset my account in order to do a re-take of the exam (even though I've passed it with a score above 300). The second option is take the VCI-510. This exam has the same questions, the only difference is the pass mark. The VCI-510 is set at 350 so you will automatically fail it, if you don't reach the instructor level and there's no account reset needed. That's why VCI-510 is for VCIs only. Recently I've received a free VCP5 voucher from VMware as a thank you for my participation in the original VMware Certified Professional 4 – Desktop program and the VCI-510 exam isn't open for enrollment yet so I tough what the hack – let's do it. How difficult can it be. The actual preparation for this exam has started months ago, while I was participating in the beta of vSphere 5, I've recorded many vSphere 5 instruction and learning videos which can be found at YouTube and my iTunes channel. I've also attended the vSphere 5 What's New Train The trainer and I've delivered the "What's New" training once already. Besides that, I'm reading a lot of good vSphere 5 articles from my fellow bloggers. I've also filled my DropBox with many PDF files that have recently been released by VMware and contain real good information. I didn't know what to expect so I've used the days prior to the exam for building my own exam training, a cool project that eventually has spinned off into a real gig - soon the be announced.

When I started the exam I was pretty comfortable but after the first 10 questions I had something like "is this going to be the same level at the next 75 questions?". First tip - don't focus too much on the maximums PDF. It won't do you any good. There are not a lot of "how many this and how many that" questions in the exam. Second tip - don't learn all the marketing and licensing stuff by head. Yes you will have a few questions about licensing but you can answer them already, trust me. What you really need to know is how the complete vSphere product suite works. You cannot pass this exam by learning theory from a book or student guide. The exam questions will test you on things that only people with real world experience can answer. If you want to prepare for this exam I can give you one good advice. Create a lab environment and install all the vSphere components you can get your hands on. Also deploy all the appliances like the vCenter, the VSA and even setup auto deploy. Install it - Use it - Play with it - Administrator it and Eat it :-) That's the only way to get the knowledge needed to pass for this exam. I'll give you one example whiteout breaching the NDA.


Say you're an administrator of a vSphere 5 environment and you get a call from an application owner. People are complaining about the performance of their business utility. You're investigating the problem and eventually you have found the virtual machine with the performance problem, it's part of a DRS resource pool with other virtual machines who run fine. After logging on the ESXi 5 host and starting ESXTop, the following diagram is presented.
To solve the performance problem you have to (click the picture):

a)    Add more CPUs to the ESXi host because there's a very high CPU-Ready value.

b)    vMotion virtual machines to another host to free up resources and higher the shares value of the virtual machine in trouble.

c)    Higher the CPU limit of the resource pool the virtual machine lives in and higher the resource pool reservation. If expendable reservation is disabled, enable it.

d)    Check the log files of the application running in the virtual machine for an error.

So the right answer is d…. The virtual machine with performance problems was configured with a limit on purpose. The software in the virtual machine has the tension to blow up every once in a while so that's the reason why the virtual machine was configured with a limit otherwise it would dominate a complete core. The (MLMTD) max limited time is the percentage of time the VM world was ready to run but deliberately wasn't scheduled because that would violate the VM's "CPU limit" settings.

You can only answer this question if you're familiar with ESXTop otherwise you would go for triggers like resource pools and expandable reservations. You see, that's what I mean – you have to know how it works not how it can or should work by reading the manual. It's a fair exam. I've scored a perfect 350 and I'm proud of it, good luck with prepping and have fun, VCP5 is a real challenge.







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Friday 23 September 2011

vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) - Useful Links [Updated]

[Updated with new blog references - 23-Sep-2011]

Last week, the vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) was officially launched by VMware. This is VMware's low cost, easy to install, shared storage solution which aims to enable SMB (Small to mid-size) customers to have access to core vSphere features such as vMotion & vSphere HA.

This blog article is simply to bring together a bunch of links to allow you to successfully evaluate, and then deploy a VSA in your infrastructure.

 

VSA Software

 

Offical Documentation

 

HCL

 

VSA VMTN Community

 

VSA Product Demos

 

KB Articles

 

Blog Articles

If you happen to be at VMworld 2011, stop by the VMware stand in the Solutions Exchange and get a demo of the VSA.

 Get notification of these blogs postings and more VMware Storage information by following me on Twitter: Twitter VMwareStorage






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Thursday 22 September 2011

Host Power Management in vSphere 5

Host Power Management in vSphere 5

Host power management (HPM) on ESXi 5.0 saves energy by placing certain parts of a computer system or device into a reduced power state when the system or device is inactive or does not need to run at maximum speed. This feature can be used in conjunction with distributed power management (DPM), which redistributes VMs among physical hosts in a cluster to enable some hosts to be powered off completely.

The default power policy for HPM in vSphere 5 is "balanced," which reduces host power consumption while having little or no impact on performance for most workloads. The balanced policy uses the processor's P-states, which save power when the workloads running on the system do not require full CPU capacity.

A technical white paper has been published that describes:

  • What to adjust in your ESXi host's BIOS settings to achieve the maximum benefit of HPM.
  • The different power policy options in ESXi 5.0 and how to set a custom policy.
  • Using esxtop to obtain and understand statistics related to HPM, including the ESXi host's power usage, the processor's P-states, and the effect of HPM on %USED and %UTIL.
  • An evaluation of the power that HPM can save while different power policies are enabled. The amount of power saved varies depending on the CPU load and the power policy.

For the full paper, see Host Power Management in VMware vSphere 5.

Note: Some performance-sensitive workloads might require the "high performance" policy.

 
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@vCloud, 9/22/11 12:57 PM

VMware vCloud (@vCloud)
9/22/11 12:57 PM
RT @VMwareSP Great resource from @tier3 - Checklist for evaluating enterprise #cloud provider platforms & services: http://t.co/7Lj3cQSS
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Technical Paper - VMware vShield App Protecting Virtual SAP Deployments

This paper describes some use cases of deploying SAP with vShield App. vShield App provides microsegmentation / zoning of different landscapes which enables a secure SAP deployment. The configurations covered here are examples only, but provide a starting point from which to plan for a security architecture to cover a SAP installation on VMware in production and non-production environments.


Workload characterizations conducted against SAP show that CPU resources are required by vShield firewall virtual machines, the extent of which is dependent on the network traffic generated by the application. When there is a need for additional firewall capacity, administrators can add CPU or memory resources to the vShield App appliance. If the cluster is resource limited, administrators can add another host to the cluster along with the vShield App appliance and the hypervisor module.


Customer workloads will differ from those tested here which will result in different utilizations of the vShield App firewall appliance. Situations where systems are designed as two-tier instead of three-tier would reduce network traffic between virtual machines and lower firewall appliance utilization. For example, some SAP customers may deploy database and application instances in a single large virtual machine.


Categorizing applications into a container such as vApp greatly simplifies management of firewall policies with vShield App. Application and security administrators can respond rapidly to specific demands in a dynamic landscape, and while virtual machine templates enable quick deployment of systems, vShield App facilitates speedy security compliance.


VMware-vShield-App-Protecting-Virtual-SAP-Deployments.pdf







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VMworld 2011 content: SPO3977–Next Generation Backup and Storage for VMware

This session was on the topic of what are the 2nd and 3rd order effects on backup and storage architectures that VMware is driving.  

I was frankly a little shocked at how many people came to the session (401) – hope you all found it interesting!

It discussed both the near term (state of the art VADP, CBT and other backup topics – and also state of the art on VAAI, VASA, and other storage topics), but more interestingly the long term – discussing questions like:

  • What will be the effect of cloud and multitenancy on backup – and what's needed for "Backup-as-a-service"
  • What is the state of the art around VMware-integration in storage, and VM-awareness?  What's next?  (think beyond the current "integrate UIs" and "vCenter plugins" a-la Tintri or what EMC VNX/VMAX do today) – this is all about the topic in VSP3205 (which I'll be doing a blog post on after VMworld Copenhagen)
  • What is the effect on "traditional storage clusters" (think VNX, NetApp FAS, HP EVA, Nexenta, etc) vs. "scale out models" (think VMAX, 3PAR for block and things like Isilon for NAS).
  • What are the latency challenges inherent in "loosely coupled" distributed storage systems (both file and object) – and what are we doing about it?
  • What are the challenges with NAS scale-out models with VMware (ergo the NFSv3 limitations) – how will this change over time
  • What's next re host-side Flash – and how will that change things?
  • What's next re: storage/server hybrid models?

Thanks all who attended and gave feedback.  While CLEARLY an EMC session, as always I try to be as balanced as I can be – though on this one, since I'm so close to the VMware/EMC efforts, I think it's probably a little more biased than others.

Read on for a copy of the deck, and the recording of the session!

Click on the link below to download the deck (warning it's a big one – 80MB)

image

Here's the session recording…

And here is the feedback:

*1.. How would you rate this session?
Poor 2.38 % (1)
Fair 0% (0)
Neutral 11.9 % (5)
Good 26.19 % (11)
Excellent 59.52 % (25)
Average: 4.4
Total Responses: 42
*2.. When compared to the session abstract, this session
Needed more technical content 9.52 % (4)
Had the right amount of technical content 88.1 % (37)
Had too much technical content 2.38 % (1)
Average: 1.93
Total Responses: 42
*3.. How would you rate the speaker(s) overall effectiveness?
Poor speaker(s) 0% (0)
Below average speaker(s) 2.38 % (1)
Average speaker(s) 7.14 % (3)
Good speaker(s) 19.05 % (8)
Great speaker(s) 71.43 % (30)
Average: 4.6
Total Responses: 42
*4.. How likely are you to implement what you learned in this session?
Extremely Unlikely 2.38 % (1)
Unlikely 4.76 % (2)
Neither Likely nor Unlikely 16.67 % (7)
Likely 35.71 % (15)
Extremely Likely 40.48 % (17)
Average: 4.07
Total Responses: 42
*5.. How likely are you to recommend this session to a friend or colleague ?
0 – Not at all likely to recommend 2.38 % (1)
1 2.38 % (1)
2 0% (0)
3 0% (0)
4 2.38 % (1)
5 2.38 % (1)
6 4.76 % (2)
7 11.9 % (5)
8 23.81 % (10)
9 9.52 % (4)
10 - Extremely likely to recommend 40.48 % (17)
Average: 8.37
Total Responses: 42
  • Awesome. At last, long waited integration of EMC products: SAN and VMware. Move over 3PARs of the world!
  • can the presentation be downloaded?
  • Can we have Chad come and speak with our mgmt team?
  • Chad!
  • Fantastic session!
  • Great job Chad.
  • Great speaker!!
  • Need to run additional session
  • To much emc employes taking seats fr.o.m. Customers.
  • Too EMC specific
  • Typical Chad...a bit salesy toward Avamar, but overall great preso








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Should I defrag my Guest OS?

Yep - this old chestnut. :-)

This has come up time and time again, and I am going to share with you some conversations that have been occurring within VMware on this topic. In fact, we've been having these conversations for a long time now.

What is it that defragmentation is supposed to give you?

Well, historically, if you ran a defragmentation operation against an OS disk (typically Windows), you would expect to see a performance improvement. Defragmentation moves blocks around the disk to bring together blocks belonging to the same file in an effort to make the file contiguous on disk. This means that sequential I/O operations should be faster after a defrag. Here's a view of the Disk Fragementer that is part of the System Tools with Windows 7:

Defrag2
What about defragmentation of a Guest OS in a Virtual Machine?

This is very different to running a defrag on a physical host with a local disk. Typically you are going to have multiple VMs running together on a VMFS or NFS volume. Therefore the overall I/O to the underlying LUN is going to be random so defragmenting individual Guest OS'es is not really going to help performance. However, there are other concerns that you need to keep in mind. The easiest way to explain the concerns is to give you some scenarios of what might happen to a VM which is defraged, and what impact it has on the various vSphere technologies. You can then make up you own mind about whether it is a good idea or not.

  1. Thin Provisioned VMs. If you defragment a Thin Provisioned VM, as file blocks are moved around, the TP VMDK bloats up, consuming much more disk space.
  2. Linked Clone VMs (vCloud Director, View). In the case of a VM running off of a linked clone, the defragmenter bloats up the linked clone redo logs.
  3. Replicated VMs (Site Recovery Manager, vSphere Replicator). If your VM was being replicated, and you defragemented the VM on the protected site, it could well cause a lot of data to be sent over the WAN to the replicated site.
  4. Snapshot'ed VMs. This is a similar use case to Linked Clones. Any VMs running off of a snapshot which ran a defrag would cause the snapshot to inflate considerably, depending on how many blocks were moved during the defrag operation.
  5. Change Block Tracking (VMware Data Recovery). The CBT feature is used heavily by backup products, including VMware Data Recovery (VDR). This feature tracks changes to a VM's disk blocks during a backup operation. If a defrag is run during a backup operation, the number of blocks that changes will increase, which means more data will have to be backed up, meaning a longer backup time.
  6. Storage vMotion. Storage vMotion also uses CBT in vSphere 4.0. If a VM was being Storage vMotion'ed when a defrag operation was initiated, it would also impact the time to complete the operation since the defrag is changing blocks during the migration.

Defragmentation also generates more I/O to the disk. This could be more of a concern to customers than any possible performance improvement that might be gained from the defrag. I should point out that I have read that, internally at VMware, we have not observed any noticeable improvement in performance after a defragmentation of Guest OSes residing on SAN or NAS based datastores.

I also want to highlight an additional scenario that uses an array based technology rather than a vSphere technology. If your storage array is capable of moving blocks of data between different storage tiers (SSD/SAS/SATA), e.g. EMC FAST, then defragmentation of the Guest OS doesn't really make much sense. If your VM has been running for some time on tiered storage, then in all likelihood the array has already learnt where the hot-blocks are, and has relocated these onto the SSD. If you now go ahead and defrag, and move all of the VM's blocks around again, the array is going to have to relearn where the hot-spots are.

Defrag3
If you automate the defrag to run regularly, I think this could cause a performance decrease rather than give you any sort of performance gain if the VM is deployed on a datastore backed by tiered storage. This may already be enabled on some Operating Systems.

What do the Storage Array vendors say?

NetApp have a very good vSphere/NetApp interoperability WP in which they briefly discuss this topic. Quoting directly from the paper - "VMs stored on NetApp storage arrays should not use disk defragmentation utilities because the WAFL file system is designed to optimally place and access data at a level below the guest operating system (GOS) file system. If a software vendor advises you to run disk defragmentation utilities inside of a VM, contact the NetApp Global Support Center before initiating this activity."

What do you recommend?

My recommendation is not to use any defrag tools in the Guest OS. If you are being advised to use a defragmentation tool, you should now have a number of questions to raise about possible outcomes using the content in this blog posting.

Get notification of these blogs postings and more VMware Storage information by following me on Twitter: Twitter VMwareStorage








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