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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

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VMware

VMware reveils the news in the End User Computing

28 August 2012
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During the keynote of the second day, Steve Herrold have present the new End User Computing (EUC) solutions from VMware.

Starting from the new View and Mirage approach where you can handle both physical and virtual desktop and you really plan both Windows OS migrations (from XP to 7 for example), but also handle the move from physical to virtual (with a real good live example from Vittorio Viarengo).

The next part was the Horizon Suite that can handle the access to all desktops, applications, data of you EUC.

Included the Horizon Mobile that could handle smartphone (and this year the demo was on the iOS version).

For more information see the entire keynote.

VMware ,

VMware Cloud Suite 5.1 announce

27 August 2012
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Yesterday, during the live event, VMware has announced the new release of most of their Cloud Suite products (concept already introduced with the announce of the release 5).

New release will be v5.1 for all products to adopt a uniform and consistency enumeration across products (View 5.1 was already released some month ago!).

So this will be the versions changes for the suite:

  • vSphere 5.0 -> 5.1
  • vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) 1.0 -> 5.1?
  • vCloud Director 1.5 -> 5.1
  • vShield 5.0 -> 5.1
  • vCenter SRM 5.0 -> 5.1
  • vCenter Operations 5.0 -> 5.1?

As you can notice, the suite is no more a simple virtualization suite (ESXi + vCenter Server), but is more complex according the evolution of the virtualization market (with more focus on the cloud) and, of course, of also the technologies and the customer’s needs.

The new vSphere 5.1 will probably be also a reply to the Microsoft Hyper-V3 announces (where most gaps will be closed). In this way we could finally be able to compare the features of two homogeneous product’s version!

What is really interesting is that, due to minor release changes (for most products), those products will be available for people that already have the last version.

VMware

VMware Workstation 9 and Fusion 5

23 August 2012
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Could seems strange, but VMware has announce the new release of Workstation 9 and Fusion 5 some days before VMworld US. Probably to keep the focus of the announces on the Enterprise and Cloud platform.

For Workstation, of course this release will support Windows 8 (seems also in the Windows 8 style interface). But more interesting seems:

  • OpenGL support in Linux
  • Restricted Virtual Machines
  • A new web interface to share VMs
  • Hyper-V (although is not supported)

See also:

VMware none

VM replication in VMware SRM 5.0

23 August 2012
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One of the interesting feature of VMware SRM 5.0.x is the vSphere Replication (VR) technology that is a VM a replication engine (part of SRM 5.0 and that also requires ESXi 5.0 and later) to implement protecting and replicating virtual machines between sites without the need of storage array–based replication (that usually it’s costly and too much vendor dependent).

It use different elements:

  • VRA (vSphere Replication agent): included in ESXi starting from v5.0
  • VRMS (vSphere Replication Management Server): one virtual appliance (VA) for each site to handle the communication
  • VRS (vSphere Replication Server): one virtual appliance (VA) on the DR side that is just the “target” of the VR agent

The deployment of all those VA could be simple handled from the SRM plugin.

How VR determines what is different and what needs to be replicated

There are two forms of synchronization that VR will use to keep systems synchronized:

  • “Full synch”: that happens usually just on the first pass when the VM is configured for VR, but can also happen occasionally during other situations such as when recovering from a crash.
    When VR is first configured for a virtual machine you can choose a primary disk file or set of disk files and a remote target location to hold the replica. This can be an empty folder, or it can be a copy of the VMDK that has the same UUID as the primary protected system.The first thing VR will do when synchronizing is read the entire disk of both the protected and recovery site and generate a checksum for each block.
    Then it compares the checksum mapping between the two disk files and thereby creates an initial block bundle that needs to be replicated on the first pass to bring the block checksums into alignment. This happens on port 31031.
  • “Lightweight delta”: the ongoing replication is by use of an agent and vSCSI filter that reside within the kernel of an ESXi 5.0 host that tracks the I/O and keeps a bitmap in memory of changed blocks and backs this with a “persistent state file” (.psf) in the home directory of the VM. The psf file contains only pointers to the changed blocks. When it is time to replicate the changes to the remote site, as dictated by the RPO set for the vmdk, a bundle is created with the blocks that are changed and this is sent to the remote site for committing to disk. This replication happens on port 44046.

For more information see also:

VMware

Issue in VM migration: MAC Address may change

22 August 2012
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Recently I got a strange issue using a cold storage migration usign the Migrate function of vCenter Server.

This was the scenario: a Free Hypervisor with some VMs where a full license (Essential Plus) was added and the host was also added to a vCenter Server. For compatibility matrix reason the version 4.1 was used (although the storage can work with vSphere 5.0 but officially was not supported). Also the Free Hypervisor was build with the 4.0 version and upgraded (one year ago) to the 4.1 version.

This was the issue: after a cold storage migration all the VM build when the ESXi was on version 4.0 have changed their MAC address. No issue on the VM build when ESXi was upgraded to the 4.1 (but still in free mode).

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VMware, vNetworking none

SRM issue: how clean a pending reprotecting task

21 August 2012
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Around a month ago I’ve got an issue with VMware SRM 5.0.1 during a test of the Recovery Plan.

In my case the storage was well configured for the replication, but not to permit the reverse reverse replication. So the reprotect task was locked and there was no way to remove this state because also the Delete Protection group was greyed out. If you fix the storage part usually the issue could be fixed in a clean way, but in my case the original LUN was removed and was not possible resume or fix the operation (also if you build a new LUN the ID could not be same). Also a SRM reboot was unsuccessful because the state was in the database.

I’ve looked around but I’ve not found a clean solution, so I’ve simple build a new Protection Group to look in the SRM DB and compare the wrong state with the clean one. With a little of patiance you can find the tables (note that are more than one and both on the production and the disaster recovery site) and fix the values. After that you can finally delete the Protection Group to really clean the database.

Now I’ve notice that there is a recent KB 2032621 (Protection group in vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5.x hangs in reprotecting state during the reprotect task), available from Aug 9 2012, that describe exactly this situation and the same solution.

VMware none
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