As I have mentioned numerous times I am a big fan of The VESI and Alan Renouf’s powershell blog, well now Alan has released his powerpack for The VESI which means every VMware admin can have the power of Alan Renouf in their toolkit. Alan has taken his scripts and incorporated them in the VESI powerpack which means they can now be ran simply through the VESI GUI, saving you even more time. Due to current work commitments I haven’t had a lot of time to have a play with the powerpack yet but from the little I have seen it’s fantastic!

More information on The VESI can be found here

http://www.thevesi.org

and Alan’s powerpack can be found here

http://www.virtu-al.net/2009/11/02/virtu-al-vesi-powergui-powerpack/

If you like what you see and it starts saving you time consider a donation to Alan’s home test environment that will help us all in the long run!

http://www.virtu-al.net/likemyscripts/

Wow quite a surprise I have been shortlisted for the Computerweekly.com IT Blog Awards 2009: Individual IT Professional Male.

Head on over to http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2009/09/20/237824/it-blog-awards-2009-individual-it-professional-male.htm to cast your votes!

When conducting a vSphere upgrade using either the Host Update utility or Update Manager you get the following error appear on the host console. 

It is first worth checking that you do have enough free space using the vdf –h command and this error message does not appear on update manager or host update utility and is not visible in any logs only on the console screen.

To resolve this issue download the vSphere Client and Host Update package from vmware.com and reinstall. You should now be able to conduct your upgrade from the host update utility. I haven’t tried using update manager again.

Many thanks to novakk_AH on the VMware community forum for assisting me with this http://communities.vmware.com/message/1407914

I always look forward to updates from Veeam their ability to deliver products that are a joy to use and do what they say on the tin is fantastic. Snippets about version 4 have been released practically since version 3’s release and for me seeing version 4 in action at IPExpo proved that Veeam had done it again with the vStorage API integration and the Enterprise Management Console amongst numerous other enhancements.

Veeam are the first 3rd party provider to make use of the vStorage API’s in its backup product and what this effectively means is your backups can now be completed up to 10x faster than previously using ESX4 changed block tracking and native thin-provisioned disk support.

The Enterprise Management Console means you can now manage multiple Veeam installations across your enterprise with a single view, this also means that you no longer need to connect into your backup server to view your backups, this can be done from your desktop by pointing at the Enterprise Management Console website.

I look forward to upgrading customers to version 4 and seeing what performance increase they receive from this upgrade alone, the backup window is often the biggest challenge in the backup solution.

Veeam News Release >> http://www.veeam.com/news/veeam-backup-is10-times-faster.html

Veeam Backup 4 Product Page >> http://www.veeam.com/vmware-esx-backup.html#fragment-1

5 Ways VMware vSphere Improves Backup and Recovery White Paper by Eric Siebert >> http://www.veeam.com/go/vmware-vsphere-backup-wp?ad=veeam_backup

A few pictures from Veeam’s Website

 

 

On with the vSphere blogging competition, the winner of round 2 was announced on Friday and I was extremely surprised to see it was me! All the details can be found here http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2009/10/winning-post-from-cycle-2-distributed-switch.html I would also like to point you in the direction of Hany Michael’s entry on his blog which as per usual was a fantastic source of information http://www.hypervizor.com/2009/10/vsphere-40-vnetwork-distributed-switch-vds-video-demonstration-architecture-diagram/

Onto the third round of the vSphere blogging contest VMware Data Recovery

The Problem

Often when working with SMB’s a key factor in any project is the cost, with lots of companies understanding the benefits of virtualisation the project soon gets of the ground but often is restricted by budget. This often leads to the core system being impletmeneted and features that are seen as nice to have are left until further funding can be allocated. With many companies already having licences for backup products the traditional style of backup (agent inside each VM) is left in place and the added benefits that virtualisation can bring to backup are missed.

The Solution

In steps VMware Data Recovery,

Whilst there are already many excellent backup products on the market for virtualisation, these all mean an additional cost when the budget has already been spent, Data Recovery is included with VMware vSphere Essentials Plus and from VMware vSphere advanced and up.

VMware Data Recovery works on the basis of a virtual appliance that you deploy from the packaged ovf and a plug-in that you install within your vSphere client to manage and administer the backups. Setup and configuration of your first backup jobs can easily be configured within 30 minutes. VMware Data Recovery can backup a maximum of 100 VM’s and these can be written to a maximum of two datastores at once. Your data will be de-duplicated whilst it is being backed up ultimately saving you space and Data Recovery also makes use of the changed block tracking within vSphere so only has to backup the changed blocks since the last backup, a feature that we are only just seeing introduced in some of the leading products now.

Installation

Now prior to writing this blog post VMware Data Recovery was not a product I had ever used, I am pleased to report that VMware have done a fantastic job making the installation as pain free as possible.

You will first need to download Data Recovery from the download page on VMware’s website.

Steps

You need to deploy the OVF file that is on the Data Recovery ISO to your datacenter, this is done easily with vSphere using the Deploy OVF template option from the file menu.

Once you have deployed the OVF, you can add a hard disk to it to act as a datastore for your backup or skip this step until later, alternatively you are able to use a CIFS share or RDM as your datastore.

You will now need to boot up the Data Recovery appliance and configure the networking.

Once this is complete all is left is to install the Data Recovery plug-in to your vSphere client and configure the plug-in to see your appliance, before you start configuring your backups.

Below is a short video to show you through these steps if you need a little more assistance. Please excuse the poor quality as this is the first video like this I have made, also please excuse my West Country accent! It maybe easier to watch the video straight from Vimeo here >> http://www.vimeo.com/7126178

more about “A beginners guide to VMware Data Recovery“, posted with vodpod

Things to be Aware of

Be aware of where you are storing your backups, there is little point to storing them on the same storage device as the VM’s you are backing up. For this reason a CIFs share on a physical server or NAS maybe a good idea. Data Recovery has no ability to be able to backup your VM’s to tape.

Network Destinations Must Be specified Using IP Addresses – Using DNS-resolved names to specify network destinations is not supported with Data Recovery. When adding network destinations using Configure > Destinations, enter an IP address. For example, use \\192.0.2.12\share rather than \\example\share. It has also been reported that by typing your username like There is a file level recovery option but this is only experimental, as such you should not be counting on this in a production enviroment.

Must Read Documents

All the documents relating to Data Recovery can be found at the link here >> http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/vdr_pubs.html I highly recommend reading all the release notes and admin guide before undertaking and installation of Data Recovery.

I have spent quite a lot of time this week reading up and sitting in on webinars regarding VMware’s soon to be released View 4.0 with the inclusion of the software version of PCoIP. I have been really impressed with the demonstration’s and what is being promised and can’t wait to get my hands on it to take a look. I wanted to point out a couple of resources regarding view 4. The first is a blog post by Scott Davis, VMware View Chief Technology Officer and can be found here >> http://blogs.vmware.com/view-point/2009/10/why-pcoip-is-the-best-protocol-for-virtual-desktops.html This post discusses the workings of PCoIP and why and how it works.

The second is a video that was released last week demonstrating VMware View 4.0’s ability to stream video to a thin client and handle multi monitors using of the PCoIP technology. For many of our customers and especially schools, the ability to watch streaming media on a view desktop will mean they can now start looking seriously at desktop virtualisation on a large scale instead of just small scale deployments. 

View 4 PCoIP demo

I have had some fantastic feedback about my cue cards to help you with studying for the VCP410, I have recently made a few updates including vNetwork Distributed switches and VMware data recovery, to download the latest version please check out my VCP in vSphere 4.0 page here >> http://virtualisedreality.wordpress.com/vcp-in-vsphere-4-0-study-notes/ 

As ever if there is any feedback about the design, content or future requests please let me know.

Having started blogging about VMware virtualisation just over a year ago my knowledge and enjoyment for learning more has grown and grown. I was drawn to start a blog and eventually start twittering about my experiences and VMware products after spending a long time reading other users blogs, at the time it was www.yellow-bricks.com and www.virtu-al.com that got my attention the most. Whilst I don’t think my blog will ever be up to the status of these bloggers, due to their gift for explaining technical elements to a technical audiance it has been good to get possitive feedback from users who have enjoyed reading articles, or that I have been able to help out of a tight situation with problems in the datacenter.

Since I started posting regularly on twitter and following some key people in the virtualisation community I have really began to understand the concept of the VMware community that is mentioned so often in blog posts and the round tables podcast etc. Being able to comment on new events and products, find out about all the latest thought provoking blog post and make some keys contacts that share the same passion as myself. I have been helped out with issues by industry leaders, been able to offer help to other specialists, assist with ideas for products being designed to help the virtualisation administrator and much more.

This week saw for me and many others treck to IPExpo at Earls Court in London, I plan to blog about IPExpo a little later. But what IPExpo meant for me was a chance to finally meet a lot of the people in the VMware Community that I either speak to on a regular basis or follow on twitter. Being my first event of this type I was somewhat nervous, as putting myself out there and making first contact isn’t one of my strongest points (it’s easy to do when sat behind a screen and keyboard!) After a fantastic day meeting Scott Herold from Vizioncore (@vmguru), Doug Hazelman from Veeam (@VMDoug), Alan Renouf from virtual-al.net (@alanrenouf) plus many others and watching lots of fantastic demos, I headed to the storagebeers at the local pub. I lost track of all the people I spoke to but what a fantastic bunch of people! to be able to walk in a room with a group of people I had never met and be a. be recognised and b. be able to chat to about anything and everything including virtualisation was fantastic. So a big thank you to all of those that made me feel welcome (ecspecially Scott Herold, Doug Hazelman, Simon Seagrave, Stu (@vinternals) and Stevie Chambers even if I did only meet him briefly!)  and I hope next time I have the guts to introduce myself to a few more of you and can stay a little longer than 2 hours.

My week was topped off by being included in Eric Siebert’s Top 100 VMware & virtualization people to follow  list, to even be considered for this by someone as knowledgable and with as much experience as Eric Siebert is a great honour.

For anyone new to VMware or hoping to gain some more knowledge, following the people on the list above is a great start, dont be affraid to ask questions or add your comments or opinions. There maybe differences in opinions but by taking part and blogging albeit micro blogging via twitter or starting your own blog about your feelings and thoughts is a great way to learn more and get involved in the community atmosphere.  Also the VMware communities at http://communities.vmware.com/home.jspa are at the center of this community, this is a great place to get involved answering questions or poss your questions to the community.

Thanks to everyone involved in the community I hope I can continue to contribute for a long time to come and meet many more of you at community events, VMUG’s and hopefully even VMworld next year.

VMware have now released SRM 4.0 with support for vSphere and NFS amongst other new features. This will bring the ability to upgrade to vSphere to a lot more customers. SRM 4.0 not only supports vSphere hosts but will also support 3.03 and 3.5 ESX hosts, although you do need to be running vCenter 4.0.

 

The features listed as new in this release are as below taken from the release notes

New in This Release

This release of Site Recovery Manager introduces several new features:

• Full compatibility with vCenter 4.
• Full support for NFS-based arrays.
• Support for shared recovery sites.
  Enables many-to-one pairings of protected sites with a recovery site. For more information, see the technical note Installing, Configuring, and Using Shared Recovery Site Support, which is available at http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/srm_pubs.html.
• Resilience in the face of vCenter unavailability during a test recovery.
  Placeholder virtual machines can be quickly repaired after the protected site vCenter becomes available again.
• New repair-mode installation features.
  You can run the SRM installer in repair mode if you need to change configuration parameters such as vCenter credentials, database connection information or credentials, and certificate details.
• Graphical interface to advanced settings.
  Eliminates most requirements to edit the XML configuration file
• Support for DB2 as an SRM database server.
• New licensing options.
• Improved scalability.
  A single protection group can now include up to 1000 virtual machines.
• Full Compatibility With DPM (Distributed Power Management)
  SRM recovery plans can now power-on or power-off a host that is in standby mode.
• New Option to dr-ip-customizer Utility
  The dr-ip-customizer utility now logs less verbose diagnostic output by default. To force dr-ip-customizer to log the same level of diagnostic output that it produced in earlier releases, use the -verbose option.
• Change in Certificate Validation
  When you select certificate authentication, the SRM installation validates the certificate you supply before continuing. Certificates signed with an MD5 key are no longer allowed.
• Support for Protecting Fault-Tolerant Virtual Machines.
  SRM can now protect virtual machines that have been configured for fault-tolerant operation. When recovered, these virtual machines lose their fault tolerance, and must be manually reconfigured after recovery to restore fault tolerance.
• Improved context-sensitive Help.
• PDF documents available on release media
  Current versions of the PDF documents for this release are available in the docs folder at the root of the SRM 4.0 CD. Updated versions of these documents may be available at http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/srm_pubs.html.

There is also an Article by Michael White here >> http://blogs.vmware.com/uptime/2009/10/srm-40-is-here-the-wait-for-vsphere-and-nfs-support-is-over.html that discusses the upgrade procedure to SRM 4.0

We’re just waiting for VMware View support now and all our customers will be in a position to upgrade.

We are now onto the second stage of the VMware vSphere Blogging contest, the winner of week one’s FT subject was Hany Michael from http://www.hypervizor.com/ you can read his post here >> http://www.hypervizor.com/2009/09/vsphere-40-fault-tolerance-architecture-diagram-video-and-use-cases/ you can also get the full run down from VMware on the vSphere blog here >> http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/ Congratulations to Hany for the win it was well deserved.

Moving onto the next subject vNetwork Distributed Switches, there is already a lot of information regarding the vNetwork Distributed Switches, including a very good white paper by VMware which I have linked to at the end and numerous videos and how to blogs. I have decided to make my blog post more of a guide for potential new users / customers and pass on my thoughts on using vNetwork Distributed Switches.

The vNetwork Distributed Switches vDS for short allows you to configure a single virtual switch to span multiple hosts, so you would be correct in thinking that this means you no longer need to create your virtual machine port groups on all your hosts, saving you time and taking the risk out of accidently spelling one wrong and causing issues for vMotion / HA. The vNetwork Distributed is a feature that is only available to those with vSphere Enterprise plus licensing.

vDS also introduces a number of other features these are :-

• Private VLANs
• Network VMotion—tracking of VM networking state, improving troubleshooting and enabling
• 3rd Party Virtual Switch support with the Cisco Nexus 1000V Series Virtual Switch
• Bi-directional traffic shaping

You did read that third item right, you can now have a Cisco switch as your virtual switch, the Cisco Nexus 1000V is an optional extra that you can purchase that allows you to have a Cisco switch inside your virtual infrastructure, a must have for any large company with Cisco networking throughout. The VMware administrator can now pass the networking back to the networking team, they can now manage the virtual networking in exactly the same way as they do the physical, much to the relief of the networking team who were always probably a bit concerned with the virtual aspect of the network and possibly open the world of virtualisation to some customers who haven’t been able to proceed for this reason.

Network vMotion allows counters and statistics regarding the virtual machine to move with the machine when it is vMotion’ed this ensures monitoring and troubleshooting is a lot easier for machines that are being moved by vmotion.

There are two main concepts to understand about vNetwork Distributed Switches these are

Distributed Virtual Port Groups (Left Side of image below) Much like the port groups on your standard virtual switches, these are port groups on the vDS that specify port configuration.

Distributed Virtual Uplinks (Right Side of image below) This is a new concept the Distributed Virtual Uplinks contain the physical NICs that will act as uplinks on your hosts, from here you can configure NIC teaming, load balancing and failover policies.

If the configuration for some reason differs on one of your hosts maybe due to downtime due to a fault or other host issues you will receive a warning making you aware of this issue.

When the host then becomes available again the settings will be automatically updated on that host.

When deploying a vDS you are able to automate the configuration of your hosts by using host profiles. This will also allow you to check compliance of your hosts at any time and quickly add new hosts in the future.

My Preference…

My preference when using vDS is to run in a hybrid mode, keeping the service consoles and vmKernel as a standard switch and moving all the Virtual Machine Port groups to a vDS. This means I handle the service console and vmKernel at installation the same as usual then add my host to the vDS, when I then find the need to add a new portgroup to my hosts I have only got to configure it in one place. In large environments this saves considerable amounts of time and the potential for error.

Although running with the service console and vmKernel as part of the vDS is a fully supported configuration and what a number of people would do, indeed in an environment with less physical NICs this would be what I would choose to do.

I have updated my VCP in vSphere Cue Cards with some key information on vSphere networking to assist you with studying towards the new VCP. These can be found here >> http://virtualisedreality.wordpress.com/vcp-in-vsphere-4-0-study-notes/ 

If you are considering using vDS’s or would like more information the following white paper from VMware is a must read! >> VMware® vNetwork Distributed Switch Migration and Con­guration