vSphere

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.

Continued »

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.

Continued »

Three ways to kill a frozen vSphere ESXi host virtual machine

At some point, you may need to know how to kill a stuck or frozen VMware vSphere 4.0 ESXi host virtual machine when the traditional power controls do not work. As with VMware ESX, there are several methods, which I covered in a previous post, killing a virtual machine (VM) on a VMware ESX host in vSphere.

The methods for ESXi are very similar to that of ESX, but the execution is different as ESXi doesn’t have a service console like ESX’s. The methods below are listed in order of usage preference, beginning with using normal VM commands and ending with a brute force method.

Method 1: Use the vmware-cmd command in the vSphere command-line interface (CLI) Continued »

More details on VMware’s Fault Tolerance feature

This week’s VMTN Community Roundtable podcast was about Fault Tolerance (FT). Henry Robinson and Karen Ritter of VMware joined to provide information about the development and future of FT.

Here’s a summary of some interesting details from the podcast, but if you haven’t listened to it yet, I recommend that you check out the recording as it provides a lot of valuable technical information.

• VMware spent a lot of time working with Intel/AMD to refine their physical processors so VMware could implement its vLockstep technology, which replicates non-deterministic transactions between the processors by reproducing the CPU instructions on the other processor. All data is synchronized so there is no loss of data or transactions between the two systems. In the event of a hardware failure you may have an IP packet retransmitted, but there is no interruption in service or data loss. Continued »