vSphere

First update to vSphere released

VMware has finally released the first update to vSphere almost 6 months after the initial release of vSphere in May 2009. Version 4.0 Update 1 delivers many fixes to bugs and issues as well as support for new features, products and operating systems. Perhaps the biggest updates in this release are support for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 as guest operating systems as well as support for the newly released VMware View 4.0. Continued »

Quota limits in vSphere?

A reader was recently reading the VMware white paper  What Is New in VMware vSphere 4: Storage and he came across this paragraph:

Improved Storage Resources Control

As the scope of storage resources have increased significantly with large deployments of virtualization environments, so has the need for greater automation and control of these resources. In the vSphere release, vCenter has been enhanced with several new storage specific capabilities to help the virtual administrator manage these environments with a higher degree of control. These enhancements provide administrators with proactive alerts and alarms to address issues before they interrupt the availability of applications running on those resources. vCenter allows setting permissions and quota limits on datastores, as well as per VM.

His question was to explain the meaning of the following line: “vCenter allows setting permissions and quota limits on datastores, as well as per VM.” In particular he wanted to know about setting quota limits on data stores and VMs. While I know a lot about the new permissions in vSphere, particularly for data stores, the part about quota limits confused me also because I have never heard of quota limits in vSphere. I did some research, checked all the vSphere documentation and couldn’t find anything about them. So I contacted VMware to get some clarification and I received the following response from the white paper author:

The quota limit applies to the storage given to a VM.  There is not really an equivalent for a data store.  One can set alarms to notify/alert one when a certain percent-full or overcommit is hit. But I am not aware of a means to stop allocations or placement of VMs when a certain percent overcommit is hit.  That is a common request that I do not believe is there now.

So basically “quota limits” simply  means the amount of disk space assigned to a VM. I guess technically it’s a quota but once you assign the space to the VM you can’t control how much of it that it can use. If you create a 20 GB virtual disk for a VM the guest operating system is going to see all 20 GB of it regardless of whether it is a thick disk or thin disk. If you do overcommit your data stores by using thin disks you need to carefully monitor datastore free space using alarms and reporting. Currently in vSphere there is no way to set any type of quotas for snapshots, virtual disks or datastores.

So while alarms and permissions are greatly improved in vSphere there are really no quota limits that you can use. Perhaps in a future release VMware will put some type of quota controls in place. Thanks to John Troyer and Paul Manning from VMware for the clarification on this.

What are IP Pools and vApps?

While navigating in the vSphere client the other day I noticed a new tab. When selecting a Datacenter object, a tab called IP Pools appeared. When clicking on this tab you had the option to view and add IP Pools. Having never seen this before my first thought was, what are IP Pools?

After doing some research I found out they were part of the new vApps feature in vSphere. I’ve heard a little about vApps but never looked at them in depth, so I thought I would take the time to research them and write about them.

We’ll come back to IP Pools in a bit. First we’ll cover what a vApp is and how they work in vSphere. VMware’s definition of a vApp is below: Continued »

The vSphere API is not just for programmers

The topic of the VMworld 2009 session which Luc Dekens and I gave recently was how to take PowerCLI to the next level. I’ll explain that premise for a bit in this post for those who may not have been able to make it to the session (or the show, for that matter).

PowerCLI has a lot of functionality built in. As of this writing, there are 165 cmdlets that let you do a wide range of tasks such as starting virtual machines or creating virtual switches. Cmdlets are great because they are high-level, task-based, and their usage is mostly consistent across all domains, whether you are talking about virtualization or managing your mail servers.

Here’s a PowerShell command which will display all of the various types of objects which you can manipulate with PowerCLI. Continued »

Goodbye pink highlighter, hello iPod Touch: VMware training in the 21st century

The high-flying days of pre-Y2K seem a distant, fairy-tale like memory. IT has gotten far more complex. Capital budgets continue to shrink, corporate greed continues unabated, shareholder gain is as strong as ever, and the demands on IT have naturally increased to meet such demands. The demands on our time are ever greater. Yet we must still make time for training on new products and technologies, for how else are we to continue to dream about the IT glory days of the 90’s?

Perhaps you have also noticed as well that budget constraints are causing us to rethink how we get training on the latest technologies. It is not always possible to take a week off work to take a class each time a new OS version is released, and additional weeks to receive instruction on all the individual components. Now it is expected that we somehow become proficient in dozens of applications from a score of vendors and implement the latest technologies while continuing to support legacy systems and contribute to the IT community.

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No room for VMFS haters here!

Fresh off the release of my recent SearchVMware.com tip on the inner workings of VMware’s vStorage VMFS, I came across a VMFS-hater blog post. I am a big fan of VMFS for VMware implementations, frequently referring to the popular clustered file system as the most underrated technology VMware has ever made. Continued »

Will VMware ever release a Linux version of the VMware Infrastructure Client?

VMware users have been asking for a Linux version of the Windows-only VMware Infrastructure/vSphere Client for years. Last year at VMworld, VMware hinted that it may be releasing a version for Linux soon. But a year has gone by and there is still no sign of VMware releasing a client that will work with Linux. It is doubtful that VMware will release a Linux client for VMware Infrastructure 3 now that vSphere has been released, but a Linux version of the vSphere client is still a possibility. Continued »

VMware ESX Web access in vSphere

With VMware Infrastructure 3, Web access was enabled by default. VMware chose to disable it in vSphere for security purposes. If you access an ESX 4 host with a Web browser you will see the default welcome page but if you click the log-in link you will get a 503 Service Unavailable error message.

This only affects ESX hosts (VMware vCenter Server has this enabled by default; ESXi does not have a Web access user interface (UI) to manage the host and virtual machines).

There is a tech note that describes the process for enabling this feature in ESX 4.0, but before you go ahead and do this you should ask yourself if you really need this feature enabled on all your hosts. VMware disabled this feature for a reason — Web based access methods are inherently insecure and are subject to numerous vulnerabilities that could potentially compromise your VMs and hosts.

The Web admin UI is very limited as you can only administer guest VMs and not host servers. Leaving it disabled removes a potential attack vector for your ESX hosts and makes them more secure. This is also true of other configuration settings that are disabled by default in ESX such as root access using SSH.

The first thing many administrators do is enable this because it is easier than setting up another user account and using su or sudo. So resist the urge to enable web access and utilize the vSphere client instead. If you must use web access for a specific reason only enable it on the hosts that need it. If you are using a vCenter Server use the web access on vCenter instead and use the roles and permissions built into it for additional security. By leaving vSphere web access disabled you are helping to make your ESX hosts and your whole virtual environment more secure.

Monitoring vSphere adoption: A forum moderator’s perspective

As an active moderator and VMware Communities Guru, I’m in a unique position to see the level of vSphere adoption from an interesting vantage point — topic activity in the forums.

Take one morning’s statistics from this past week:

• 3 pages of new VMware vSphere Forum Posts vs 1.5 pages of VMware ESX 3.5 Forum Posts.
• VMware ESX 3.5 Forum posts used to be around 3 pages
• The majority of VMware vSphere Forum Posts that dealt with ESX 4 vs ESXi 4 was in favor of ESXi 4 by a wide margin (I did not actually count posts but noticed there were more ESXi posts than ESX posts in those 3 pages)

So using this as a rough measurement and in a completely unscientific way, we do see that VMware vSphere is being investigated for use at least by those activie within the VMware community forums. The same thing happened when ESX v3.5 was released, and over time ESX 3.0 community posts dropped to less than a dozen per day. (I say per day because I review the vSphere, ESX 3.5, and ESX 3.0 communities once about every 24 hours give or take an hour or so.)

Given the types of questions, it looks like two things are happening:

• VMware vSphere is being investigated
• VMware ESXi 4 is the packaging of choice

The second item could be because many people believe that when the next version of ESX comes out, it won’t have a service console, and these users want to get a head start on the adjustment.

What we do not know from this type of adoption measurement is whether these are adoptions for use within production, enthusiasts, or testing within lab environments.

What we do know is that the increase in volume and the drop in ESX v3.5 forum posts is that vSphere is definitely gaining traction. This is not surprising, but what is to me is that ESXi 4 has a constant flow of posts while ESX 4 does not. This will shift the security model people employ to protect virtualization hosts as well.

The votes are in: Favorite vSphere enhancements

Now that users have started using vSphere, I wanted to know which new technologies in the latest ESX platform release are most popular. I ran two polls on my website, and the survey results are in: Thin provisioning is the favorite new major enhancement and alarm improvements are the favorite smaller enhancement. Both features existed in VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3) but were very limited and difficult to use.

In VI3, thin provisioning could only be used when creating virtual disks via the command-line interface, but in vSphere it is fully integrated into the vSphere client, which makes is much easier to use. Additionally, new alarms and reporting helps manage your thin-disk usage.

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