To be sure, there are plenty of new features to get excited about in vSphere 5.0. VMware has come a long way since 2002, when I first started using the technology. Often in the technology world, practitioners get excited about learning and implementing new technology without planning properly. They want to implement as fast as possible to bring about the benefits and innovation that the new technology has to offer. I believe that we have all been guilty of this at one point. So, this post is to remind all technology practitioners to take a step back and think about proper planning when implementing new technology projects. One of the basic tasks that should be done at the beginning of any virtualization design is capacity planning.

My role at TBL allows me to examine many virtual infrastructures. One of the common challenges that I see in many of these infrastructures is resource allocation after they have been running for a while. Workloads were virtualized quickly without proper capacity planning and by the team I am called in to assess the infrastructure, resources are strained in the environment. This point may come quickly if proper capacity planning is not performed up front. …
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Centralized management brings organizations more control over resources with fewer equipment assets in the field. There are many cases where equipment may be needed in a branch office to speed access time to a resource or eliminate the dependency on a network link to the central datacenter. It is very common to see at least one, if not multiple, servers at the branch office to provide file/print services or user authentication. Perhaps the servers are providing some service that is specialized to a particular business (banking applications come to mind here). Whatever service is being provided, sometimes it is better to maintain local access at the branch. So there are servers to maintain at the branch office, as well as networking gear and other such devices.

What if you could consolidate your branch office services with your router? That is exactly what the Cisco UCS Express is meant to do. The UCS Express is a Services-Ready Engine (SRE) module that works in Integrated Services Router Generation 2 (ISR G2) routers. This module is …
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This is a quick blog to discuss where vSphere is at with memory management today. vSphere has many mechanisms to reclaim memory before resorting to paging to disk. Let’s briefly look at these methods.

Memory Reclamation

• Transparent Page Sharing (TPS)
• Think of this as deduplication for memory. Identical pages of memory are shared with many VM’s instead of provisioning a copy of that same page to all VM’s. This can have a tremendous impact on the amount of RAM used on a given host if there are many identical pages.
• Balooning
• This method increases the memory pressure inside the guest so that memory that is not being used can be reclaimed. If the hypervisor were to just start taking memory pages from guests, the guest Operating Systems would not react positively to that. So, balooning is a way to place artificial pressure on the guest VM so that the VM pages unused memory to disk. Then, the hypervisor can …
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The desktop PC is dead! Finally!

Well, not yet, but VMware is sure working hard to make this a reality. I have been discussing with clients and colleagues why the traditional desktop model does not make sense for “today’s” end user for quite a few “todays.” VMware calls a user-centric approach to computing End User Computing. End users need access to their applications and information on any device from anywhere. They should not know or care about the nuances of the Operating System. This sounds like a lofty goal, but it is becoming a reality more and more every year.

If we look at the last decade (or even further into the 90’s), we have seen the Operating System itself have the spotlight. New “Operating System” features were actually marketed towards end users.

• The latest OS supports more RAM!
• The latest OS supports 64-bit computing!
• The latest OS supports Solid State Flash Drives!
• The latest OS can take advantage …
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I recently spoke at a lunch and learn event about “Security in a Virtualized World”. If one thing was made abundantly clear during the discussion, it was the fact that securing a virtual infrastructure is more complicated than securing a physical infrastructure. There are many moving parts to consider along with the hypervisor itself. For many years, I have been discussing the need for automation with my clients. It makes the infrastructure much easier to manage and from a security standpoint it helps to ensure that build policies are consistent for all of the virtual hosts in the infrastructure.

There have always been tools to automate a vSphere infrastructure ranging from Perl scripts to PowerCLI. With the release of vSphere 5 automation is becoming more and more a reality. When you think about automating a VMware infrastructure, you may think about writing scripts to perform certain tasks or spending hours on the “perfect” ESX build that can be deployed through automation. Scripts are still available and in some cases necessary for automation. However, with vSphere 5 we are beginning to see an “automation-friendly” environment built into the management tools that are given to us from VMware.

ESXi: Built for Automation

One …
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We all get in a hurry. When we get in a hurry we make mistakes. The following scenario has been played out plenty of times in a virtual infrastructure.

1. VM Administrator gets a request for a new VM to be deployed ASAP, which usually means yesterday.
2. VM Administrator looks through multiple datastores to determine a datastore with a sufficient amount of capacity.
3. VM Administrator picks the datastore and deploys the VM.

What if this particular VM was a database server and the log volume needed to be provisioned on a RAID1/10 datastore. Hopefully the datastores are named with the RAID level in the naming convention. But, what if they are not? Even if they are, it can be very tedious to wade through multiple datastores to find an appropriate datastore that meets both capacity and performance requirements. What if there was a way to “tag” certain datastores with characteristics that are meaningful to the VM administrator? That’s where the new “Profile-Driven Storage” feature comes in with vSphere 5.

Profile-Driven …
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vSphere 5 has many new and exciting features. This post will concentrate on High Availability(HA) and how it affects blade designs. While HA is certainly not new, it has been rewritten from the ground up to be more scalable and flexible than ever. The old HA software was based on Automated Availability Manager (AAM) licensed from Legato. This is why HA had its own set of binaries and log files.

One of the problems with this “now legacy” software was the method it used to track the availability of host resources. HA prior to vSphere 5 used the concept of primary nodes. There were a maximum of (5) primary nodes per HA cluster. These nodes were chosen by an election process at boot time. The (5) primary nodes kept track of the cluster state so that when an HA failover occurred, the virtual machines could restart on an available host in the cluster. Without the primary nodes, there was no visibility into the cluster state. So, if all (5) primary nodes failed, HA could not function.

This was not usually an issue in rackmount infrastructures. However, it posed some challenges in a blade infrastructure where a chassis failure can cause multiple blades to fail. Blade environments should typically have at least two chassis for failover reasons. If there was only a single chassis providing resources for an HA cluster, that single chassis failure could cause an entire cluster outage. You’ll seen in the diagram below that just because multiple chassis are used does not mean that the entire HA cluster is protected.

<a …
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The storage platform in a virtual infrastructure serves as most important foundation piece of the infrastructure. There are certainly many options to choose from. Those storage options generally fall into two main categories. Block storage and File System storage. Let’s take a look at these two categories.

Block Storage

This method of providing shared storage to a VMware cluster has been supported the longest. At its core, block storage presents a set of physical disks as a logical disk to a host (ESX server in this case). This is a very well understood method of providing storage for the virtual infrastructure. There are a couple of protocols that we can use to provide this type of storage: Fibre Channel and iSCSI.

Fibre Channel

• Fibre Channel uses a dedicated Fibre Channel fabric to provide connectivity for the storage.
• Fibre Channel was built from the ground up as a storage protocol.
• Fibre Channel is the most mature protocol for block storage presentation.

iSCSI

• iSCSI can use the same network fabric as your LAN servers. However, it is best to use a separate Ethernet fabric.
• iSCSI is an IP based storage protocol that utilizes the existing TCP/IP stack.
• iSCSI is a relatively new protocol for block storage.

The …
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