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VMworld US 2012 report: opening keynote

3 September 2012
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VMworld keynotes where three this edition:

  • Monday, August 27: Paul Maritz has shared how VMware is helping customers and partners thrive in the Cloud era and has also introduced Pat Gelsinger. New release products has been announced has also the dead of the vSphere 5 vRAM Entitlement.
    Then Steve Herrod has discuss and introduced the technology at the heart of the software defined datacenter.
    Watch Mondays General Session
  • Tuesday, August 28: Steve Herrod introduce the End User Computing vision of VMware with also a great demo with Vittorio Viarengo. Then VMware partners take the stage to demonstrate state of the art technology that is transforming IT and enabling the mobile workforce.
    Watch Tuesdays General Session
  • Thursday, August 30: three extraordinary researchers — Kevin Slavin, Co-Founder, Area/Code; Dr. Dennis Hong, Director, RoMeLa (Robotics and Mechanisms Lab), Virginia Tech University; and Chris Urmson, Lead, Self-Driving Car Project, Google — show how they are working at the frontier of machine technology.
Events

VMworld US 2012 – Show ends

31 August 2012
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On Thu 30 August the  VMworld 2012 US has finally been finished.

In the next days  the detail of the event!

Actually the first info for the edition 2013: will be again at San Francisco.

Events

New vCloud 5.1 – Networking and Security

30 August 2012
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In the new vCloud suite 5.1 there are several improvements and new features in the networking and secuirity part.

For vSphere 5.1 are mainly in the distribuited virtual switch (VDS) part with several news:

  • Network Health Check support: helps detect misconfigurations across physical and virtual switches.
  • Configuration Backup Restore: allows vSphere admins to store the VDS configuration as well as recover the network from the old configurations.
  • Rollback and recovery: addresses the challenges that customer faced when management network failure caused the Hosts to disconnect from the vCenter Server.
  • Port Mirroring enhancements: new troubleshooting capabilities are introduced by supporting RSPAN and ERSPAN.
  • Netdump: provides the ESXi hosts without disk (stateless or with Autodeploy) the ability to core dump over network.
  • Improved Scaling numbers.
  • Other enhancements focused on simplifying the operation of the VDS.

But in the vCloud Director 5.1 the number of enhancements and new functions is quite high and relevant and the concept of Software Defined Networking (SDN) is widely applied. The components are:

  • VXLAN: is the foundation for creating elastic portable virtual datacenters. VXLAN technology allows compute resources to be pooled across non-contiguous clusters or pods and then segment this pool into logical networks attached to applications.
    VXLAN works by creating Layer 2 logical networks that are encapsulated in standard Layer 3 IP packets. A “Segment ID” in every frame differentiates the VXLAN logical networks from each other without any need for VLAN tags. This allows very large numbers of isolated Layer 2 VXLAN networks to co-exist on a common Layer 3 infrastructure.
    For more information see the posts of Scott Lowe and Duncan Epping.
  • App: is used to isolate and protect workloads based on trust levels, so that customers can protect critical applications in the virtual datacenter.
  • Data Security: adds to App functionality and provides Sensitive Data Discovery across virtualized resources, enabling IT organizations to quickly assess the state of compliance with regulations from across the world.
  • Edge: delivers an operationally efficient, simple and cost-effective security services gateway to secure the perimeter of virtual datacenters and provide integrated services such as load balancing, VPN, NAT etc.
  • vShield Manager: integrates with vCenter and vCloud Director for seamless management of all virtual datacenter resources.
  • vCloud Network Automation Framework: enables partners to add both hardware and software network and security services.

Of course VXLAN and new vShield suite features are quite interesting, but I want to discuss the “Extensible Platform” aspect. There are four points of possible integration for services:

  • Inside a virtual machine
  • Network access edge for a virtual machine
  • Network edge of a virtual datacenter
  • Management plane
Application programming interface shifting to Netsec API:
  • Load Balancing, IPS, WAN Optimization are some 3rd Party services solutions developing on the Netsec API
  • 3rd party vendors using the VMSafe API are transitioning over to the NetSec API
  • This kind of integration will be similar to the one provided already by Microsoft System Center 2012, but actually limited (for the networking part) only to load balancers.
Endpoint, such as antivirus scanning, is still part of the vSphere platform. This is because it uses the endpoint security API and not the NetSec API.
VMware

VDP: the new VDR in vSphere 5.1

29 August 2012
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In the new vSphere 5.1, there is a missing component replaced by a new one: VMware Data Recovery (VDR) has been replaced by the new VMware vSphere Data Protection (VDP).

VDR was a backup solution introduced with vSphere 4.0 and based on the VMware vSphere API for Data Protection (VADP) which includes the Changed Block Tracking (CBT) technology (to have incremental backup). But was a limited product (especially not suitable to scale to with several VMs) and also the 2.0 version introduced in vSphere 5.0 was not so changed too much (except in a little better stability).

continue reading…

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VM replication in vSphere 5.1

29 August 2012
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Another interesting feature in vSphere 5.1 is the vSphere Replication (VR) technology. This feature was first introduced on 2011 with Site Recovery Manager 5.0 (on vSphere 5.0) to protect virtual machines natively by copying their disk files to another location where they are ready to be recovered, using a VM replication technology (storage vendor independent) instead of the storage replication (storage vendor depend). It provides simple and cost-efficient replication of applications to a failover site.

The big change is that now it is a component delivered simple with vSphere editions (starting from Essentials Plus), and of course also comes bundled with Site Recovery Manager. This offers protection and simple recoverability to the vast majority of VMware customers without extra cost.

And it’s completly integrated in the new vSphere Web Client!

This feature is probably a clear replay to Microsoft move to include a similar function in their new Hyper-V3 product! But will be also a possible strike to some products in the ecosystem.

From technical point of view, it’s a non-disruptive technology: it does not use vSphere file-system snapshots nor impact the execution of the VM in any abnormal way. Since VR tracks changes at a sub-VM level, but above the file system, it is completely transparent to the VM unless Microsoft Volume Snapshot Service is being used to make the VM quiescent (and this could be handled in the write way).

It works in a similar way as on Site Recovery Manager 5.0, but now is more simple because it does not need SRM (although it could still be used) and also both the “VRMS and VRS” in the SRM 5.0 implementation of VR are included in a single “VR Appliance” now (still one per paired site and it could also support multi-site configuration!).

But note that vSphere Replication is targeted at replicating the virtual disks of powered on virtual machines only because it’s based on a disk filter to track changes that pass through it, therefore static images can not be tracked. For this reason could not be used in those cases:

  • Powered-off or suspended VMs
  • FT, linked clones, VM templates
  • VM snapshots in and of themselves are not replicated but instead are collapsed during replication (Note: Reverting from a snapshot may cause a full sync!)
  • Non-disks attached to a VM (ISOs, floppy images, etc) could not be replicated

Some interesting note:

  • Can replicate to a different format than its primary disk (for example you can replicate a thick provisioned disk to be a thin provisioned replica)
  • VMs can be replicated with a recovery point objective (RPO) of at most 15 minutes and at least 24 hours
  • Virtual Hardware 7 or later is required for VMs to be protected by VR
  • It require vCenter Server version 5.1 with the new Web Client, but can work with ESXi 5.x!
  • Both Storage vMotion and Storage DRS are supported, but with some considerations and exceptions

One important note is the dependency with vCenter Server, because on the other side you need vCenter Server to click “Recover”.If you have a single vCenter Server this could be a problem, but there is an unsopported solution descrived on this post.

Also the VA could be paired only with one vCenter Server, and this will limit the flexibility (for example in multi-site topology).

VMware

Enhanced vMotion with vSphere 5.1

29 August 2012
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With the new vSphere 5.1 a new vMotion option has been added (only in the new Web Client) that combine vMotion and Storage vMotion in a singe hot migration step to migrate between hosts/clusters without shared storage! This could increase the mobility of the VMs and usage also of local storage (for some cases). Both VM state and VM files are transported across network using the vMotion vmkernel interfaces (so a good network design could be necessary).

The requirements are:

  • Hosts must be managed by same vCenter Server
  • Hosts must be part of same Datacenter
  • Hosts must be on the same layer-2 network (and same switch if VDS is used)
  • Hosts must have the same CPU or have the same EVC baseline (like for the vMotion across clusters)

continue reading…

VMware ,

Bye bye vSphere Client

29 August 2012
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In the previous new products release we have notice several changes in some core parts, and several components are gone (see What’s in and what’s out). Now with the new vSphere 5.1 a new historical component (from the VI 3.0) will die soon: the vSphere Client!

The limits of this client are:

  • it works only on Windows client (so it isn’t a multi-platform solution) and has some dependency with the .NET Frameworks
  • it’s a thick client-server approach (compared with thin solutions, like browser oriented)
  • it’s “complicated” to deploy and upgrade (strange that VMware has not opted to a simple ThinApp packaged to deliver this products)
  • most of the vCenter plugins may require also a client plugin part

continue reading…

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