Category: News

Nov 02 2011

VSphere 5 upgrade challenges: Licensing and ESXi (Part 1)

Because of its new features and enhancements, many of your customers are likely anxious to start planning their vSphere 5 upgrade, and it’s important to know new caveats and issues before you let your customers dive right into it.

Solution providers can ensure a smooth transition to vSphere 5 by taking note of these important modifications and understanding what they mean to individual customer environments:

New licensing
Perhaps the biggest vSphere 5 deviation from previous versions is that your customers will need to deal with the new licensing model.

VSphere 4 licensing was fairly straightforward: as licenses were bought per CPU socket and you could run unlimited virtual machines (VMs) on the host. That model is no more with vSphere 5, and while licenses are still sold per CPU socket, each license comes with a fixed amount of virtual RAM (vRAM) that can be assigned to VMs. Depending on the environment, this could cause a customer to spend thousands of dollars in additional licenses to be compliant with new vSphere 5 licensing. The new model favors scale-out architectures that hold a greater amount of hosts that have smaller resource amounts. This means less VMs running on each host, which results in less vRAM usage per host. When you try and scale up with hosts that have large amounts of RAM, the additional license costs to match the amount of that RAM in a host can get very costly.

Read the full article at searchsystemschannel.com…

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Oct 28 2011

Setting up VMware Auto Deploy for customers (Part 2)

You learned about VMware Auto Deploy’s benefits in part one of our two-part series, but it’s also important to know the vSphere 5 feature’s nuts and bolts and how to set it up for customers.

Auto Deploy takes advantage of the Preboot Execution Environment (PXE) boot feature that is present in many physical network interface cards (NICs). This allows a server to boot from a remote image file using only a physical NIC and without local storage.

A server booting with PXE first obtains an IP address using Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) and then loads a boot image from a Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) server. Auto Deploy uses PXE booting to download an ESXi image file to a host and its components work to define which image a host should use, customizations and host-specific configuration information.

Auto Deploy relies on software depots that are used to store collections of vSphere Installation Bundles (VIB) and image files that are accessed remotely via HTTP to deploy or update hosts. VIB files are used to deploy the ESXi software and any hardware vendor customizations. The Auto Deploy Server uses the software depot to pull VIBs and image profiles when booting an ESXi host.

Read the full article at searchsystemschannel.com…

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Oct 28 2011

How VMware Auto Deploy can ease VAR workloads (Part 1)

Although creating new hosts is a common server virtualization task, it is also a tedious process. Solution providers can use VMware Auto Deploy for vSphere 5 to do it much more efficiently.

Installing single hosts isn’t hard for solution providers but configuring multiple hosts can be time consuming. A VAR that has to create a new vSphere host without VMware Auto Deploy typically has to do the following:

1. Locate the installation media for ESX or ESXi and boot the server from it.

2. Follow the setup prompt to set configuration information.

3. Complete the installation and then reboot the server.

4. Verify that management console networking works properly.

5. Add the host to vCenter Server.

6. Configure networking, storage, security and other settings.

In doing all this, you risk making mistakes during the build process and could configure hosts inconsistently. Consistency is very important in a virtual environment both from a security and operational perspective. Once you’ve built and configured a host, another challenge is to back up host configuration data so if a problem occurs and you need to rebuild the host, you don’t have to restart from scratch.

Read the full article at searchsystemschannel.com…

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Oct 28 2011

vSphere 5’s Storage DRS and storage profile function deliver control over storage resources

The release of VMware Inc.’s vSphere 5 brings many exciting new features and enhancements to the virtualization platform, especially when it comes to storage. Two of the biggest new features in that area are Storage Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and Profile-Driven Storage, which provide some much-needed control over storage resources.

In previous versions of vSphere, Distributed Resource Scheduler balanced VM workloads based on CPU and memory resource utilization. Storage DRS extends this capability to storage, enabling intelligent VM initial placement and load balancing based on storage I/O and capacity conditions within a cluster. Profile-Driven Storage, for its part, ensures that VMs are placed on storage tiers based on service-level agreements (SLAs), availability, performance and capabilities of the underlying storage platform. In this tip, we’ll examine both Storage DRS and the storage profile functionality in detail.

Storage DRS

Similar to the traditional DRS feature, Storage DRS uses a new type of cluster called a data store cluster, which is a collection of data stores that are aggregated into a single unit of consumption. By controlling all of the storage resources, Storage DRS allows intelligent placement of VMs that are powered on, as well as the shifting of workloads from one storage resource to another when needed to ensure optimum performance and avoid I/O bottlenecks. What this means in simpler terms is that, similar to vMotion’s movement of VMs from host to host, VMs can now be moved from data store to data store as well; the decision to move a VM from one data store to another is made by Storage DRS, which tells Storage vMotion to make the move.

Read the full article at searchvirtualstorage.com…

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Sep 22 2011

Choosing a virtualization hypervisor: Eight factors to consider

Selecting a virtualization hypervisor begins with an important choice: Do you need a hosted or bare-metal hypervisor? Once you decide which type of hypervisor you need, there are lots of factors to consider.

You want a virtualization hypervisor that’s compatible with your hardware, allows for simple management and gives you the performance your virtual infrastructure needs. You should also consider high availability, reliability and scalability. And of course, look into costs.

Here are eight considerations for choosing a virtualization hypervisor:

Performance
If you want high performance, a bare-metal virtualization hypervisor is really your only option. Bare-metal virtualization offers the least amount of resource overhead. Bare-metal virtualization hypervisors also have advanced resource controls that allow you to guarantee, prioritize and limit virtual machine (VM) resource usage.

Hosted hypervisors typically have no or limited resource controls, so VMs have to fight each other for resources. Unlike bare-metal virtualization, hosted hypervisors often have steep resource-overhead penalties, especially when operating system services, tools and applications are running on the guest operating system.

Read the full article at searchservervirtualization.com…

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Sep 22 2011

Top 10 hypervisors: Choosing the best hypervisor technology

Once you choose the type of hypervisor that fits your needs, you need to choose the best hypervisor technology for your infrastructure. Hypervisor products from the major virtualization vendors have their pros and cons, so consider the features of these hosted and bare-metal virtualization hypervisors before you make your decision.

Bare-metal virtualization hypervisors

VMware ESX and ESXi
VMware has the most mature hypervisor technology by far, offering advanced features and scalability. However, VMware’s bare-metal virtualization hypervisor can be expensive to implement because of its higher licensing costs. The vendor does offer a free version of ESXi, but it’s very limited and has none of the advanced features of the paid editions. VMware also offers lower-cost bundles that can make hypervisor technology more affordable for small infrastructures.

Microsoft Hyper-V
Microsoft Hyper-V has emerged as a serious competitor to VMware ESX and ESXi. Hyper-V lacks many of the advanced features that VMware’s broad product line provides, but with its tight Windows integration, Microsoft’s hypervisor technology may be the best hypervisor for organizations that don’t require a lot of bells and whistles.

Reach the full article at searchservervirtualization.com…

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Aug 19 2011

Face-off: Is VMware Tools worth the virtual security risks?

VMware Tools are an optional set of drivers and utilities that improve the performance and manageability of virtual machines. But there’s a debate about whether the benefits of installing VMware Tools outweigh the potential virtual security risks that it introduces.

On one hand, VMware Tools replaces many of the guest operating system drivers that were designed for physical hardware. These optimized drivers can drastically improve performance and functionality (e.g., providing copy-and-paste capabilities between the host and VM). But the installation of VMware Tools also adds potential virtual security vulnerabilities to an otherwise secure infrastructure.

In this face-off, two experts debate the merits of running VMware Tools.

Creating unnecessary virtual security risks with VMware Tools
vs.
Realizing a virtual infrastructure’s potential with VMware Tools

Read the full article at searchvmware.com…

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Aug 19 2011

The top iPad applications for VMware admins

The iPad is becoming more and more popular in the enterprise, and not just for mobile workers. There is also a slew of iPad applications for VMware admins.

Many IT vendors see the iPad’s potential and are developing iPad apps that can manage their traditional hardware and software products. Xsigo Systems, for instance, has a very nice app called Xsigo XMS , which manages virtual I/O through the company’s XMS servers. There is also an iPad application called SiMU Pro that manages Cisco Systems Inc.’s Unified Computing System.

In addition, there are several iPad applications that can supplement the traditional VMware admin toolkit, including the vSphere Client and Secure Shell (SSH) applications. With the right iPad applications, VMware admins will reach a new level of management flexibility that’s not possible with traditional desktops and laptops.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. Top iPad applications for VMware management

II. Applications for remotely connecting to hosts and workstations

III. Top iPad applications for VMware networking

IV. General purpose iPad apps for VMware admins

I. TOP IPAD APPLICATIONS FOR VMWARE MONITORING AND MAINTENANCE
With the top iPad applications for infrastructure management, VMware admins can control basic functions, such as powering virtual machines (VMs) on and off and using vMotion.

These iPad apps mimic some of the functionality of the vSphere Client and service console, but they aren’t a full-fledge replacement. Even so, these iPad applications allow VMware admins to perform key virtualization tasks without a full-scale computer.

Read the full article at searchvmware.com…

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