Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

5.1

90% of all vSphere 5.1 Clustering Deepdive books sold are virtual

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I was just checking the sales numbers of the vSphere 5.1 Clustering Deepdive and 90% of all vSphere 5.1 Clustering Deepdive books sold on Amazon are e-book copies. Both Frank and I are heavy supporters of e-books and hence the reason we priced all of our books aggressively. Just some facts for the 5.1 book:

  • 100 pages extra content
  • Stretched Cluster section added and Storage DRS section fully rewritten
  • Over 3000 copies sold in under two weeks (wooohooooooooooo)
  • Over 200 paper copies sold at VMworld
  • Available on paper for just $ 24.95
  • Available as an ebook for just $ 7.49
    (location based pricing so may vary)
  • Yes this book contains all 5.0 info with call-outs to what has changed in 5.1!

While we are at it, I just enabled the vSphere 5.0 Clustering Deepdive book for the Kindle Lending Library. But for $ 4.99 you can’t really go wrong. The 4.1 HA/DRS Deepdive is still available for only $ 0.99, and there might just be another opportunity to pick it up for $ 0.- next week between the 11th and the 13th of September.

vSphere 5.1 networking enhancements

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There are many networking enhancement in vSphere 5.1 but I want to call out a couple specifically. The reason for this is that there have been many discussions on this blog about “hybrid VSS / VDS” environments as many were not comfortable with running everything on a VDS. Although the risks were minimal I could understand where people were coming from. So what’s new in this space?

  1. Management network rollback and recovery
  2. VDS config backup and restore
  3. Network health check

Management Network rollback / recovery says it all I guess. I for whatever reason you made changes that will result in your host not being able to connect to vCenter then this change will not be committed. Even more importantly, if you ever end up in the situation where your host is not able to connect to the network while using a VDS you can now reconfigure it through the DCUI (Network Restore Options). I played around with it, and I think it is a huge enhancement. I don’t see a reason to go hybrid any longer… go full VDS!

Another often heard complaint was around export/import of the VDS config or backup/restore. With vSphere 5.1 this ability is now added. Not only can you save the VDS config and use it for new VDS’s but you can of course also use this feature for backup purposes (see screenshot below). Another cool feature is that if you made a change to a portgroup that was not what you intended you can actually roll it back.

Last but not least is the “Network Health Check” option. I particularly like this feature as I’ve been in the situation many times in the past that changes were made on a physical level and people forgot to inform me about it. This will allow you to quickly identify when things changed and that will make the discussion with your networking colleagues a lot easier. In this release three things are checked:

  • VLAN
  • MTU
  • Network adapter teaming

These checks will be done every minute, and is done by sending probing packets on the VDS uplinks. If for whatever reason these probing packets fail it could indicate that the config of the physical components have changed. Nice right… I am not going to reveal any more secrets as I am guessing Venky will be writing some deepdive stuff soon.

In the mean while, for more details around what’s new I would like to refer to the great what’s new paper that Venky Deshpande wrote: What’s New for Network in vSphere 5.1.

vMotion enhancement in vSphere 5.1

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There’s a nice new enhancement to vMotion in vSphere 5.1. (and no, it doesn’t have specific name :-)) With vSphere 5.1 you can migrate virtual machines live without needing “shared storage”. In other words you can vMotion virtual machines between ESXi hosts with only local storage. It is very simple:

  • Open the vSphere Web Client
  • Click “VMs and Templates”
  • Right click the VM you want to migrate
  • Select “Change both host and datastore”

I am sure Frank Denneman is going to dive in to this soon so I won’t elaborate on how the process it self works. There’s already a blogpost out by Sreekant Setty which has some more details and which points to a nice white paper about vMotion / SvMotion performance.

Demo time – vCloud Director 5.1 disaster recovery demo

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When I was playing with the new vCloud Director 5.1 and Site Recovery Manager 5.1 I figured I would record a demo of the DR solution that Chris Colotti and I developed. The demo is fairly straight forward and hopefully helps you in the process of building a resilient cloud infrastructure. In this demo I have included:

  • vSphere 5.1
    • vSphere Replication
  • vCloud Director 5.1
  • Site Recovery Manager 5.1

Demo time – Consuming vCloud Director 5.1 resources in 10 minutes…

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We all know how difficult it can be to implement and configure a new infrastructure. Racking, cabling, configuring VLANs, setting policies / permissions, firewalling etc. It is a lot of work… Well in a physical world it is a lot of work, in a vCloud Director environment that is slightly different. In this demo that I recorded I am going to show you:

  • Login as a vCloud Admin
    • How to create an organization
    • How to create an organization virtual datacenter
      • Selecting a specific compute tier
      • Selecting all storage tiers
      • Selecting a specific networking tier
    • How to create an Edge Gateway
    • How to create add a vApp to a Catalog
  • Login as the tenant:
    • Deploy a 3-tier vApp with each VM on a different storage tier
    • Snapshot the full vApp

All of that in under 10 minutes, I could do it faster… but I guess it would be difficult to watch then :). Anyway, I hope this demo shows how easy it is to provide access and resources to a tenant in a vCloud environment .