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by Duncan Epping

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VirtualCenter

VMware’s first announcements.

Duncan Epping · Sep 15, 2008 ·

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.

VirtualCenter log files in your temp directory

Duncan Epping · Sep 8, 2008 ·

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>

Update on Kodiak

Duncan Epping · Sep 4, 2008 ·

So I blogged about Kodiak a couple of days, and just received some new information. Let’s start of with the facts that weren’t clear in the first blog:

  1. Kodiak is not open-source at this time. (We’re working on that)
    We will be releasing an easy to use Open-SDK, and hope to eventually open up the entire code-base.
  2. Kodiak is 100% free for personal use.
  3. All systems purchased from bluebear include an unlimited use, enterprise license (and early code access).

Now, there’s already a discussion going on what “personal use” means.

But much more exciting in my opinion is the rumor that they’re polishing off a new feature – the
ability to manage multiple Virtual Center instances simultaneously and independently (as opposed to only ESX hosts at the moment)!!!

BlueBear will be opening the beta program to new registrants tomorrow, so better be quick! They will also be at VMworld in a few weeks (booth NI 10). And launch their latest product, for the enterprise; Grizzly!
In addition, all VMworld 2008 attendees will be given invites to Kodiak’s private beta!

Linux VirtualCenter client?

Duncan Epping · Aug 30, 2008 ·

Scott already wrote about this one yesterday… A lot of people have been asking for a Linux VirtualCenter client for a long time. I’m sorry this is not the announcement for the official client. But there might be a decent Linux, Mac and Windows client coming up. There’s a beta going around of a product named Kodiak, by a company called Bluebear:

Welcome to the next generation of unified systems management! Kodiak, from BlueBear, enables unprecedented visibility into and control over virtualized infrastructures, regardless of size or composition. As the industry’s only application that’s both hypervisor-agnostic and cross-platform, Kodiak sets a new standard in versatility, pushing virtualization out of the datacenter and catalyzing it’s widespread adoption throughout the information technology landscape. BlueBear believes useful software should be available to anybody who needs it, and at no cost; hence Kodiak’s price, totally free!

In other words, expect a client which can manage ESX, Hyper-V and Xenserver at the same time! Unfortunately there’s not much info available at the moment. I’ve send these guys an email to see if I can get a Beta to test it out! Check this page for a couple screenshots, it already looks promising I must say! So I’m gonna build a Ubuntu workstation and hope I will receive this beta soon and can start testing!

I love the title in the application bar: Kodiak: Ruling your virtual empire. How cool does that sound!

Book: Deploying the VMware Infrastructure

Duncan Epping · Aug 21, 2008 ·

There’s a new book launched at VMworld Vegas 2008! This book is written by John Arrasjid(VMware), Daniel Conde(VMware), Karthik Balachandran(VMware), Gary Lamb(INX) and Steve Kaplan(INX).

You can pre-order the book via Digital-Guru, and here’s there description just to give you an idea: Deploying the VMware Infrastructure is an introduction to the world of VMware virtualization technology written by hands-on experts in the field. This booklet explains virtualization, enumerates its many benefits, and describes a set of real-world use cases. Overviews are provided for each of the VMware server virtualization, desktop virtualization, and automation and infrastructure management products; and detailed information is given about virtualizing your infrastructure-from building a VMware Infrastructure and selecting candidates for migration, to managing and optimizing the virtual environment. Other topics include security and disaster recovery, virtual desktop infrastructure, and advanced capabilities such as high availability, virtual machine snapshots and consolidated backups. This booklet is highly recommended for anyone interested in virtualizing their IT infrastructure or expanding their knowledge of VMware Infrastructure, including managers, technical staff, and those new to virtualization or VMware technology.

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About the Author

Duncan Epping is a Chief Technologist and Distinguished Engineering Architect at Broadcom. Besides writing on Yellow-Bricks, Duncan is the co-author of the vSAN Deep Dive and the vSphere Clustering Deep Dive book series. Duncan is also the host of the Unexplored Territory Podcast.

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