During VMworld I received multiple questions around support for vSphere Storage DRS with vSphere Site Recovery Manager (SRM), we even had this question during our session and my answer was “Yes it does”. During some of the other sessions presenters stated that it was unsupported. Scott Lowe also mentions recalling the fact that it was mentioned somewhere down the line to be unsupported. Now although the Resource Management Guide for vSphere 5.0 on page 91 currently says it is supported it is not supported. Yes I know I stated it was supported but unfortunately the document is incorrect and the information provided to me was outdated. Although I verified the facts, I was not informed about this change. Hopefully this will not happen again and my apologies for that.

Now lets give the raw facts first, SRM does not support Storage vMotion and SRM does not support Storage DRS. The reason that SRM does not support Storage vMotion (and subsequently Storage DRS) is because it changes the location of the virtual machine without SRM being aware of it. After the location of the virtual machine has changed the VM that was originally protected by SRM will not be protected anymore which can have an impact on your RTO. These are the raw facts. I have requested the SRM team to document this in a KB to make sure everyone understands the reason and the impact.

The question of course is… will it work? My colleague Cormac has tested it and you can read his observations here.

This statement is documented in the SRM releasenotes: http://www.vmware.com/support/srm/srm_releasenotes_5_0_0.html

Interoperability with Storage vMotion and Storage DRS:
Due to some specific and limited cases where recoverability can be compromised during storage movement, Site Recovery Manager 5.0 is not supported for use with Storage vMotion (SVmotion) and is not supported for use with the Storage Distributed Resource Scheduler (SDRS) including the use of datastore clusters.

** update: I followed the documentation which apparently was incorrect. Documentation bug has been filed, should be update in the near future. **
** update: Link to SRM releasenotes with statement added. **

I just noticed I am listed as one of the top 50 “Must-Read IT Blogs” by BizTech. It is a great honor to be part of a list which features some of the most brilliant people in IT and some of the largest corporate blogs out there. Make sure to read the Top 50 and add these blogs to your RSS reader as there are some real gems in there! Thanks BizTech!

BizTech’s Must-Read IT Blogs

VMworld US has just been wrapped up and it is time to start looking at VMworld Europe already. I just checked the schedule builder and it looks that our session is scheduled on Thursday at 14:00 Wednesday at 15:00. Yes I would have definitely preferred a different time slot as well, but it is what it is and we will do our best to make the most out of it. Those who want to attend our session keep in mind it is a Q&A and our session can only be a success if you participate, please think about what you would like to ask and we will do our best to answer it. We will bring a couple of books again to give away during our session to those with the best questions.

There are a couple of sessions I want to plug as they were really successful during VMworld US and are worth attending in my opinion! Now mind most of these are not beginner sessions!

Yes I know… a lot of great sessions and I probably missed out on a few. Considering my session is scheduled on Thursday I am hoping to attend some of these and possible live blog them. The “regular” show runs from Tuesday morning until Thursday 16:00. The Monday before is Partnerday / TAMday / Education-Instructor Day. So if you are a partner, TAM customer or a VMware certified instructor make you sure you sign up for these! Another thing I wanted to point out are the keynote sessions:

Tuesday – 15.30 – 17.00
Wednesday – 09.00 – 10.00
Thursday – 09.00 – 10.30

I’ve been told that Steve Herrod will be speaking on Tuesday this year… be prepared for some cool demos!

** update: time slot changed for our session **

When I finished my article about auto deploy I figured it was really lengthy and wanted to write down the bare minimum which can be used as a quick cheat sheet when setting up auto-deploy. Of course you will need to install vCenter, PowerCLI, Auto-Deploy and TFTP first, but I am guessing most of you will know how to do that. Here’s what you will need to do when you have all of the requirements up and running:

1. Add-EsxSoftwareDepot c:\tmp\VMware-Esxi-5.0.0-<buildnumber>-depot.zip
2. Add-EsxSoftwareDepot http://<vcenter server>/vSphere-HA-depot
3. New-EsxImageProfile -CloneProfile "ESXi-5.0.0-<buildnumber>-standard" -name "ESXiStatelessImage"
4. Add-EsxSoftwarePackage -ImageProfile "ESXiStatelessImage" -SoftwarePackage vmware-fdm
5. New-DeployRule -Name "FirstBoot" -Item "ESXiStatelessImage" -AllHosts
6. Add-DeployRule -DeployRule "FirstBoot"
7. Boot one of the hosts
8. Configure the host
9. Create Host Profile based on “first host” named “ESXiHostProfile”
10. New-DeployRule -name "ProductionBoot" -item "ESXiStatelessImage", ESXiHostProfile, <target_cluster> -Pattern "vendor=<unique hw identifier>"
11. Add-DeployRule -DeployRule "ProductionBoot"
12. Remove-DeployRule -DeployRule FirstBoot -delete
13. Boot all hosts
14. Assign Host Profiles to all hosts
15. Provide the “user input” aka create an Answer File per host
    
16. Reboot hosts –> done
17. Before you leave your PowerCLI session make sure you save your newly create image profile as a Software Depot so you can make changes later if and when needed! Otherwise the data will be saved in your image profile cache but you will not be able to make changes!
    Export-EsxImageProfile -ImageProfile "ESXiStatelessImage" -ExportToBundle -FilePath c:\tmp\ESXiStatelessImage.zip

That seems a bit more simplistic than my previous post doesn’t it.

** update: added step 17 **

I bumped in to Mornay today who is on of the people behind the VMworld Labs. I asked him if he could share some numbers with me as I haven’t been involved with the labs this year. It was a very successful lab event again, with much great feedback from the attendees. In total 13415 labs have been taken by our attendees. Which has resulted in a total of 148138 virtual machines deployed. The top 5 of this year was:

1. HOL-01 – Building your hybrid cloud
2. HOL-10 – Advanced Troubleshooting and Performance
3. HOL-05 – Datacenter Migration and Disaster Recovery Protection
4. HOL-14 – vSphere Automation with PowerCLI
5. HOL-07 – Using Virtual Distributed Switch and Network IO Control

Once again, great work by the VMworld Labs team… I know how much work it is, I have all respect in the world for the people organizing this every year and the people assisting every year!

What a great week… I’ve seen some great sessions and I met a lot of great people! The sessions I presented were all successful, at least in my opinion (please fill out the survey forms), and I especially loved the group discussions. Our book was literally sold out in 2.5 days and was the best-selling book at VMworld.

Once again, it was my pleasure to meet all of you. Thanks for your support, thanks for the compliments, thanks for the feedback and lets hope we will meet again next year! I plan to be there in 2012 – San Francisco. For those who will be attending VMworld EMEA, see you in Copenhagen!

Before I forget, The Killers were amazing! One of the best bands these days in my opinion. I think I partly lost my voice due to the shouting along with The Killers. I think they played every single song I love. One of the few European bands that would be able to top this show would be the Arctic Monkeys or Editors! I’ve seen Editors live, they rock and I guess I don’t need to say anything about Arctic Monkeys!

VMworld Day 2 started off with a great keynote by no one less than Dr Steve Herrod. Steve spoke about all the changes we introduced with the launch of the Cloud Infrastructure Suite and all the change which are coming up… including sneak peeks of not release products. I live blogged the session and I don’t want to blog just to blog, so for more details read it here. There are a couple of things though I want to stress which in my opinion stood out:

• VMware Appblast –> New project which allows you to start any app in a HTML5 compatible browser on any device.
• VXLAN –> Provides a Layer 2 abstraction to virtual machines, independent of where they are located. (quote from Steve’s article)
• VMware Octopus –> Probably best described as an enterprise level “Dropbox” service

After the keynote I headed over to the VMware Storage Booth and introduced many attendees to the cool new storage features which are part of vSphere 5. There were a couple of things which stood out for me, everyone loved Storage DRS! Profile-Driven Storage is hot and the changes in VMFS-5 were very very welcome.

Next stop was the infamous #VSP1425 aka “Ask the Expert vBloggers”. We had roughly 200 attendees. The panel was formed as follows: Scott Lowe, Frank Denneman, Chad Sakac and I. It was moderated by Rick Scherer (Thanks for buzzing out Chad ) and as we had an empty seat we decided to pull up a person from the audience… I forgot the name of this person (please identify yourself), but once again thanks for joining this session and thanks for your great contribution, much appreciated! This session did extremely well in my opinion. We had great questions from the audience but especially the interaction between the panel members worked great. Definitely something we will do again next year. (We scored 4.8 out of 5 on the survey.)

Next up was a meeting with Tintri. We met up with Kieran Harty and Pratik Wadher and got a demo of the current platform and discussed futures. I already discussed their product in-depth on my blog so I will not repeat our whole discussion or my thoughts. I just want to add that I was impressed by their UI now that we got to play around with it and I expect them to do really well in Europe due to the simplicity of the set up.

After having random chats with other vendors we (when I say we I mean Frank and I) headed over to my Group Discussion (#GD43). Now this was the first Group Discussion I ever hosted… I LOVED IT! This is the best format for a session and can I say thanks to Richard Garsthagen who came up with this excellent concept! I had prepared a couple of slides with questions around VMware Clustering solutions. These questions formed the basis of the discussion. The participation of the audience was excellent. Frank helped driving this session and one of our lead HA engineers, Keith Farkas, joined as well… Believe me when I say that Keith was happy with all the excellent feedback we received from the audience during this session. Next year, and in Copenhagen, I want to do more sessions like these… This is what VMworld should be like, small discussion sessions with lots of interaction with the audience!

Before I head out to breakfast there are a couple of things I would like to mention… Did everyone see PowerCLI-Man? I don’t know who he is or where he all of a sudden came from, but he is my new favorite super hero! What an amazing guy, dropping in on a session hosted by Luc Dekens and Alan Renouf while you know he is fighting operational wars on a day to day basis… amazing. (He even has Facebook?!)

I also forgot to mention VMworld TV in my “Day 1″ report… Sorry Richard here you go. In all seriousness check the VMworld TV youtube channel and watch the great interviews and summaries that Richard and his team produced. It is a great way of getting an impression of what is going on at VMworld. Believe me, it is a madhouse.

Another day at VMworld about to start… hopefully I will have bit more time to watch some sessions myself today. If you are attending I would ask all of you to please fill out the session surveys. Keep in mind that all speakers, and the VMworld organizational, love to feedback on what worked well and what can be improved. Please provide constructive feedback, keep in mind that many of the people presenting at VMworld are just technical people like you and me and not professional “marketing” type speakers! My respect to each and everyone of you who does not do this on a day-to-day basis and presented a session at VMworld. I know it is a huge step and I know it is not easy to get up in front of literally hundreds of people!