Malaysia VMware Communities

New Generation of Cisco UCS Virtual Interface Card 1240

craig — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 15:54:26 +0000

Cisco UCS had updated the product line up with VIC 1240, VIC 1280 and LOM expander which allow a single half width blade to aggregates up to 80Gbps total bandwidth to deliver high performance and high throughput requirement for the server system.

The New VIC 1240 come with the following capabilities.

Advanced Support for Virtualized Environments

The Cisco UCS VIC 1240 implements the Cisco VM-FEX, which unifies virtual and physical networking into a single infrastructure. It provides virtual-machine visibility from the physical network and a consistent network operations model for physical and virtual servers.

The Cisco UCS VIC 1240 supports VMware’s VMDirectPath with vMotion technology, which allows it to:

“Pass through” the hypervisor layer
Provide near-bare-metal performance for unified computing systems
Integrated modular LOM for new generation Cisco UCS blade servers
Delivers up to 80 Gbps aggregate bandwidth to the servers, with the use of an I/O expander in the optional mezzanine slot
Near bare-metal I/O performance
Ease of management
Exceptional network visibility
support Up to 256 dynamic virtual adapters and interfaces

Please read more from the official Cisco UCS site

You can also refer the detail architecture from here

Integrated modular LOM for new generation Cisco UCS blade servers
Delivers up to 80 Gbps aggregate bandwidth to the servers, with the use of an I/O expander in the optional mezzanine slot
Near bare-metal I/O performance
Ease of management
Exceptional network visibility

Private Cloud Computing Consideration

craig — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 17:02:41 +0000

Cloud computing had been the top priority in most Enterprise IT spending now. While rushing to evaluate or roll out the Enterprise private cloud, you should always have the detail level of understanding and future consideration to decide the right technology platform to be adopted. I had been spoken to quite a number of users, which initial thought the cloud computing should drive the IT spending down compare to the legacy methodology they are doing today. After a detail study and analysis, they realize the upfront investment and additional tools may cost them more compare to the current spending, which are mainly due to new capabilities require additional tools, software and processes to be in placed.

Business are always the key drivers for cloud computing. The main benefits will always go to business rather then Enterprise IT. IT department had been educated to practice cost saving every year in most Enterprise Environment. More than 70% of the Enterprise IT today are focus cost cutting exercise rather than technology innovation for business enablement.Therefore, we are not surprise to see legacy application, devices are always in the production without ownership today.

As the IT leader to roll out the cloud computing, we should always understand the need of business and how the cloud will enable business to be better in future. You may not need all the cloud capability in place to support the business, but you will need the core component require to full fill the business model in your environment.

Cloud computing contains physical infrastructure include networking, security, servers, storage, backup, recovery, DR and etc. Beside the technology, automation and management are the core components which enable self service capability, automated management capability and others core function require to convert existing infrastructure to the cloud computing.

The selection of the technology should always consider compatibility, reliability, simplicity and flexibility. Open standard is another key word we should always remember. All this consideration will secure our investment into cloud computing. Hybrid cloud concept had been in the market for years but lack of practical due to technology constrains such as bandwidth, security concerns, compatibility and etc. Recently, we had seen some success roll out which enable hybrid solution in enterprise environment. To enjoy the full benefit of cloud computing, which usually tie to the phrase of ” Everything on demand”, you will require to ensure your private cloud are compatible, burst able to public cloud hosting at anytime you want. Therefore, the private cloud solution you choose to deploy, will make the huge impact to your future strategy for hybrid cloud adoption.

I had seen many cloud deployment been done lately, which require long deployment cycle and incompatible with public cloud provider platform. Those deployment sometimes leave them no choices in future to burst their application or compute requirement to others cloud provider due to incompatible issue. This will dismiss the hybrid cloud benefits for the enterprise, to leverage the large compute resource spool in the public at anytime they want. While every principle claim their solution are the best for cloud offering, we as users should always re-think the right strategy and the infrastructure consumption by the business internally before we deploy the enterprise private cloud.

To summarize this, the evaluation criteria of the cloud computing solution, shouldn’t just base on Cost. IT spending is hardly stretched beyond 5% from the total revenue of the company. The agility, reliability and flexibility will provide more benefits to the business, this must been seen by IT and Business together to ensure a correct cloud computing strategy to be chosen.

EMC VSPEX offering

craig — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 16:29:08 +0000

EMC had announce VSPEX offering days ago. What is VSPEX? vBlock and Flexpod had been in the market for years which focus on highly integrated, tested and proven technology to bring Virtualization solution as a single solution stack to cover Networking, Storage and Compute. EMC had partnered with VMware and Cisco by offered vBlock to the market to simplify the ordering and deployment cycles to the user who want a reliable system with simple ordering method. At the same time, Netapp had partnered with VMware and Cisco to provide Flexpod offering to the market. Flexpod are more focus in reference architecture and channel driven business by the Channel Partner. The approach is another way round if you compare vBlock with Flexpod. Client and partner have flexible choice to choose the solution.

Today, EMC had launch the VSPEX offering to address the channel market which provide more flexible choice to the partner and users to be considered in smaller scale deployment. vBlock will still be positioned as large scale deployment due to the density of the architecture are design to fit in for different environment.

Below is the high level summary of EMC VSPEX

VSPEX Is Simple – VSPEX Proven Infrastructures deliver predictable performance that significantly reduces the planning, sizing and configuration burdens of adopting private cloud or end-user computing environments. In addition, EMC’s validation of the VSPEX configuration greatly reduces deployment time. Finally, tight alignment with Windows Server Hyper-V and VMware vSphere cloud infrastructure provide customers a single point of management using System Center for Microsoft cloud and VMware vCenter™ Operations Management Suite for private cloud deployments.
VSPEX Is Efficient – Built on EMC’s award-winning VNX™ and VNXe™ unified storage systems and Avamar® and Data Domain® next-generation backup products, VSPEX provides customers with unmatched levels of efficiency. Leveraging technologies such as data deduplication, compression and Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST), customers can expect to significantly lower operational costs. By integrating these technologies tightly with the hypervisor and end-user computing environments, customers can also benefit from simpler administration and lower management costs.
VSPEX Is Flexible – VSPEX allows customers to combine their choice of industry-leading server, network, and virtualization technologies into a proven infrastructure validated by EMC and built on a highly flexible EMC storage and backup infrastructure. Additionally, the customer’s channel partner of choice – who understands the specific customer’s requirements – can customize VSPEX to meet their needs.

For details information, you can refer to the official link from EMC

Cisco UCS Product Update with B200M3

craig — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 15:12:16 +0000

I just received an email from my Cisco Counter Part today, which Cisco had released the B200 M3 to their UCS line up. First thing I did, is to launch the Netformx design tools from my Laptop which provide myself the direct access to the latest configuration and price list online and authenticated by Cisco.

I notice there are couple of significant improvement from this new generation blade as below

2 sockets base blade servers to provide up to 16 cores with Intel E5 chip by utilizing 1600Mhz DDR3 memory
It provide up to 384 GB of memory with 16 GB memory module
IO interface through put increase up to 40Gbps per blad

I had done the comparison to B230M2, the B200M3 seems to be a better choice for high density computing which require higher memory but considering to reduce the foot print of the machine.

Great release from Cisco which provide more option for us to consider moving forward in the future.

Hitachi Storage Manager for VMware vCenter

jlchannel — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 15:46:03 +0000

Finally Hitachi Data System(HDS) released the Storage Manager Plugin for VMware vCenter server.

Hitachi Data Systems announces the availability of specific integration for VMware’s vCenter called “Hitachi Storage
Manager for VMware vCenter”. Hitachi, Ltd. and Hitachi Data Systems jointly developed this functionality in which this will
be installed as a separate plug-in for VMware vCenter. Customers upgrading to vSphere 4.1 and vSphere 5.0 using the
Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage 2000, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform or Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V will
automatically be able to leverage the capabilities of this key integration.

The Hitachi Storage Manager plug-in for vCenter supports both:

VMware vSphere 4.1 and vCenter 4.1
VMware vSphere 5.0 and vCenter 5.0

Key features of the plug in include:

Provisioning of new datastores into the AMS2000 (VSP and USP-V in a future release)
Capacity utilization for datastores
Provide a self-service solution that allows customers vSphere administrators to easily manage Hitachi storage through the vCenter Console.
Enable Joint Customers of VMware and Hitachi Data Systems to provide an end-to-end solution for management of their VMware Infrastructure on Hitachi Storage.
Close a key integration and competitive gap that other Vendors have existing vCenter integrations.
Correlation between VMware datastores, ESX hosts, virtual machines and storage resources on the AMS2000, VSP and USP-V systems

Please refer to http://www.hds.com/go/vmware or any local HDS representative for more information about Hitachi Storage Manager Plugin for VMware vCenter.

Purple screen for ESX host during vSphere 5 Upgrade

craig — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 18:26:09 +0000

Just read through 1 of the KB here which referring to the potential risk to create a purple screen scenerio during the vSphere 5 upgrade while you ESX host update 2 could potential conflict with the vCenter 5.

You may encounter an issue where:

You have recently upgraded your vCenter Server to version 5.0
You have hosts of minimum version ESXi 4.0 Update 2 (build 261974) and maximum version ESXi 4.0 Patch 9 (build 360236) in your vCenter Server inventory
After the vpxa agents are upgraded, the ESXi 4.0 Update 2 hosts experience a purple screen that includes this error:NOT_IMPLEMENTED bora/vmkernel/filesystems/visorfs/visorfsObj.c:3391

Solution

This issue has been resolved in ESXi 4.0 Update 3. To avoid this issue, upgrade all affected hosts to at least ESXi 4.0 Update 3 (build 398348) before upgrading vCenter Server to 5.0.

please refer to the full post here for more details.

VCP 5 Exam Experience

craig — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 18:21:33 +0000

I just did my VCP 5 Exam las 2 days ago. I would like to share some of my experience to you, who may plan to go for the exam. Currently, VMware will allow all VCP 4 to proceed to direct exam upgrade path for VCP 5. You need to get your VCP 5 before end of Feb 2012. If you are failed to obtained the VCP 5 after end of Feb 2012, you will require to attend the official training before you can sit for the exam.

Well, I would like to share some of my thought and experience for the VCP 5 exam. I had passed it but it took me more than 1.5 hours as I recheck all the 80 questions after I answered the 1st round. I used to be the 1st VCP 5 in Malaysia, but I am not sure whether I am going to be 1st VCP 5 again in Malaysia. The exam is never easy as most of the questions are deep dive into specified technology area, and you will require a lot of hands on deployment, support administration or lab environment to visualize or provide the correct answer. Simon Long’s blog may had helped little bit, but to my surprise, most questions are relevant to the administration experience on VMware stuffs.

If you plan to buy DUMP to pass this exam, I will suggest you save the money and time to perform more testing in your own environment. Most questions are relevant to our day to day job rather than theory.Please ensure you master the functionality on vsphere 5 with all new capabilities and console. The exam cover Hypervisor, Storage, Cloud, Networking, HA deep dive and scenario base troubleshooting. P

I am glad that VMware had set the standard for the certification high, and I hope they will continue maintain the quality of the certification.

I am officially VCP 5 now…. time to enjoy my weekend and good luck to whoever plan to go for VCP 5.

Database requirement in Citrix Xendesktop

craig — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 02:53:25 +0000

I had gone through few days of hands on training for Citrix Xendesktop. The experience of the training is good and it went through technical deep dive. 1 of the key thing we discussed during the training was about the databases requirements to support the Xendesktop and Xenapp infrastructure. Microsoft SQL will be 1 of the key component, and you will require to plan for the high availability architecture to support the production environment.

The best approach may just consider to build an independent Active/Passive or Active/Active SQL cluster to support the infrastructure. A backup for the SQL is always recommended to create recovery point in the event of data corruption. Most data on the SQL databases is the configuration changes, log and etc. Similar to VMWare vCenter Database.

XenDesktop License Server Flexibility

XenDesktop License Server Flexibility

craig — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 02:31:32 +0000

While I am attending the training for XenDesktop today, we had covered the topic of License Server for Xendesktop.
I had raised the question to the trainer.

what if the license server go down, will all the existing connections or sessions been terminated automatically?

He had explained as the configuration in the license server and license files are design to prevent the point of failure in the scenario of license server unavailable due to any failures. You will be given 28 days period of time with unlimited seats in the event of license servers unavailable during the outage.

In normal scenario, assume your license server is functioning with 1000 seats, you will also allow to provision 10% extra within 28 days before you increase the purchased licenses. This will allow you to turn on extra capacity temporally in the short period.

New license offer from VMware vSphere 5 on 3rd party VDI solution

Steve Jobs Deserve the respect from the World for IT

craig — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 05:57:27 +0000

I got a big shock for the first email I read this morning is regarding the sad news of the Legend Steve Jobs who left us 1 day right after the iphone 4S launching. I had always admire his talent and vision as a Technology leader since I was a kids and the days I know about Computer. I always told my friend about how a success leader just like him had made the changes to our life today. Some people may not agree with him, but they do see him as a target for competition. For my personal opinion, he had changed the living style that I have today compare to 20 years ago.

He made impossible to become possible especially with the iphone, ipod and ipad that he launched with apple in the past. These devices had become enterprise ready with global adoption. Now we even talk about application or desktop access form the mobile devices that require IT to support. Internet Data and content access anywhere, anytime and any devices.

If Steve do not deserve the respect, who should?