Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Server

vCenter

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So there’s a new term floating around “vCenter”. So what is vCenter?

vCenter provides comprehensive management of applications and infrastructure in this flexible, fluid environment and integrates with leading systems management vendors for seamless, end to end datacenter management.

So as spectacular as this may sound, it just VirtualCenter renamed. Although not every section of the VMware website as been changed accordingly, this is what vCenter is.

So I just noticed a couple of more “hidden” announcements. These announcements all deal about management and automation. And if you do the math you can probably link some of them back to certain acquisitions that VMware did recently.

So here’s the list of new vCenter add-ons:

  • vCenter ConfigControl extends policy-based change and configuration management with automated enforcement across every aspect of the VDC-OS.
  • vCenter CapacityIQ continuously analyzes and plans capacity to ensure optimal sizing of virtual machines, resource pools and the entire datacenters.
  • vCenter Chargeback enables automated tracking of costs and chargeback to the business enabling IT to function as a utility with true visibility into operating costs.
  • vCenter Orchestrator enables the development of customized workflows that automate operational tasks through a simple drag and drop interface, without the need for scripting.
  • vCenter AppSpeed automatically ensures application performance levels. It monitors end user response time for applications, correlates these response times with different elements in the infrastructure, and triggers remedial actions to alleviate bottlenecks.

Combine these 5 with the ones that were already discovered but also in some way deal with management and automation: Host Profiles, Distributed vSwitches, Linked VC’s and vApp and you’ve probably got the ultimate Virtual Automated DataCenter… Only two question left. How is VMware going to top this? And how is the competition going to respond?

VMware’s first announcements.

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Here it is, VMware’s first announcement this week:

A Virtual Datacenter Operating System is characterized by hardware and location independent applications, service level contracts between the infrastructure and applications and a shared, dynamic infrastructure.

vCenter provides comprehensive management of applications and infrastructure in this flexible, fluid environment and integrates with leading systems management vendors for seamless, end to end datacenter management.

VMware Infrastructure delivers the virtual datacenter OS through the following essential components:

  • Application vServices guarantee the appropriate levels of availability, security and scalability to all applications independent of hardware and location.
  • Infrastructure vServices subtract, aggregate and allocate on-premise servers, storage and network for maximum infrastructure efficiency.
  • Cloud vServices federate the on-premise infrastructure with third party cloud infrastructure.
  • Management vServices allow you to proactively manage the virtual datacenter OS and the applications running on it.

I guess everybody was to tired yesterday or still amazed by the Virtual DataCenter that they forgot to blog about the following, which is atleast as important and spectacular as the above,  cause these new features will(2009) be the backbone for the VDC-OS:

  1. Synchronization and a single-console view of inventory, configuration, roles and permissions between multiple vCenter instances with vCenter Linked Mode.
    So no more maintaining and configuring several VC’s, just link ’em up!
  2. Monitoring and automated remediation of VMware ESX physical host configurations for compliance with standard baseline profiles.
    This is the future, real plug and play, define your ESX host once and just roll it out! I’m starting to see the big picture with ESXi… no more installing at all, just plug it in!
  3. Paravirtualized storage device enables over 200,000 i/o operations per second.
    High i/o servers? No problem…
  4. Distributed Switch simplifies the setup and change of virtual machine networking.
    A single point of administration for your vSwitches, or should I say dSwitches in this case…
  5. Network VMotion enables network statistics and history to travel with a virtual machine as it moves from host to host for better monitoring and security.
  6. Third party virtual switches plug into virtual networks and deliver value added network monitoring, security and QoS.
    So this would be that Cisco vSwitch that everybody was talking about these last couple of days?
  7. VMware Fault Tolerance, a groundbreaking new product provides zero downtime, zero data loss and availability to all applications against x86 hardware failures without the cost and complexity of hardware or software clustering solutions.
    No more need for any  other way of clustering, zero data loss, no more down time!
  8. vStorage Thin Provisioning enables users to reduce storage required for virtual environments by up to 50% by allocating storage only as required while providing the reporting and alerting capabilities needed to track actual usage.
    Besides power, rack space and cooling, save on storage as well!
  9. vStorage Linked Clones reduce the storage required for virtual machines by sharing common OS images while still retaining user specific profile and application data.
    Think about rapid deploying a 1000 VDI desktops… and saving on disk space.
  10. Virtual machines increase in size from 4 way to 8 way SMP, from 64 GB to 256GB of RAM, enabling even the largest, most resource intensive applications to run on  VMware.
  11. Hot add of virtual CPU, memory and network devices enables applications to scale seamlessly without disruption or downtime.
    No more downtime.
  12. vCenter Data Recovery provides quick, simple and cost effective backup and recovery for all applications through:
    Agentless disk based back up and recovery of virtual machines, Incremental backups and dedupe to save disk space, vCenter – integrated virtual machine level or file level restore.
    Doing backups and restores from the same console you are already used to, VirtualCenter!
  13. vApp turns new and existing applications into self-describing and self-managing entities. vApp leverages OVF, an open industry standard, to specify and encapsulate all components of a multi-tier application as well as the operational policies and service levels associated with it. Just like the UPC bar code contains all information about a product, the vApp gives application owners a standard way to describe operational policies for an application which the Virtual Datacenter OS can automatically interpret and execute.

What more can I say than “WOW”! Oh, and another thing… it seems like there’s a rebranding going on: vCenter, vStorage, vApp, vServices.

So with ESXi, host profiles and dSwitches there’s no need to spend a lot of time on configuring. Figure it out once, and just apply it to the rest of the hosts! With hot add CPU, MEM, Networkand with VMotion and Fault Tolerance there’s no need for down time any more. And I’m not even talking about doing backups and restores from within your vCenter and all the cool new storage related features…

Read more @ Scott Lowe, PCWorld, ComputerWorld, VMETC.Com, VMware.

HA, primary and secondary nodes?

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Because I’ve been looking into HA myself I wanted to clarify things up, for you guys and for myself… writing is a good way of getting the facts straight. I’ve seen and get a lot of questions regarding HA. So I just bundled a bunch of questions I received over the last couple of months…

How does a primary and / or secondary get selected?

  • The first 5 hosts that join the VMware HA cluster are automatically selected as “primary nodes”
  • All the others are automatically selected as “secondary nodes”
  • When you do a reconfigure for HA the primary nodes and secondary nodes are selected again, this is random

What’s up with these primaries and secondaries?

  • Primary nodes hold cluster settings and all node states which are synced between primaries
  • Secondary nodes send their state info(resource occupation) to the primary nodes
  • Nodes send heartbeats to each other, primary nodes send heartbeats to primary nodes only and secondary also only to primary. And they do this every second. (Which is a changeable value: das.failuredetectioninterval)

So what if a primary node fails, will a secondary be promoted?

  • No, there will only be a new primary appointed when the failed one is removed from the cluster. A secondary will be promoted to primary at random.

But what if all my primary nodes fail?

  • This is an unaddressed issue, that’s the reason why you can only account for 4 host failures within a cluster! There needs to be at least one primary!

So when does the gateway come in play?

  • Actually the gateway, which is the default “isolation address”, will only be used when an isolation has occurred. So when the AAM client thinks it’s isolated it will check the isolation addresses.

So if anyone has a question just drop it here and I’ll try to answer it and update the above list…

VirtualCenter log files in your temp directory

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By default your VirtualCenter logfiles are stored in a temp folder(as of 2.5 they are stored in: C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\Logs). VMware Wolf wrote a nice article about all the locations these log files are stuffed. For some reason I don’t get a pleasant feeling when I store my VirtualCenter (VPXD) log files in a temporary windows directory or the profile directory for that matter(thanks for the comment!!). If there’s one thing admin’s clean up first when they tend to run out of diskspace it’s their temp directory… it’s called temp for a good reason!

So in order to prevent this you could change the location of the VPXD log files very easily. Edit “vpxd.cfg”. It’s located here: %AllUsersProfile%\Application Data\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\.

Add the following lines in the “<config>” section and change the path accordingly:

<log>
<directory>c:\VC_Logs</directory>
</log>