The VS Blog

vSphere 5 documentation sources

andybaxta — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 12:58:03 +0000

Taken directly from Forbes Guthrie’s vreference.com blog:

VMware has published the vSphere 5 documentation:

http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-pubs.html

In addition to the online html library and the downloadable PDFs, there are now e-book versions to grab. There are MOBI files for your kindle and EPUB files for most other e-book readers. I’ve requested this for some time now, so I’m glad VMware is providing them. They have to be one of the first large mainstream software vendors to offer their documentation in these formats. I wouldn’t say it is a revolutionary concept, but nice that VMware is leading competition and being innovative when they can.

The result is great:

vKernel Releases vRAM Tools and Guide

andybaxta — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 15:41:40 +0000

The folks over at vKernel have been busy and recognized that there is a lot of panic about vRAM entitlements. They have a new help center and tool for monitoring your current utilization and to help you plan for the future.

The tool is located here

VMware Revises vRAM Entitlements

andybaxta — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 21:40:00 +0000

In an unexpected but greatly appreciated change of heart, VMware has published that it is revising the vRAM entitlements and model with regards to vRAM Entitlements, the following is an extract from a blog post and mail sent to all VMware Partners:

VMware vSphere 5 Licensing and Pricing Update

As you are probably aware, when VMware announced our new Cloud Infrastructure Suite, we also introduced changes to the vSphere licensing based on a consumption and value-based model rather than on physical components and capacity.

While we believe this model is the right long-term strategy as we move into the cloud-computing era, the announcement generated a great deal of passionate feedback from partners and customers that led us to examine the impact of the new licensing model on every possible use case and scenario – and equally importantly, taking into consideration our partners’ and customers’ desire to broadly standardize on VMware. We’ve listened to your ideas and advice, and we are taking action with the following three updates to the vSphere 5 licensing model:

We’ve increased vRAM entitlements for all vSphere editions, including the doubling of the entitlements for vSphere Enterprise and Enterprise Plus. Below is a comparison of the previously announced and the new vSphere 5 vRAM entitlements per vSphere edition:

We’ve capped the amount of vRAM we count in any given VM, so that no VM, not even the “monster” 1TB vRAM VM, would cost more than one vSphere Enterprise Plus license. This change also aligns with our goal to make vSphere 5 the best platform for running Tier 1 applications.
We’ve adjusted our model to be much more flexible around transient workloads, and short-term spikes that are typical in test & development environments for example. We will now calculate a 12-month average of consumed vRAM to rather than tracking the high water mark of vRAM.

Finally, we introduced the vSphere Desktop Edition to address vSphere licensing in a desktop environment. vSphere Desktop is licensed on the total number of Powered On Desktop Virtual Machines allowing customers to purchase vSphere for VDI use case on per user basis. Our price books are being updated and will be available on Partner Central shortly.

Microsoft and VMware Compared Series–An Introduction

andybaxta — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 14:18:09 +0000

As expert providers of VMware’s vSphere server virtualisation platform and Microsoft’s Hyper-V with System Centre Virtual Machine Manager we are often asked to make comparisons between the two platforms. The web is filled with propaganda from both organisations and there is little objective commentary. In the ‘Microsoft and VMware Compared Series, we are going to provide an in-depth series of comparisons that show the bottom-up solutions compared side-by-side, showing the features, glossary, costs and issues of both solutions. We are going to base this content initially on vSphere v4, but will be updating it to reflect any changes in v5 of the solution.

All of the blog posts relating to this will be titled ‘Microsoft and VMware Compared Series’ and we will issue a filtered view of the blog for them to be an online referral point for anyone trying to understand the differences. We welcome objective commentary and will integrate suggestions or comments into the blog entries.

Fatal Error 205 installing System Centre VMM (Virtual machine manager)

andybaxta — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 10:02:11 +0000

One of the single most common errors I see with first time installers of System Centre VMM is the Fatal Error 205 and 99 times out of 100, its a very simple fix. The computer account needs to be registered in the domain using the domains FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name). To fix, place the VMM server into a workgroup, then re-add it to the domain – add it using the FQDN of the domain i.e. ‘VIRTUSOLVE.LOCAL’ instead of ‘VIRTUSOLVE’.

If adding to the domain using the FQDN fails you have either connectivity or DNS issues, check your IP settings and that you can ping a domain controller and you can ping the domain FQDN.

vSphere 5 New Demo’s

andybaxta — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 21:46:12 +0000

VMware TV has released a load of new vSphere 5 demonstration videos, they are embedded below:

vSphere Web Client Demo

vSphere Storage DRS Demo

vSphere Profile-Driven Storage Demo

vSphere Storage Appliance Resilience Demo

vSphere Auto Deploy Demo

vSphere Storage Appliance Installation and Configuration

More on vRAM Entitlements

andybaxta — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 18:08:41 +0000

More focus being placed around vRAM licensing issues with vSphere 5

New video from VMware

VMware Begins RAM Model Charm Offensive

andybaxta — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 08:32:27 +0000

It must be difficult for VMware, a market leader in the field, no-one really near them to offer strong competition – so they plough ahead anyway, bring some amazing innovation (see the new vSphere Web Client Post) and all everyone is talking about is the new licensing model!

Well they must’ve predicted this coming, but they are beginning the official responses and charm offensive by slipping the odd clarification and blog post out. The latest is ‘Understanding the License Model’, ahhh, so that’s it – not that people are worried it will cost more, just we don’t ‘understand’, the blog entry is linked below:

http://blogs.vmware.com/rethinkit/2011/07/understanding-the-vsphere-5-vram-licensing-model.html

Personally I have mixed feelings on this, I am as frustrated as everyone else and It’s likely we will be hit with between 30-50% higher numbers of licences with this change, but some of the innovation it brings will reduce administrative overhead, make the environment cleaner and more easy to manage and is more aligned to being a ‘Private Cloud’ provider. Also, there was a storm coming anyway when we tripped over the ‘8 Cores in a Processor’ mark which is likely to be within the next 12-24 months anyway. That would’ve seriously held back some providers from investing in 10 or 12 core processors, which would’ve forced hardware vendors to engineer around the software offerings – which wouldn’t be a great place to be.

On one hand frustrated, on the other understanding, if you have a great product then you have an opportunity to charge a premium for it – I cannot see too much business lost to Citrix or Microsoft as a direct result of this, I honestly can’t, why would you move your technology backwards 2-3 years to avoid a comparatively small increase in Capital Expenditure charging (comparative to the cost of running the environments in the first place). I would advise anyone of making the change to think hard about the Operational Expenditure and migration costs before they make a rash decision.

AND to respond to a few comments, I am also a consultant in Hyper-V technologies, my comments are not born out of bias towards VMware – they come from a working knowledge it is a superior product. If you want proof- check out what product Microsoft always uses in their competitor analysis media – ESXi3.0 – that speaks volumes (Source).

(This doesn’t mean Hyper-V should be ignored btw – give it another 2-3 releases and we may see the products on par)

vSphere 5–Web Client in Detail

andybaxta — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 15:55:18 +0000

One of the coolest features of the up-and-coming new version of vSphere 5 is the feature-rich web client, which, for the majority of admins will do away with the requirement for downloads of the vi-client. Written in Adobe Air, it is a very slick and polished product, which will only get better (some are predicting the future removal of the thick vi-client – and when you read below, you will start to see why).

Anyway, once we have our vSphere Web Server installed, we can browse to it using any compatible browser (that runs Adobe Air) which is pretty much all of them, you are then presented with a logon screen:

Even the logon screen is nice and clean, after a short logon you are then presented with the relatively familiar layout of the vi-client, with our vCenter Managed environment tree on the left hand side and a basic summary in the center:

Clicking on a virtual machine on the left hand side will then dynamically fill the content panel on the right hand screen with details of the virtual machine, including a live captured thumbnail of the console of that VM and the hardware configuration, state of the virtual machine and notes:

The drop down in the upper left corner of the vCenter Management Window allows us to quickly jump to different tasks within the vCenter Managed environment:

Clicking on Search for instance will allow us to find objects within our vCenter estate:

and the granular part of advanced search lets us find a number of different properties for an object:

This will be massively useful to get a really quick advanced look at parts of our estate in a ‘certain’ state, for instance – imagine trying to find all virtual machines running a specific version of VMtools, or in fact any VM’s where the version of VMtools is out of date, this is really easy:

By now, I was surprised and very happy at how powerful this was, but, the fun doesn’t stop there – VMware have really thought this through and understand their admins don’t necessarily want to have to fill in three drop boxes every time they run a search! So, they have introduced save searches to make re-doing the exercise all the easier:

Great, you are thinking after you have run the query – I’ll now connect to the VM’s with the out of date VMTools with VI-Client and update them. But you don’t need to, the search results are all links to the objects within the webclient, you simply click on a VM you want to upgrade, right-click on the host and select Configuration > Install/Upgrade VMware Tools – just as you would in the full-fat vi-client :

OK, so you get this, its not a viewer, it is the FULL VMware console from which you can administer your environment, need to place a host in maintenance mode – no problem, migrate a guest – no problem:

What is also really cool is that the application is so rich and is layered, so, for instance in the middle of this VM migration I may need to resolve a problem with something else – but I am part way through migrating a VM – do I have to cancel and start again. No! By clicking in the area around this popup, the workflow I am involved in (the migration) is parked in a neat box on the right hand side for me to return to at any point:

Just another example of great design, it is probably one of the most feature rich web-applications I have ever used and is as much a nod to the fantastic AIR framework as it is to VMware in the design. It means there is a logic and simplicity to using the web application that makes things so so easy.

The interface has been kept very similar to the original VI-Client for a reason and navigation is logical to anyone who has never used the full-fat client before:

This new console along with a simplified CLI command set with ESXCLI (to be discussed in a further post), will dramatically improve the lives of VMware Admins, just think how simple remote management of a VMware environment can be using this method – port 443 opened on a firewall and you are now able to do things that used to take forever.

vSphere 5–All the White Papers

andybaxta — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 17:53:24 +0000

VMware now has a comprehensive number of white papers with all of the answers to What’s New for components in vSphere 5, please use the following links:

Also the new VMware Certified Professional (VCP 5) exam details are available: