Category: News

Aug 09 2010

vSphere networking features: Distributed vSwitches; private VLANs; IPv6

VMware’s vSphere 4 brings a number of new vSphere networking features to the table, including tighter VM traffic management and control with the vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS) , as well as support for third-party virtual switches (vSwitches). Along with that come a new high-performance virtual NIC, VMXNET3, the ability to create private VLANs and support for IPv6.

Implementation and benefits of private VLANs with a vSphere network

Private VLANs allow communication between VMs on a vSwitch to be controlled and restricted. This feature, which is normally available on physical switches, was added only to the vDS and not the standard vSwitch. Normally, traffic on the same vSwitch port group has no restrictions and any VM in that port group can see the traffic from other VMs. Private VLANs restrict this visibility and in essence act as firewalls within the VLAN. Private VLANs must first be configured on the physical switch ports of the uplink NICs on the vDS. Private VLANs are then configured by editing the settings of a vDS and selecting the Private VLANs tab.

Read the full article at searchnetworking.com…

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Aug 09 2010

Virtualized infrastructure design for vSphere

If designing a physical server is similar to designing a house, designing a virtualized infrastructure is almost like designing a small city. There are lots of interrelated components, and you have to make many critical design decisions to ensure that all of the residents’ needs are met properly.

If you don’t properly account for water, gas and electric needs, for example, your houses won’t have the resources they need for basic services and peak loads. Similarly, when designing a virtualized infrastructure for customers, solutions providers need to size the storage, network, CPU and memory resources correctly, or the virtual machines (VMs) will not have the resources they need to run applications.

Besides hardware resources, you have to make other decisions when designing a vSphere virtualized infrastructure, many of which will dictate your hardware requirements. The vSphere features you’ll need are often tied to the type of server hardware you use. If you do not make the correct hardware decisions when designing your customer’s virtual environment, you may find that you cannot use some of vSphere’s features. Therefore, it’s important to understand vSphere’s requirements and limitations early on in your design phase.

Read the full article at searchsystemschannel.com…

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Aug 09 2010

Assigning vSphere security access controls

Security is critical in a vSphere environment. Virtual machine (VM) architecture, access methods and management is much different from that for physical servers. Because VMs are encapsulated into a single file that resides on a shared data store, additional attack vectors need to be secured. Further, any change or operation in a virtual environment can have a ripple effect on other residing VMs because all share common infrastructure components. Consequently, having proper security access controls in place is paramount to protect hosts and their VMs.

Because they have multiple components, virtual environments are secured in layers. You can do much of the work to secure an environment through vCenter Server, which provides centralized authentication and authorization services at many different levels inside vSphere. VCenter Server features four main components:

  • Privileges. A privilege enables or denies users access to perform actions in vSphere.
  • Roles. A role is a set of privileges that can be assigned to a user or group.
  • Users and groups. Users and groups are used in permissions to assign roles from Active Directory (AD) or local Windows users/groups.
  • Permissions. A permission is assigned to an object in vSphere and is composed of users/groups and a role.

Read the full article at searchsystemschannel.com…

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Aug 09 2010

Data backup application choices for backing up virtual server environments

Traditional data backup procedures used with physical servers typically consist of using an operating system (OS) agent running on each server to be backed up. But virtualization technology changes everything, and introduces more options and flexibility when backing up your servers.

This article will look at how data backup applications that were originally developed to back up physical systems and how they have adapted to support virtual server environments. You’ll also learn about data backup applications that were developed specifically for virtualization, and additional methods that are available for backing up virtual machines (VMs).

Read the full article at searchdatabackup.com…


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Aug 09 2010

Test ESXi 4.1 today, migrate smoothly from ESX tomorrow

VMware has long claimed that ESXi will one day be the Palo Alto-based company’s main hypervisor, and the time has come for ESX to begin to gracefully make its exit. The recent release of VMware vSphere 4.1 will be the last release to include the ESX version of VMware’s hypervisor, which may not make ESX fanboys happy. The improvements in ESX 4.1, however, demonstrate that the time to start switching is now.

In a recent Virtualization Viewpoints column, I wrote about drawbacks of VMware ESXi and why widespread adoption of ESXi is not a reality. Some of the problems with ESXi included:

  • No official support for booting ESXi from a storage area network (SAN),
  • no Web-based console to manage virtual machines (VMs),
  • no support for scriptable installations, and
  • no support for Active Directory (AD) integration.

The article also outlined several suggestions for making ESXi more attractive to administrators used to working with ESX. While I have always preferred ESX over ESXi, I am now recommending that you start using ESXi and plan on migrating all of your current ESX installations to the ESXi platform.

Read the full article at searchvmware.com…

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Aug 09 2010

Using VMware vSphere as a private cloud computing platform

If you’re involved in virtualization, you probably can’t go a day without hearing the word cloud – and I don’t mean as part of your weather forecast. If you pay attention to companies like VMware and EMC, it seems as though everything is migrating toward the cloud — and it’s not a matter of if your environment will enter the cloud but when.

Today, virtualization seems to have taken a back seat to cloud computing. If you look at the VMworld 2010 tracks and sessions this year, they focus on cloud computing. But you can’t have internal cloud computing without virtualization, so virtualization remains on the hot topics list, even if it’s no longer in the No. 1 spot.

In this tip, we consider how clouds and virtualization go hand in hand and how to leverage the capabilities of VMware vSphere to create your own private cloud.

Read the full article at searchvmware.com…

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Aug 09 2010

Affordable shared storage options for VMware vSphere

You can use VMware vSphere without a shared storage device, but it limits the amount of advanced features that you can use with it. Certain features in vSphere require that a virtual machine (VM) reside on a shared storage device that is accessible by multiple hosts concurrently. These features include high availability (HA), Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), Fault Tolerance (FT) and VMotion, which provide high/continuous availability as well as workload load balancing and live migration of virtual machines. For some storage administrators, these features may only be nice to have, but they are also essential for many IT environments that cannot afford to have VMs down for an extended amount of time.

A few years ago, VMware shared storage typically meant using a Fibre Channel (FC) SAN, which was expensive, required specialized equipment and was complicated to manage. In recent years, other shared storage options that utilize standard network components to connect to storage devices have become popular and make for affordable, easy-to-use shared storage solutions. The protocols used for this are iSCSI and NFS, both of which are natively supported in vSphere. The performance of NFS and iSCSI are similar, but both can vary depending on a variety of factors including the data storage device characteristics, network speed/latency and host server resources. Since both protocols use software built into vSphere to manage the storage connections over the network there is some minimal CPU resource usage on the host server as a result.

Read the full article at searchsmbstorage.com…

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Aug 09 2010

Using iSCSI storage with vSphere

To tap into some of VMware vSphere’s advanced features such as VMotion, fault tolerance, high availability and the VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler, you need to have shared storage for all of your hosts. vSphere’s proprietary VMFS file system uses a special locking mechanism to allow multiple hosts to connect to the same shared storage volumes and the virtual machines (VMs) on them. Traditionally, this meant you had to implement an expensive Fibre Channel SAN infrastructure, but iSCSI and NFS network storage are now more affordable alternatives.

Focusing on iSCSI, we’ll describe how to set it up and configure it properly for vSphere hosts, as well as provide some tips and best practices for using iSCSI storage with vSphere. In addition, we’ve included the results of a performance benchmarking test for the iSCSI/vSphere pairing, with performance comparisons of the various configurations.

Read the full article in the August 2010 issue of Storage Magazine at searchstorage.com…

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