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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.

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.

VMware vSphere 5 Web Client

craig — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 16:43:24 +0000

If you require to manage a different Virtual Data center with long distance and latency, now you can consider the alternative management tools beside viClient. vSphere 5 come with a new features call vSphere web client. Which allow you to perform the basic administration from the browser level. It does not allow users to launch the virtual machine console from the web client.

Below are some of the screen shot to share

Option to select vSphere web client for vSphere 5

Configuration wizard for web client

Screen shot on Web Client Management console

Update Manager Changes on vSphere 5

craig — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 16:27:38 +0000

There are major change on the up coming version of Update Manager on vSphere 5. I was quite surprise with the change which I found out during the training today. In previous version, the update manager was able to provide patch update to virtual machine and ESX host. Which allow users to patch the virtual machine for both windows and Linux easily without require to purchase additional software management tools. With the new version of update manager, this capability had removed. It will only support the patch capability for ESX host level. You will no longer enjoy the benefits to perform patch update for virtual machine with Update Manager vSphere 5.

I was quite disappointing with this changes as I had used to the patch capability on virtual machines in the previous version. I will need to clarify further with the local representative about the changes on this.

ESXi 5 is the only to go as VMware remove ESX Console in vSphere 5

craig — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 16:17:36 +0000

VMware had tried hard to push their existing customer to switch over to ESXi version since vsphere 4. With the up coming vSphere 5, there will no longer provide esx service console as it does in the previous version. vSphere 5 will only come with ESXi edition with leave the users no choice by adopting to it.

For users who plan for an upgrade in the near future or any new deployment, I will suggest you to deploy all your ESX host with ESXi for the ease of upgrade or migration. The upgrade process is pretty straight forward from version 4 to version 5 without any big hassle.

Site Recovery Manager are not supported with vCloud Director

craig — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 05:10:04 +0000

While vCloud director is the hot topic now for private cloud computing solution from VMware, some of us may overlook into certain requirements that may require Site Recovery Manager for DR solution. If you run in to this situation, the current version of vCloud director may not be the option for you. SRM are officially not supported with vCloud director, which been informed during the official training class and the official reference document you can read from here. You may want to wait for the update release in the future if you plan to have SRM in your private Cloud environment with vCloud director.

Maximize CPU utilization on ESX host with Cisco UCS B250M2

craig — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 16:01:50 +0000

We were doing some stress test with more than 15 VMs on a single B250M2 Cisco UCS blade machine with 2 x Intel 6 Cores 2.93Ghz, and 192GB memory. While are stress test are pretty simple, each VM been provisioned with 2 vCpu and 4GB of physical memory. We maximize the CPU load of all the virtual machine and end up I was able to capture the print screen as attach here.

Weird Thing had happened here as we maximize the CPU utilization, but the total MHZ on the ESX host had exceeded the calculation if we base on 12 x 2.93 Ghz. I am still trying to understand in details how the system can stretch more than the available capacity on the total Ghz it suppose to have with the chip set on the machine. If you do have any valuable comment to explain this, feel free to comment here as I am interesting to learn this out.

Great Post about NUMA Hyperthreading in ESX 4.1

craig — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 16:49:14 +0000

As you may aware, significant improvement had been done on the latest hypervisor from VMware vSphere 4.1.
1 of the key changes are the vCPU for each virtual machine with latest NUMA hyperthreading architecture.

I found a very details and great post talk about this topic, please read the full post from here.

This will significant improve the Consolidation ratio and performance over the virtual machine VS the previous version ESX 4.0.

How to make APC PCNS 2.2.4 work with ESXi 4.1

jlchannel — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 16:30:24 +0000

For the past 1 week, I have been busy with the APC PCNS and ESXi 4.1 and I would like to share my experience “How to make APC PCNS 2.2.4 work with ESXi 4.1″ here.

Basically I will not discuss How To Install PowerChute Network Shutdown on VMware ESX /ESXi again and you may refer to APC official link here.

If you’re try to install APC PCNS 2.2.4 on vSphere Management Assistant (vMA) 4.1 and I’m sure you will get the similar error like “This version of PowerChute Network Shutdown only support VMware ESXi” which I think APC teams should it much more clear. The error message caused by APC PCNS (ver 2.2.4) setup file – “install.sh” which check on “/etc/vima-release” file. In the vMA 4.1 released, you’re can only found “/etc/vma-release” file which changed recently. Create a symbolic link or edit the installation script can temporary ignore these error message. See this link.

Unfortunately, the solution as above does not help much. I found another serious problem which the connectivity between the ESXi 4.1, vMA 4.1 and PCNS 2.2.4 authentication problem due to “/opt/APC/PowerChute/group1/bin/shutdownhost.pl” and “vi-fastpass”.

To cut the story short, I would suggest you go with vMA 4.0 and just ignore vMA 4.1 until APC solve the problem. Again, you may consider William Lam post “Why you should upgrade from vMA 4.0 to vMA 4.1”

Tips to troubleshoot Nexus 1000V

craig — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 16:14:29 +0000

If you are deploying nexus 1000v in your VMware vSphere environment, you may usually hit to the point require to unload VEM, VSM or reconfigure. Today I found some tips just to share here. If you accidentally deleted your VSM which before you unload the VSM from the vCenter, you will either end up having orphan nexus 1000V show up in your vCenter. Even if you try to name the same as previous, it will prompt the error telling you that the previous extension key and your current extension are mismatch.

Do not panic as you can easily fix this by manually configure your extension key by using the command below

n1000v(config)# vmware vc extension-key

This should able to make your new VSM to have the same extension key as previous. Once you had done this, you should able to reconfigure your new VSM to have the same name with previous. The orphane nexus 1000V DV Switch will not happen in this case.
Good Luck!!!!!