VMware Blogs

A week or so ago I published an article about new View 5.1 storage features. I followed this up with a short video post explaining how you would go about using View Storage Accelerator. In this article, I want to demonstrate the other very cool feature in View 5.1, VCAI (View Composer API for Array Integration) to you. Although this feature is still in Tech Preview for View 5.1, it is a very cool enhancements which could have very many benefits when it is eventually fully supported as a feature.

Another way of describing this feature is Native NFS Snapshots. Essentially, what the feature allows you to do is to offload the creation of the linked clones which back your View desktops to the storage array, and let the storage array handle this task. In order to do this, the NAS storage array on which the snapshots are being deployed must have the NAS Native Snapshot VAAI (vSphere API for Array Integration) feature, which was first introduced in vSphere 5.0. A special VIB/plugin (provided by the 3rd party storage array vendor) must also be installed on the ESXi host to allow us to use this offload mechanism.

The main advantage of VCAI is an improvement in performance and a reduction in the time taken to provision desktops based on linked clone pools. This task can now be offloaded to the array, which can then provision these linked clones natively rather than have the ESXi host do it. 

What follows is a short video (approx. 3 and a half minutes) of setting up View 5.1 VCAI feature, showing an installed VCAI VIB from NetApp on the ESXi host, and then how to use native NFS snapshots when creating desktop pools based on linked clones. Again, my thanks to Graham Daly of VMware KBTV fame for his considerable help with this.

Further detail about the View Composer for Array Integration (VCAI)  can be found on the EUC blog here.

Get notification of these blogs postings and more VMware Storage information by following me on Twitter: @VMwareStorage

Posted by Justin Murray
Systems Engineer

Like everyone else on the planet today, software professionals—developers, QA testers, and group managers—are asking themselves, “How is the cloud going to affect my work?” On the one hand, developers are always looking for better ways to develop, test and integrate code, and they can see how moving certain tasks to the cloud could make their lives easier. At the same time, they need complete control over their rapidly changing code throughout the entire development phase, and question whether cloud-based tools will constrain them. After all, when it comes to the developer’s desktop, freedom of choice is paramount.

Managers share many of their concerns, but also know that strong controls on the iterative check-in/check-out, integration, and testing processes at the back-end are essential to creating a tested, working product. Their wish list is to have the latest tools for development combined with rock-solid version control at the team level.  One company is giving developers and QA testers—and their managers—a great reason to take a hard look at the cloud.  CloudOne, a VMware partner, now offers the IBM Rational tools in a hosted or cloud-based model.

I recently chatted with CEO John McDonald about CloudOne’s hosted offering of IBM Rational ClearCase, ClearQuest, and Team Concert.  Here are highlights of our conversation.

Posted by John McDonald
CEO, CloudOne

Ramp Up Faster with Lower Investment Costs

First, I asked John a basic question: Suppose I’m spinning up a software group and plan to use ClearCase ClearQuest, or Team Concert in my development environment. Why would I choose CloudOne? 

For starters, development groups can benefit from the same economics that are driving enterprises to cloud-based CRM, ERP, and other applications—pay as you go (and grow).  Start with a small Rational environment and scale as you add staff.  Pay a monthly fee instead of investing in server and storage capacity that you might not need for months—or ever. The business model is compelling.

CloudOne also gets you up and running much, much faster—no delays for buying, installing, configuring and deploying servers and software.  You don’t have to devote scarce staff resources to maintaining hardware or installing patches or the million-and-one tasks required to manage a Rational environment.  CloudOne does all that so you can spend your time developing software.

Securing the Crown Jewels

John was once a software manager at IBM, so he knows first-hand the number one concern of development teams: security.  After all, source code is the organization’s crown jewels and managers are understandably reluctant to trust it to someone else.

CloudOne has a unique and effective response, what they call an isolated occupancy service model.  By privatizing the data stream at every layer, they can deploy a secure virtual private cloud (VPC)—in their terminology, an Island.  There’s only one client per Island, so there’s essentially zero chance of anyone compromising their information.  Plus, they use leading-edge WAN technology to ensure a high level of performance. That’s a big part of CloudOne’s success—make it secure, make it perform, and keep the implementation details out of the way.

Making Headway—And Leveraging VMware Technology

Look under the hood of CloudOne and you’ll find VMware vSphere virtualization software and vCenter management tools.  VMware technology allows data center managers to rapidly provision virtual machines for ClearCase and ClearQuest and reclaim those resources quickly when they are no longer needed. It also gives CloudOne maximum flexibility to allocate computing and storage as needed and offers a high level of security.

CloudOne is gaining traction—McDonald’s, Fidelity, and Boeing are customers. Some analysts predict that, in just a few years, hosted applications will generate more revenue than their on-premises counterparts.  That remains to be seen, but there’s no doubt that the cloud is transforming software development. In fact, I’ll be writing soon about new CloudOne innovations for the developer desktop.  You can also learn more about CloudOne’s SaaS approach to delivering Rational software by downloading this white paper.

In the meantime, tell us about your experiences with cloud-based software development---good, bad, or indifferent.

By Ben Goodman, Lead Evangelist, VMware Horizon Application Manager

This is the 2nd blog in the series on the Consumerization of IT, it's effect and how it can be managed successfully. It will be followed by a whitepaper on this topic. Read the 1st blog here.

As we noted in our last post, for many reasons, the consumerization of IT is a force in IT that can’t be stopped. It can be managed, but not stopped (nor should it). Increasingly employees are choosing the devices and the services they want to use to get their jobs done. The people you really want to work for you no longer want to be forced to work on dull corporate issued notebooks or mobile devices. They want to use the same phones and tablets at work as they and their friends do at home.

Let’s face it, when it comes to devices - they’re no longer viewed as just something to get work done with. They’ve grown to become a statement, or extension of oneself, or self-image. That is: they’re now viewed by many as fashion. Who wants to be seen with a stodgy black notebook when they can have the latest flashy netbook or tablet?

However, the more important trend, at least when it comes to security and regulatory compliance - is happening under the surface of the device. It’s how employees are choosing the cloud-based applications they want to use. These impulse application selections means, too often, that proprietary data or data that should be protected actually ends up scattered through many online services and accessed on devices the enterprise doesn’t manage.

To date, there has been a lot of discussion about how cloud and Software-as-a-Service providers are more secure than the data center or infrastructure managed by most businesses. And, at times, this may be true. However, it entirely misses the point of the issues created by the Consumerization of IT, or what’s now commonly known as CoIT.

The fact is that the business risks associated with the CoIT are high… Very high. It means regulated and protected information is much more likely to end up on multiple cloud services, greatly increasing the risks of a nasty data breach, as do the risks of regulatory audit findings - as IT loses its ability to govern corporate data.

First, as more regulated and highly confidential data finds its way onto services that aren’t appropriate for that category of data the risk (often without IT’s knowledge)  – and the implications – of a data breach grows proportionally. Moreover, as more employees turn to rogue services, it’s no longer even possible for the IT team to perform many of its most basic functions that fall under its responsibility: such as the implementation of an effective disaster recovery program, IT Audit responsibilities, the tracking of the true cost of IT services, or even helping departments to gain the most value from the services they are using. A business example of this in action would be how a larger enterprise loses its collective price and SLA bargaining power as services are bought piecemeal by many different business units.

Yet, perhaps the biggest risk here is that data and applications that are being used and accessed outside the eye of the IT and IT security departments. That makes the already very difficult task of securing data next to impossible to attain. There is no way to govern data that isn’t or can’t even be watched. No one knows who is accessing it, when they’re accessing it, or why. So what to do about it? What can enterprises do to regain control?

It certainly isn’t simply relying on policy. Study after study has shown that employees are rarely compliant with most policies - especially those that they view as counterproductive. And traditional security tools won’t work because they can’t be deployed and maintained in a way to be effective on rogue IT services and devices. And the truth is that most of the action that is happening on an employee’s device or on a mobile network the enterprise simply doesn’t and can’t control.

What enterprises need to do is provide users with a viable alternative - not policies that attempt to roadblock the inevitable and the business value that comes with it, nor try draconian controls over devices. It’s become apparent these tactics aren’t working. 

However, a viable alternative - such as IT managed Application catalogs and workspaces that can be used by employees to access their desired applications, and which can segment work and personal data can work. And in this way make it possible for IT to maintain proper access controls to corporate apps, while also monitoring access so that user actions can be audited. And this can be done in a way so that the employee has privacy and security in their personal applications and data.

All of this is possible (and we would argue necessary), and in the weeks ahead we’ll be providing more insight and details as to how you can get there. 

By Duncan Epping, Principal Architect.

I received a question on twitter last week around HA split brain scenarios. Let me give an example first of when a split brain scenario could occur:

• Isolation response = leave powered on
• iSCSI / NFS storage

When the above two requirements are met and a host in your cluster is fully network isolated HA will be able to restart the virtual machine as it will appear to HA as the host has completely failed. There reason for this is because:

1. There will be no network heartbeats coming from this host
2. There will be no datastore heartbeats 
3. The management address of this host cannot be pinged
4. The "isolated host" cannot write to the datastore to inform the master it is isolated

On top of that the host which is isolated will also take no response as "leave powered on" was selected. In other words, the virtual machines running on the isolated host will just remain up and running. As to the master it seems that the host has failed it will initiate the restart of the impacted VMs. Because the full host has isolated, including storage network, the VMs can be powered on as the "file lock" that the isolated host had times out.

Now as soon as the isolated host return you will have two instances of the same VM on the network. However only one of these has disk access. The one which doesn't have disk access will automatically be killed by the host it is running on. This was introduced in vSphere 4 U2 and still applies today.

Of course this whole situation could be prevented, you could just change the "isolation response" to "power off" and this is what we recommend!

By Duncan Epping, Principal Architect.

Technical Marketing Update 2012 - Week 20

Short list this week as many of us were either in an internal training or at an internal R&D event. I promise you there will be more next week,

Blog posts: 

• Poweron file? (Duncan Epping) http://bit.ly/Jjn8CD
• Admission control and vCloud Allocation Pool model (Frank Denneman) http://bit.ly/L9NYiW
• KB article about SvMotion / VDS / HA problem republished with script to mitigate! (Duncan Epping) http://bit.ly/Ktu5Ci
• Resize & Hot-Add/Extend Virtual Machine Disks using vCloud API (William Lam) http://bit.ly/M4qOag
• Why is my pathing policy limited to "fixed" or "MRU" with things like MSCS cluster? (Duncan Epping) http://bit.ly/JVmWJx
• Retrieving License keys from Multiple vCenters (Alan Renouf) http://bit.ly/KiHHg9
• Attaching an unreplicated VMDK after SRM failover using scripts (Ken Werneburg) bit.ly/JmQ9iY

Posted by
Ken Werneburg
Tech Marketing

I've run into a few scenarios where it's been beneficial to not replicate a particular disk attached to a VM when using vSphere Replication, yet in order to recover the VM correctly it's necessary to have even a really stale copy of it there as a placeholder.

For example, a SQL Server might have a temp DB on a dedicated disk.  We want it to be available so the VM will boot and SQL will have the DB there to use, but it is a waste of bandwidth to replicate it on an ongoing basis.

So the workaround is to copy the disk over to the recovery site, or to replicate it at least once.  There are other means, but this is the simplest as it gives you a disk that has the right ID etc.

Next, copy the replicated but unwanted copy of the disk at your recovery site to somewhere else.  This is important, as the next step is to disable replication for that disk and detach it within vSphere Replication as identified in this blog.  The reason we copied the disk somewhere else is because disabling/detaching the disk very sensibly deletes the replicated copy of it!

Force another sync, to make sure it's all up to date, then move the copy of the disk back into the original directory at the recovery site.

You should now have a disk that is a one-time copy, resident in the recipient directory at your recovery site, but not being replicated on an on-going basis.

The last step is to use a simple PowerCLI script to attach the disk using a callout in the recovery plan.  This script will use the stale copy of the disk and mount it to the VM during the recovery process.  

You'll need to have powershell and powercli installed on your recovery SRM server as outlined in this post, and create a very simple script that looks something like the following.  

Obviously there are specific variables that you'll need to alter to match your environment.  They've been marked in italics in the below example.

g:\scripts\addvmdk.ps1:

add-pssnapin VMware.VimAutomation.Core
Connect-VIServer -Server vc01.mydomain.local -WarningAction SilentlyContinue
New-HardDisk -VM sql_test_srv3 -Persistence IndependentPersistent -DiskPath "[ovi-wdc-tsapps-vnx-sas-lun10] sql_test_srv3/sql_test_srv3_1.vmdk"

Finally, add a poweron script to the VM in your recovery plan that calls the script on the SRM server (not a prompt, nor a script that runs within the VM):

c:\windows\syswow64\windowspowershell\v1.0\powershell -file g:\scripts\addvmdk.ps1

Note two other things about this.  First, I'm using the 32 bit syswow64 powershell.  This is necessary because SRM is a 32 bit environment.  Secondly, I am also presuming your SRM service is running with VC admin-level credentials like a domain admin or service account, because this is the security context under which the script will be executed on the SRM server.  If this is not the case you can add hardcoded userids and passwords in the script to authenticate against the VC.

So what's the end result and the benefit?

It will automatically attach the appropriately IDed disk to the VM that needs to have the disk without doing ongoing replication of unneeded data.  Perfect for a temp DB scenario where the data is junk but the DB won't work correctly without it!

-Ken

In addition to the numerous enhancements detailed here, View 5.1 debuts a number of significant enhancements and optimizations to the PCoIP protocol. In this blog, we detail some of the most beneficial:

PCoIP efficiency

Continuing refinements to compression protocols and general performance optimization deliver further improvements in PCoIP efficiency and corresponding reductions in CPU consumption. While already performing better than the VDI competition (as illustrated here and here), these enhancements deliver up to an additional 1.3X reduction in PCoIP overheads.

Client optimizations

For this release, there has been significant optimization of the VMware View clients, making their protocol handling significantly more streamlined. This is especially apparent on thin-clients, where video playback performance is improved by as much as 3X over previous versions, as illustrated in the figure below. Indeed, even relatively low-performance processors can deliver excellent 720p video playback performance. These improvements are available for both x86 and ARM clients.

Network improvements

PCoIP handling of adverse network conditions has been significantly improved. This is especially beneficial for users connecting wirelessly from tablets or laptops over congested and lossy WiFi networks. These enhancements are most apparent during video playback and ensure fluid high-frame video playback -- the improvement can be as high as 8X.

Interactivity improvements

Significant improvements have also been made to interactivity, making interaction with the remote desktop significantly more fluid, and continuing to further improve the experience associated with using a remote desktop. As a simple visual test of this improvement, the picture below show a user rapidly drawing a spiral in mspaint, when connecting to their remote desktop using both RDP7 and View 5.1. With RDP7, the resulting spiral is obviously formed from rough polygons, whereas, with View 5.1, the spiral is significantly smoother (while this test may seem an overly simple example, it is heavily influenced by the speed and frequency at which the client communicates with the remote desktop and clearly conveys the likely differences in scrolling and dragging performance – in a later blog we will deep-dive on interactive performance, using the user experience techniques we discuss here).

By William Lam, Sr. Technical Marketing Engineer

In vCloud Director today, users can not modify or resize a virtual disk for a Virtual Machine (VM) using the vCloud UI, even if the VM is powered off. Though not ideal, this operation can still be accomplished in vCloud Director by leveraging the vCloud API or vCenter Orchestrator (vCO). In this article, I will demonstrate how you can easily resize a virtual disk for a VM in vCloud Director as well as hot-add and hot-extend a virtual disk for a running VM using the vCloud API.

Before getting started, if you are not familiar with the vCloud API, you should take a look here and here for an introduction on how to get started.

Resize Virtual Disk

Let’s start off by identifying a VM in vCloud Director that we wish to modify the virtual disk. In this example, I have a VM called VM1 that is powered off and it is configured with a single 8GB virtual disk.



To retrieve the VM and inspect its virtual disk configuration using the vCloud API, we will leverage the Query Service API to quickly find the VM in question.

$ curl -i -k -H "Accept:application/*+xml;version=1.5" -H "x-vcloud-authorization: vx0dCUUMJkA/dgRz8SyMfFReOAQju02/LTjm6/JP52Y=" -X GET "https://vcd/api/query?type=adminVM&filter=(name==VM1)"



Next, to get a list of all the virtual disks for the VM, we just need to look at the disk section by using the GET operation for the VM as documented here in the vCloud API. Take the VM’s href URL and append the following /virtualHardwareSection/disks. Using the example above, our final URL will be

https://vcd/api/vApp/vm-e71abae8-ca51-4418-94fd-c726e9e443c6/virtualHardwareSection/disks

$ curl -i -k -H "Accept:application/*+xml;version=1.5" -H "x-vcloud-authorization: vx0dCUUMJkA/dgRz8SyMfFReOAQju02/LTjm6/JP52Y=" -X GET https://vcd/api/vApp/vm-e71abae8-ca51-4418-94fd-c726e9e443c6/virtualHardwareSection/disks

As you can see from the response output, we have a single 8GB virtual disk which is connected to an LSI Logic SCSI controller on bus 0 with unit number 0. It also contains a default IDE controller. To increase the disk capacity from 8GB to 10GB, we just need to adjust the “vcloud:capacity” property and perform an update using the PUT operation.

For this, we need to create a file that contains the changes we plan on making. In this example I will create a file called increase-disk. The easiest way to create this file is to take the output from our initial GET operation on the VM’s disk and paste that into the file and then modify the “vcloud:capacity” property from 8192 to 10240.



Note: Even though we are just changing the capacity of a single virtual disk, we need to ensure that we include the rest of the original elements in the request, else you could  accidentally remove a virtual disk or controller.

Now we are ready to resize the VM’s virtual disk by using the PUT operation on the VM’s disk and specifying the request file we just created as outlined in the vCloud API Programming Guide here.

$ curl -i -k -H "Accept:application/*+xml;version=1.5" -H "x-vcloud-authorization: vx0dCUUMJkA/dgRz8SyMfFReOAQju02/LTjm6/JP52Y=" -X PUT https://vcd/api/vApp/vm-e71abae8-ca51-4418-94fd-c726e9e443c6/virtualHardwareSection/disks -H "Content-Type: application/vnd.vmware.vcloud.rasdItemsList+xml" -d @increase-disk

If you take a look at the VM in the vCloud UI after the operation, you should now see the virtual disk for the VM has successfully been increased.



Note: You can only increase the capacity of the virtual disk for a VM, you can not decrease the capacity. This is the exact same behavior in vSphere.

Lastly, you will need to go into your guestOS and extend the disk partition to ensure that the new capacity is now seen. You should refer to the guestOS documentation for the steps.

As you can see the process of modifying a virtual disk for an offline VM is fairly straightforward, we retrieve the disk section of the VM using the GET operation and then we change/modify the disk(s) using the PUT operation. So what about hot-adding or hot-extending a virtual disk for a running VM?

Hot-Extend Virtual Disk

The process of hot-extending a virtual disk is exactly the same as modifying an existing virtual disk. You just need to perform a GET operation on the disk section of the VM in question, then modify the capacity for the virtual disk(s) you wish to extend using the PUT operation as shown above. Here is an example of the request file for increasing our VM1 from 10GB to 20GB while it is running.



Here is the screenshot of the VM in the vCloud UI:

Do not forget to go into the guestOS to extend the disk partition for the new capacity to be seen.

Hot-Add Virtual Disk

The process of hot-adding a virtual disk follows a similar workflow, but instead of just modifying a single property, you will be adding an additional entry into the request. In this example, I will be adding an additional 2GB virtual disk residing on the same SCSI controller and will be using unit 1 as defined in AddressOnParent property (you will need to increment this based on the number of devices on the given controller). Next you need to adjust the ElementName property to reflect the hard disk name, in this example it will be “Hard disk 2”. Finally, you will need to also adjust the InstanceID which must be a unique ID and in this example I took the original InstanceID of our first virtual disk and added that to AddressOnParent property giving me a value of 2001.

Here is an example of the request file for the additional virtual disk to be added to the VM while it is running:



Here is the screenshot of the VM in the vCloud UI:

Do not forget to go into the guestOS to extend the disk partition for the new capacity to be seen.

Fast Provisioning Caveat

One additional thing you should be aware of, is that you will not be able to resize or hot-extend a virtual disk for a Fast Provisioned VM in vCloud Director. The reason for this is the use of snapshots with Linked Clones which Fast Provisioning leverages. If you try to perform the operation using the vCloud API or even the vCO workflow “Change Hard disk capacity”, you may see the following error in the vCloud UI and/or in vCenter Server if you have access:

Invalid hard disk parameters specified. The following parameters are invalid or conflict with other configured devices in the virtual machine:

Adaptor Type: SCSILSILOGIC, Bus Number: 0, Unit Number: 0

If you need to modify the virtual disk for a Fast Provisioned VM, you will need to consolidate the VM’s virtual disk which will inflate the VM to a “thick” provisioned VM and no longer leveraging Linked Clones. You will still be able to hot-add a disk for a Fast Provisioned VM, but if you decide to clone from this VM, that you will not be able to resize or extend the disk afterwards due to use of Fast Provisioning.

In conclusion, though the vCloud UI does not provide the functionality today to resize a virtual disk for a VM in vCloud Director, you can still leverage the vCloud API to help you accomplish this task. In addition, you can also perform both hot-add and hot-extend of a virtual disk for running VMs in vCloud Director.

Additional Resources:
If you are interested in using the PowerCLI cmdlets for vCloud Director, you can check out this blog post by Jake Robinson who shows you an example of using the vCloud API and PowerCLI cmdlets with vCloud Director http://geekafterfive.com/2012/02/24/vcloud-apigui-throwdown-part-2/

Get notification of new blog postings and more by following VMware Automation on Twitter:  @VMWAutomation

From Tina de Benedictis, Technical Marketing Manager, Enterprise Desktop, End User Computing, VMware

Did you know that in VMware View 5.1 you can customize the View Portal that users see when they log in to the View Connection Server to begin using their virtual desktop?

By default, the View Download Portal has built-in intelligence to detect the user’s browser and operating system and responds with instructions and download links matched to the client. For example, if a user connects to their View Connection Server with a Windows PC, the View Portal offers links to download the various types of Windows View Clients from the VMware.com website.

You can customize the links and link text in the View Portal for your environment. Why would you want to change the View Portal contents? By customizing the View Portal, you can:

• Restrict users to specific client versions

• Provide your own View Clients, such as your own Linux View Client

• Disable downloads altogether

You can create a local download repository that is an HTTP server, place View Client installers on this local site, and allow your users to download clients even if they have no access to the VMware.com client download site.

How do you customize the View Portal? You edit one properties file for links (portal-links.properties) and another properties file for link text (portal.properties).

Try it! Go to the VMware View 5.1 Evaluator's Guide and search for Evaluation Tasks for View 5.1 New Features, then View Client Unbundling.

Posted by
Alan Renouf
Technical Marketing

A question I receive all the time is:

How can I list all license keys I have for all of my Virtual Centers in my Infrastructure ?

Luckily PowerCLI enables us to work with multiple vCenters all at one, we can connect to many vCenters or hosts and pull back information on all of these at the same time, to do this you need to set the PowerCLI Configuration to work in multiple mode and then you can connect to more than one vCenter at the same time, to do this see the following example:

Once we are in multiple configuration mode we can then use Connect-VIserver on as many vCenters or hosts as you like, we can use this to connect to multiple vCenters with the same credentials or just list each one like below:

Connect to multiple vCenters with the same username and password:

Connect-VIServer VC1, VC2, VC3, VC4 –User Administrator –Password MyPa$$word

Connect to multiple vCenters with different credentials:

Connect-VIServer VC1 –User Administrator1 –Password MyPa$$word1

Connect-VIServer  VC2 –User Administrator2 –Password MyPa$$word2

Connect-VIServer VC3 –User Administrator3 –Password MyPa$$word3

Connect-VIServer VC4 –User Administrator4 –Password MyPa$$word4

Once connected this information is stored in the $DefaultVIServers variable, this can easily be viewed at any time:

We are also easily able to run scripts against these connections, like for example the License script at the end of this post, this lists all license keys and their information for each vCenter:

(You will excuse me if I exclude the actual key)

The Code

# Set to multiple VC Mode
if(((Get-PowerCLIConfiguration).DefaultVIServerMode) -ne "Multiple") {
    Set-PowerCLIConfiguration -DefaultVIServerMode Multiple | Out-Null
}

# Make sure you connect to your VCs here

# Get the license info from each VC in turn
$vSphereLicInfo = @()
$ServiceInstance = Get-View ServiceInstance
Foreach ($LicenseMan in Get-View ($ServiceInstance | Select -First 1).Content.LicenseManager) {
    Foreach ($License in ($LicenseMan | Select -ExpandProperty Licenses)) {
        $Details = "" |Select VC, Name, Key, Total, Used, ExpirationDate , Information
        $Details.VC = ([Uri]$LicenseMan.Client.ServiceUrl).Host
        $Details.Name= $License.Name
        $Details.Key= $License.LicenseKey
        $Details.Total= $License.Total
        $Details.Used= $License.Used
        $Details.Information= $License.Labels | Select -expand Value
        $Details.ExpirationDate = $License.Properties | Where { $_.key -eq "expirationDate" } | Select -ExpandProperty Value
        $vSphereLicInfo += $Details
    }
}
$vSphereLicInfo | Format-Table -AutoSize

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By: David Davis

Yesterday I attended the Charlotte regional VMware user group for the third year in a row. It was an amazing event with top-notch speakers including the likes of Chris Colotti, Scott Lowe, Eric Siebert, Cody Bunch, Alan Renouf, and more. 

Before I delve into the topics that these experts covered I want to first point out the power of the regional user groups from a social networking perspective. No matter who you are or what stage of your career you're in, you should be looking to better yourself and your career. User group meetings like these provide networking opportunities only rivaled by VMworld. Not only do you get to talk to virtualization experts and VMware admins from hundreds of different enterprise and 25+ virtualization partners, but these partners are also glad to give you the opportunity to learn about the various products they represent (and are potential sources for job opportunities). After all, to be a successful VMware admin, consultant, product manager or tech marketer you need knowledge of VMware’s solutions and the many third-party products making up the VMware ecosystem. 

Virtualization consulting groups like eGroup and Varrow offer full-featured hands-on labs where you can gain experience configuring just about every VMware product feature. If you have never been to one before, events like these are a lot more than just a bunch of guys sitting around swapping war stories. 

With over 25 different sessions and just five time slots during the one day, it was so difficult to make my selection as to what sessions to attend. So who did I get to meet and what did I learn? Here's the list of topics and experts.

Scott Lowe, vExpert, VCDX, and Author of Mastering vSphere 5 presented on vSphere and Network Attached Storage Storage Best Practices

Alan Renouf, vExpert and co-author of the vSphere PowerCLI Reference book presented “PowerCLI 201.”

Cody Bunch, vExpert and author of the VMware Press book on VMware Orchestrator, covered the same topic.

Chris Colotti, vExpert, VCDX, and vCloud Guru from VMware provided a vCloud Director Deepdive.

Eric Siebert, vExpert of HP covered how to understand and optimize vSphere Storage.

Jonathan Klick of vKernel covered The Top 20 vCenter Metrics That Matter.

And Jason Nash, vExpert and VCDX of Varrow presented a vSphere Distributed Switch deepdive.

These were some amazing sessions where I learned so much. I encourage you to attend your local VMware user group meeting – don't miss it!

You can download presentations from the conference here.

I'll be at the central Ohio regional VMware user group next week in Columbus Ohio speaking about VMware VCP certification.

David Davis is a VMware Evangelist and vSphere Video Training Author for Train Signal. He has achieved CCIE, VCP,CISSP, and vExpert level status over his 15+ years in the IT industry. David has authored hundreds of articles on the Internet and nine different video training courses for TrainSignal.com including the popular vSphere 5 and vCloud Director video training courses. Learn more about David at his blog or on Twitter and check out a sample of his VMware vSphere video training course from TrainSignal.com.

By: Andy the Angry IT Guy

Editor’s note: This is the sixth installment in our ongoing series featuring “Andy,” an anonymous IT administrator at a small- to mid-sized organization located somewhere in the American Midwest. When we last left Andy, he was espousing the benefits of automated patch upgrades while trying to contain his excitement about the release of Diablo III.

Today, Andy continues on the topic of patch management and debunks a commonly held myth that only Microsoft applications should be regularly patched.

One of my favorite plot lines in Game of Thrones is that of the Night’s Watch – an ancient military order that guards the Seven Kingdoms from the great unknown that lurks in the wild beyond the wall that surrounds their domain. I’ve increasingly come to believe that the Night’s Watch is a thinly-veiled allegory for IT professionals. Think about the parallels:

• Both groups protect a wider, largely oblivious population from unknown evils that lurk just beyond the wall (or, in the case of IT, a firewall);
• Both groups perform arduous tasks that go beyond the grasp of most people’s basic comprehension. And they do so at the expense of meeting/socializing with members of the opposite sex;
• While both groups perform selfless tasks in the name of protecting their peers, their exploits will largely go unrecognized and uncompensated.

The last point is particularly prescient when describing the primary responsibilities of an IT administrator, especially at a smaller organization that lacks the deep resources of a Fortune 500-type company. Your job is to make sure that things work and promptly fix them when they don’t. Most of the time, no news is good news and you’ll only hear from people when something is wrong.

After nearly a decade in IT, I can safely say that the single biggest thing you can do to control your own destiny in this area is ensuring that you stay on top of all patch updates. Yes, I mean ALL patch updates – not just the Microsoft ones. Malware has evolved beyond its early, Microsoft-hating days and will now target nearly any vulnerability on almost any application.

To that end, the only way to stay ahead of the curve – and remain gainfully employed as an IT administrator – is ensuring you’re up to date on all major updates. To expand on that point, here are a few handy tips I’ve picked up on over the years:

No Browser is Safe From Malware

Not only that, but the much-maligned Internet Explorer isn’t even the most vulnerable. According to the National Vulnerability Database, Safari (81), Chrome (61), and Firefox (44) all had more vulnerabilities than IE (34) in Q1 and Q2 2010[MC1] . Web browers are the most commonly targeted applications, so it’s critical to stay as up-to-date as possible with patches.

Third-Party Applications – Not the OS – Are the Biggest Security Risks Today

While common knowledge holds that the operating system (and Microsoft) are the biggest vulnerabilities in your IT infrastructure, it’s simply not the case. In recent years, third-party apps have emerged as the single greatest threat – that includes those from Adobe, Apple, Java, Mozilla, and Oracle, among others.

Automation Increases Accountability

While some people claim it’s the lazy admin that automates as many tasks as possible, I say it’s the smart, efficient one that does so. I invite anybody that thinks IT admins are lazy to spend a day in my shoes – you try dealing with a never-ending stream of angry help tickets while simultaneously keeping IT operations up and running. If you can automate any portions of the patch management process, I strongly recommend doing so; it’s the single best way to ensure that all machines in your network are up-to-date and not vulnerable to malicious software.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: IT is a thankless job, and there’s always going to be someone looking to blame you for even the slightest misstep. Like the brave men of the Night’s Watch, we have to stay constantly alert and a step ahead of our enemies to ensure the continued welfare of our organization.  

If you’re interested in diving into this topic a bit deeper, take a look at The Importance of Patching Non-Microsoft Applications, a technical white paper from VMware.

In a nutshell, relational databases weren’t built for the cloud. With vFabric Postgres, VMware customers can get a proven, enterprise database integrated with VMware virtualization and ready for cloud computing.

As announced earlier this week, vFabric Postgres (vPostgres) is now available within vFabric Suite 5.1 Advanced. With vPostgres, the well-respected, open-source database gains built in best practices, optimized configuration, and cloud-ready features.  While vFabric Postgres is synced up to PostgreSQL 9.1.3 minor release and includes all the new features of this version of the database (see PostgreSQL wiki for more), vFabric adds many features and considerable improvements in three categories:

1. Development and deployment become simpler, smarter, and cloud ready
2. Performance improvements with elastic memory and more
3. Monitoring and administration get an upgrade
4. Lower TCO and increase staff efficiency

Development and Deployment with vFabric Postgres

First, vPostgres is available in two form factors:

• vPostgres Virtual Appliance
• vPostgres RPMs for 64-bit Linux Servers (RHEL 6, Suse 11 sp1+)

The virtual appliance is easy to deploy because it is designed for the vSphere 5.0 platform.  vPostgres RPMs are also available for custom installations requiring co-locations with other applications in a VM or having special deployment needs (including hot-standby setup). The RPMs can be accessed from repo.vmware.com and also from the VMware download website. The vPostgres virtual appliance can be used for development and test on VMware Player, Workstation, and Fusion products.  Since vPostgres is free for developers and works on various platforms (including mobile development), developers will have a less cumbersome time moving their work to a cloud platform or virtualized environment.

In addition, the virtual appliance is ready to handle changing resource needs by adapting CPU, memory, disk size, and more without needing any other changes inside the appliance. The vPostgres smart tuning and management capabilities require less in-depth knowledge about the inner workings of the database. With these features, developers, architects, and administrators can 1) spend less time on manual resets of configuration parameters for the core engine and 2) gain cloud scale.

vFabric Postgres Performance Improvements

There are several elements that bring cloud scale to vPostgres:

• vPostgres can be highly available. Using vSphere HA and vMotion technologies, “database aware high availability” and automatic failover are available with simple point and click setup using the vSphere client.
• Many companies face scenarios where databases requests spike – where memory consumption is tight and lowering.  With Elastic Database Memory working directly within the vSphere hypervisor, The Kernal Balloon driver, vPostgres Database Balloon driver, and buffer pool dynamically allocate memory to and from the hypervisor during times of need to help avoid inconsistent performance. This reduces performance variances drastically when facing changing memory pressures seen in server consolidation scenarios.   

• Many critical settings have higher default values than standard PostgreSQL. This improves out-of-the-box performance with a slight trade-off in disk space and memory usage.
• Checksums are performed on each write to tables and indexes to help ensure data is clean. For example, in scenarios where SANs fail, the checksums help prevent silent bit corruption.
• Lastly, checkpoint trade-offs between recovery time and performance are more complicated in the virtual world.  vPostgres allows for SLA configuration. With this capability, checkpoint parameters are tuned dynamically for recovery time and performance as the system monitors itself.

Monitoring and Administration with vFabric Postgres

vPostgres supports core admin tools and adds enhancements.

• vPostgres native clients are available for Linux, Windows and Mac. JDBC and ODBC clients are also available. Community PostgreSQL 9.1 clients and management tools work with vPostgres including pgadmin.

• vPostgres includes an enhanced version of pg_top which gives database transactions per second, bufferpool hits, cpu, memory, disk ios and top database connections in a single dashboard view for easier understanding of the state of the database. 

• vPostgres is integrated with VMware vFabric License server for license management. The license keys can be used locally or using VMware vFabric License server. (There is a default 60-day trial license also available.)

Lower TCO and increase staff efficiency

• Financially, license costs are more attractive compared to other “commercial” databases. 
• The database is packaged to work with vSphere infrastructure where virtualizing supports considerable cost-savings.
• The virtual appliance saves a significant amount of installation time – no need to size hardware, install the OS, install the RDBMS, set-up the database server, and tune, With VMware vSphere 5.0+, the appliance can be set up in 15 minutes and supports real-world workload.
• A built-in watchdog process enables quick HA configuration, and vSphere-based High Availability can be set-up in one click.
• Smart tuning, configuration, and management reduce overall management time.
• The advanced version of pg_top helps to quickly narrow the focus on problematic areas saving DBAs time who do not have indepth Postgres knowledge.

Learning More

To try out vFabric Postgres, you can download a 60 day free trial, as part of vFabric Suite Advanced, at www.vfabric.co/try.

About the Author: Jignesh Shah is the Product Manager for vFabric Postgres. He also has interests in database performance  and have been working with Postgres Community for many years. He was also a key member to deliver the first published benchmark with Postgres.

By Matt Eccleston, chief architect - VMware View, VMware

VDI with VMware View has brought many benefits to customers over the years, including business agility, improved control and security and end-user flexibility. However, a vexing problem as our customers scale up the size of their deployments has been how to achieve cost-effective storage designs for VDI environments while maintaining an excellent quality of service for their end users. The “VDI storage problem” fundamentally stems from the different economics of traditional desktop storage (a local SATA drive), and datacenter-class storage. Datacenter storage is almost always more expensive on a $ per GB, or $ per I/O throughput basis. However, at the same time, datacenter storage offers significant opportunities for pooling resources, securing, consolidating and centralizing the data of the desktop.

VMware has always been a leader in attacking this challenge, able to closely leverage its vSphere technology and apply it to the VDI market through VMware View. An example of this is View’s linked clones technology. View Composer linked clones allowed you to take advantage of the fact that many of the virtual desktops in a given environment had gigabytes of identical content (since they all came from the same Windows image template) and did not need to waste capacity by storing the same content multiple times on disk. For many scenarios, View Composer achieves a massive reduction in the amount of storage space consumed on datacenter storage.

However, with the subsequent heavy consolidation of VM data onto a relatively small amount of physical storage, coupled with the tendency of desktops to exhibit synchronized bursty storage workloads (the famed I/O storm problem, with “boot-storm” being the most well known of the ilk), new challenges arose with I/O throughput. Capacity was no longer the main issue. IOPS became the key design factor for VDI storage.

VMware again led the way, introducing View Composer based storage tiering in VMware View 4.5. This allowed the parent disk, in a linked clone scenario, which contains all of the common content of the Windows image template, to be stored on a different class of storage (typically SSD/EFD backed). This allowed for a significantly better user experience at lower cost, by dramatically increasing the read I/O capabilities available to the VDI environment.

However, storage tiering done in this manner, still had three major gaps to address:

• It required a specific storage array configuration
• It did little to address contention on the storage interconnect and storage controllers
• It was best-suited for stateless desktop type deployments

The View Storage Accelerator helps address all three of these. The first two are addressed by adding a high read I/O capability into vSphere itself. This means that for cached read I/Os, an I/O is never even issued by ESX to the storage! In addition, it works regardless of the storage backend being used, allowing View to be deployed cost-effectively on a much broader set of storage platforms and architectures.

To illustrate how the View Storage Accelerator addresses the last point, having a read-acceleration technology that works equally well for stateful or stateless desktops, requires a bit more explanation on the internal workings of View Storage Accelerator.

The View Storage Acceleration functionality uses a patent-pending technology in ESX known internally as a content-based read-cache. There is a lot in a name. A content-based read cache is a cache in that it uses host memory to store data blocks. It is a read-cache in that it addresses only reads (as an aside, host-based write caching for stateful desktops has a very tricky coherency problem in the presence of a host-failure to solve). And perhaps most importantly, it is content-based, which means it can cache any block from any VM accessed by the host that holds identical content, regardless of how those VMs were created. This means that it works for VMs that are full copies of each other, VMs that are created from common linked clones, VMs that are created through array-based provisioning techniques, or even VMs that are P2V’d and imported from vCenter. Because the cache holds blocks of data indexed by their content rather than by logical sector, the required cache size is very small, small enough that it can fit within a reasonable, cost-effective amount of memory on every server in a cluster.

So how does this content-based caching work exactly?

The key to understanding this is: Offline indexing, online caching. At VM creation time (or in the case of View manual pools, when the VM is imported), and at configurable intervals there-after (typically weekly or monthly), the content of each VMDK file is indexed and fingerprints of the content are stored in what we call a digest file per VMDK (e.g. “myDisk-digest.vmdk”). The digest file allows for efficient management and lookups into the vSphere-based cache while the VM is running.

There are two somewhat technical points needed to complete a detailed understanding of the View Storage Accelerator mechanics:

The first is that the cache only caches blocks common to more than one VM. This is because Windows already has caching mechanisms for it’s I/O (it’s page cache). Caching that data twice, with no benefit to other VMs, would provide no benefit and waste precious RAM.

The second is that to avoid expensive computation on the I/O path, writes to previously cached entries cause the VM that issued it to no longer participate in caching for the written block (since the content likely changed). If the newly written data is in fact the same across multiple VMs, this fact will be picked up the next time digest files are regenerated (the weekly / monthly periodic maintenance operation mentioned above). To illustrate this nuance: If you roll out a significant service pack update to all of your VMs by installing it directly in each VM (an example where lots of identical content is written to different VMs), those newly written blocks will not participate in the caching immediately, but will do so at the next interval where digests are recalculated. We feel this periodic storage maintenance task (which can be configured through View as described in my colleague Narashima’s blog) is a small price to pay for keeping expensive computation off of the storage I/O path, and allowing interoperability with all storage architectures.

Ok sounds great. So what can I expect for results, and what do I need to know to put this to use in my environment?

For some of the performance results we’ve seen in our labs I will refer to you another blog entry from Narashima, who covers it well.

In terms of putting it to use in your environment, the View Storage Accelerator was designed to be applicable in any VDI scenario with VMware View. The only common scenario where you may not want to enable it is where you have an existing deployment, and are fully satisfied with the I/O characteristics of your storage. The View Storage accelerator consumes some RAM on the ESXi hosts both for the cache of data blocks, and the per-VMDK metadata associated with managing the cache entries. For most configurations this will be less than 5% of RAM on a given system. (If this sounds alarming at first blush, please consider the economics of 5% more DRAM capacity vs. the costs of getting equivalent levels of I/O improvement from the storage, and we suspect you, like us, will find that the tradeoff is well worth it). However, in a system where everything is running well and sized appropriately already, and the storage has sufficient I/O capabilities (perhaps because tiered storage is in use), it may not be worth “rocking the boat” in terms of reducing RAM available (or number of VMs) per server.

Finally, I do want to recognize that while View Storage Accelerator provides impressive benefits in addressing read I/O storms, it doesn’t directly address write I/O storms. Designing a storage architecture that accounts for peak write I/O in a VDI environment will still require consideration and adherence to best practices, especially for stateful desktops. We are not yet at VDI storage nirvana (my definition: storage $/user <= PCs, perf >= PCs, planning effort <= PCs). But the View Storage Accelerator, by continuing our history of integrating our best-in-class vSphere technology with best-in-class VDI management software brings us one big step closer, and starts to pull back the veil on the types of approaches that may allow us as an industry to not just resolve the challenges, but take advantage of the benefits of heavily consolidated storage for VDI environments.

By Pat Lee, director, End-User Clients, VMware

The View Clients team is excited to release our latest clients for Windows, Linux, Mac, iPad and Android. The new client releases are optimized to deliver the best possible experience when combined with VMware View 5.1.

Optimized for VMware View 5.1
The new View Clients have up to 3x better video playback, improved interactive performance, and more robust performance on high-latency and lossy networks. See VMware View 5.1 Continues to Improve Performance for more details.

Also, the new View Clients work with VMware View 5.1 to support additional two-factor authentication vendors, leveraging a RADIUS client in the View 5.1 Connection Server. This gives you more choice when implementing single sign-on or security tokens in your virtual desktops.

Support for the Latest iPad and Android Devices
The new VMware View Client for iPad has been updated to support the new third-generation iPad and deliver better video playback and interactive performance for users of the new iPad.

The new VMware View Client for Android supports Android 4.0, otherwise known as Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS). The latest View Client takes advantages of new ICS features to deliver excellent support for USB and Bluetooth external mice. This includes right-click, hover, and scroll wheels, to give you a great remote desktop experience.

Better Mobile Experience
We continue to improve the user experience on the VMware View Clients for iPad and Android. The new View Client for iPad has an updated user interface that works and looks better on the new iPad.

The new View Client for Android has new and improved graphics, an all-new Settings interface, and enhancements for smaller screen devices.

The following mobile client features all require VMware View 5.1, which has been enhanced to support our View mobile clients:

• Touch in text fields to activate the onscreen keyboard – Just click in a text field and the onscreen keyboard will now be activated.
• Bluetooth keyboard improvements - The extended keyboard bar no longer covers the Start menu and task bar when using a Bluetooth keyboard. Also, the touch in text field option will also activate the Bluetooth keyboard when clicking in a text field.
• Internationalization improvements - French, German, and Spanish keyboards are supported when using VMware View 5.1 servers and appropriate international desktop keyboards. Direct Korean language input is supported when using VMware View 5.1 servers and desktops.
• Save password option with VMware View 5.1 – VMware View 5.1 introduces a new administrator option to allow end users to securely save their user name and password on a mobile device to simplify login to their View desktop. Once the administrator enables this option, the View Client user can enable it on their particular client.

Download Latest View Clients Today
We are excited to release the new View Clients optimized for VMware View 5.1.  Go download the Windows, Mac, and Android clients today from the VMware View Clients Download Center. The new iPad and Ubuntu Linux clients will be available shortly

The VMware End-User Computing team is happy to announce the general availability of VMware View 5.1.  No dancing this time, just great engineering!

Announced on May 2, 2012 as core component of the VMware end-user computing portfolio, VMware View 5.1 represents a major leap forward enabling IT organizations to empower more agile, productive and connected businesses by creating a better desktop for the Post-PC era.

Centralized and automated desktop management provided by VMware View 5.1 enable the scalable management of tens of thousands of virtual desktops through a single console. VMware View reduces operational costs by as much as 50 percent while increasing availability, reliability and security levels beyond levels of traditional PCs.

Built on VMware vSphere, the industry’s most widely deployed virtualization platform, VMware View 5.1 will enable the industry’s best end-user experience while simplifying IT management for large-scale deployments and reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) associated with a virtual desktop infrastructure.

VMware View 5.1 Features and Benefits:
So what do you get in View 5?  Enhancements and new features in VMware View 5.1 include:

VMware View Storage Accelerator – VMware View Storage Accelerator (formerly known as Content Based Read Cache) optimizes storage load and improves performance by caching common image blocks when reading virtual desktop images, helping to reduce overall TCO in VMware View deployments.  Read more about VSA here.

VMware View Composer Array Integration (VCAI) – Offered in VMware View 5.1 as a Tech Preview, VCAI will leverage the native cloning abilities in the storage array to offload storage operations within a VMware View environment.  As a result, VCAI improves provisioning speeds and management in View Composer and offers another solution for customers wanting to leverage other storage options. Read more about VCAI here.

VMware View Persona Management – New in VMware View 5.1, VMware View Persona Management will extend to physical desktops, enabling IT organizations to preserve user settings across all Windows devices and streamline the migration from physical to stateless virtual desktops.

VMware vCenter™ Operations for VMware View – Offered as a new add-on to VMware View, VMware vCenter Operations for VMware View will enable administrators to have broad insight into virtual desktop performance.  Increased insight can empower administrators to quickly pinpoint and troubleshoot issues, optimize resource utilization and proactively address potential issues in real time. Read more about vCenter Operations for VMware View here.

VMware View Administrator Enhancements – New performance enhancements to the administrator user interface will deliver faster response times for large-scale desktop environments in the tens-of-thousands. With VMware View 5.1, desktop provisioning with pre-created AD accounts simplifies the process and enhances compliance policy. Administrator enhancements also include editable locations for disposable disk drives. Read more about how VMware View makes it easier to deploy large-scale designs here.

RADIUS Support – Support in VMware View 5.1 for RADIUS will enable greater choice for organizations looking to deploy two-factor authentication, while maintaining compatibility with existing choices.

New VMware View Clients – Users will be able to connect to their VMware View desktop from a variety of mobile and fixed endpoints with updated clients for Mac, Windows and Linux desktops, thin or zero clients and Apple iPad, Android and Amazon Kindle Fire tablets. VMware View 5.1 with PCoIP® adapts to the end users’ network connection to provide a high-quality, customized desktop experience over the LAN or WAN.  Learn more about new VMware View Clients for Linux here.

VMware View Media Services Enhancements: VMware View 5.1 Local Mode will add multi-monitor support and expanded USB device compatibility, improving the user experience by enabling more peripherals to connect seamlessly into VMware View virtual desktops.

VMware View Administrator Language Support – Globalization and localization of administrator UI provides a better experience for non-English speaking IT organizations and will enable greater adoption in additional markets.  Languages will include French, German, Japanese, Korean and Simplified Chinese.

Visit the VMware View landing page or watch the View 5.1 Webinar learn more.

Name:  Nick Howell
Blog URL:  datacenterdude.com
Twitter handle:  @that1guynick
Current employer:  NetApp – Virtualization Solutions Architect

How did you get into IT?


I started in IT right around Y2K, cabling buildings, learning about networking, and eventually diving into server administration.Being the typical AD/Exchange/Server admin, I discovered virtualization and shared storage in 2007, and immediately began implementing it in environments in which I worked.  For the last few years, i have been an outspoken advocate of “virtualizing everything,” and doing so on NetApp storage arrays. I am currently a Virtualization Solutions Architect for NetApp, helping customers design and learn how to deploy advanced virtualization solutions.
NicI hold many industry certifications, and continue to work towards advanced Cisco and VMware certifications, including VCDX.

How did you get into working with VMware and becoming a 2012 vExpert?

Essentially, I was your typical SysAdmin working with servers/AD/Exchange, and used Workstation to do some test/dev/scripting stuff before implementing anything into the live environment.  Around 2007, I started hearing more and more about this "ESX" stuff, and started looking into it.  We replaced Workstation on my laptop with ESX on some older servers, and once everyone saw and understood the capabilities, it was a no-brainer, and we virtualized everything, including Exchange and Oracle.

I've been active on Twitter, and blogging since 2008, and a fervent participant in the Vmware Communities podcasts for about the same time.  I received my first nomination and award in 2011, and was subsequently selected again for 2012.  I've been a speaker at Vmworld, Oracle OpenWorld, and various VMUG's, and have been with NetApp since Feb 2011.


What would you tell someone who wanted to get a job like yours to do?

Be passionate.  Be transparent.  Always speak your mind, and be willing to admit when you're wrong or don't know the answer to something.  Integrity.  But at the same time, unbridled passion for the subjects.  You have to eat, sleep, and breathe Virtualization.  Evangelizing and sharing information has to excite you, and get you up in the morning.

Microsoft’s wildly exaggerated claims of providing a less expensive virtualization platform than VMware vSphere have been hard to miss if you’ve spent any time on the web lately. We’ve previously pointed out the flaws in their math and our public Cost Per Application Calculator clearly shows how deploying a virtual infrastructure built with vSphere will cost about the same as one built using Microsoft Hyper-V and System Center (or even much less when vSphere’s proven VM density advantage over Hyper-V is factored in.) Now we’re pleased to share recent independent test results that show how vSphere also delivers dramatically lower operational costs compared to Microsoft.

The acquisition capital expense (CapEx) advantage for vSphere shown by our Cost Per Application Calculator is just part of the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) that diligent customers will want to evaluate when choosing a virtualization and cloud platform. The other key TCO element to consider is Operational Expenses (OpEx) representing the ongoing costs of administering your virtual infrastructure. To help customers assess the OpEx differences between vSphere and Hyper-V, we enlisted Principled Technologies to run both platforms in their labs and measure the system administrator labor time needed for typical recurring tasks.

Five Typical Datacenter Tasks Tested

Principled Technologies selected five common tasks that any administrator of a virtualized datacenter must regularly perform and they measured the administrator labor time taken to complete each one using both the VMware and Microsoft platforms. The tasks tested were:

1. Shifting virtual machines off a host to accommodate physical maintenance
2. Adding storage volumes and redistributing virtual disk files across the new storage
3. Isolating storage-intensive “noisy neighbor” virtual machines
4. Provisioning new hosts
5. Performing a non-disruptive disaster recovery failover test

Care was taken to conduct the scenario tasks as realistically as possible using the full capabilities of the latest released versions of the VMware and Microsoft products available at the time of the testing. vCenter Site Recovery Manager was included in the VMware configuration (and the full list SRM license costs were included in the VMware total cost figures.) vSphere 5 delivered a convincing across-the-board win over Microsoft for each task tested: tasks took 78% to 97% less time to complete using vSphere. The time savings provided by the VMware platform arise from the more advanced capabilities built into vSphere and the more efficient and optimized implementation of those features we’ve perfected over our years of focusing purely on delivering the best virtual infrastructure and cloud platform.

It’s important to note that the OpEx dollar savings shown in the chart above derive from only five representative sysadmin tasks. There are many other regular activities performed by administrators of virtualized datacenters, most of which will show similar efficiency advantages for vSphere over less mature and capable alternatives, so customers should expect even greater total OpEx savings from using vSphere.

Scenarios Delivering Big OpEx Wins for vSphere

Contributors to the biggest operational advantages for vSphere were:

• Storage Distributed Resource Scheduler – When more storage is needed, the vSphere administrator can add volumes and let Storage DRS redistribute virtual disk files to the new volumes automatically with no VM downtime. The Hyper-V administrator must manually redistribute VM storage and make arrangements for VM downtime during the operation.
• Concurrent vMotion – The vSphere administrator can complete physical host maintenance much sooner because vMotion maintenance mode evacuations of VMs can proceed concurrently and at a faster rate (see comparative live migration testing results here.) Hyper-V hosts can only handle one live migration at a time, so administrators are tied up with much longer maintenance windows.
• Storage I/O Control – vSphere makes it easy to cap the storage IOPS consumed by each VM to prevent resource hogging by “noisy neighbors.” Hyper-V has no such feature, so administrators can only respond by dedicating storage volumes for misbehaving VMs – a tedious task requiring VM downtime.
• vCenter Site Recovery Manager – SRM fully automates replication of mission-critical VMs to a remote site and failover in case of disaster. Real disasters may be rare, but full-scale DR tests should be regular events. That’s where the automated and non-disruptive DR failover test features in SRM deliver big operational savings. Setting up DR failovers with Hyper-V requires maintenance-intensive scripting to orchestrate VM replications and restarts and to modify VMs for network isolation.

After making their labor time measurements, Principled Technologies then estimated how many times each task would be repeated over the course of a two-year period in a datacenter operating 1,000 virtual machines. Multiplying the cumulative time taken performing each task by the U.S. national average system administrator compensation rate gave a dollar figure for the OpEx savings. As shown below, the final result was an impressive 91% reduction in operational expenses when using vSphere compared to Microsoft Hyper-V and System Center.

Operational Expenses Dominate Total Costs

The impact of the OpEx savings delivered by vSphere are even more significant when you consider that IT operational expenses are typically much larger than capital expenses. In fact, Gartner survey data shows cross-industry IT OpEx spending is almost three times CapEx spending – even more reason to choose a virtualization platform that will save you money with better operational efficiency long after the initial purchase.

The OpEx savings delivered by vSphere were enough to tip the two-year TCO advantage in favor of VMware in the 1,000-VM datacenter that was the baseline for Principled Technologies’ tests. When you can have the clearly superior features provided by vSphere 5 Enterprise Plus Edition together with vCenter Site Recovery Manager at a lower total cost than Microsoft’s best alternative, it’s easy to make the decision to go with VMware.

If you’re running your datacenter on vSphere now, an OpEx win by vSphere probably isn’t surprising. vSphere users benefit from over a decade of optimizations we’ve built into our platform that derive from experience in thousands of production datacenters. What did surprise us was just how large an operational advantage vSphere has over the Microsoft platform. The results are a clear example of why you need to look at more than just a feature checklist and initial price tag when choosing the virtualization platform for your most critical workloads.

Take a look for yourself at the full test report by Principled Technologies here (registration required.)

Yesterday, we’ve announced the vFabric Suite 5.1, which features automated deployment, new components, and open source support. I’ve always had a soft spot for open source software in my heart, and am glad to see the vFabric team showing it some love.

Back to the new features and components though, because there are a ton of them:

• Application Director automates the deployment of applications through easy-to-use blueprints with standardized templates, component libraries and workflows
• Application Performance Manager (APM) provides comprehensive monitoring of end-user transactions, Java code, middleware servers, and vSphere hosts. APM includes two components: vFabric AppInsight, which does transaction- and code-level monitoring and vFabric Hyperic, which monitors middleware servers and vSphere hosts, providing 50,000 metrics for over 75 popular web technologies.
• vPostgres is relational SQL database that comes in as a virtual appliance and has virtualization optimizations such as elastic database memory and smart configuration to reduce tuning time after resizing virtual machines.
• vFabric Administration Server (VAS) has a REST Management API for a uniform way to administer groups of vFabric Servers.

• Support for Apache Tomcat, Apache HTTP Server and RabbitMQ, which are the open source runtime components most frequently used in production deployments of Spring applications.

And in addition to all the new stuff above, every already existing product in vFabric Suite has been updated. Here are some of the highlights:

• vFabric tc Server 2.7 has been updated to the latest stable Apache Tomcat release, and supports websockets and JDK7.
• vFabric Elastic Memory for Java (EM4J) 1.1 adds support for Apache Tomcat (in addition to tc Server) and JDK7.
• vFabric Web Server 5.1  now uses OpenSSL 1.0.1, adding support for TLS 1.1 and TLS 1.2.
• vFabric RabbitMQ 2.8.1 now has improved reliability, new message flow control to improve performance under load, dead letter queues for handling undelivered or expired messages, and compatibility with Erlang R15B for native operation on 64-bit Windows.
• vFabric GemFire Application Cache Node 6.6.2 adds HTTP Session Management support for tc Server 2.5, 2.6, and 2.7, Apache Tomcat 6.0 & 7.0 and generic module for other application servers (such as Oracle WebLogic)
• vFabric SQLFire Professional Edition 1.0.2 now supports unlimited node connections, which allows SQLFire Professional to scale horizontally like the other components in vFabric Suite.

While not exactly a new release, our product page vmware.com/products has received a radical makeover, and I have to say, I dig it. Now you can browse all the myriad products that we now offer, either by type, or A to Z. This new page also incorporates a product selector tool, an interactive product diagram to help make sense of it all, and a nice animated Virtualization Overview video that is both informative and fun to watch. All the product news are also listed on that page now, that’s where you will find links to the new vFabric products today.

The registration is now open for VMword San Francisco—go register yourself and tell your friends. There are early bird discounts, VMUG Advantage discounts, other discounts that I can’t all remember, and of course the steepest discount of all is the speaker discount—if you present at the show, you will get your ticket free! There are still two more days left to submit your talk proposal, and the call for papers closes on the 18^th of this month. This year, the VMworld team says there will be no extensions for the CFP, so if you miss the deadline, you’ll have to come back next year.

And finally, there will be three full-day VMUG conferences happening before the month is out: one in San Diego, another in Central Ohio, and also one in Denver. Go to myvmug.com to find a VMUG conference near you and to register.

View all

Share your VMware Instagram experience at EMC World, and win a prize! From May 21-24^th at EMC World in Las Vegas, drop by VMware booth #201 to pick up your “VMware +_______” paddle, which is shown above.

See the instructions on the back of the paddle and upload your photos to VMwares Instagram page – it’s easy! Please be sure to upload using the hashtags #EMCworld and #VMwarePlus, so we can seed your photos into the VMware at EMC World + Instagram page. Three prizes will be awarded for the most creative #VMwarePlus photos.

You can still participate even if you can’t attend EMC World! Since we are collecting all of the #EMCworld photos you can check out the sights of the conference as they unfold in real-time on the VMware Instagram page.

Not an Instagram user?  Just download the app to your smartphone for free. Click here for Andriod users or here for iPhone users to get started.

In the comments section of this post, please let us know how your experience was with #VMwarePlus and if you have any questions.

Be sure to follow @VMwareEvents and @VMware_Partners for more information during the conference.

Many of you may be wondering what virtualization can do for you beyond server virtualization. At VMware, we like to call this the “virtualization journey.” Virtualizing your server hardware infrastructure is really just the first step in the journey to transform your business through IT. Virtualization opens the door to greater IT agility, resource utilization and cost savings. It also enables critical solutions, like business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR). The ability to maintain business operations in the event of a disaster or an outage is critical to the survival of a business. Failure to have a business continuity and disaster recovery solution in place can result in grim consequences. 

“43% of companies experiencing disasters never re-open, and 29% close within two years.” McGladrey and Pullen

“93% of businesses that lost their data center for 10 days went bankrupt within one year.” National Archives & Records Administration

So, needless to say, having a reliable and viable business continuity and disaster recovery solution is essential. Thankfully, virtualizing your hardware infrastructure is the first step towards building a solution. The inherent characteristics of virtual machines (partitioning, isolation, encapsulation and hardware dependence) are the building blocks of a BCDR solution. By combining these characteristics with solutions like VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager, companies can build a reliable and cost-effective BCDR solution. 

Take a look at the resources below to learn more about VMware’s solutions for business continuity and disaster recovery and how to get started.

Resources:

• Myron Steves, a 200 employee insurance wholesaler in Texas, has been able to slash their business continuity and disaster recovery costs across the business to become a more agile organization. Learn more.
• Business continuity solution brief
• Uptime Blog
• Backup & Recovery VMware Community

Send your questions or comments!

~Rob Chen
  Sr. Manager, SMB Marketing

By Aaron Blasius, senior product manager, VMware

VDI solutions have been available for many years now and are becoming the preferred desktop platform for many market segments.  From the enterprise to state, local and education customers and from Health Care to the the small and mid-size businesses, organizations are realizing the benefits of delivering desktop workloads to their employees from private clouds enabled via VMware View. 

Centralization, automated provisioning and additional security are the primary drivers of View hosted solutions. Until recently, customer’s looking to secure their high value workstations assets in hosted solutions has been limited to niche solutions. 

This is about to change.Virtualizing graphics workloads was not an immediate need for the early adopters of virtualization for the data center.  It was the evolution to virtual desktop workloads forced the issue of virtual graphics for the data center.  Organizations wanted to bring VDI to more teams and employees demanded the same high fidelity experience from their virtual machines as the one they could find at home. 

VMware leveraged the virtual 3D technology developed for the Workstation and Fusion products to ensure the rich graphics experience provided by enterprise software products such as Aero.  Software rendered 3D in View 5 was delivered and the use case grew.

At VMworld in Copenhagen last year we announced a technology preview with NVIDIA that enabled a true virtual workstation experience.  vSphere virtualization coupled with the full power of the NVIDIA Quadro GPU card securely delivered from the data center to scientist, engineers, artists and manufacturing partners through a View virtual environment.  Private clouds will be able to host the organizations most important IP.  This provides the ability to more easily and securely leverage their global workforce, distributed supply chains and external partners; the View use case grew.

What’s next?
For me, few end-user scenarios expand the VDI use case more than 3D graphics.  Harnessing the tremendous efficiency of the GPU for graphical rendering in a View environment impacts the two major concerns of any VDI initiative: experience and cost. 

The tremendous power of ESX will be able to virtualize and manage NVIDIA’s hardware based GPU resources.   Accelerated 3D rendering provides a better end-user experience and increased efficiency means higher consolidation ratios.  Cards like NVIDIA’s next generation VGX GPU cards provide the horsepower to ensure GPU doesn’t have to be limiting resource for graphics hungry power users.  Managing this resource with the industry’s leading hypervisor from VMware means customers will continue to manage all their private clouds via vSphere.  Multi-monitor use cases, DirectX and OpenGL application, CAD reviewers and diagnosticians are just some of the groups who have struggled with the graphics performance of VDI in the past.  But with virtual graphics acceleration, this will no longer be the case. 

As I said, things are about the change and look for VMware to continue to lead the way by providing the most comprehensive graphics strategy in the market, I for one am very excited.

Posted by Andre Kemp
Principal - SAP Business
Practice, Americas

In a post last week, Elliot Fliesler alluded to some exiting news that we would soon share around our SAP partnership. And where better to finally unveil that news than at Sapphire Now 2012 and here on our alliances blog?  It’s now official: SAP has validated its Sybase High Performance OLTP Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) Database on VMware cloud infrastructure.

This validation announcement is notable for a number of reasons:

• It assures customers and prospects running SAPSybase ASE databases as virtual machines that they can achieve high-performance results that match their physical infrastructure.
• It enables customers and prospects to stop worrying about virtualizing business-critical applications—including their most important databases.
• It signals the beginning of further testing by VMware and SAP to support the virtualization of other key SAP products, such as SAP Sybase IQ, Replication Server and SQL Anywhere on VMware cloud infrastructure.

Commentary from the Show

One of the reasons I enjoy coming to Sapphire every year is to hear firsthand how customers are currently using and prospects are thinking about using our joint solutions and services. Yesterday, I co-presented a session (2307) with one of our customers, Fonterra. This $16B (NZD) dairy company virtualized its entire SAP landscape in 2010 and is now deploying automated disaster recovery on the VMware vSphere^® platform.

From Fonterra and other attendees, I have learned that the launch of vSphere 5 has really done more to unlock the potential value of SAP landscapes. For example, customers virtualizing their SAP landscape with VMware solutions are benefitting from enhanced business agility. They also are able to provide superior service levels and improve asset turnover while lowering TCO.

More customers today are moving from server consolidation (the IT Production phase that begins the VMware Journey) into virtualizing business-critical applications (phase two or the Business Production phase). What this tells us is that a greater number and a wider variety of customers—enterprises and small and midsize businesses (SMBs)—are embracing IT transformation. They are all moving ahead with us on the journey from virtualization to cloud computing and IT as a service—at their own pace.

As I gather new insights from customers during the many meetings that I’m participating in this week, I’m reminded about how far we have come with virtualization and cloud infrastructure. At first, our products helped technical customers to overcome IT challenges and save money. Now, there is tremendous demand from CIOs and line-of-business stakeholders for more extensive services and solutions that move their business applications to a virtualized and cloud environment that solves real business issues. In this way, we are helping to transform enterprises, and this makes me look forward to working even more closely with SAP on solutions that are yet to come. Let us know how virtualizing SAP has made a difference to your business, in the comments section below.

Photo: A packed VMware theatre session at the booth yesterday.

For those organizations on the journey of transforming their datacenters to meet the demand of a modern IT consumption model, it’s easy to envision what cloud euphoria could/should look like.  That’s mostly because vision is quite cheap – all it takes is a little imagination (maybe), a few Google queries, several visits by your favorite vendor(s), and perhaps a top-down mandate or two.  The problem is execution can break the bank if the vision is not in line with the organization’s core objectives.  It’s easy to get carried away in the planning stages with all the options, gizmos and cloudy widgets out there – often delaying the project and creating budget shortfalls.  Cloud:Fail.  But this journey doesn’t have to be difficult (or horrendously expensive).  Finding the right solution is half the battle…just don’t go gluing several disparate products together that were never intended to comingle and burn time and money trying to integrate them.  Sure you might eventually achieve something that resembles a cloud, but you’re guaranteed to hit several unnecessary pain points on the way.

Of course I’m not suggesting putting all your eggs in one vendor’s basket guarantees success.  Nor am I suggesting that VMware’s basket is the only one that provides everything you’ll ever need for a successful cloud deployment.  In fact, VMware prides itself with an enormous (and growing) partner ecosystem that provides unique approaches and technologies to cloudy problems and beyond.  What I am suggesting, however, is the need to pick and choose wisely.  Well integrated clouds = well functioning clouds = happy clouds and happy customers.  Integration means common frameworks and interfaces, extensible API’s, automation via orchestration, app portability across clouds, and technologies that are purpose-built for the job(s) at hand.  And as a bonus, integration can mean leveraging what you already have – an infrastructure awaiting the transformation of a lifetime.  That’s right, the cloud journey should not be a rip-and-replace proposition.

There’s another major component to this – while I spend the majority of my time helping organizations and federal agencies adopt the cloud and transform their infrastructures, there’s often something else on the customer’s mind that can’t be ignored.  It’s a long-term strategy delivered in nine datacenter-shattering words: “I want to get out of the infrastructure business”.   I’m hearing this more often than not and it cannot be ignored.  What they are referring to is the need to eventually shift workloads to public clouds rather than continue to invest in their own infrastructures.  This strategy makes perfect sense.  As the adoption of public cloud services increases, more and more CIO’s are finding new comfort levels in handing over their apps and workloads to trusted cloud providers, albeit slowly.  But this also introduces new challenges.  How does an organization well on its way to delivering an enterprise/private cloud to the business ensure that future adoption of public clouds does not mean starting from scratch?  What about managing and securing those workloads just as you would in the private cloud?  Public cloud providers need to be an extension of your private cloud, giving you the freedom of application placement, the ability to migrate workloads back and forth, and providing single-pane-of-glass visibility into all workloads and all clouds.  This endeavor requires the right planning, tools, and frameworks to be successful.

Here are the top “asks” from customers currently on, or getting ready to start, this journey (in no particular order):

• Private cloud now…public cloud later (or both…now)
• Workload portability (across clouds / cloud providers)
• A holistic management approach
• End-to-end visibility
• Dynamic security
• Cloud-worthy scalability

If any of this is resonating, then you’re probably in a similar situation.  CIO’s are pushing the deployment of private clouds while simultaneously considering public cloud options.  Therefor the solution needs to deliver everything we know and love of the private cloud while laying down the framework for public cloud expansion.  Problem is not many solutions out there can do this.  Public cloud providers often run proprietary frameworks and management tools to keep costs low and private cloud solutions are generally focused on just that (being private).

Enter VMware.

VMware has put a lot of effort in leveraging the success of vSphere – the cloud’s critical foundation – to help take a controlling lead up the software stack and deliver a cloud solution for both private and public (i.e. hybrid) clouds.  And through the VMware Service Provider Program (VSPP), they have also enabled a new generation of cloud service providers that build their offerings using the same vCloud frameworks available to enterprises.  As a result, each and every one of these vCloud-powered service providers instantly becomes a possible extension of your private cloud, placing the power of the hybrid cloud – and all the “asks” above – at your fingertips.

Here’s what that looks like from a 1,00ft view…

  Let’s review this diagram:

1 – Physical Infrastructure: commodity compute, storage, and network infrastructure.

2 – vSphere Virtualization: hardware abstraction layer and cloud foundation.  Delivers physical compute, storage, and networks as resource pools, datastores, and portgroups (or dvPortgroups).

3 – Provider Virtual Datacenter (PvDC) and Organizational Virtual Datacenter (OvDC): delivered by vCloud Director as the first layer of cloud abstraction. resources are simply consumed as capacity and delivered on demand.

4 – vCenter Orchestrator: key technology for cloud integration, automation, and orchestration across native and 3^rd-party solutions.

5 – vCenter Operations: holistic management framework for visibility into performance, capacity, compliance, and overall health.

6 – Security & Compliance: dynamic, policy-based security and compliance tools across clouds using vShield Edge and vCenter Configuration Manager (vCM)

7 – VMware Service Manager for Cloud Provisioning (VSM-CP): self-service web portal and business process engine tying it all together.  Integrates with vCO for mega automation.

8 –vCloud Connector (vCC): single pane of glass control of clouds and workloads.  enables workload portability to/from private and public vClouds and traditional vSphere environments.

Last but not least is the very important question of “openness” in the cloud (don’t get me started on heterogeneous hypervisors!).  VMware spearheaded the OVF standard several years ago, which has been adopted by the industry as a whole as a means of migrating vSphere-based workloads to non-vSphere hypervisors (and the clouds above them) with metadata in tact.  In fact, OVF remains a key technology in the Hybrid cloud scenarios and is an integral part of workload portability across clouds.  OVF gives customers the ability to move workloads in/out of vSphere and vCloud environments and into other solutions that support the standard.  Just beware of solutions that will happily accept OVF workloads but not so happily give them back (warning: the majority won’t).

The end result: cloud goodness, happy CIO’s, and streamlined IT.  How’s that for a differentiator?

++++

@virtualjad

Guest Post by Anjan Srinivas, Director of Product Marketing, Atlantis Computing

Correct IO sizing can be a challenge for customers adopting VDI. Storage can represent between 20 and 70% of the total desktop cost in VDI infrastructure. Get it right and the project is successful – users accept it and desktop cost is low. Get it wrong and the desktop costs can rise,  and the team may not get to scale beyond the first implementation – or the desktop is inexpensive and users reject it for performance reasons.

Here’s why….

The Windows OS was designed with a local and dedicated disk and requires constant access to the hard drive even when it is idle. In addition, the Windows OS will consume as much disk IO or throughput to the hard drive as is available. Windows desktop workloads are write heavy (70-80% writes, 20-30% reads) .Windows 7 OS images are also larger than XP images, forcing enterprises to buy more storage capacity to accommodate larger numbers of users( a Windows 7 image ranges from 25GB to 50GB or more depending on the components and apps installed).

There is another problem with IOPS when it comes to VDI. All IOPS coming out of virtual desktops are typically treated as “equal” by the hypervisor. This causes a lack of consistent user experience (as user workloads vary). Imagine a user running a zip file compression or running an on-demand virus scan on the same host as the CEO who needs his desktop to work on his board meeting presentation.

So why is IOPS a limiting factor?

Essentially the problem comes down to the physics of a spinning disk. In a traditional hard disk drive there is a spinning platter which is why all disks have an RPM value. Each disk can provide 65-150 IOPS per spindle depending on what type of disk is being used in the array.  Customers sometimes size for the storage capacity or average IOPS. Both these approaches may result in under sizing the storage resulting in poor user experience. When sized for peak IOPS, the number of disks make the solution very expensive and raises the cost per user.  It should be noted, that as of View 4.6, the concept of tiered storage was introduced…that is the ability break up the VDI workload and place different components on different types of storage.  The impact is that it is now possible to put the linked clone image on SSD on the compute host, which offers a high performance experience for users (fast app launch times) as well as an improved IT experience.

What Else is Possible?

Even with the tiered storage support in View, there is also another approach customers can take to overcome IO challenges  using a storage optimization solution. ILIO is NTFS aware and with its advanced IO processing and inline de-duplication it offloads the IOPS before it reaches storage. This results in lower storage capacity consumed and high performing desktop because write and read IO offload provided by ILIO. Being software, Atlantis ILIO is storage and hardware agnostic- customers no longer need to worry about qualifying new hardware vendors and buying new hardware and can leverage what they have. ILIO solution is optimized for both XP and Win7 images and supports both stateless and persistent desktops.  Atlantis ILIO works in conjunction with advanced vSphere features like vMotion / DRS / HA and FT.

So what does performance look like with ILIO? Well you can expect to support high performance desktops (300+ IOPS per desktop) with up to 90% less cost when it comes to storage. You can actually support 4 to 7x more users on your existing infrastructure - SAN, NAS, local disk or even diskless (memory) options.Find out more about the IO offload and capacity improvements for a high performance desktop (300 IOPS – 2x you the PC performance) VMware View 5 desktop in the reference architecture published here.  This RA includes View 5, VMware ThinApp, View Persona and View Planner tools.

Useful Links

VMware View, Atlantis ILIO & Trend Micro Reference Architecture

Offloading Virtual Desktop IOs with Atlantis ILIO: Deep Dive  - By Andre Leibovici

View Calculator with Atlantis ILIO - By Andre Leibovici

Diskless VDI with Cisco UCS and Atlantis ILIO

Posted by Matt Dreyer

We live in interesting times socially, economically, and technologically.  It is pretty clear that “best effort” just isn’t good enough anymore as the drive for efficiency shifts into ever higher gears.  In IT we have seen some fantastic examples of this transformation unfold in the last couple of years.

Let’s look at the mundane example of a computer power supply. For decades the computer industry loafed along using power supplies with efficiency ratings in the range of 70%.  Good enough?  Not good enough for the folks at Open Compute Project who rethought the problem and drove efficiency up to 94.5%.

It should be no surprise that 20 year old routing technologies are showing their age.  Google revealed that Software Defined Networking, merchant silicon, and great traffic engineering can be combined to replace BGP routing and push WAN utilization well beyond 90%.  Best effort need not apply.

When thinking about IT processes today we usually end up in a manually driven trouble ticketing system that takes days or weeks to resolve – nowhere near 90% efficiency.  Need to spin up a new development server?  File a ticket and wait.  Need a new secured collaboration space for your working group?  File a ticket and wait. The best effort model of waiting on IT simply won’t last in the era of BYOIT. 

VMware redefined server provisioning velocity with vSphere by reducing deployment times from days to minutes.  We are now taking that same approach to address storage, networking, security, availability, and applications in order to create the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC).  In the SDDC enterprise users get IT on demand, without IT intervention.  SDDC enables enterprise IT departments to offer services that users need while delivering better economics, velocity, and security than can be achieved with legacy architectures.

On this journey it is important that IT leaders identify and remove the barriers to achieving 99% efficiency.  Is it VLAN stitching? Storage provisioning?  Firewall configuration? Workload placement? Application installation? Any IT activity that is associated with “operations” or “process” is a candidate for automation in the SDDC.  Legacy technologies will need to be retired and replaced with those that are able to meet the service velocity required by enterprise users.

Pushing to the enterprise data center to 99% requires new thinking and a different approach to solving old problems.  Best effort appliances, command line interfaces, and trouble ticket queues need not apply.

Matthew Ford, R&D Manager at VMware shows you how to use vFabric Application Director to create and model a three-tier custom application.  

OVF (Open Virtualization Format) allows you to package, maintain, and manage one or more virtual machines as a single unit. OVF is an open standard and allows you to move the virtual machines from one VMware platform to another. You can even export to or import from other virtualization environments. This video gives an overview of OVF benefits and of the different tools for creating an OVF.  

By Ben Goodman, Lead Evangelist, VMware Horizon Application Manager

This is the first blog in series on the Consumerization of IT, it's effect and how it can be managed successfully. It will be followed by a whitepaper on this topic.

Ready or not, your employees have gone rogue. It sounds scary, but it’s true. They’re turning to on-demand cloud services whether it be for a quick server deployment, easy access to online storage, some form of collaboration tools, or virtually any software that is delivered as-a-service. And it’s changing the very nature of the relationship between IT and the enterprise. 

This story published in CIO magazine shows how difficult a job it is for industry analysts to capture the real-world penetration of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) into the enterprise. After conducting a survey of senior IT managers, only 13 percent of respondents reported that IaaS deployments were running in their environment. Unfortunately, that number fell woefully short of reality and shows how out of touch many IT managers are when it comes to knowing what cloud services are actually being used by their organization:

"The actual number was double that, and that was only talking about IAAS," according to Galen Schreck, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research (FORR).

Even Schreck's anecdotal number underestimated the gap between how many cloud apps IT thinks an organization is using and the real number, according to Frank Gillett, VP and principal analyst at Forrester.

"Informal buyers" from outside IT buy IAAS twice as often as "formal" buyers inside IT, and the informals make five times as many software buying decisions as the IT people who are supposed to be in charge, according to Forrester.

And that, as analyst Schreck pointed out, is only infrastructure. While trends in that area of the market have been profound, the revolution ahead will continue to be mobile and Software-as-a-Service application delivery. Currently, it’s commonly known that people are bringing their own devices to work, but how many realize, as Gartner predicts, that application development aimed at smartphones and tablets will outpace PC development by a ratio of 4-to-1 in the next three years? And that in the same timeframe, 35 percent of enterprise IT expenditures for most organizations will be managed outside of the IT department’s budget? Many of these applications will be SaaS-based and they’ll run far outside the management control of many IT departments.

These two trends alone are going to prove to have a more profound impact on IT departments than anything we’ve seen before.

Why is this happening now, and at an accelerating pace?  The trends driving mobile and IT consumerization are quite similar to those that have driven the virtualization and “cloudification” of infrastructure. It comes down to speed, convenience, and low cost. It can take many weeks to provision servers, get access to new applications, or even allocate big chunks of storage. So why not turn to a SaaS provider if an identical service is available that can be charged to the corporate credit card – and that service can be delivered to most any form factor the end user desires? This trend is also supported by the fact that many operating system and Web browser neutral apps are on the way. With speed of delivery and an abundance of applications instantly at the ready, the barriers to entry for end users are just too low, and the benefits too high for them to ignore. That is why I call SaaS the “Gateway Drug” to the cloud.

At least that’s the perspective of the typical business user. And it’s why there are plenty of examples today of enterprises having a sanctioned public cloud, CRM system, or any number of other approved services running along with islands of similar rogue applications and services scattered throughout the very same enterprise. And most of these services are fully un-managed, leaving the enterprise blind about the users who are accessing these applications.

There are many implications to these trends for both IT and the business. First, how can IT stay relevant when much of the business is getting the IT it needs (or at least thinks it is) without the assistance of the IT department? Second, how does the enterprise ensure that its data is secured, that its policies are being enforced, and that regulatory compliance demands are being met with so much IT happening below the radar? Third, how does the business know it’s getting all of the value it should from all of these services?

There are no easy answers to any of these questions. However, in the weeks ahead, we are going to tackle these issues head-on, and hopefully shed light on how IT can regain full relevance and control of the IT within an organization, so that users get maximum benefit from their technology, maximum cost effectiveness, and do so securely with the proper levels of governance in place.

In our next post, we will cover some of the risks these rogue services create, and why it’s crucial for IT to regain governance over access to these services for that reason alone.

Follow Ben on twitter at @benontech.

By Mason Uyeda, Director, Technical Marketing, End-User Computing

Nexenta announced the release of a purpose built virtual local storage appliance that dramatically simplifies deploying, managing, and calibrating storage for VMware View.

In Nexenta VSA for View, end users now have an application that automates the entire process of deploying VDI, and related storage, through a few simple clicks. Integrations with VMware vSphere, vCenter, and View Manager, along with local virtual storage, facilitate this automation.

With traditional storage systems, customers are required to manually calculate the required IOPS and then calibrate their storage appliance without any real-time data from their VDI infrastructure. This theoretical calibration can lead to a guessing game, often resulting in higher TCO, and added complexity. By deploying local storage on the same compute node where the VDI machines are deployed, NexentaVSA for View cuts through performance barriers that result from network constraints, storage protocol limitations, and external storage bottlenecks.

With VMware Rapid Desktop certification, customers now can obtain a turnkey solution from resellers that includes VDI (VMware View), storage (NexentaVSA for View), and the necessary hardware—all completely integrated into one solution.

Fig 1. Architecture diagram for NexentaVSA for view

About VMware’s Rapid Desktop Program

This program enables the rapid deployment of VDI desktops on an acknowledged configuration, with pre-installed and pre-configured software, especially for the initial proof-of-concept (POC) stage. This is a simplification of process for partners who can assemble and distribute a complete VDI-in-a-box solution in short order.

Rigorous Workload Testing with View Planner

As an example, the following metrics apply to 100 floating, normal desktops deployed for this certification process.

• Concurrent Users: 100
• Image Size: 16 GB Windows 7 Enterprise Edition, 32 bit
• 150 IOPS (for Boot Storm)
• 15 IOPS, per machine, normal work load running 9 enterprise applications, performing 44 normal workday operations (i.e., email, Word docs, etc.)
• IO Meter:
  • 100% non-sequential write operations, 45 IOPS
  • 100% non-sequential read operations, 135 IOPS
  • Quality of Service:

When running tests, for top 95 percentile, 0.0862 seconds was achieved, cutting the industry    standard (and goal) of 1.5 seconds by nearly in half.

NexentaVSA for View is certified and ready to go. For more info on VMware’s Rapid Deployment Program, please visit: http://www.nexenta.com/vsa4view.

Posted by Dana Vickey
EMC Alliance Marketing
Director

Whether you are just beginning your journey to your Cloud—or well on your way to IT as a service, see how EMC and VMware help customers transform their business and IT. It’s all at EMC World 2012 on May 21-24^th.

Hear Paul Maritz, VMware CEO, speak about the forces shaping Cloud Computing and the next generation IT at his keynote on Tuesday, May 22^nd at 8:30AM.

Learn more about EMC and VMware’s joint solutions that can help accelerate your journey to the cloud. Here is just one solution that VMware will be demoing and discussing at EMC World – End User Computing.

Support Your Transformation into the Post-PC Era with End User Computing

To give end users more freedom while IT maintains control, we recently announced unified solutions for the post-PC era. For example, with the newly available VMware View 5.1, your organization can build on the most effective virtualized desktop infrastructure to further end-user computing goals:

• Simplify – Transform end-user assets from computing silos into centralized managed IT services

• Manage – Create a single, central point for IT to manage end-user access to IT services across the public and private cloud—with control over when an end user has access and at what level of security
  
  
• Connect – Better connect end users to IT services and to other end users with the freedom to choose the best device, application and service to accomplish a task

At EMC World 2012, we’ll show and tell you more about this vision and our journey stages to support them. Join Scott Davis, VMware end-user computing CTO, for his session on VMware View Deployment Architecture Optimizations. Visit the VMware booth for theater presentations about “What’s New in VMware View 5.1.”

And, just for fun, show us your world. Stop by VMware’s booth #201, and grab a paddle to capture images with VMware. Upload to Instagram using  #VMwarePlus and #EMCworld to see your post.VMware will create a collage with all of the images taken and highlight some fun and interesting ones. Keep an eye out on this blog or follow @VMwareEvents for more information.

Looking forward to seeing you at the conference next week.

By: Andy the Angry IT Guy

Editor’s note: This is the fifth installment in our ongoing series featuring “Andy,” an anonymous IT administrator at a small- to mid-sized organization located somewhere in the American Midwest. When we last left Andy, he was emulating one of his all-time favorite TV heroes (non-Star Trek division), Jack Bauer, with 9 – a heart-racing, minute-by-minute account of a standard day at work for him.

Today, Andy talks about how he dodged a major bullet by automating a critical patch update that would have otherwise gone uninstalled and would have left his anonymous small- to mid-sized organization vulnerable to malicious attacks from a cavalcade of villainous internet hackers.

Yesterday (Monday) was a typically crazy day at the office for me. Between helping half of the office connect to the new printer because they didn’t choose to read my step-by-step instructional email and managing other trouble tickets, the day flew by in a typically hectic style. Naturally, all I could think about when I got home was getting back to my game.

I think it was somewhere between defeating the evil lord Baal in the second act and preparing to face off with the even more sinister Mephisto in the third act (after returning to Tristram to refill my inventory, obviously) that I realized it was after 4:00 AM, and I had to be to work in less than four hours. So, I resolved to take a quick nap to get at least some rest.

Tuesday promised to be a busy day at the office: there were critical patch updates for Adobe, Mozilla, and Outlook, respectively, and they all needed to be downloaded ASAP to eradicate existing vulnerabilities and ensure that my company didn’t become the next target of Anonymous.

It was about 11:15 AM on Tuesday by the time I realized all of this. That’s right, I slept through my alarm, head resting on my keyboard for well over seven hours. This was going to be a disastrous day.

I got a horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach and proceeded to root through my closet to find my old Best Buy t-shirt. If I screwed up this patch update, it would most certainly be the end of my tenure at my current job and back to the Geek Squad. My current boss already seemed to have it in for me, and I had no doubt that screwing this up would be all he needed to finally get rid of me.  

Looking in the mirror after finally pulling my trusty royal blue Best Buy polo out of my closet, I realized I’d put on a few pounds since I last worked there. Damn you, Diablo II and a general lack of exercise!

And that’s when it hit me.

I had automated the patch updates last week with VMware Go Pro! I wasn’t going back to Best Buy after all – and better yet, I could continue to wear my more loose-fitting sweaters that better conceal my ever-expanding gut so that my coworkers (namely, Liz from accounting) wouldn’t notice!

Here’s what happened: I had had a burst of productivity the previous week. While I was playing around with the patch management features in VMware Go Pro, I noticed that I could automate the scan and deploy process for individual patch updates. I saw that there were a number of big patch updates coming the following week, and decided to be proactive (for once) and set up the process so that it would occur automatically first thing on Tuesday morning.

To allay any lingering concerns I had about the patches, I pulled up my VMware Go Pro from home to confirm that the updates did in fact go through – it was easy to do remotely, since Go is browser controlled. I was able do so by both name and machine group to be extra safe. All was OK, and my day was made. Automation really is a beautiful thing.

Seriously, though, I have no idea how I’m going to keep my job once Diablo III comes out. At least I won’t have to worry about patch updates…

Today, VMware announced the release of VMware vFabric Suite 5.1, an integrated family of components that streamline how companies build, run and manage Java Spring applications whether on-premise or in the cloud. At VMware, we understand that smart, agile and cost-effective cloud infrastructure services are important. But ultimately, it’s about the applications that run atop that cloud infrastructure. 

This latest release of vFabric Suite puts the largest set of modern cloud services within easy reach for companies that need to build cloud-ready Java applications that are deployed easily, scale quickly, and use popular open source application infrastructure technologies.

Seven New Components

vFabric Suite 5.1 now includes support for seven new products that are critical to supporting the full lifecycle of applications development, deployment and management. These are:

• Application Director. vFabric Application Director automates the deployment of applications through easy-to-use blueprints with standardized templates, component libraries and workflows. With Application Director, you can elastically scale out all components of vFabric Suite to accommodate changing workloads.
• Application Performance Manager (APM). vFabric Application Performance Manager provides comprehensive monitoring of end-user transactions, Java code, middleware servers, and vSphere hosts, enabling customers to proactively manage application performance, find and fix problems quickly, and meet SLAs. APM includes two components: vFabric AppInsight and vFabric Hyperic. AppInsight provides transaction- and code-level monitoring, and incorporates metrics from vFabric to provide high-level summaries of overall application performance. vFabric Hyperic monitors middleware servers and vSphere hosts, providing 50,000 metrics for over 75 popular web technologies. 
• vPostgres. vFabric Postgres is a VMware-optimized relational SQL database that comes in as a virtual appliance and has virtualization optimizations such as elastic database memory to share database memory pools and smart configuration to reduce tuning time after resizing virtual machines. vFabric Postgres is fully compatible with open source PostgreSQL, enabling customers to leverage existing standard PostgreSQL tools. 
• vFabric Administration Server (VAS) provides a REST Management API that provides a uniform way to administer groups of vFabric Servers. Initially supported in vFabric RabbitMQ, tc Server, and GemFire, VAS lets you perform typical CRUD operations (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) on the following entities:
  • Groups - collections of servers
  • Installations - binary install of a product
  • Instances – template based runtimes
  • Configurations – config files
  • Deployments – application archives and code
  • Start/stop of instances and applications
  • Status of runtimes and applications

Keep an eye on VAS, since there are a number of interesting things that we hope to do with it.

• Enterprise support for Apache Tomcat, Apache HTTP Server and RabbitMQ. vFabric Suite now includes support for the open source runtime components most frequently used in production deployments of Spring applications, including Apache Tomcat, Apache HTTP Server and RabbitMQ messaging. This simplifies the adoption path of vFabric technologies for organizations using these open source components today.

Enhancements for Every Component

Beyond the product additions above, every product in vFabric Suite has been updated. Here are some of the highlights:

• vFabric tc Server 2.7 has been updated to the latest stable Apache Tomcat release, and supports websockets and JDK7. We’ve improved the getting started experience and usability of tc Server as well. With vFabric Administration Server, tc Server has a REST Administration API to administer clusters of tc Server instances and the applications that run on them.
• vFabric Elastic Memory for Java (EM4J) 1.1 adds support for Apache Tomcat (in addition to tc Server) and JDK7. It has console UI improvements such as historical data persistence and right sizing, garbage collection enhancements, memory management improvements for soft references, and improved support for very large heaps. 
• vFabric Web Server 5.1 has been update to latest stable Apache httpd release (Apache 2.2.22), and now uses OpenSSL 1.0.1, adding support for TLS 1.1 and TLS 1.2. It provides automation-compatible server statistics available through a new module, mod_bmx, which provides JMX-like manageability to the web server tier, dramatically improving the visibility and mean-time-to-resolution for debugging java applications running on it. It also has commercial mod_fcgid support to deploy isolated, managed pools of accelerated CGI processes, and commercial mod_ftp support for alternate ftp retrieval of content and resources. 
• vFabric RabbitMQ 2.8.1 features active-active HA queues improve reliability, new message flow control to improve performance under load, dead letter queues for handling undelivered or expired messages, and compatibility with Erlang R15B for native operation on 64-bit Windows. With vFabric Administration Server, vFabric RabbitMQ has a new REST Administration API to administer clusters of RabbitMQ servers.
• vFabric GemFire Application Cache Node 6.6.2 adds HTTP Session Management support for tc Server 2.5, 2.6, and 2.7, Apache Tomcat 6.0 & 7.0 and generic module for other application servers (such as Oracle WebLogic), querying enhancements, portable data eXchange (PDX) serialization updates, updated network partition detection, support for resuming and suspending transactions, and 64-bit support for GemFire GFMon and Data Browser tools. Note that some enhancements are available only when used in conjunction with GemFire Data Management Node, sold separately from vFabric Suite. With vFabric Administration Server, GemFire has a new REST Administration API to administer clusters of servers.
• vFabric SQLFire Professional Edition 1.0.2 has undergone some packaging changes. It supports unlimited node connections, and no longer has the two-node connection limit that came in vFabric 5.0. This allows SQLFire Professional to scale horizontally like the other components in vFabric Suite. Also, SQLFire has a new JMX agent that provides administrative and operational monitoring for all members of a distributed system, new sqlf DdlUtils command options to enable importing tables with identity values, and new sqlf commands to help install classes from a local JAR file or from a URL to all members of a SQLFire distributed system.

This vast set of enhancements are the result of a large group of talented, dedicated engineers on the vFabric team who have been working on this release for the better part of a year. We hope you find their work helpful in bringing applications into production faster and with less effort.

For more information on vFabric, please visit www.vmware.com/vfabric.

About the Author: Al Sargent leads vFabric Suite product marketing at VMware. A VMware employee since 2010, Al has helped make the vFabric Cloud Application Platform become one of the fastest-growing application infrastructure suites in the industry. Prior to joining VMware, Al was co-founder of cloud computing startup Sauce Labs, a software testing platform as a service (PaaS). Previously, Al held product roles at Oracle, Mercury Interactive (acquired by HP) and Wily Technology (acquired by CA), and holds one patent (#7730193). He holds a B.S. Symbolic Systems from Stanford University, and an MBA from UCLA Anderson.

Posted by Jerry Chen
Vice President, Cloud
and Application Services

In 2009, VMware acquired SpringSource because we saw a fundamental change in the way our customers were building and running their applications.  More than ever, our customers were using technology to build new applications to improve their business, respond to competition, and get closer to their customers. These new applications were built for mobile, used social networks and leveraged enormous volumes of real-time data to make better decisions.  The underlying frameworks and technologies powering these applications needed to be lightweight and cloud-ready so they could be developed, deployed, and scaled out in rapid succession. 

Part of this broader shift in application infrastructure was the move to cloud and application deployment on virtual infrastructure. Traditional application servers simply weren’t designed, optimized or licensed for this new world. These legacy systems are too cumbersome, too costly, and definitely not cloud-ready. We saw the need for a new breed of application infrastructure to support this new world of applications.   

The VMware vFabric product family seeks to address the complexity and cost of traditional Java platforms by providing a simple, lightweight development and runtime optimized for VMware cloud infrastructure.  

Today we continue to advance our vision with the introduction of vFabric Suite 5.1 and vFabric SQLFire Enterprise Edition. The new suite includes vFabric Application Director to automate the deployment and management of vFabric applications on VMware cloud infrastructure. SQLFire Enterprise Edition is an in-memory distributed SQL database that will enable application data to meet cloud scale and performance needs. VMware vFabric Suite 5.1 will provide the core application services required to build, run and manage Java Spring applications whether on-premise or in the cloud.

As enterprises move to the cloud, they are choosing vFabric to effectively build and architect new cloud-ready applications. With vFabric, our customers are increasing the reliability, availability and scalability of applications and enhancing application portability between their private clouds and VMware-enabled public clouds. They are also improving application performance through advanced management, monitoring and optimization.

At VMware, we believe the cloud is changing enterprise IT, and we are excited about the opportunities this transformation will open up for our customers.  We believe the vFabric Suite represents the best platform for building and running modern applications on VMware cloud infrastructure.

By Duncan Epping, Principal Architect.

I had a question this week around what the "poweron" file is and does as someone spotted it on one of their datastores. The "poweron" file is a file that is located on the designated heartbeat data stores. The file contains the set of powered on virtual machines, this allows the master to track the state of the virtual machines, may anything occur to one of your hosts. It should be noted that the master also created a "poweron" file as the state of the virtual machines it is running will also need to be tracked. Tracking virtual machine power-on state is not the only thing the “poweron” file is used for. This file is also used by the slaves to inform the master that it is isolated from the network: the top line of the file will either contain a 0 or a 1. A 0 means not-isolated and a 1 means isolated. If a host is isolated the master will then inform vCenter about the isolation of the host.

The naming scheme for this file is as follows:

host-<id>-poweron

I hope that clarifies that file on your designated heartbeat datastores!

Name: Niels Engelen
Blog URL: http://foonet.be
Twitter handle: nielsengelen
Current employer: PriorWeb BVBA - A Belgian (web)hosting company

How did you get into IT?

Started at the age of 14 playing with computers and made a job from my hobby specialized in system engineering, virtualisation and networking.

How did you get into working with VMware and becoming a 2011 vExpert?

Started with ESX 3.5 a few year ago, changed jobs where I had to design and implement the whole vSphere infrastructure (version 4.0) and currently still holding that position. Started a blog where I post my experiences and furthermore I tend to be active on the VMware communities and Twitter.

What would you tell someone who wanted to get a job like yours to do?

Feel free to call me if you need help ;-)

By Ben Chong, Product Management, VMware View Clients

Here at VMware, we have been working closely with our key Thin Client partners to deliver a new Linux client that is optimized for View 5. The benefits of the new View 5 optimized Linux client include better PCoIP performance thanks to client-side caching, secure connection indicators, and multi-desktop capability.

The new VMware View Client for Linux is now available on VMware Ready certified thin clients and as upgrades to existing thin clients from HP, Praim, Stratodesk, Fujian Centerm, IGEL, 10ZiG and Wyse.

View customers still using the older 4.6 View based Linux thin clients are encouraged to upgrade now. Contact your thin client vendor for more information.

Also, Ubuntu users will also be excited to know that the new View client available in the Ubuntu Software Center works great with the 64-bit version of the new Ubuntu 12.04.

We are excited that our partners are taking advantage of all the great capabilities to make VMware View 5 and later even better:

• HP
• Praim
• Stratodesk
• Fujian Centerm
• IGEL
• 10ZiG
• Wyse

By: Chris Colotti, Consulting Architect, VMware Global Center of Excellence

This is a repost from Chris' personal blog, ChrisColotti.us.

A while back I was messing around with Fast Provisioning in vCloud Director and I noticed something I wanted to dig a little deeper into.  My Co-Worker Cormac Hogan (@VMwarestorage) also wrote a little about this as well which does a great job showing the linked clone aspect.  Also William Lam (@lamw) wrote up some nice scripts to find the linked chains.  However, it took me up until now to get my home lab back into a clean state to test things a little differently specifically with how these interact with the vCloud Director Catalogs.  The premise of what I am looking at is a very simple setup, but could change some operational ideas about how and when you enable Fast Provisioning, which is a great, and handy thing to have in test and development environment.  However, you need to understand a little about how they work before you check the box to enable them.

There is a couple of things you need to know first about vCloud Director Fast Provisioning.

1. It is Enabled on a PER organization vDC level so it is either on or off.
2. ONLY System Administrators can consolidate Fast Provisioned virtual machines, Organization Administrators cannot
3. Once disabled existing machines will remain fast provisioned

The real key that I wanted to look at here was deploying items back and forth from the catalog with the feature enabled.  So what I setup was pretty basic.

• Master Organization with a published catalog and Fast Provisioning DISABLED
• Customer organization with local catalogs and Fast Provisioning ENABLED
• Both Organization vDC’s are Pay-As-You-Go for reference
• The template is CentOS 6.2 minimal exported/imported from vCenter.

The rest of this post will be various operations in certain orders to see what happens with and without fast provisioning enabled on a consumer organization.

The Shadow Virtual Machine

In some cases, in order for fast provisioning to work it will use the concept of a Shadow VM on each datastore where a linked clone will live, but in many cases it may not get created for some time.  This VMware KB has a lot of good information, and a couple of key points taken from it are as follows:

• The source template virtual machines are called primary virtual machines
• Shadow virtual machines are created on demand
• Subsequent copies to the same datastore are fast
• Org Admin/User only sees the ‘source’ virtual machine. Shadow virtual machines are an implementation detail that are only visible to vCloud Director administrators.
• Shadow virtual machines stored in System vDC
• Shadow virtual machines disk space billed to the service provider

Shadow virtual Machines are only created once a clone needs to be placed on a storage volume different from where the original one is located.  Until that needs to happen everything else is done on the same storage.

Initial vApp Template Import Into the Catalogs

The first thing I wanted to see was taking an OVF, and importing to each catalog to see what happens.  Obviously on the Master organization the catalog item will be imported as a thick copy, but I was not 100% sure on the Fast Provisioned vDC.  Interestingly, From what I saw both vApp templates were brought in as full copies into the catalog by the initial import from OVF.

However I actually tested COPYING the vApp template from the Master Catalog to the Org’s local catalog.  In this case the copy was actually a linked clone.  It created the initial snapshot and then made the local Org’s catalog version a linked clone to the original just as if it was deployed to the cloud itself.  I found this interesting as it leads me to something we will discuss later about updating and re-adding items to the catalog.

The Use Case

What we see is a pretty common use case for why I am testing this.  It has also been asked how does someone deal with patching and updates once these catalog’s are linked together.  The consumer wants to deploy the Guest Operating System from the provider’s published catalog, customize it, and save a copy to their local organization catalog.  The consumer’s organization is enabled for Fast Provisioning, but they may want to ensure their local catalog chain does not link back to the master catalog.

Deploying from vCloud Director Shared and Local Catalogs

Where this gets really interesting is on the deployment of each version of the vApp Catalog item.  Now we are going to only work off the Master Shared Catalog since that’s what most people would do.  The first time a deploy operation of a vApp Template to a Fast Provisioned vDC is requested, the original virtual machine is put into snapshot mode.  This means the actual virtual machine that is the catalog vApp in the master organization is now in snapshot mode indefinitely.  If there happens to be a Shadow VM required, that would be created, then a snapshot taken.  At this point forward anything deployed from that catalog virtual machine will be deployed from the base snapshot.

Now that we have a deployed vApp as a linked clone, we can update it, patch it, add new applications to it, whatever we want to treat it like a normal virtual machine.  Let’s say we want to save this to our LOCAL catalog at this point.  When we make that copy to the local catalog, we will get a full copy however there is a catch.  The full copy appears to be a full copy of the deployed virtual machine’s Delta Disk as you can see in the info below.  As we can see below the VMDK is still pointing back to the original catalog base disk.

Let’s take this one step further, and now deploy a vApp from this new local catalog virtual machine.  What we see here is that the newly deployed virtual machine from the local catalog is also linked back to the original master VMDK.  This means that as this consumer edits, saves, and re-deploys they are always saving Delta files and referencing back to the original disk.

Master Catalog VM (Orange)

First Consumer VM (Green):

Consumer Local Catalog VM (Green):

Consumer Re-Deployed Catalog VM (Purple):

Something to Consider – Break The Chain

Based on now knowing how some of this works, you want to decide how you to handle fast provisioned Org vDC’s since once they are enabled you can see how everything from that point on will be based on linked clones.  Something many providers and consumer organizations alike may want to do is break the link chain of their local catalog so they are always deploying from a full copy within their local organization catalog.

This can in fact be done with a few steps.  Remember in the beginning when I stated that only a System Administrator can consolidate?  That comes into play here, as once a vApp is checked into the local catalog a system admin OR something with system administrator credentials, like vCenter Orchestrator or other scripting method, can consolidate the virtual machines in the consumer’s local catalogs.  Below you can see the vCloud Director interface option on the virtual machine in the consumer’s catalog.  Using a service to do this for you would certainly be a better way to go.

This will break the chain so that only the deployed virtual machines will have a link to the local catalog VMDK only instead of back to the master catalog’s VMDK.  This would isolate the local consumer’s deployed virtual machines and catalog chains from the Master Catalog.  However, this process will still exist anytime a virtual machine is deployed for updates then placed back into the catalog in the fashion described above.  The advantage to this is that the consumer’s can all deploy in this fashion and in THeory the provider can have nothing linked to their original templates allowing them to patch them and replace them as they need:

• Start with the provided templates
• Customize them
• Add them to their catalog
• Consolidate to break the chain
• Remove the linked customized vApp

To accomplish this of course you need some custom intervention and have your consumer’s deploying via custom tools that interface with things like vCenter Orchestrator.  Either way it can be done such that the original virtual machines have no links to them and the consumer’s all have the links to their own local copies.  Figuring out all the hooks to leverage the API’s to make this happen…..well….that’s for you to figure out.

It should be noted that vCloud Director is smart enough to know that if you delete the item from the catalog and there are virtual machines linked to it, the base disks will remain on storage.  They will not be removed from storage until all linked VMDK’s are eventually removed.  So you can deploy, patch, and remove a catalog virtual machine from vCloud Director, and the linked ones will still function.

Chris is a Consulting Architect with the VMware vCloud Delivery Services team with over 10 years of experience working with IT hardware and software solutions. He holds a Bachelor of Science Degree in Information Systems from the Daniel Webster College. Prior to VMware he served a Fortune 1000 company in southern NH as a Systems Architect/Administrator, architecting VMware solutions to support new application deployments. At VMware, in the roles of a Consultant and now Consulting Architect, Chris has guided partners as well as customers in establishing a VMware practice and consulted on multiple customer projects ranging from datacenter migrations to long-term residency architecture support. Currently, Chris is working on the newest VMware vCloud solutions and architectures for enterprise-wide private cloud deployments.

Apache Active MQ
Comparing multicast and failover transport for ActiveMQ (2005518)
Date Published: 5/9/2012

Apache HTTP Server
Log file rotation in Apache HTTP Server, vFabric Enterprise Ready Server, and vFabric Web Server (2010979)
Date Published: 5/10/2012

My VMware
Resetting a forgotten My VMware password fails (2020621)
Date Published: 5/11/2012

Shavlik SCUPdates
Deploying 32-bit Java updates to 64-bit operating systems with vCenter Protect Update Catalog or SCUPdates fails (2013912)
Date Published: 5/11/2012

Socialcast
Attempting to launch a Socialcast community in a Web browser fails with the error: Page Not Found (2020378)
Date Published: 5/10/2012

Socialcast On Premise v2
Error when configuring the community URL in a Socialcast desktop or mobile app: not a compatible Socialcast server (2020394)
Date Published: 5/9/2012

Spring Framework
Using connection pooling with JMSTemplate in Spring Framework (2005838)
Date Published: 5/10/2012

VMware ESX
Understanding guest operating system support levels (2015161)
Date Published: 5/10/2012
CentOS and Red Hat 5.5 kernel panic on boot after install on AMD Opteron 6000-series based ESX/ESXi hosts (1033205)
Date Published: 5/8/2012
The esxupdate query command does not list the correct bulletins after performing an update (2002854)
Date Published: 5/8/2012
Starting the ESXi host fails at the SYSLINUX prompt (2017755)
Date Published: 5/7/2012

VMware ESXi
Adding autodeployed ESX 5.0 hosts running on Cisco UCS to vCenter Server fail with the error: com.vmware.vim.vc.license.error.licenseExpired (2012607)
Date Published: 5/10/2012
Opening a console to a virtual machine fails with the error: Unable to connect to the MKS: Console access to the virtual machine cannot be granted since the connection limit of 0 has been reached (2015407)
Date Published: 5/7/2012
APD and PDL condition implications to High Availability (HA) in vSphere 5.0 and 5.0 Update 1 (2015681)
Date Published: 5/11/2012
UDP packets are dropped from Linux systems using the VMXNET3 Network Adapter (2019944)
Date Published: 5/8/2012
vCenter Server tasks or operations fail with the error: Overlapping Link regions (2003620)
Date Published: 5/8/2012
Virtual machine cloning or deployment operations between ESXi hosts do not make full use of available network bandwidth (2019587)
Date Published: 5/8/2012
After upgrading from ESX 4.x to ESXi 5.0, NAS/NFS datastores with a space in their name fail to mount (2013844)
Date Published: 5/7/2012
Poor mouse performance on Windows 2008 R2 virtual machine or a Windows 7 virtual machine (2004145)
Date Published: 5/9/2012
ESXi 5.0 hosts are marked as Not Responding 60 seconds after being added to vCenter Server (2020100)
Date Published: 5/9/2012

VMware Fusion
Installing or upgrading VMware Tools on a Windows XP or Windows 2003 R2 SP2 virtual machine fails with the error: Failed to install driver: 0x00000002 (2020221)
Date Published: 5/9/2012

VMware Go
Cannot run IT Advisor or Patch Scan in VMware Go when using Internet Explorer 9 (2020260)
Date Published: 5/8/2012
VMware Infrastructure Management Assistant
Virtual Center Server Appliance or vSphere Management Assistant has no network connection after re-registering, cloning or restoring from backup (2012451)
Date Published: 5/9/2012

VMware Service Manager
When running searches the Clear Form button changes default check boxes (1029012)
Date Published: 5/7/2012
Sending an update to an Infra incoming email account intermittently fails with error: Call no. has not been identified (1030189)
Date Published: 5/8/2012
Current Group field is not displaying a value in Call Info panel (1030301)
Date Published: 5/8/2012
Imported reports in VMware Service Manager 9.0 reference the incorrect screenset when exporting/importing reports using extension views between systems (1030511)
Date Published: 5/10/2012
Error when installing VMware Service Manager 9.0 RP10: Patch has already been applied (2009742)
Date Published: 5/10/2012
Unactioned Discrepancy reports are overridden on every incremental scan in Service Manager 9.x. (2020211)
Date Published: 5/8/2012
Moving a Custom Call screen from one system to another (1028938)
Date Published: 5/7/2012
System.Security.Permissions errors after installing a hot fix on a Windows Server 2008 system (2010889)
Date Published: 5/11/2012
Calls logged via the portal are always in the unspecified partition (1028856)
Date Published: 5/7/2012
Watched/Forum calls not displaying when first opening the calls outstanding view (1030055)
Date Published: 5/8/2012
After saving changes in the Public Holiday Definition screen, you receive a script error (2015864)
Date Published: 5/9/2012
Preventing email deletion after polling in VMware Service Manager (2018423)
Date Published: 5/7/2012
Tasks beyond the Start Task fail to activate if the Workflow service was stopped when the request was submitted (2018603)
Date Published: 5/7/2012
Clearing the VMware Service Manager server cache via a URL (2020042)
Date Published: 5/7/2012

VMware ThinApp
A ThinApp which includes the .NET Framework generates the message: Event ID: 1101 ".NET Runtime Optimization Service  (clr_optimization_version) - 1>Failed to compile:" (2018794)
Date Published: 5/7/2012
Running a ThinApp application fails with the error: License problem: Unable to validate your license (2019985)
Date Published: 5/7/2012

VMware vCenter CapacityIQ
Optimal of Recommended % in the Oversized_Virtual_Machines report of vCenter Capacity IQ (2009681)
Date Published: 5/9/2012

VMware vCenter Configuration Manager
Configuring email alerts for a compliance template in vCenter Configuration Manager (2010574)
Date Published: 5/11/2012
Machine Groups are removed when doing a Virtual Environment Collection in VMware vCenter Configuration Manager 5.x (2020439)
Date Published: 5/9/2012

VMware vCenter Converter Standalone
Installing VMware vCenter Converter Standalone fails with the error: Insufficient permissions to connect to IP_Address (2002995)
Date Published: 5/8/2012

VMware vCenter Infrastructure Navigator
Navigator discovery Status shows: "Access failed.  An unknown discovery error has occured" (2014307)
Date Published: 5/9/2012

VMware vCenter Lab Manager
Unable to export to SMB with ESXi hosts using vCenter Lab Manager (1000522)
Date Published: 5/8/2012

VMware vCenter Operations Manager (vApp)
Cannot import LDAP users into VMware vCenter Operations Manager  (2017641)
Date Published: 5/10/2012
Missing Disk I/O running vCenter Operations 5.0.1 on ESX/ESXi 4.0.x and earlier (2020649)
Date Published: 5/11/2012

VMware vCenter Operations Standard
VMware vCenter Operations Standard installation errors (2001144)
Date Published: 5/7/2012

VMware vCenter Orchestrator
vCO UCS plug-in for Cisco does not work with v2.0.1T of UCS (2015596)
Date Published: 5/9/2012

VMware vCenter Server
Custom JVM memory settings are lost after upgrading to vCenter Server 4.1 (2014576)
Date Published: 5/7/2012
When deploying from template the clone fails at 97% with the error: Invalid configuration for device '0' (1029965)
Date Published: 5/9/2012
Clicking the Storage View tab in vCenter Server reports the error: Column hostEntityId not found (2002780)
Date Published: 5/8/2012
ESXi hosts connected to vCenter Server using NAT disconnect after 30 to 60 seconds (2019865)
Date Published: 5/9/2012
Backing up the vCenter Server database running on Microsoft SQL or SQL Express server (2012138)
Date Published: 5/11/2012
Configuring Windows Deployment Service to PXE boot with the VMXNET3 driver in Windows Server 2008 R2 (1038585)
Date Published: 5/7/2012
Understanding vApp power operations (2012036)
Date Published: 5/9/2012
When powering on a virtual machine after a cold migration to a host, the virtual machine is automatically migrated to different host (2013809)
Date Published: 5/9/2012
Adding an ESX/ESXi host to vCenter Server fails with the vpxa backtrace error: Received unexpected error from property collector: at line number 7, not well-formed (invalid token) (2015234)
Date Published: 5/9/2012
Performance data does not get collected for one or more hosts in vCenter Server 5.x (2020277)
Date Published: 5/9/2012

VMware vCenter Server Appliance
Services bundled with vCenter Server Appliance (2002531)
Date Published: 5/8/2012
Locating downloads and documentation for VMware vCenter Server Appliance 5.0 (2007867)
Date Published: 5/9/2012

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager
Upgrade vSphere Replication appliances in Site Recovery Manager 5.0 (2016544)
Date Published: 5/8/2012

VMware vCenter Update Manager
Importing offline bundle into vCenter Update Manager fails with the error: Authentication failed, not a valid user (2003711)
Date Published: 5/9/2012

VMware vCloud Usage Meter
Collections fail when there are no hosts, VMs, and resource pools (2017505)
Date Published: 5/8/2012

VMware vFabric Enterprise Ready Server
File Descriptor Leak when using Apache HTTP Server 2.0 and the WebSphere plugin module (2010982)
Date Published: 5/11/2012

VMware vFabric Hyperic Agent
HQ Agent support on IA-64 microprocessor (1029950)
Date Published: 5/8/2012
vFabric Hyperic Agent fails on some AIX machines (2010344)
Date Published: 5/9/2012

VMware vFabric Hyperic Server
RecoverAtomicAction warning message filling up vFabric Hyperic server.log (1030942)
Date Published: 5/10/2012
Running SQL commands on the PostgreSQL database bundled with vFabric Hyperic (2020200)
Date Published: 5/10/2012

VMware vFabric tc Server
Spring Insight is not showing detailed trace information (2015614)
Date Published: 5/11/2012
Tomcat session replication fails with the log entry: java.io.InvalidClassException (2010516)
Date Published: 5/11/2012

VMware vFabric Web Server
XML files ending in .htm are interpreted as HTML files in Apache HTTP Server, vFabric Enterprise Ready Server and vFabric Web Server (2010627)
Date Published: 5/7/2012

VMware View Manager
Troubleshooting Smartcard Reader redirection issues in VMware View Manager (2015494)
Date Published: 5/7/2012
View refresh task fails with the vCenter error: Another task is already in progress (2017256)
Date Published: 5/8/2012
Upgrading to View 5.0 Agent on Windows XP SP3 causes a Windows blue screen error (2017284)
Date Published: 5/9/2012
View Persona folder redirection fails when redirecting to an existing folder in the Persona managed profile (2019502)
Date Published: 5/8/2012
Desktop login takes a long time when using Persona Management (2019937)
Date Published: 5/8/2012
View virtual machine unexpectedly reboots on user login (2019989)
Date Published: 5/8/2012
Unable to add vCenter Server in View Administrator due to the repadmin.exe being present in \windows\adam (2016258)
Date Published: 5/10/2012
VMware View 4.5 management packs used in Microsoft SCOM are supported in later View releases. (2020543)
Date Published: 5/10/2012
Unable to install VMware View Composer 2.7 with Oracle ODBC connection (2011045)
Date Published: 5/11/2012
Deploying or recomposing a linked clone pool fails with the error: View Composer agent initialization state error (9): Failed to relocate disposable (waited 0 seconds) (2020204)
Date Published: 5/7/2012

VMware vShield
ESX/ESXi host appears grayed out in vShield Manager (2013686)
Date Published: 5/10/2012
Support for McAfee MOVE AntiVirus [Agentless] 2.5 with VMware vShield Endpoint 5.0 (2020338)
Date Published: 5/8/2012

VMware vShield Edge
Cannot create a VP tunnel in vShield Edge (2012955)
Date Published: 5/10/2012

VMware vShield Endpoint
After updating to vShield Endpoint 1.0 Update 3, you do not see an option to upgrade the vShield Endpoint service (2014029)
Date Published: 5/10/2012

VMware vSphere Management Assistant
Scanning for updates using vima-update in vSphere Management Assistant fails with the error: The format of the metadata is invalid (1029908)
Date Published: 5/7/2012

VMware vSphere Storage Appliance
VSA appliance cannot exit maintenance mode (2018009)
Date Published: 5/10/2012
Performing a controlled power down of a VMware vSphere Storage Appliance cluster (2019135)
Date Published: 5/10/2012
Performing hardware maintenance on a single host in a VSA Cluster (2019005)
Date Published: 5/9/2012

VMware Workbench
FullCopyCloneVMTests fails during VAAI certification due to insufficient space (1030808)
Date Published: 5/10/2012

VMware Workstation
Virtual machine does not release the keyboard after the screensaver on the host has locked the desktop (2016574)
Date Published: 5/8/2012
Troubleshooting a slow network connection in VMware Workstation (2019058)
Date Published: 5/7/2012

ZCS Network Edition
Updating the Zimbra Outlook Connector (ZCO) in Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) (2020293)
Date Published: 5/8/2012

Zimbra Collaboration Server
Out of memory error after installing Zimbra Collaboration Server on RHEL 6 (2020335)
Date Published: 5/9/2012

On June 7^th, VMware will host its first online GSS Customer Support Day event. This event is a unique opportunity for you to get answers to your questions directly from our Global Support Services technical experts. You told us that you’d like to see an online version of the popular live events that we’ve hosted in various locations throughout the world. We listened, and now anyone, anywhere can tap in to the advanced technical expertise of our Global Support Services team in this dynamic, interactive forum. 

Participation is limited, so please register early.  The sessions will be recorded and posted in the Support Insider Blog for later viewing if you can’t attend at the scheduled time.

Thank you — and we look forward to seeing you on June 7^th!

	Please join us for our first ever GSS Virtual Customer Support Day. This event is the same style as we hold in various cities throughout the world but brought to you for the first time online. On Thursday, June 7, 2012 please join us for a comprehensive and highly educational seminar. Expect to gain "best practices" and "tips and tricks" as provided by our Senior Technical Support Engineers. There will also be an invaluable Q&A session directly with our "in the trenches" support staff following each topic. Agenda: 8:00 a.m. Welcome and GSS Overview 8:30 a.m. – 9:30 a.m. Networking Best Practices 9:30 a.m. – 10:30 a.m. Performance Troubleshooting 10:30 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. Storage Best Practices 11:30 a.m. Wrap Up Questions? Contact Beth Lawson. The VMware Team		June 7, 2012 8:00 a.m. – 12:00 pm. US – Pacific Daylight Time Location ONLINE ONLY *This event will be recorded for those that cannot attend. Random participants will be sent a raffle prize upon completion of the survey after the event.

Posted by Travis Nisbett
Hosting.com, Sr. Product
Manager

There’s a very common saying – disaster happens. Actually, that’s not the saying, but it is close enough. And disasters come in a variety of flavors – everything from people making mistakes to horrible disasters like hurricanes.  In any case, when something happens, you want to be ready for it and be able to continue moving forward. That’s true in our personal lives, and it’s true in the business world.

Drivers have auto insurance for that very reason. Insurance provides the funds necessary to continue to be able to repair a vehicle after an accident. Hopefully, insurance is something you won’t ever need.But it provides peace of mind in the meantime. In some locales, regulatory compliance means that you must carry insurance.

Hosting.com has been working with VMware to provide insurance in the form of Disaster Recovery services to our customers. These services provide organizations with the ability to operate mission-critical business solutions quickly after a disaster interrupts operation. Historically, when a disaster occurred, it took a great deal of time, energy, and resources (both human and capital) to get those business systems back up and running. In addition, there are intangible costs such as loss of reputation and brand equity, as well as impacts on customer satisfaction. Thanks to Cloud Replication, a service for disaster recovery that utilizes VMware’s SRM 5 solution, companies can now have replacement systems operational in a very short period of time (often less than 15 minutes) with very little data loss.

Hopefully, a disaster doesn’t happen and you won’t need to implement the disaster recovery.  But what about that peace of mind? Cloud Replication from Hosting.com includes non-disruptive testing capabilities so that you can test your disaster recovery plans at your leisure - according to a set schedule or whenever your systems change. And just like the situation where some government agencies mandate auto insurance to remain in compliance, some oversight organizations require disaster recovery planning and testing of such plans to remain in compliance.

The Hosting.com Customer Portal makes such testing quick and easy. A single mouse click on the “Test” button starts a test. This causes no interruption to the production system. And the results of the test are readily accessible in a report that shows all recovery steps and their success or failure (see screenshot below). That provides the peace of mind that IT managers want and need.

The following chart provides a picture of the test output in the Hosting.com customer portal. As you can see, this provides a clear illustration of the test results that can be utilized to ensure RTO / RPO targets are being met and also to provide to third parties for compliance purposes.

Cloud Replication from Hosting.com provides disaster recovery services that used to be available only to the largest organizations. The fact is all companies  run mission-critical applications and need a cost-effective way to protect their data. Cloud replication is a fast, secure, and affordable insurance policy.

For more information on Hosting.com’s cloud-based disaster recovery solutions, please register here for the DR to the Cloud webinar on May 17th featuring experts from VMware and Hosting.com or watch the video below from the Hosting.com Cloud Replication webpage.

Hosts
John Troyer, @jtroyer

Guests
Open Topic/Community Discussion

Link to Audio Recording
Open Topic: New CTO site, Software-Defined Data Center, vCAT

Virtualization News (VMTN Blog)
VMworld 2012 Call for Papers - Deadline May 18 
New VMware CTO Website
vSphere Blog is VMware's #1 Blog - Check it out
vBrownBags - Details: VCAP/VCDX Certification Study Group
Check out your local VMUG User Conference
VMware vSphere Support of Hyperscale and Embedded Servers - Open Compute Project
John Troyer was a guest on - Speaking in Tech: VMware polishes post-PC virty tools [Podcast]

Show
Considering Speakers Workshop - For first time Speakers at VMworld

Consider presenting at your local VMUG for a warm-up to VMworld

John Troyer dressing up as Chewbacca - World Tour - lets get it started! - Just Kidding

Software Defined Data Center - Interop and the Software-Defined Datacenter

VMware vCloud Architecture Toolkit

[Direct Download] VMware Cloud Architecture Toolkit v2.0.1

Beginning of the end for bufferbloat

Additonal Links
VMware Certifies vSphere 5 To Run on Open Compute Project Architecture

Technical Marketing Update 2012 - Week 19 - #tmupdate 

It was a busy week in Technical Marketing Land, many blog articles were published. I expect that upcoming week we will have less though as many of us will be either following a training or going to a VMware R&D conference. Pick up your tablet and relax a bit on this nice sunday with some great articles!

Blog posts: 

• Problems using the vCenter Web Client (Duncan Epping) http://bit.ly/LuXTOT
• Storage DRS Load Balance Frequency (Frank Denneman) http://bit.ly/IRmPkc
• Hosting.com shares data on bandwidth, sync times, and RPOs with vSphere Replication (Ken Werneburg) http://bit.ly/J9ff0F
• Enabling/Disabling EVC using the vSphere MOB (William Lam) http://bit.ly/KE7FJh
• ESXi Image Builder and Auto Deploy PowerCLI Quick Reference (Kyle Gleed) http://bit.ly/JagYmi
• Backup Design for vCloud Director Tenant vApps Whitepaper (William Lam) http://bit.ly/Ja9ekB
• Mixing Resource Pools and Virtual Machines on the same hierarchical level (Frank Denneman) http://bit.ly/J0igOb
• A closer look at the View Storage Accelerator [incl. Video] (Cormac Hogan) http://bit.ly/JdNBTI
• Navigating your application landscape (Duncan Epping) http://bit.ly/JfSeZI
• Why use Static Port Binding on VDS? (Venky Deshpande) http://bit.ly/LfqNQD
• Lefthand joins the vSphere Metro Storage Cluster program (Duncan Epping) http://bit.ly/IEGr6y
• The admission control family (Frank Denneman) http://bit.ly/LnEWLu
• vCenter Infrastructure Navigator throws the error: "an unknown discovery error has occurred" (Duncan Epping) http://bit.ly/JjQ6R2
• ESXiShellTimeout Doesn’t Work in vSphere 5.0 (Kyle Gleed) http://bit.ly/KJbRO7
• vSphere Metro Storage Cluster solutions and PDL's (Duncan Epping) http://bit.ly/IHg0x2
• Getting started with Cisco UCS PowerTool (Alan Renouf) http://bit.ly/J4k5te
• New vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) Whitepapers now published (Cormac Hogan) http://bit.ly/KQgnoh
• Easily creating Powershell Quick References (Alan Renouf) http://bit.ly/KdiZNK 
• Does a Reverse Web Proxy Protect Against An Auto Deploy Server Outage? (Kyle Gleed) http://bit.ly/KQInZ4

We have a couple of new KB articles just published to address some things a few customers have reported to us.

If you see the error Unable to Complete Your Request when resetting your password from within My VMware, head right on over to Troubleshooting the My VMware error: Unable to Complete Your Request (2018716).

Otherwise if you're just having difficulties recovering a forgotten My VMware password Start with: Resetting a forgotten My VMware password fails (2020621).

Kyle Gleed, Sr. Technical Marketing Architect, VMware

A while back I did a write-up on using reverse web proxy servers with auto deploy.  At the time I thought that using a reverse web proxy would not only help with scalability, but would also help protect against an outage affecting the auto deploy server.  However, I’ve learned this is not the case – using a reverse web proxy does not protect against an auto deploy server outage.

There are two parts to the auto deploy server, a rules engine and a web server.  In setting up a reverse web proxy we are creating a redundant web server, but we still only have one rules engine, and that’s on the auto deploy server. 

The way the communication flows when using a reverse web proxy with auto deploy is as follows:

1. ESXi host PXE boots and contacts the auto deploy server.
2. Host is processed against the rules engine to identify the image profile (VIBs to be installed), host profile, and vCenter location.
3. Host is passed off to the reverse web proxy where the image profile is copied and the host profile applied (note: existing hosts get the host profile from the web proxy, new hosts will get the host profile from the auto deploy server).
4. The host informs the auto deploy server that it has been installed and is ready to be added/reconnected to vCenter.

So even with a reverse web proxy, if the auto deploy server becomes unavailable you will not be able to deploy new hosts or reboot existing hosts.  The role of the reverse web proxy is limited to delivery of the image profile and host profile.  The auto deploy server is still needed at the beginning of the boot operation to parse the rules, and at the end where it connects the host to vCenter.

So in summary, using reverse web proxy servers with auto deploy helps with scalability by offloading the task of streaming the image profiles to the ESXi hosts, but it does not protect against an outage of the auto deploy server.  

To address HA of the auto deploy server my recommendation is to run the auto deploy server in a separate “management” cluster (along with vCenter and other core infrastructure VMs) and to leverage VMware HA/DRS to ensure availability.  VMware Tech Pubs has a couple of short videos that give a great overview on using reverse web proxy with auto deploy as well as how to implement a highly available auto deploy infrastructure.  Definitely worth checking out!

Get notified on future  posts by following me on twitter @VMwareESXi

IT is undergoing a top to bottom transformation…Are you ready?

Take advantage of the best educational opportunity to expand your knowledge, maximize your investments and gain greater competitive edge with cloud and virtualization solutions at VMworld 2012.

Register now

VMworld enables you to:

• Choose from over 300 expert led breakout sessions and hands-on labs highlighting key trends and strategies to help empower your organization
• Collaborate with knowledge experts and share experiences in focused group discussions and one-on-one meetings
• Leverage, network and share best practices with the VMware community
• Engage with more than 250 technology partners showcasing leading innovations

Register by June 8 for the best rates and learn how to transform the way you work.

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Hi all,

A quick post today to let you know that VMware has just published some new performance whitepapers on the vSphere Storage Appliance. The performance evaluations were carried out by Principled Technologies with a view to measuring real-life workloads on the VSA. One looks at the performance with a RAID-5 configuration, the other looks at the performance with a RAID-6 configuration. You can get the whitepapers from the VSA landing page here. Hope you find them useful.

Get notification of these blogs postings and more VMware Storage information by following me on Twitter: @VMwareStorage

By Duncan Epping, Principal Architect.

Yesterday I wrote about HP/Lefthand joining the vSphere Metro Storage Cluster program. Today I want to inform you about something that I believe is rather important when implementing stretched cluster solutions. Hopefully all of you have read about the Permanent Device Loss (PDL) enhancements that were added to vSphere 5.0 Update 1. I wrote about it in-depth in an upcoming white paper and in this blog post, and Cormac Hogan wrote an excellent article about it on the vSphere Storage Blog. In summary:

"The Permanent Device Loss condition is a condition that is communicated by the array to ESXi via a SCSI sense code. It indicates that a device (LUN) is unavailable and more than likely permanently unavailable."

By issuing this command to ESXi the storage array informs ESXi what the status is of the LUN and then action can be taken if and when this is configured. In the case of vSphere 5.0 Update 1 two specific settings need to be set in order for ESXi and vSphere HA to respond to a PDL scenario.

The first setting is configured on a host level and is “disk.terminateVMOnPDLDefault”. This setting can be configured in /etc/vmware/settings and should be set to “True”. This setting ensures that a virtual machine is killed when the datastore it resides on is in a PDL state. 

The second setting is a vSphere HA advanced setting called das.maskCleanShutdownEnabled. This setting is also not enabled by default and it will need to be set to “True”. This settings allows HA to trigger a restart response for a virtual machine which has been killed automatically due to a PDL condition. 

Why am I calling this out specifically? Well after exchanging some tweets and emails with HP I discovered that HP Lefthand does not issue a PDL (as we know it) but kills all iSCSI connections instead in the "losing site". Lets assume for a second you have 2 sites and HP/Lefthand storage in both. If anything happens to the storage network in between the sites the storage system will give ownership of the LUN to site which you selected as the preferred site, or in HP terms that you designated as the "primary site". Meaning that the losing site would not be able to write/read from that LUN anymore, it is unavailable! If a PDL would be issued all VMs would eventually be killed on the site that lost connection and automatically be restarted by HA on the site that was the preferred site. However as HP Lefthand does not issue a PDL the VMs will not be killed by ESXi. Now here is the funny part. If you had configured das.maskCleanShutdownEnable to "true" the VMs will be restarted on primary site, if you did not... the VMs will probably not restarted.

Imagine you have das.maskCleanShutdownEnable to true, what happens? For VMs that reside in the designated primary site nothing happens. VMs that happen to reside in the "losing site" will be restarted. However these will not be killed in the losing site. Meaning that you will have two identical VMs active on your network. One in Site-A and one in Site-B, only of those will have access to disk however. Just imagine your users are not aware and are still accessing and working on that VM which doesn't have access to disk anymore, yes this could get ugly.

In this scenario DRS VM-Host affinity rules are key. Actually DRS VM-Host affinity rules are key in all vMSC implementations. Make sure your VM-Host affinity rules align with the "site affinity" / "preferred site" defined on the storage system for your datastores.

I hope this helps, if you have any questions though don't hesitate to leave a comment.

My VMware has been live for almost a month, and more than 550,000 users have logged in to manage their product licenses and support. You told us that you would like to see enhancements in some key areas, including registration, downloads, and profile updates. We have started to make improvements in these areas and welcome your feedback as we continue to improve the site.

The live My VMware Webinar training sessions are wrapping up this week, but you can view all of the topics on demand going forward. Attend these sessions at your leisure, and sharpen your My VMware skills!

Visit the Webinar Training site to learn more!

by Neal Mueller

COLLABORATE is a big event for Oracle Database and Oracle Application users. You can find just what you need with help from one of our three participating users groups, those being:

• IOUG: for database users
• OAUG: for e-business suite users 
• QUEST: for JDEdwards and Peoplesoft users

VMware customers are virtualizing all of Oracle's products, so we were a popular booth at Collaborate. VMware also had eight sessions at Collaborate:

• Virtualization Boot Camp: Demystifying Oracle Database Virtualization Part I of III
• Virtualization Boot Camp: Demystifying Oracle Database Virtualization Part II of III
• Virtualization Boot Camp: Demystifying Oracle Database Virtualization Part III of III
• Oracle on VMware Expert Panel
• Oracle on VMware: Expert Panel
• Virtualizing Oracle Business Critical Applications
• Virtualization Boot Camp: Virtualizing Oracle 11gR2 RAC on VMware vSphere: Best Practices
• Demystifying MySQL for Oracle DBAs and Developers

Here is booth picture of VMware's Oracle expert Kannan Mani working with the Harvard University DBA Team. The DBA explained his architecture to Kannan on the piece of paper on the table and then took note of what Kannan said, putting it into his iPhone.

VMware had a booth and signage at the show.

Next year, Collaborate 13 will be held in Denver. Denver is home to VMware's Oracle-Master Don Sullivan and VMware's Oracle-Double-Ace George Trujillo.

Previous deep dive posts have dealt with performance issues or faulty hardware. This week Nathan Small takes us through the determination of root cause for a SCSI Reservation Conflict issue:

History of issue:

Customer performed a firmware upgrade to their IBM SVC's. Upon completing the firmware update and bringing them back online, command failures and SCSI reservation conflicts were observed across all hosts. Issue was resolved by sending LUN reset (vmkfstools -L lunreset /vmfs/devices/disks/naa.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) to the affected LUNs. Root cause analysis requested.

We need to start by ensuring that all hosts saw the issue the same way, and that the firmware update sequence logically makes sense. Let's start by looking at the firmware update sequence, and to determine when it began and finished. We have to locate when the paths to one target dropped:

2012-04-29T13:18:19.684Z cpu10:4768)<3> rport-5:0-4: blocked FC remote port time out: saving binding

2012-04-29T13:18:19.685Z cpu2:4794)<3>lpfc820 0000:04:00.0: 0:(0):0203 Devloss timeout on WWPN 50:05:07:68:01:30:59:fd NPort x3f010d Data: x0 x7 x0

2012-04-29T13:18:19.713Z cpu12:4759)<3> rport-6:0-4: blocked FC remote port time out: saving binding

2012-04-29T13:18:19.714Z cpu7:4795)<3>lpfc820 0000:04:00.1: 1:(0):0203 Devloss timeout on WWPN 50:05:07:68:01:10:59:fd NPort x5d0010 Data: x0 x7 x0

From the above we can see there were 2 paths dropped, 1 per HBA. Infact, these Emulex device loss messages even give you the WWPN of the IBM SVC targets:

WWPN 50:05:07:68:01:30:59:fd

WWPN 50:05:07:68:01:10:59:fd

For our example, we will refer to LUN 42 when comparing WWPNs of targets and tracking path failures:

naa.60050768018900725000000000000810 : IBM Fibre Channel Disk (naa.60050768018900725000000000000810)

   vmhba1:C0:T2:L42 LUN:42 state:active fc Adapter: WWNN: 20:00:00:00:c9:a2:26:87 WWPN: 10:00:00:00:c9:a2:26:87  Target: WWNN: 50:05:07:68:01:00:59:fd WWPN: 50:05:07:68:01:10:59:fd

   vmhba1:C0:T1:L42 LUN:42 state:active fc Adapter: WWNN: 20:00:00:00:c9:a2:26:87 WWPN: 10:00:00:00:c9:a2:26:87  Target: WWNN: 50:05:07:68:01:00:59:fc WWPN: 50:05:07:68:01:20:59:fc

   vmhba0:C0:T3:L42 LUN:42 state:active fc Adapter: WWNN: 20:00:00:00:c9:a2:26:86 WWPN: 10:00:00:00:c9:a2:26:86  Target: WWNN: 50:05:07:68:01:00:59:fc WWPN: 50:05:07:68:01:40:59:fc

   vmhba0:C0:T2:L42 LUN:42 state:active fc Adapter: WWNN: 20:00:00:00:c9:a2:26:86 WWPN: 10:00:00:00:c9:a2:26:86  Target: WWNN: 50:05:07:68:01:00:59:fd WWPN: 50:05:07:68:01:30:59:fd

Based on the Device Loss messages from the Emulex (lpfc820) driver, we can see that the first and last paths listed were the ones that went down. This means that the other two paths to this LUN can still be used for access.

A non-disruptive upgrade sequence involves taking one array controller offline, apply firmware update, bring controller online, and then apply the same sequence to the other controller. Each of these sequences requires the connected ESX hosts to failover paths (MRU/FIXED) or remove those dead paths from the working path list (RR aka Round Robin). In this environment the PSP (Path Selection Policy) used is FIXED so we see failover events:

2012-04-29T13:18:19.745Z cpu10:6334)NMP: nmp_ThrottleLogForDevice:2318: Cmd 0x2a (0x4124011a3a00) to dev "naa.60050768018900725000000000000810" on path "vmhba0:C0:T2:L42" Failed: H:0x1 D:0x0 P:0x0 Possible sense data: 0x0 0x0 0x0.Act:FAILOVER

2012-04-29T13:18:19.745Z cpu10:6334)WARNING: NMP: nmp_DeviceRetryCommand:133:Device "naa.60050768018900725000000000000810": awaiting fast path state update for failover with I/O blocked. No prior reservation exists on the device.

The above messages shows us a Host status of '1' (H:0x1), which translates to NO_CONNECT, and is a valid failover condition. For more information on NMP host statuses, See KB 1029039. Next we will see actual failover sequence:

2012-04-29T13:18:19.747Z cpu9:4278)vmw_psp_fixed: psp_fixedSelectPathToActivateInt:479: Changing active path from vmhba0:C0:T2:L42 to vmhba1:C0:T1:L42 for device "naa.60050768018900725000000000000810".

2012-04-29T13:18:19.747Z cpu2:4786)WARNING: NMP: nmpDeviceAttemptFailover:599:Retry world failover device "naa.60050768018900725000000000000810" - issuing command 0x4124011a3a00

2012-04-29T13:18:19.748Z cpu6:7233)NMP: nmpCompleteRetryForPath:321: Retry world recovered device "naa.60050768018900725000000000000810"

When you see "Retry world recovered device" or "Retry world restored device", this means that the path has switched and commands are completing on the new path. The firmware update is applied, controller is rebooted, and then brought back online.

16 minutes later we observe LUN resets for all paths/LUN on the controller that was brought down for the firmware update

<snip>

2012-04-29T13:34:16.269Z cpu1:4144)ScsiCore: 1455: Power-on Reset occurred on vmhba1:C0:T2:L42

2012-04-29T13:34:16.270Z cpu1:4144)ScsiCore: 1455: Power-on Reset occurred on vmhba0:C0:T2:L42

<snip>

This is the result of the SVC coming back online after the firmware upgrade. There are no subsequent messages showing that the ESX host has failed back to the original paths, however the reason for this is because there were no preferred paths set by the customer. For more information on this behavior, see KB Preferred path behaves like MRU if preferred paths are not specified in fixed path policy (1009414).

Now it is time to apply the firmware update to the second IBM SVC:

2012-04-29T14:21:23.073Z cpu20:4778)<3> rport-5:0-5: blocked FC remote port time out: saving binding

2012-04-29T14:21:23.074Z cpu20:4794)<3>lpfc820 0000:04:00.0: 0:(0):0203 Devloss timeout on WWPN 50:05:07:68:01:40:59:fc NPort x3f010b Data: x0 x7 x0

2012-04-29T14:21:23.143Z cpu2:4762)<3> rport-6:0-3: blocked FC remote port time out: saving binding

2012-04-29T14:21:23.144Z cpu18:4795)<3>lpfc820 0000:04:00.1: 1:(0):0203 Devloss timeout on WWPN 50:05:07:68:01:20:59:fc NPort x5d000f Data: x0 x7 x0

This time we see the other IBM SVC device disappear:

WWPN 50:05:07:68:01:40:59:fc

WWPN 50:05:07:68:01:20:59:fc

Just as before, we see the host status of "H:0x1" or NO_CONNECT, which requires us to failover:

2012-04-29T14:21:23.153Z cpu2:7233)NMP: nmp_ThrottleLogForDevice:2318: Cmd 0x2a (0x412400dd5080) to dev "naa.60050768018900725000000000000810" on path "vmhba1:C0:T1:L42" Failed: H:0x1 D:0x0 P:0x0 Possible sense data: 0x0 0x0 0x0.Act:FAILOVER

2012-04-29T14:21:23.153Z cpu2:7233)WARNING: NMP: nmp_DeviceRetryCommand:133:Device "naa.60050768018900725000000000000810": awaiting fast path state update for failover with I/O blocked. No prior reservation exists on the device.

Then we see failover is successful:

2012-04-29T14:21:23.154Z cpu9:4283)vmw_psp_fixed: psp_fixedSelectPathToActivateInt:479: Changing active path from vmhba1:C0:T1:L42 to vmhba1:C0:T2:L42 for device "naa.60050768018900725000000000000810".

2012-04-29T14:21:23.154Z cpu6:4786)WARNING: NMP: nmpDeviceAttemptFailover:599:Retry world failover device "naa.60050768018900725000000000000810" - issuing command 0x412400dd5080

2012-04-29T14:21:27.640Z cpu2:4132)WARNING: NMP: nmpCompleteRetryForPath:429:Retry world restored device "naa.60050768018900725000000000000810" - no more commands to retry

Later we observe more LUN resets, indicating that the IBM SVC is back online:

<snip>

2012-04-29T14:37:29.305Z cpu17:4759)ScsiCore: 1455: Power-on Reset occurred on vmhba1:C0:T1:L42

2012-04-29T14:37:29.306Z cpu23:4759)ScsiCore: 1455: Power-on Reset occurred on vmhba0:C0:T3:L42

<snip>

At this point it looks like a clean and simple firmware upgrade to both controllers has completed, however shortly after the last controller came back online, we see a flood of SCSI commands to LUNs begin to fail with various host statuses:

2012-04-29T14:37:46.430Z cpu5:4101)ScsiDeviceIO: 2305: Cmd(0x412400d7ce40) 0x2a, CmdSN 0x104bbb to dev "naa.60050768018900725000000000000672" failed H:0xb D:0x0 P:0x0 Possible sense data: 0x0 0x0 0x0.

2012-04-29T14:37:46.430Z cpu5:4755)ScsiDeviceIO: 2305: Cmd(0x412401f5e3c0) 0x2a, CmdSN 0x2c47eb to dev "naa.600507680189007250000000000007d7" failed H:0xb D:0x0 P:0x0 Possible sense data: 0x0 0x0 0x0.

2012-04-29T14:37:48.427Z cpu1:8559)ScsiDeviceIO: 2305: Cmd(0x412400d7ce40) 0x2a, CmdSN 0x40b3c1 to dev "naa.6005076801890072500000000000080d" failed H:0xb D:0x0 P:0x0 Possible sense data: 0x0 0x0 0x0.

2012-04-29T14:37:48.427Z cpu3:4099)ScsiDeviceIO: 2305: Cmd(0x412401d2e5c0) 0x2a, CmdSN 0x54f766 to dev "naa.6005076801890072500000000000065e" failed H:0x5 D:0x0 P:0x0 Possible sense data: 0x0 0x0 0x0.

2012-04-29T14:37:48.497Z cpu13:4109)ScsiDeviceIO: 2288: Cmd(0x412401f94840) 0x2a, CmdSN 0x80000015 to dev "naa.6005076801890072500000000000065e" failed H:0x8 D:0x0 P:0x0

This is where all hosts started to observe an inability to complete SCSI commands to the IBM SVC. All hosts are littered with the above failure messages, and with Emulex verbose logging we might be able to determine why different host errors statuses were returned, but that isn't important right now. This behavior eventually leads to the following:

2012-04-29T14:38:17.866Z cpu17:134520)ScsiDeviceIO: 2305: Cmd(0x412440df52c0) 0x16, CmdSN 0x207323 to dev "naa.6005076801890072500000000000065e" failed H:0x2 D:0x0 P:0x0 Possible sense data: 0x0 0x0 0x0.

2012-04-29T14:38:17.866Z cpu17:134520)NMP: nmp_PathDetermineFailure:2084: SCSI cmd RESERVE failed on path vmhba0:C0:T2:L17, reservation state on device naa.6005076801890072500000000000065e is unknown.

2012-04-29T14:38:18.804Z cpu4:4100)ScsiDeviceIO: 2305: Cmd(0x412401f5e3c0) 0x16, CmdSN 0x207324 to dev "naa.6005076801890072500000000000061e" failed H:0x2 D:0x0 P:0x0 Possible sense data: 0x0 0x0 0x0.

2012-04-29T14:38:18.804Z cpu4:4100)NMP: nmp_PathDetermineFailure:2084: SCSI cmd RESERVE failed on path vmhba1:C0:T0:L7, reservation state on device naa.6005076801890072500000000000061e is unknown.

What you are looking at here is a command failure for SCSI command 0x16, which is a SCSI-2 RESERVE command. Not only is this a command failure, but we specifically state that the reservation state of a LUN is “unknown”. This message is displayed when we attempt to issue a SCSI-2 RESERVE and the command does not complete. When we attempt to send an abort for that command and the abort does not complete either, we legitimately do not know what the reservation state of the LUN is at that point. This will typically only happen if there are severe problems trying to communicate with the device, whether the problem is fabric related or the array itself. The fact that this is an IBM SVC will add a layer of complexity to the analysis since there are arrays behind it.

Next we see Reservation errors:

2012-04-29T14:38:28.606Z cpu14:4133)WARNING: FS3: 1835: Reservation error: Timeout

2012-04-29T14:38:28.807Z cpu22:4131)WARNING: FS3: 1835: Reservation error: IO was aborted

Then eventually we see the SATP for the IBM SVC report SCSI Reservation Conflicts for LUNs 1, 2, and 14:

2012-04-29T14:39:53.082Z cpu7:4277)VMW_SATP_SVC: satp_svc_UpdatePath:213: Failed to update path "vmhba0:C0:T3:L1" state. Status=SCSI reservation conflict

2012-04-29T14:39:53.082Z cpu17:4278)VMW_SATP_SVC: satp_svc_UpdatePath:213: Failed to update path "vmhba1:C0:T1:L2" state. Status=SCSI reservation conflict

2012-04-29T14:43:27.452Z cpu13:4277)VMW_SATP_SVC: satp_svc_UpdatePath:213: Failed to update path "vmhba1:C0:T1:L14" state. Status=SCSI reservation conflict

This needs to be our area of focus. The issue was finally resolved by issuing a LUN reset to the affected LUNs:

2012-04-30T02:26:32.197Z cpu23:2689589)WARNING: NMP: nmpDeviceTaskMgmt:2210:Attempt to issue lun reset on device naa.6005076801890072500000000000083b. This will clear any SCSI-2 reservations on the device.

2012-04-30T02:26:32.204Z cpu23:2689589)<3>lpfc820 0000:04:00.1: 1:(0):0713 SCSI layer issued Device Reset (1, 14) reset status x2002 flush status x2002

2012-04-30T02:26:32.204Z cpu23:2689589)Resv: 618: Executed out-of-band lun reset on naa.6005076801890072500000000000083b

2012-04-30T02:26:32.873Z cpu6:2689590)WARNING: NMP: nmpDeviceTaskMgmt:2210:Attempt to issue lun reset on device naa.60050768018900725000000000000672. This will clear any SCSI-2 reservations on the device.

2012-04-30T02:26:32.879Z cpu6:2689590)<3>lpfc820 0000:04:00.0: 0:(0):0713 SCSI layer issued Device Reset (2, 2) reset status x2002 flush status x2002

2012-04-30T02:26:32.879Z cpu6:2689590)Resv: 618: Executed out-of-band lun reset on naa.60050768018900725000000000000672

2012-04-30T02:29:28.765Z cpu18:1055548)WARNING: NMP: nmpDeviceTaskMgmt:2210:Attempt to issue lun reset on device naa.6005076801890072500000000000095f. This will clear any SCSI-2 reservations on the device.

2012-04-30T02:29:28.773Z cpu18:1055548)<3>lpfc820 0000:04:00.1: 1:(0):0713 SCSI layer issued Device Reset (2, 22) reset status x2002 flush status x2002

2012-04-30T02:29:28.773Z cpu18:1055548)Resv: 618: Executed out-of-band lun reset on naa.6005076801890072500000000000095f

Why did a SCSI-2 RESERVE get left on a LUN requiring a manual LUN reset be issued to the device to clear it? Well, as stated above, we observed a host state that the reservation state of a LUN was unknown because of the following sequence:

1. Issue SCSI command 0x16 (SCSI RESERVE)

2. Command fails (timeout)

3. Issue abort for the SCSI command 0x16

4. Command may fail

5. Reservation state of device is unknown

When we look at the other hosts during that time period, they also had difficulty completing SCSI commands, specifically SCSI-2 RESERVE resulting in the other hosts not knowing the reservation state of LUNs:

esx-esxhost1.local-2012-04-30--14.41/var/run/log/vmkernel.1:2012-04-29T14:38:02.029Z cpu5:4101)NMP: nmp_PathDetermineFailure:2084: SCSI cmd RESERVE failed on path vmhba1:C0:T0:L17, reservation state on device naa.6005076801890072500000000000065e is unknown.

esx-esxhost1.local-2012-04-30--14.41/var/run/log/vmkernel.1:2012-04-29T14:38:02.029Z cpu21:4117)NMP: nmp_PathDetermineFailure:2084: SCSI cmd RESERVE failed on path vmhba1:C0:T0:L16, reservation state on device naa.6005076801890072500000000000065d is unknown.

esx-esxhost1.local-2012-04-30--14.41/var/run/log/vmkernel.1:2012-04-29T14:38:02.029Z cpu21:4117)NMP: nmp_PathDetermineFailure:2084: SCSI cmd RESERVE failed on path vmhba1:C0:T0:L39, reservation state on device naa.6005076801890072500000000000080d is unknown.

esx-esxhost1.local-2012-04-30--14.41/var/run/log/vmkernel.1:2012-04-29T14:38:42.028Z cpu17:4113)NMP: nmp_PathDetermineFailure:2084: SCSI cmd RESERVE failed on path vmhba1:C0:T0:L18, reservation state on device naa.6005076801890072500000000000066f is unknown.

esx-esxhost1.local-2012-04-30--14.41/var/run/log/vmkernel.1:2012-04-29T14:38:42.028Z cpu3:4099)NMP: nmp_PathDetermineFailure:2084: SCSI cmd RESERVE failed on path vmhba1:C0:T0:L2, reservation state on device naa.60050768018900725000000000000672 is unknown.

esx-esxhost1.local-2012-04-30--14.41/var/run/log/vmkernel.1:2012-04-29T14:38:42.029Z cpu17:4113)NMP: nmp_PathDetermineFailure:2084: SCSI cmd RESERVE failed on path vmhba1:C0:T0:L15, reservation state on device naa.600507680189007250000000000007d7 is unknown.

esx-esxhost1.local-2012-04-30--14.41/var/run/log/vmkernel.1:2012-04-29T14:39:22.028Z cpu10:550864)NMP: nmp_PathDetermineFailure:2084: SCSI cmd RESERVE failed on path vmhba1:C0:T0:L39, reservation state on device naa.6005076801890072500000000000080d is unknown.

esx-esxhost1.local-2012-04-30--14.41/var/run/log/vmkernel.1:2012-04-29T14:39:22.028Z cpu18:7351)NMP: nmp_PathDetermineFailure:2084: SCSI cmd RESERVE failed on path vmhba1:C0:T0:L14, reservation state on device naa.6005076801890072500000000000083b is unknown.

esx-esxhost1.local-2012-04-30--14.41/var/run/log/vmkernel.1:2012-04-29T14:39:22.028Z cpu10:550864)NMP: nmp_PathDetermineFailure:2084: SCSI cmd RESERVE failed on path vmhba1:C0:T0:L17, reservation state on device naa.6005076801890072500000000000065e is unknown.

esx-esxhost2.local-2012-04-30--14.52/var/run/log/vmkernel.1:2012-04-29T14:38:17.866Z cpu17:134520)NMP: nmp_PathDetermineFailure:2084: SCSI cmd RESERVE failed on path vmhba0:C0:T2:L17, reservation state on device naa.6005076801890072500000000000065e is unknown.

esx-esxhost2.local-2012-04-30--14.52/var/run/log/vmkernel.1:2012-04-29T14:38:18.804Z cpu4:4100)NMP: nmp_PathDetermineFailure:2084: SCSI cmd RESERVE failed on path vmhba1:C0:T0:L7, reservation state on device naa.6005076801890072500000000000061e is unknown.

esx-esxhost2.local-2012-04-30--14.52/var/run/log/vmkernel.1:2012-04-29T14:38:18.866Z cpu23:2134223)NMP: nmp_PathDetermineFailure:2084: SCSI cmd RESERVE failed on path vmhba0:C0:T2:L39, reservation state on device naa.6005076801890072500000000000080d is unknown.

esx-esxhost2.local-2012-04-30--14.52/var/run/log/vmkernel.1:2012-04-29T14:38:57.866Z cpu15:2134223)NMP: nmp_PathDetermineFailure:2084: SCSI cmd RESERVE failed on path vmhba0:C0:T2:L3, reservation state on device naa.60050768018900725000000000000721 is unknown.

esx-esxhost2.local-2012-04-30--14.52/var/run/log/vmkernel.1:2012-04-29T14:38:58.866Z cpu2:1781073)NMP: nmp_PathDetermineFailure:2084: SCSI cmd RESERVE failed on path vmhba0:C0:T2:L18, reservation state on device naa.6005076801890072500000000000066f is unknown.

esx-esxhost2.local-2012-04-30--14.52/var/run/log/vmkernel.1:2012-04-29T14:38:58.866Z cpu23:1675016)NMP: nmp_PathDetermineFailure:2084: SCSI cmd RESERVE failed on path vmhba0:C0:T2:L15, reservation state on device naa.600507680189007250000000000007d7 is unknown.

esx-esxhost2.local-2012-04-30--14.52/var/run/log/vmkernel.1:2012-04-29T14:39:37.866Z cpu17:2154857)NMP: nmp_PathDetermineFailure:2084: SCSI cmd RESERVE failed on path vmhba0:C0:T2:L1, reservation state on device naa.600507680189007250000000000006d7 is unknown.

esx-esxhost2.local-2012-04-30--14.52/var/run/log/vmkernel.1:2012-04-29T14:39:38.866Z cpu20:1675016)NMP: nmp_PathDetermineFailure:2084: SCSI cmd RESERVE failed on path vmhba0:C0:T2:L17, reservation state on device naa.6005076801890072500000000000065e is unknown.

esx-esxhost2.local-2012-04-30--14.52/var/run/log/vmkernel.1:2012-04-29T14:39:38.866Z cpu20:1675016)NMP: nmp_PathDetermineFailure:2084: SCSI cmd RESERVE failed on path vmhba0:C0:T2:L2, reservation state on device naa.60050768018900725000000000000672 is unknown.

esx-esxhost3.local-2012-04-30--09.49/var/run/log/vmkernel.log:2012-04-29T09:40:01.001Z cpu8:4104)NMP: nmp_PathDetermineFailure:2084: SCSI cmd RESERVE failed on path vmhba0:C0:T0:L14, reservation state on device naa.6005076801890072500000000000083b is unknown.

esx-esxhost3.local-2012-04-30--09.49/var/run/log/vmkernel.log:2012-04-29T09:40:41.000Z cpu0:4120)NMP: nmp_PathDetermineFailure:2084: SCSI cmd RESERVE failed on path vmhba0:C0:T0:L14, reservation state on device naa.6005076801890072500000000000083b is unknown.

esx-esxhost4.local-2012-04-30--14.37/var/run/log/vmkernel.1:2012-04-29T14:39:00.633Z cpu17:4113)NMP: nmp_PathDetermineFailure:2084: SCSI cmd RESERVE failed on path vmhba1:C0:T3:L7, reservation state on device naa.6005076801890072500000000000061e is unknown.

esx-esxhost4.local-2012-04-30--14.37/var/run/log/vmkernel.1:2012-04-29T14:39:01.633Z cpu11:4107)NMP: nmp_PathDetermineFailure:2084: SCSI cmd RESERVE failed on path vmhba1:C0:T1:L3, reservation state on device naa.60050768018900725000000000000721 is unknown.

esx-esxhost4.local-2012-04-30--14.37/var/run/log/vmkernel.1:2012-04-29T14:39:01.633Z cpu15:14989)NMP: nmp_PathDetermineFailure:2084: SCSI cmd RESERVE failed on path vmhba1:C0:T1:L15, reservation state on device naa.600507680189007250000000000007d7 is unknown.

esx-esxhost4.local-2012-04-30--14.37/var/run/log/vmkernel.1:2012-04-29T14:39:40.633Z cpu3:4099)NMP: nmp_PathDetermineFailure:2084: SCSI cmd RESERVE failed on path vmhba1:C0:T1:L1, reservation state on device naa.600507680189007250000000000006d7 is unknown.

esx-esxhost4.local-2012-04-30--14.37/var/run/log/vmkernel.1:2012-04-29T14:39:41.633Z cpu5:4101)NMP: nmp_PathDetermineFailure:2084: SCSI cmd RESERVE failed on path vmhba1:C0:T1:L14, reservation state on device naa.6005076801890072500000000000083b is unknown.

esx-esxhost4.local-2012-04-30--14.37/var/run/log/vmkernel.1:2012-04-29T14:39:41.633Z cpu16:15845)NMP: nmp_PathDetermineFailure:2084: SCSI cmd RESERVE failed on path vmhba1:C0:T3:L7, reservation state on device naa.6005076801890072500000000000061e is unknown.

esx-esxhost4.local-2012-04-30--14.37/var/run/log/vmkernel.1:2012-04-29T14:40:20.634Z cpu15:4174)NMP: nmp_PathDetermineFailure:2084: SCSI cmd RESERVE failed on path vmhba1:C0:T1:L3, reservation state on device naa.60050768018900725000000000000721 is unknown.

esx-esxhost4.local-2012-04-30--14.37/var/run/log/vmkernel.1:2012-04-29T14:40:21.634Z cpu17:4113)NMP: nmp_PathDetermineFailure:2084: SCSI cmd RESERVE failed on path vmhba1:C0:T1:L15, reservation state on device naa.600507680189007250000000000007d7 is unknown.

esx-esxhost4.local-2012-04-30--14.37/var/run/log/vmkernel.1:2012-04-29T14:40:21.634Z cpu17:4113)NMP: nmp_PathDetermineFailure:2084: SCSI cmd RESERVE failed on path vmhba1:C0:T1:L1, reservation state on device naa.600507680189007250000000000006d7 is unknown.

This shows us that more than LUN 1, 2, and 14 reported the reservation state unknown errors, though LUNs 1, 2, and 14 were the only LUNs that had a SCSI-2 RESERVE left on the volume. The reason why one LUN had the reserve left on it while another did not is purely due to whatever operation a host was doing when it attempted to grab the reserve. Determining why this was the case for one LUN over another is not as important as why the hosts started to have difficulty completing SCSI commands to the IBM SVC following the reboot of the last controller after a firmware update.

These unknown reservation states occurred for a 2 minute window between 2012-04-29T14:38:02.029Z and 2012-04-29T14:40:21.634Z. Since this is UTC time, this translates to 9:38am to 9:40am, which the time period in which the last SVC reboot occurred and then brought its paths back online (9:38am) to the moment the SVC had fully logged back into its targets (9:40am). This can be illustrated with the following entries from the IBM SVC logs:

Error Log Entry 960

  Node Identifier       : SVCN4

  Object Type           : node

  Object ID             : 13

  Copy ID               :

  Sequence Number       : 30815

  Root Sequence Number  : 30815

  First Error Timestamp : Sun Apr 29 09:38:13 2012

                        : Epoch + 1335710293

  Last Error Timestamp  : Sun Apr 29 09:38:13 2012

                        : Epoch + 1335710293

  Error Count           : 1

  Error ID              : 987102 : Node coldstarted

  Error Code            :

  Status Flag           : SNMP trap raised

  Type Flag             : INFORMATION

Error Log Entry 6438

  Node Identifier       : SVCN3

  Object Type           : cluster

  Object ID             : 0

  Copy ID               :

  Sequence Number       : 0

  Root Sequence Number  : 0

  First Error Timestamp : Sun Apr 29 09:38:18 2012

                        : Epoch + 1335710298

  Last Error Timestamp  : Sun Apr 29 09:38:18 2012

                        : Epoch + 1335710298

  Error Count           : 1

  Error ID              : 990415 : Software Install completed

  Error Code            :

  Status Flag           :

  Type Flag             : CONFIGURATION EVENT

00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

Error Log Entry 962

  Node Identifier       : SVCN4

  Object Type           : cluster

  Object ID             : 0

  Copy ID               :

  Sequence Number       : 30816

  Root Sequence Number  : 30813

  First Error Timestamp : Sun Apr 29 09:40:43 2012

                        : Epoch + 1335710443

  Last Error Timestamp  : Sun Apr 29 09:40:43 2012

                        : Epoch + 1335710443

  Error Count           : 1

  Error ID              : 981003 : FC discovery occurred, configuration changes complete

  Error Code            :

  Status Flag           : SNMP trap raised

  Type Flag             : INFORMATION

01 02 00 00 04 1E 00 00 04 04 00 00 06 00 06 00

06 00 00 00 50 01 00 00 60 00 60 00 60 00 30 00

00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 68 FE 01 00 66 00 00 00

32 01 00 00 F0 FF FF FF 0B 00 00 00 66 00 00 00

66 00 66 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

00 00 00 00 03 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

Error Log Entry 420

  Node Identifier       : SVCN3

  Object Type           : cluster

  Object ID             : 0

  Copy ID               :

  Sequence Number       : 30817

  Root Sequence Number  : 30813

  First Error Timestamp : Sun Apr 29 09:40:43 2012

                        : Epoch + 1335710443

  Last Error Timestamp  : Mon Apr 30 01:00:12 2012

                        : Epoch + 1335765612

  Error Count           : 2

  Error ID              : 981004 : FC discovery occurred, no configuration changes were detected

  Error Code            :

  Status Flag           : SNMP trap raised

  Type Flag             : INFORMATION

01 01 00 00 1C 1E 00 00 04 04 00 00 06 00 06 00

00 00 00 00 50 01 00 00 60 00 60 00 60 00 30 00

00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 68 FE 01 00 00 00 00 00

98 01 00 00 F0 FF FF FF 0F 00 00 00 66 00 00 00

00 00 66 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

00 00 00 00 03 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

The collective ESX logs alone clearly show that the SVC was not completing all SCSI commands from the hosts within the 5 second timeout window during the timeframe of 9:38 and 9:40, but some of those commands did complete, particularly a few SCSI-2 reserves that the ESX hosts lost track of due to the timeout events. Also, based on the ESX hosts logs and the SVC logs, we would postulate that the SVC advertised its paths as online and active before it had fully logged into the arrays behind it. This means that commands could have been queued up on the SVC side while waiting for login to complete and then flush those commands through, which may have explained the behavior we observed.

While the SCSI-2 Reserve was a symptom of the issue, this scenario as well as many other scenarios regarding SCSI Reservation Conflicts can be avoid by utilizing the hardware assisted locking feature of VAAI, also known as ATS (Atomic Test and Set). This type of locking will not prevent another host from accessing the volume. This feature was introduced in vSphere 4.1 and improved in vSphere 5.0, and requires a storage array that supports VAAI.

For more information on VAAI and ATS, please see KB vStorage APIs for Array Integration FAQ (1021976).

Kyle Gleed, Sr. Technical Marketing Architect, VMware

I recently spent some time in my lab applying all the security recommendations outlined in the 5.0 Hardening Guide and while doing this I was very surprised to discover that the ESXiShellTimeOut setting doesn’t work as expected. 

To quote from the vSphere 5.0 Security Guide:

“The [ESXiShellTimeOut] setting is the number of minutes that can elapse before you must log in after the ESXi Shell is enabled. After the timeout period, if you have not logged in, the shell is disabled.  If you are logged in when the timeout period elapses, your session will persist. However, the ESXi Shell will be disabled, preventing other users from logging in.”

So in theory, if I set ESXiShellTimeout = 1 then one minute after I start the ESXi Shell service it should automatically get stopped (disabled).   However, I set the ESXiShellTimout = 1, start the “ESXi Shell” service from the vSphere client, and nothing.  The ESXi Shell stays running indefinitely.

Digging into this what I found is when I start/restart the ESXi Shell using the vSphere client it seems to ignore the ESXiShellTimeout and the service stays running indefinately.  However, when I start/restart the ESXi Shell from the shell command line (/etc/init.d/ESXShell restart) it does honor the ESXiShellTimeout and the service does get stopped (disabled) after one minute.

I’ve filed a bug on this so hopefully it will get fixed soon.  In the meantime if you rely on the ESXiShellTimeOut to automatically stop the ESXi Shell service for you, the best I can suggest is anytime you enable the ESXi Shell, take an extra step to login and do a quick restart from the command line to make sure the ESXiShellTimeOut will go into affect.

BTW, the ESXiShellTimeOut works the same way for the SSH service (to start SSH from the command line run /etc/init.d/SSH restart) with one notable exception.    With the ESXi Shell, stopping the service does not affect existing sessions, it only prevents new sessions.  With SSH however, when it stops the service it also disables the firewall rule causing any existing SSH session to hang and eventually timeout.

Get notified on future  posts by following me on twitter @VMwareESXi

VMware vFabric Application Director is a tool for automating application deployments to infrastructure clouds – it basically automates the provisioning of infrastructure, install, and configuration processes. Once an application has been designed inside Application Director, it can also be deployed to multiple cloud environments without redesigning the application.

This blog post (and a very helpful accompanying video embedded below) will explain how Application Director’s Command Line Interface (CLI) can be used alongside VMware’s cloud stack to support a self-service portal for provisioning cloud applications.  A future blog post will outline a second key use case with Application Director – it’s use in a continuous integration development lifecycle to automate builds and migrations.

VMware software used in this Use Case:

• VMware Service Manager Cloud Provisioning (VSM CP)
• VMware vCenter Orchestrator (vCO)
• VMware vFabric Application Director (AppD)
• VMware vCloud Director (vCD)

Steps in this Use Case:

1. End User orders a service from VSM CP
2. Admin/Manager approves request in VSM CP
3. VSM CP calls to vCO to feed Application Director
4. vCO captures status and updates VSM CP
5. Application Director deploys the app with vCD
6. vCD receives a registered vApp
7. VSM CP notifies the user

1. End User orders a Service via VSM CP

From a user’s perspective, the process is quick, easy, and completely self-service. They simply browse the service catalog, where they can drill down to look at the details of each application on offer to them, and then select the version they want to deploy.

Once the user finds the application they want, they click on the order button and are asked to fill out a request form, the deployment profile dropdown determines the cloud environment it can be deployed into, for example development, test or production infrastructure, in private or public clouds. This can also determine who approves the request, as there may be more approvals required before deploying an application into a production or public cloud.

2. Admin/Manager approves Request in VSM CP

Once the user submits the order, the relevant person gets an approval request. In this example the development environment was selected so it is the development manager only who approves the request, although in many cases an approval wouldn’t be necessary for dev/test environments.

The development manager reviews the details of the request and approves the request by entering their password.

3. VSM CP calls to vCO to feed Application Director

This triggers the workflow in VSM CP to call out to vCO in order to invoke the Application Director CLI. Note: the Production Manager approval was skipped in this workflow because this request was to deploy into a development environment.

The vCO workflow then builds a Spring Roo script to feed into the Application Director CLI based on the inputs provided by the user, which essentially involve the application name, the version and the deployment profile. The deployment profile determines which cloud to deploy into, and the mapping of the logical templates and networks defined in the application blueprint to the templates and networks in that cloud. Once this script is compiled, it starts the Application Director CLI and runs the script.

4. vCO captures Status and Updates VSM CP

The CLI reports that the application was successfully scheduled in Application Director and vCO searches the output in the command line to find the deployment name and provides it as a workflow output to VSM CP. This means that VSM CP is aware of which vApp in vCloud Director this request relates to, and allows the end user to see and manage this new vApp in the cloud portal once provisioning is complete.

5. Application Director deploys the App in vCloud Director

Application Director then automatically deploys the application based on the application blueprint we have created. Application Director fully supports dependency management, so it knows which order to install the middleware and application components. In this example Application Director first installs, configures and starts MySQL as a database server and JBoss as an application server. Once MySQL is installed and the database is initialized, and the JBoss server is installed and running, the Duke’s Bank application .jar and .ear files are deployed. Finally, the Apache Load Balancer is installed and started up. The steps are visible in the below execution plan.

6. vCD gets a registered vApp

The end result is a multi-tiered vApp in vCloud Director (either a private or public cloud), with the application installed and running.

7. VSM CP notifies the User

Once deployment is complete, the VSM CP workflow finishes and emails the user, notifying them of the successful deployment. The user can view and manage the vApp and its VMs in the VSM CP portal as well as launch the VM console directly via the web.

The result is a fully operational application, running in the cloud, in less than 15 minutes from the moment the request is approved to the delivery of the working application.

If you want to see the video, click here. 

Learn more about vFabric Download the vFabric data sheet Compare vFabric Standard vs Advanced

Watch vFabric on Youtube Read more on vFabric Application Director Download a trial of vFabric Application Director

Download a trial of other products Review VMware vFabric Consulting Services Download the vFabric brochure

About the Author: Matthew Carpenter joined VMware in 2010 as an Enterprise Management Specialist with a background in ITIL and Application Lifecycle Management. As part of the UK and Ireland Systems Engineering team, his area of expertise is VMware's cloud provisioning portfolio, which touches all three VMware product suites with a focus on the vFabric Cloud Application Platform and the Cloud Infrastructure Suite.

Name: Edwin Weijdema

Blog URL: http://www.vmguru.nl

Twitter handle: @Viperian

Current employer: Imtech ICT in the Netherlands

How did you get into IT?

I started playing games on an Atari game console when I was about 6 years old (1980) and grew up with games like Space Invaders, Pac Man, Donkey Kong and many more. Two years after the Atari, the Commodore 64 made its entry, faster and with way better colour graphics. I started developing interest in what was behind the scenes how are those games made, how do things work? So I started programming machine code on a Commodore 64 which was hard but still managed to get some sprites bumping around the screen. Also a  Sinclair ZX Spectrum with an Z80 CPU was tried, I still remember the awesome rubber keyboard.

I am still very happy that my Dad had a clear vision that those PC’s introduced in 1983 at his work could change the world. So we had a WANG 8086  and a bit later an IBM PC with an 80286. Those machines where interesting but were only made for business purposes. Through a PC at home project I got introduced to the MSX.

In 1986 we got a Philips MSX2 hobby machine with an MSX-DOS operating system which made programming a lot more fun. I started writing articles for the Belgian and Dutch MSX Club which also published MSX Club Magazine, which later merged with MSX Computer Magazine to form MSX Computer & Club Magazine (MCCM). During my MSX2 time I programmed several games, first alone but very soon joined by friends. Under the name Experience Soft I participated in a programming competition with The Maze of the Black Spider (1989) which made 4^th place. After that experience the taste for more developed rapidly, under the name Experience Soft more titles saw the light namely: Delta Force (1990), Amazing Cash (1990) and Infinity (1991).

After leaving secondary education to start at the University of professional education with my study Organization and Informatics friendships changed and new friends were made. So Experience Soft became Vivid with a new partner in crime and two more game titles saw the light, namely Gold Rush (1993) and Solid Snail (1994). During my ICT study I worked part time for a local ICT company and worked my way up from a shop assistant to an computer assembler into an all-round hard- and software consultant. After successfully finishing my ICT Study I started full time working for a number of ICT companies in succession. I climbed the ladder from Helpdesk Employee, Support Engineer, Systems Engineer, Technical Consultant, Network Consultant, Business Consultant to my current job role Enterprise Architect.

How did you get into working with VMware and becoming a 2012 vExpert?

Early 2005 I got the opportunity at a customer site to help with a project to replace the whole back-end infrastructure, they wanted to use my knowledge of the current situation and my urge to understand and dive into new technologies. They were looking at virtualization as technique and VMware in particular. I delved deeper into it and saw some stunning techniques and a big opportunity and so my affinity with and love for VMware was born. I did the VCP training and exam for VCP on ESX Server 2 and Virtual Center 1.  

A lot of managers have said to me, and one in particular, that virtualization is a hype that won’t last, you don’t need to spent so much time on it, just forget it, it won’t make it into mainstream. Oh boy was he wrong.

In 2008 Erik Scholten my friend and colleague started a blog named VMGuru.nl, because we were sending a lot of documents back and forth several colleagues around VMware virtualization projects. So now we had a private URL for a web based knowledge base, after receiving some requests from customers, if they also could use it, the blog became public after just a few months. Now the blog handles over 1.6 million hits per month.

In 2009 I visited my first VMworld Europe in Cannes, I still remember the words Erik and Anne Jan said: Edwin if you pass under the banner for the Solutions Exchange we won’t see you back at the surface for the next 3 days. And I must say they couldn’t have been more spot on, I visited about 200 of the 212 booths and talked with hundreds of people. What interested me was that there was a very pleasant and open atmosphere and that the people all were so friendly and accessible. That reminded me of the MSX community I had been in for a long time now and so I started blogging more on VMGuru.nl and became a member of a great VMware community. Because of my continuing efforts on www.vmguru.nl, combined with my love to spread the virtualization word through presentations, speaking and writing, VMware awarded me the vExpert award in 2010, 2011 and now recurring in 2012.

What would you tell someone who wanted to get a job like yours to do?

I found out early in my life that if you love what you do, you do it with passion and want to excel in it. This is a good foundation to build your working career and even your life on. Stay close to yourself, try to find out what makes you tick and what excites you. I, for instance, still like to know how things work, not only in technique but also in organisations, humans and so on.

Also find a good balance between private and work, and you will see that those two worlds will merge where hobby becomes work and vice versa. There is only one certainty in the ICT that I found out and that is change, so stay up to date! I would recommend going to seminars and exhibitions like for instance VMworld or local events where you can meet peers and lots of interesting new visions on new and old problems.  So you can build and maintain a good social network. It is not key trying to know everything but it is key to know people who know things or know other people who could help out.

And last but not least, never grow up!