Malaysia VMware Communities » VMware

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.

Cisco and VMware Submitted VXLAN for Open standard

craig — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 15:28:13 +0000

Interesting announcement from Cisco and VMware during the VMworld 2011 which was regarding the VXLAN capability. Both company had invited a group of product principle together to submit the VXLAN to IETF for approval as a standard for future.

Let’s talk a little bit more about what is VXLAN and why do we need that. As of today, DR solution are commonly deploy by every enterprise environment. Did you realize 1 of the biggest challenge which always happen on the DNS record, hard coded IP segment, subnet and VLAN which always require human interaction to manually change it, to allow a success fail over of the DR scenario? Well, I think this is just 1 of the major issue commonly face. With Cisco Nexus 7000 come with OTV (Overlay Transport Virtualization) which allow you to stretch the Layer 2 traffic over Layer 3, with minimal bandwidth requirement. Cisco had done a great job to the enterprise to address this, which now you can have both side learning the same VLAN, Subnet and ip address. A DNS and ip changes is no longer require as both end are transparent with similar VLAN.

What about Cloud? I always think the major challenges on cloud are Network. VXLAN created are mainly to address to concerns of the public cloud provider. That was mainly due to the limitation on the current VLAN architecture, which only allow 4000++ VLAN to be created in the single manage environment. Imagine you as the public cloud provider, you will easily hit the maximum number and you do not want to build another new infrastructure due to this limit too. According to the Cisco Expert during VMworld, the additional header is been added to the bit and byte to enhance the additional number of VLAN could be deploy in the single environment. At the same time, it deliver the similarity of OTV from private to public cloud, which bring the Hybrid Cloud to the reality of tomorrow.

I will try to find out more technical information about this area with my counterpart back to Malaysia, and share again in details with another post. From the intention of both Cisco and VMware, they are pushing hard for VXLAN on this and I do believe this is 1 of the key area need to be addressed before the hybrid cloud environment could continue scale especially on the public cloud provider perspectives.

You can view the full details of the IETF submission from Cisco and VMware from HERE.

Federated hybrid cloud with vCloud director 1.5

craig — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 21:47:51 +0000

VMworld 2011 had focused a lot on private and hybrid cloud computing environment which address the concerns from enterprise over the public cloud offering in the market today. One of the key highlight during the event was the new capability over vCloud director version 1.5.

With vCD 1.5, you can now manage both private and public as a hybrid mode from the administration with secure federated. It allow you to subscribe, manage, relocate and provision anywhere you prefer, could be internal infrastructure or public cloud provider you choosen and manage in same console. I went through the hands on lab session for this topic and found the setup was great.

It took me sbout 1.5 hours to complete the lab and the lab instruction is clear and no customization required. I would like to thank the folks from vmware who creted the lab and allow me to try it out. Every configuration is web base and wizard base, which allow the administrator to setup and configure easily. Hybrid cloud no longer a concept, whih I believe is real and many users will seriously consider it in the future.

Virtual firewall and security solution offload is the trend of future

craig — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 16:36:26 +0000

I was just attended the session this morning talk about the virtual layer security after consolidation, virtualization and cloud computing environment. As many of the users previously adopted to virtualizaton, most of the time the security consideration were minimal due to the technology limitation of that time. But today, vmware and their solution partner had produced large number of solutions available in the market which can help the users to further strengthen the security readiness after virtualization. Example will be vmware vshield edge, application, cisco nexus 1000v, cisco vsg, check point and etc. All these products was focusing on similar thing which try to off load the necessary work load from the current virtual machines to the hypervisor or virtual switch level. This will able to prevent antivirus scanning storm, performance issues and etc.

Especially on virtual desktop environment, workload offload is a must to be considered move forward to improve the consolidation ratio and maximize the the performance out of the infrastructure build. If you had not considered about this, you should immediately look into this as security can be another major bottlenecks to your infrastructure today, and of courses all the business units are always concern about it.

VMworld 2011 – Finally I am HERE

craig — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 13:04:01 +0000

It was a long journey for myself to reach vegas 10 hours ago, which took me more than 17 hours flight in total to reach my hotel . I am very excited to join this event which allow myself to explore many opportunities around the globe surrounding the Cloud and Virtualization. I will try my best to perform necessary blogging during the event, but this may need to check out the internet connectivity in the conference as I do not have the 3G coverage with my Roaming due to incredible expensive rate.

Again, finally I am here and I hope this will not be the first and my last trip to the VMworld event. I always wish there are more to come.

I would like to thank you my bosses who fully support my trip to Vegas and my friend from VMware who encourage me to attend this event.

VMware vSphere 5 GA available to be downloaded now

craig — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 14:01:21 +0000

The new VMware vSphere 5 GA are available to be downloaded now from VMware. You can direct access the official link here to download the necessary software for the GA. Related posts: Confused Explaination from VMware about New License Scheme on vSphere 5 VMware vSphere 5 Web Client Update Manager Changes on vSphere 5 Related posts:

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

craig — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 16:59:58 +0000

VMware vSphere 5 had been revised to provide better business case to the users who willing to maintain VMware as the hypervisor and run 3rd party VDI solution beside VMware view. The pre-requisite to do this, you must 1st ensure the ESX host cluster are separated from the existing Server cluster which are not running VDI in place. This could be good news to all of us which think to maintain the VMWare as the hypervisor and utilize 3rd party VDI solution in the same organization.

There will be no VRAM limit for this case, but it may be capped around 100 VDI per ESX host. I still yet to go in to details to really find out this. With the new revise, it seems had pleased some of the users who complained about the vTAX issue in vsphere 5, but there are still many users who are complained the SNS entitlement who had purchased upfront for 36 months which end up require to top up their license now.

Rumours from Blogger about new changes on vSphere 5 license change

craig — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 14:59:03 +0000

Since the Official launch of VMware vSphere 5, the hottest topic been discuss in virtualization is all about the new license been implemented by VMware more than what’s new in vSphere 5. After few weeks of complain, discussion and feedback from the users or partner, there are rumours saying that vmware is now ready to revise the license with better capacity limit per CPU sockets.

Here are some of the details to share, which been discuss on the internet frequently and yet to be announced and verified with VMware.

VMware vSphere 5 Essentials will give a 24GB vRAM entitlement
VMware vSphere 5 Essentials Plus will give a 32GB vRAM entitlement
Max vRAM in Essentials / Essentials Plus will be maxed at 192GB vRAM
VMware vSphere 5 Standard vRAM entitlement has changed to 32GB
VMware vSphere 5 Enterprise vRAM entitlement will be doubled to 64GB
VMware vSphere 5 Enterprise Plus vRAM entitlement will be doubled to 96GB

Well, looks like VMware do listen to the feedback, if the above is correct, I think it at least make more sense compare to the previous information been released. One thing i had found from the discussion forum, high consolidation ration no longer unacceptable in fact it had been well adopted by world wide users. Those feedback on the forum had shown that most production host today are beyond 96GB memory with 2 x 6 cores in place tody.

Let’s wait for the announcement from VMware to verify the statement above.