vSphere 5 – Storage pt.2 vCloud and Vsphere Migrations

The point..

So on my last post I covered some things to think on when looking at the new VMFS-5 partitions. Obviously the point in moving to the new VMFS would be to gain all the benefits as explained in that previous post. One thing you will see in this post are just the types of migrations. I also want to highlight that I shared some resources on the bottom for those of you who may want to review some deeper highlights. Obviously there isn’t a ton of documentation out there highlighting this nor the special *features* for vSphere 5 (sVmotion issues??) that you may run into. So let hope I do this yet further justice. On to the blog!

Adding VMFS-5 to the vCloud

1. Log in to vSphere and ensure you have a new LUN provisioned (covered above in how to:)
2. Log into vCloud Director Web Interface and you must be an administrator.
3. Click “System” tab and click on Provider VDC. Right click a PVDC and select “Open”
4. After opening the PVDC select the Datastores Tab and then click the +/- button to add/remove datastores

1. Browse through the datastores by clicking the > button or by searching in the top right. When you have located your datastore highlight it and then click the button then click “OK”. Disregard the warning.

(Note: the yellow highlights are ways you can search and browse through datastores. This is very handy when there are many to look through)

(Note: Highlight in yellow shows the datastore added successfully. This is a 20TB Datastore)

You will now see the datastore in the datastore summary tab for that PVDC

Migrating Virtual Machines for vCloud Director to the “new” VMFS-5 LUN.

1. Make sure the vApp is NOT a linked clone. If it is a linked clone defer to the references below.
2. Ensure the Datastore you want to Storage Motion the Virtual Machine to is also provisioned to the Org VDC. Do this by opening the Org vDC and selecting the “Datastores” Tab.

   Note: you can see both datastores are attached to this VDC with the organization known as App1
   

3. You could then log-in to vSphere client with the following noted vCenter and perform a storage vMotion. Another way of doing a Storage vMotion could be by using William Lam’s script he wrote as well. (see references below)
4. If you need to perform the sVmotion defer to the following method below.

NOTE: I would highly recommend that you roll out update 1 to all vCloud components. This addresses a few major fixes that will allow for operations to run more smoothly. More importantly, the only way to sVmotion vCloud VMs is to turn them off. This is a pretty common issue with vanilla vsphere 5/vcloud 1.5 roll outs. I also experienced this problem. For more information please see references at the bottom.

Migrate a Virtual Machine with Storage VMotion in vSphere

Use migration with Storage VMotion to relocate a virtual machine’s configuration file and virtual disks while the virtual machine is powered on. You cannot change the virtual machine’s execution host during a migration with Storage VMotion. (Note: that if VM is managed by vCloud and not at 1.5 update 1 you will need to possibly power off the virtual machine to perform the svmotion. If the virtual machine is a fast provisioned vm (linked clone) then you will need to perform the sVmotion through an API.

Procedure

• Ensure you are not moving vCloud vApp if you are please follow the above process first.
  
• Display the virtual machine you want to migrate in the inventory.
  
• Right-click on the virtual machine, and select Migrate from the pop-up menu.
  
• Select Change datastore and click Next.
  
• Select a resource pool (the same) and click Next.
  
• Select the destination datastore:
  To move the virtual machine configuration files and virtual disks to a single destination, select the datastore and click Next.
  To select individual destinations for the configuration file and each virtual disk, click Advanced. In the Datastore column, select a destination for the configuration file and each virtual disk, and click Next.
  
• Select a disk format and click Next:
  
• Option Description
  Same as Source Use the format of the original virtual disk.
  If you select this option for an RDM disk in either physical or virtual
  compatibility mode, only the mapping file is migrated.Thin provisioned Use the thin format to save storage space. The thin virtual disk uses just as
  much storage space as it needs for its initial operations. When the virtual disk
  requires more space, it can grow in size up to its maximum allocated capacity.
  This option is not available for RDMs in physical compatibility mode. If you
  select this option for a virtual compatibility mode RDM, the RDM is
  converted to a virtual disk. RDMs converted to virtual disks cannot be
  converted back to RDMs.

  Thick Allocate a fixed amount of hard disk space to the virtual disk. The virtual
  disk in the thick format does not change its size and from the beginning
  occupies the entire datastore space provisioned to it.
  This option is not available for RDMs in physical compatibility mode. If you
  select this option for a virtual compatibility mode RDM, the RDM is
  converted to a virtual disk. RDMs converted to virtual disks cannot be
  converted back to RDMs.

  NOTE: Disks are converted from thin to thick format or thick to thin format only when they are copied from one
  datastore to another. If you choose to leave a disk in its original location, the disk format is not converted, regardless of the selection made here.

• Review the page and click Finish.
  
• A task is created that begins the virtual machine migration process.
  

References:

Linked Clones:
http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2012/04/scripts-to-extract-vcloud-director.html
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1014249

Storage Motion Issue:
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2012122

How To’s sVmotion CLI/VCO style:
http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2012/02/performing-storage-vmotion-in-vcloud.html
http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2012/02/performing-storage-vmotion-in-vcloud_19.html
http://geekafterfive.com/2012/03/06/vcloud-powercli-svmotion/
http://geekafterfive.com/tag/vcloud/
http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-501-virtual-machine-admin-guide.pdf

Storage Considerations for vCloud:
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/VMW_10Q3_WP_vCloud_Director_Storage.pdf

VMware vSphere – Networking Best Practices – Networking 101 pt.2

Okay Experts take it easy on me…

As you know I have been writing various post around building your VMware Workstation Lab. One of the key points that I am trying to drive during this lab build is how to get your environment as closely matching a production environment as you can. Obviously networking is a very broad subject especially when it comes to implementing a production vSphere environment. I am going to attempt to do this topic justice by sharing some key points that should help you understand more of how you should design your network. I am not going to attempt to do what Kendrick Coleman does (because his designs are solid). I am only going to provide talking points and recommendations about traffic separation, why it should be separated, and details. Also, keep in mind that the most important factor of networking is using N+1 or not to use N+1. I will say that it is highly recommended from VMware to have your physical networking N+1 so you can benefit further from High-Availability. So let’s get started with the traffic types.

Traffic Types:

1. Management (High Availability)
2. vMotion
3. Fault Tolerance (Not in all cases)
4. VM Networks
5. Backup (Not in all cases)
6. Storage/NAS (Depends on the type)

Note: backup and Storage say depends because in some cases you may or may not have iSCSI/NAS storage or be running backups for your virtual machines, Especially if you use a product like Veeam or CommVault. Fault tolerance isn’t really used and I believe that even when it does get better it still may not be worth it, considering all the bigger workloads and cost in licensing as well. Here are my recommendations and best practices I follow for dedicating traffic:

1. Management: If possible: VLAN it, Separate the traffic (to a different switch), Use teaming or a single Nic (if you set up a MGMT kernel on another port group), You can run/share traffic with vMotion, Fault Tolerance, Backup, and Storage NAS. If you do share traffic use some sort of QOS or Network I/O control. BE mindful that running management with all this traffic isn’t recommended but this would provide you a way to run all this traffic over a separate switch a part from production VM traffic. If you have plenty of NICs then you can run it over the VM production network (but you don’t want to expose it to that network) but you must somehow separate it with a different subnet or VLAN. Most cases I see vMotion and MGMT being shared with Fault Tolerance (FT with big 10GB networks). Your NIC teaming should use explicit failover and over-ride so your vMotion/FT traffic will go over a seperate interface then your management traffic.
2. vMotion-FT-Backup-Storage-NAS: L2 traffic, hopefully doesn’t have to be routed, in most cases I see this and management traffic being shared, especially with 10GB. vMotion+FT+Backup+NAS if you don’t have a ton of connections. On this particular set up it would be good to setup Jumbo Frames. This traffic you wouldn’t want running over production if possible so a dedicated switch would be really good, also VMware recommends using a dedicated storage switch anyways.
3. VM Networks: I usually dedicate two NICs for VM production traffic and usually create separate port groups for each type of VM related traffic. In some cases you may have a customer who requires separating this out over different NICs. Again this is just one of those you have to look at based on requirements at that time. Normally the ladder is good enough.
4. Storage/NAS and Backup: In most cases businesses may have their own backup network. You could run storage and backup traffic over those switches if you choose. In that case, you mines of well also run vMotion and FT.
   

The Switches and considerations:

You usually want 2 types of switches if that is all you can do. In some cases if you go 4 that would be even better because then you can look at N+1. Where you can try to separate the big traffic from the little traffic (Management). If you cannot separate it by using dedicated switches then use QOS or NIOC to control the traffic. Managed switches can be expensive, just remember in vSphere 5 support for LLDP came into being so you don’t have to worry about buying CISCO stuff to get that CDP information. If you do not plan on using a Converged Network Architecture (FCoE) then be sure to buy enough 1GB Nics. These things are cheap you can load them up even if you may not use them. Things like migrations and stuff come up and if you only buy what you need you’ll end up robbing Peter and paying Paul.

This is really just a quick overview and recommendations. Unfortunately we only have what we are given in most cases. We also work off budgets.  I am going to cover some lab exercies that break this down even further.  General Stuff… I hope you enjoy it and I am sure I am going to be updating it as well.

Cheers,
Cwjking

Blah Blah Cloud… part 1

When you look at cloud today in context of VMware what is your biggest concern? For some of us it may be networking, others storage, and maybe even focused in a more broader perspective like; availability, scalability, and BU/DR. Since I have been working with vCloud director day in and day out I have been asking some deeper technical questions centered more around scalability of storage and other related components to the overall design. I have been challenged in various ways because of this technology. Prior to vCloud it was vSphere and a lot of how you implemented and managed vSphere was much less complex. Cloud brings another level of complexity – especially if your initial “design and management” is poor to begin with. Usually you end spending more time and money going back addressing issues related to simple best practices that most Architects and Engineers should already know. In some cases it’s a disconnect between that design and infrastructure team and the help desk. This may not always be the case but in my experience it seems to happen more often than naught.

I am sure we could all spend plenty of time talking about operations, procedures, protocols, standards, and blah blah…. but this isn’t the point of this blog…. Even though these things are of the highest importance and the more effort that is put into this the better the results you will get and the less cost you will end up spending. Anyways…

So, as I was saying vCloud has challenged me in several ways. Now not only do I have to consider the design of vSphere, but I also have to look at the design of vCloud director and how we manage all these different components. Even though you simply add vCloud director still doesn’t mean that is in the end of it all. More complexity comes with integration of other applications, Application availability, and Backup and DR. I have been amazed at how many things I see as an oversight due to the lack of expertise in this area. This is no offense to anyone but really VMware is still in its infancy when running against other markets. Though I strongly sense that VMware is going to be majority market share for a while.

Crossing the gaps:
Since I have been studying and learning day and day out covering VMware best practices and other companies best practices (not VMware) I continue to see a lot of disconnects in certain areas (vCloud Director). Storage guys have no idea or clue about running virtualized workloads on Arrays and often times they care not to even want to learn about VMware. Usually they already have plenty to do but this disconnect on some level will affect the implementation. I honestly say that in most cases the Architect should be the one researching and ensuring that all the components which make up the cloud computing stack should be standardize and implemented correctly, even so these gaps still cause setbacks. Which now leads me into the networking side of things. Networking engineers I see are beginning to come up to speed more quickly on virtualization. The main factor of this is because of Cisco UCS and how it appeals to those network administrators and engineers, and add to that FCoE/CNA’s. However, the disconnect once again lies in that knowledge transfer of the virtual platform of how it works and best practices designed around VMware. I first one to say that many don’t really get the choice especially if a company just threw you into the fire. It’s like right now we are looking at giving our network team the keys to the kingdom (CISCO UCS) but yet they have nearly ZERO understanding and training of how any of it works…. scary right? We have to cross these gaps people we need to make sure that we have people positioned in areas who can understand and impart that training or have someone available as a resource.

My Real Concerns:
vCloud director is something totally new and alien to me when I first stepped in the cloud. I had to learn and quickly. Having my background I quickly go to the manuals, read the blogs, get plugged into good sources, learn even more, read books, and I start auditing. I start looking at designs that may be questionable and start asking the questions of “Is it ignorance” or “What the … was he thinking?” and quickly find that usually it was the latter.. simply ignorance. No one really is to blame because we have to understand YES, it is a NEW technology – BUT how much more critical is it that we research and ensure that we are implementing a design that is “rock” solid before rolling it out… Yes, I know deadlines are deadlines but it is what it is either way. You either spend a lot more money in the long run or spend a little bit more to get it right the first time. We are now having to go back and perform a second phase and for the past couple of months we have been remediating a lot of different things that could’ve been done right had a simple template been designed correctly. We now spend countless additional hours updating and working more issues because of this one simple thing. This isn’t even getting into the storage and other concerns I have.

Cloud and What’s Scary?:
Yeah, I know right scary? I don’t know about yours but some of the ones I have seen are. Here is what scares the heck out of me. ABC customer decides deploy a truck load of Oracle, MSSQL, IIS, Weblogic, and etc Virtual machines all on the fly. Next thing we know we see some latency on the storage back-end and see some impact to performance. Come to find out a bunch of cloning operations are kicking off… I/O is spiking, the VM’s are writing many types of Iops and in a matter of about 12 hours we are having some major issues. This is called “Scalability” or sometimes “Elasticity” whatever you want to call it. Some catalogs host every kind of application and majority of the apps are all tier 1 virtualized workloads. This isn’t the little stuff most corporations virtualize. They usually put this stuff off for later because the need of having a high performance server and old traditional thinking still tells them to not do it (Playing it safe). Scaling a cloud to accommodate tier 1 workloads is going to be something I think we are going to be seeing a lot more. In fact, most vendors provide documentation of implementing solutions on VMware Cloud Director – but they almost NEVER cover the application workloads. I am speaking to Storage, Networking, and Server Hardware. This is probably because in most cases due to the mixed nature you can have in an environment you should do THOROUGH testing to ensure that you can scale out and run an optimal amount of workloads… some would call it vBlock..

Anyways I didn’t mean to write a blog this long but I have just had a lot on my mind lately and I will continue to write more as I continue my VMware Cloud journey.

Cheers,

***Disclaimer: The thoughts and views expressed on VirtualNoob.wordpress.com and Chad King in no way reflect the views or thoughts of his employer or any other views of a company. These are his personal opinions which are formed on his own. Also, products improve over time and some things maybe out of date. Please feel free to contact us and request an update and we will be happy to assist. Thanks!~

Brown Bag Cloud Architecture “Eco-System” Notes

So I checked out the Brown Bag over at Cody’s Site. I have to say I was very happy with the Cloud Architecture.  It definitely was a different spin to learn about the “Eco-System” and also listen to some of the questions.  Here are the notes I gathered:

• vSphere which was once the management layer is now more of an application layer
• vSphere administrators may not be vCloud
• Architecture shows best practice to have two vCenters one for the Cloud Service the other for management.
• Automation and Orchestration is more important
• Different security levels for Cloud and vSphere Management
• Scaling the cloud out brings additional complexity to traditional virtual BU/DR technologies
• Most scale-outs of the cloud involve more of use case versus meeting the vCenter maximums.
  • BU/DR requirements
  • PCI Compliance (Particular Security Use-Case)
• VCD Database is still not “officially” supported when running Oracle RAC in “Active/Active” only “Active/Standby” Configurations
• Templates are simply “powered off” VM in VCD
• Network Copy happens between Clusters (different storage)
• Cloning has always been Block-File copy between host (VAAI Helps)
• For VCD deploying vApps to the assigned tenant datastores the vApps will deploy on datastores that has the least amount of “USED” space
• VCD requires DRS – NEVER disable it
• Linked Clones do not have mis-alignment on NFS
• NFS seems to be gaining more momentum for VCD deployments

The following to me seemed to make a lot of sense.  I attempted to sort it out by what I would think is needed versus highly recommended.  Need is more of vCloud is dependent on that technology.

• High availability of certain components – applications.
  • vShield Manager > FT enabled (Fault Tolerance)
  • vCenter Server > Heartbeat (More critical because VCD uses vCenter)

• Components Needed to use in the Cloud Architecture (VMware Specific)
  • vCenter (one for management and the other for cloud)
  • vShield Manager
  • vChargeback

• Components Highly Recommended:
  • vCloud Service Manager
  • vCenter Update Manager
  • vCloud Connector
  • vCenter Orchestrator

• Future Products that will be vCloud ready:
  NOTE: Due to the different API’s in each Product, VMware is playing catch up on getting some of these products “vCloud Ready”
  • vCenter Ops
  • Infrastructure Viewer

• Skill and Knowledge increase is also needed:
  • vSphere / ESX
  • Deeper Storage Skills
  • Deeper Networking & Firewall Skills
  • Scripting (PowerCLI)
  • Workflow / Automation
  • Capacity Planning

Note: Prior it was ESX, vCenter and some scripting
it is also more about Infrastructure Management now

Cell Network Considerations:

• Network Design of Interfaces:
  • HTTP/Console Proxy (Front-End end-user aka Portal)
  • OS Management
  • Database (Oracle or MS-SQL)
  • NFS (Transfer Service Storage L2 Network with Jumbo Frames)
  • vSphere (L2 Network with Jumbo Frames)

Note: This is not referenced in the architecture but just recommendations. These may require static or additional routes. Traditionally this has been 2 interfaces. Use VLANS if possible. The NFS and vSphere are mostly for the cloning process or Import/Export processes of VCD. This would allow the cloud to be even more scalable and efficient.

Feel Free to comment! For more information visit:
http://professionalvmware.com/2011/11/brownbag-follow-up-vcloud-architecture/

***Disclaimer: The thoughts and views expressed on VirtualNoob.wordpress.com and Chad King in no way reflect the views or thoughts of his employer or any other views of a company. These are his personal opinions which are formed on his own. Also, products improve over time and some things maybe out of date. Please feel free to contact us and request an update and we will be happy to assist. Thanks!~

vCenter Orchestrator Resources and Links

I wanted to only post some resources for VMware vCenter Orchestrator so here they are. I also hear through the grapevine a PowerShell plug-in is coming the best part is that vCloud is also getting the PowerCLI cmdlets as well! Cheers!

vCenter Orchestrator Links and Other Sources:

http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/orchestrator_pubs.html
http://professionalvmware.com/vcenter-orchestrator/
http://www.vcoteam.info/
http://www.vcoportal.de/
http://downloads.vmware.com/d/details/vco_va_420/dHRAYnRoamViZHAlZA > VCO Appliance

Appliance Download and Automated Installation:
Appliance
Installation – Cody Bunch
Installation 2 – VCO Team
Automated Installation – Lamw

Documentation Download:
Orchestrator Compiled Docs (Admin guides and more)

Other Stuff:
Monitoring SNMP for Ticket Alerting “Use-Case” Plug-In
http://blogs.vmware.com/orchestrator/2011/09/snmp-plug-in-integration-with-vcenter.html
CIM Hardware (Yes, full hardware reporting and automation now..)
http://labs.vmware.com/flings/cim-plugin
Web Based UI Plug-in for VCO:
http://www.vcoportal.de/2011/10/welcome-back-perspectives/
Plug In List (Official)
http://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/vcenter-orchestrator/plugins.html
contains:
vCenter Server
vCloud Director
vCenter Update Manager
CiscoUCS Manager (this is the management application)
MS AD (Microsoft Active Directory)
HTTP-REST (This is also what VCD uses)
SOAP
AMQP protocol/MQ
SNMP

Companies with vCenter orchestrator plug-ins:
RadWare: (Automating Load balancing and auto provisioning of more web servers when load gets high)
http://www.radware.com/Solutions/Enterprise/Virtualization/vDirect.aspx
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=4rkV3ebQens&vq=medium
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=6X-J6llsuho&vq=medium
Uptime: (More monitoring)
http://support.uptimesoftware.com/orchestrator.php

***Disclaimer: The thoughts and views expressed on VirtualNoob.wordpress.com  and Chad King in no way reflect the views or thoughts of his employer or any other views of a company. These are his personal opinions which are formed on his own. Also, products improve over time and some things maybe out of date. Please feel free to contact us and request an update and we will be happy to assist. Thanks!~

VMware vSphere Management Tools

All I can say is “Whew!”. I am definitely looking forward to this.

So I am hoping to test some new products.

Criteria:

1. What free tools the vendor offers?
2. Capacity Management
3. Reporting (Access and Automation)
4. Monitoring
5. Other Features
6. Overall Cost (Licensing Model)

Tools:
(NOTE: The order is not specific to favorites or a product being the best. Also noted are the free tool they offer)

1. vKernel – vScope
2. Veeam One – Monitoring and Reporting)
3. VMTurbo – Community edition
4. Solarwinds – VM Monitor

Again, if you may know of any other products drop me a line and I see if we can add them to the list. There will be a review, rating, and follow up after testing and working with the products.

***Disclaimer: The thoughts and views expressed on VirtualNoob.wordpress.com and Chad King in no way reflect the views or thoughts of his employer or any other views of a company. These are his personal opinions which are formed on his own. Also, products improve over time and some things maybe out of date. Please feel free to contact us and request an update and we will be happy to assist. Thanks!~

vSphere 5 Licensing Polls – The Results are in…

So the results are in from the Poll I posted about 2 weeks ago.

The voting was done to where no one could vote from the same IP and its used cookies as well.  This was the best way to get the “most” accurate polls for voting.  Obviously, we don’t want people voting who have voted already… Still browser cleaning and resetting the IP would allow for you to vote but come on who honestly would do that? .

Here are the results:

Will the new vSphere 5 Licensing cost you more money?

Answer	Votes	Percent
Yes, It will cost us significantly more (Greater then 100% increase)	128	43%
Yes, It will cost me more money (less then 100% increase)	103	35%
No, and we have room to grow	41	14%
No, we will break even on cost.	25	8%

What do you think about the new vSphere 5 licensing model?

Answer	Votes	Percent
They should increase additonal vRAM	284	89%
Nothing, its just fine the way it is.	34	11%

So as you can see… the results speak for themselves. Now, according to some sources there have been a lot of confusion about the vRAM licensing but in just a short survey you can see the results. I am still not sure where VMware got its numbers and obviously they have a ot more resources to put into researching but it makes you wonder if they were catering to a certain business model already.  Still even so making businesses conform to a “Bill as you go” model doesn’t make much sense for many Private cloud companies.

So right now for us at work we are no longer going the consolidation route.  With the new licensing we are going to just upgrade all our current licenses so we will now have vRAM capacity.  In the long run it does cost us 100% more because of our previous planning/strategy.  Upgrading all our current licenses to vSphere 5 will give us nearly 5 TB of vRAM. Of course in the beginning we were planning on 1/2′ing our vSphere licenses…

Virtual Noob’s take on things?
It cannot be more obvious that most people are having to spend more money… VMware should probably take to heart what its customers are saying. Honestly I don’t see a large amount of people being confused on vRAM it almost feels to me that people are just looking for a reason.. Though I will AGREE you still need to look at the big picture.

***Disclaimer: The thoughts and views expressed on VirtualNoob.wordpress.org  and Chad King in no way reflect the views or thoughts of his employer or any other views of a company. These are his personal opinions which are formed on his own. Also, products improve over time and some things maybe out of date. Please feel free to contact us and request an update and we will be happy to assist. Thanks!~

vSphere 5 Licensing – “The Big Picture”

As we all know a lot of customers are unhappy with the current licensing introduced into vSphere 5.

It affects customers on every baseline and I suppose the real questions I have been seeing could easily be addressed by adding additional vRAM capacity to the current licensing model. I noted this in my previous blog as well.

I have been doing some more thinking about this subject and yes, I too have been caught in the mess of things and commenting/battling others in how this was justified. It obviously means that if you are not happy you can always go with a Virtual platform that does fit your budget and wallet. There are other options out there Like Hyper-V, Oracle, and of course Citrix XEN.

Recently though I have been wondering on some of the concerns I had when looking at how many licenses I needed and there have been some people who don’t like the fact that they now have to even pay for over committing your host when this was never the case prior. When I had previously looked at me licenses there were some things I didn’t consider. I saved an estimated 10 licensing when considering Failover capacity.  Not a huge additional saving but still a savings none the less.

• HA/Failover Capacity (Minus this from your licensing because you want to have that reserved capacity for failover)
• Overcommiting Memory (This can be cheaper then buying new hardware vs. Paying for the license)
• Best consolidation Ratio (On Vmware – though expensive)
• Get out of looking at *Current Capacity* and base cost on average growth
• Of course the best set of features as well!

I know this isn’t much but wanted to throw in my additional two cents, since I obviously wasn’t thinking this completely threw.

Virtual Noobs take on it?
Well, the good news is right now vSphere 4.1 doesn’t impose this vRAM capacity stuff at the moment and according to sources it will be supported for at least another 7 years.  vSphere 4.1 is a great product still and its many years ahead of others in the same arena.  Honestly, you should wait, test other products, see how they compare, and then if you need to migrate.

***Disclaimer: The thoughts and views expressed on VirtualNoob.wordpress.org  and Chad King in no way reflect the views or thoughts of his employer or any other views of a company. These are his personal opinions which are formed on his own. Also, products improve over time and some things maybe out of date. Please feel free to contact us and request an update and we will be happy to assist. Thanks!~

vSphere Experience 101 – Beginnings and VDI

Welcome to my world of vSphere. Here I will be sharing my experiences with vSphere in all the challenges we have faced with the various implementations of it. Being apart of one of the largest infrastructures in the world we have both learned from our mistakes and have learned the importance of “best practices” when working within a VI (Virtual Infrastructure) environment. As with most large enterprise we started first using MS Virtual Servers as our first implementation and then begin using VMware very little. Being a MS shop proved to be beneficial when it came to licensing and such so that is probably why we began using it. Oh those were the days…

After much testing in the lab I noticed that the virtual environment began to grow dramatically. We soon had clusters in our lab testing and working with various implementations. The MS Virtual Servers sat in the racks still running the 3 or 4 VM’s that they had always ran in the past even though the solution never really grew much. Hyper-V soon came out but after seeing the maturity of VMware over Hyper-V the choice still seemed pretty obvious. testing still went on and slowly bled out into our production environment. We had some clusters of Dell PE2900′s and R900s that were being used for some of our Homeoffice Data Center servers. Finally after slow implementation in the third quarter of 2008 I got to experience the first large implementation of VI3 in our environment.

The first large-scale implementation used DELL PEM1000 Blade Systems fully populated with M600s. Attached for storage with Equal Logix iSCSI arrays. Each host had 4 NICS and 32 GB of RAM (which obviously at the time 4 NIC seemed plenty but ended up to little) This was to begin our first Desktop Virtualization implementation using ESX 3.5 update 4 or VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure).

Being the first initiative to help cut down large cost associated with vendors using desktops sprawled all throughout our technical center. You could walk the isles of our tech center and see anywhere from 1-12 desktops stacked up that various technical teams used for other vendors or even themselves for remoting, support, and developmental services. When it was all said and done I am sure the number of systems went well over a few thousand. That is a huge amount of overhead when you even look at the power cost alone. This VDI solution was the remedy to this problem but also being the first implementation didn’t make it our best. Little did we know about the risk of “disk alignment” and the effects of it when using the iSCSI arrays with our VDI environment (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure). For the brokers aka Gateway servers we used Citrix SSL – Net Scalers, and from there we managed various applications that were streaming to the VDI enviroment and other TC’s (thin cients).

All users were setup and manged from the Citrix broker servers. We already had licensing for citrix purchased so this made sense to simply utilize what we have for this portion of the VDI environment. One other problem we saw with this implementation was that the engineers didn’t plan HA very well in the layout for host vs. blade chassis. Instead of spreading out the host between blade chassis they put all 16 host on a single blade chassis. This could prove to be a huge impact in the event that an entire blade chassis went down – it would affect an entire DRS/HA cluster. Also due to the “disk alignment” issue we had to perform a storage migration to remedy this problem and was an extensive project. This was a large-scale project which included many hours of labor all which could have been avoided if proper thought and research was performed. The real downer was that this had ruined the chance of iSCSI to prove itself as a P.O.C. (Proof of Concept).

Lesson learned and well for that matter. Now we are beginning our 2nd phase of our VDI environment and we are using High Performance NetAPP Arrays using NFS based storage. We still use the old Dells but currently use HP BL class systems. The new host had 72 GB RAM 2 Quad Core processors and 6 NICs – which I still believe would’ve been just worth doing 2x10GbE. The old iSCSI Equallogix storage is currently unused and the DELL Blades are also utilizing the NetAPP NFS as well. The second phase is using vSphere 4 and we are also using the PSA for NetAPP which is quite nice. Though we are not using all the features of the NetAPP storage solution the performance has been much more dramatic than the iSCSI stuff from the past. Of course good planning and engineering is always a good thing. This time we spread out the host between blade chassis. There are approximately 16 host per DRS/HA cluster and we placed 4/16 of those host on separate chassis. So in the event of a chassis failure or network issue we would only lose 4 host tops. Currently we manage failover capacity by %.

Though the VDI is still relatively new to us we are still learning as we go along about the Do’s and Don’t. One thing is for certain is that we will have to get all our 3.5 host to 4.1. Our new environment is being used for Dynamic Desktop Virtualization. Its getting closer each day and we finally got to give it a run when VMware View 4.5 was released. So far we have liked what we have seen. Though I think we will still use Citrix for profile management/apps and MS App-V in the future.

***Disclaimer: The thoughts and views expressed on VirtualNoob.wordpress.org  and Chad King in no way reflect the views or thoughts of his employer or any other views of a company. These are his personal opinions which are formed on his own. Also, products improve over time and some things maybe out of date. Please feel free to contact us and request an update and we will be happy to assist. Thanks!~

Cisco UCS – A lot for me to learn

Hello Hardware,

That’s right you heard me say it alright. CISCO UCS or in twitter terms #CiscoUCS #Cloud.  Tonight I got my first stab at actually researching, and read up on Cisco UCS, and I have to say, its does sound promising.  Right now, though, I haven’t given much thought to the cost of such a system.  Lately we see a lot of different offerings when it comes to hardware platforms to run a virtual shop on, and up til recent I haven’t even read about or seen a Cisco Server in a while.  In fact, the last time I saw a Cisco server was when call manager was running on Windows 2000 SP4 (HP MCS Hardware) back on version 5.5.  I guess I am beginning to get old…

Enough Said… let’s move on… Nothing to see here..

The first reading I did on Cisco UCS  was today on Ciscos site: http://bit.ly/grL4EY

Joe wrote on inter-fabric communication on the Cisco blade servers.  It peaked my interest seeing how UCS is uniquely designed to handle communication.

You can run the fabric interconnects in two seperate modes: End-Host Mode and Host Mode (EHM and HM).  Most users typically choose EHM for simplicity. It took me a while to get it all to sink in, but I think I finally got it in a nutshell.  The big point is that you can have 10GbE, and if you need to manage traffic more effectively, at the host level, you can utilize vSphere switching such as: vSS, dVS, and Cisco Nexus 1000V.  Essentially, the Cisco 1000V is what you can use to make it even more managable.  It also seems like it is definitely more geared to the clouddue to the so-called simplicity.  You still will have to utilize 10gbe networks which can still cost a pretty penny.  I am just glad it is finally beginning to make sense… at least right now..

Props to Joe who did a good job and I think he even knows a thing or two about vmware.  ;)

Thanks to ADAM Hash tag corrected!

***Disclaimer: The thoughts and views expressed on VirtualNoob.wordpress.org  and Chad King in no way reflect the views or thoughts of his employer or any other views of a company. These are his personal opinions which are formed on his own. Also, products improve over time and some things maybe out of date. Please feel free to contact us and request an update and we will be happy to assist. Thanks!~