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Reclaim free space in Thin Provisioned vmdk disk

5 December 2011
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One of the “issue” with vmdk in thin format is that they start “small” and then grow when you add new data… But when you delete some data, the vmdk file size is not reduced.

To be honest this issue is more related to the guest file systems that does never delete the block data, but only the metada (or some of them). Of course at guest OS level you will see the right disk usage, but this will probably not match the one that you see at VMware level (that usually will be bigger).

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Highlights, vStorage ,

VCP5-DT Beta Exam

5 December 2011
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Today has started the beta period for the VCP5-DT exam (of course on View 5).  The exam is available through December 20, 2011.

I’ve received the official invite, but unfortunately in my Country there is any free seat for the entire beta period (this because only a subset of the testing center are authorized and in my Country there is a single center).

By the way, the VCP511-DT beta exam consists of 210 questions and a short pre-exam survey consisting of 7 questions. The time limit for the beta exam is 225 minutes, with an additional 15 minutes to complete the survey questions and agreements.

vCertification , ,

VMware View 5 – Disable the certificate warning

2 December 2011
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As described in the  release notes, one of the new features of View5 is the certificate check from the View Client (similar as the certificate check of the vSphere Client):

Updated client certificate checking for View clients – View clients now follow the well-known browser model for handling certificates, displaying errors detected in the certificate presented by View Connection Server, or in the certificate trust chain. Administrators can set the Certificate verification mode group policy to enforce strict certificate checking; if any certificate error occurs, the user cannot connect to View Connection Server. Alternatively, administrators can use the default Warn But Allow mode, which supports self-signed server certificates and lets users connect to View Connection Server with certificates that have expired or are not yet valid. If necessary, administrators can also set a No Security mode that lets users connect without certificate checking.

This feature is important for security reasons, but after a View 5 upgrade, can create some “diseases” for the users with the standard self-signed certificates. Each time that a user open the View Client a warning message is prompted (without any way to disable or permanent ignore it):

There are two different type of solution:

  • Replace the self-signed certificates with other that are signed by an official public CA (or at least by the internal CA).
  • Disable this check.

The recommend solution is replace the certificates and there are several site with the righ steps (for example see on VMware Community or on SSL certificates in VMware View environments).

But for small and simple environment, maybe could be simple disable the check. For this purpose a specific GPO rules must be enabled, as described in VMWare View 5.0 Client – Remove Certificate Warning Message at Startup.

But what’s happen for the clients that are not in the AD domain? The GPO must be applied on the side of the View Client, so a simple solution is apply the result of the GPO, by manually change the Windows Registry entries. In this case is quite simple because only a key is required (note that the Security branch may not exist in your Registry):

[HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareVMware, Inc.VMware VDMClientSecurity]
“CertCheckMode”=”0”

 

VMware, vSecurity ,

Fix vCenter Plugins list: Remove Enterprise Converter

1 December 2011
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One possible issue after a vSphere 5 upgrade using an in-place upgrade of vCenter Server could appear when you forget to remove the Converter Enterprise plugin (and/or the Guided Consolidation plugin). As you know some products has been removed from vSphere 5, and their plugins may remain in a “orphan” state.

The result of this issue is that you will have a “broken” plugins list (with some plugins that are no more available) and also a wrong vCenter health status, due to some services that are no more existing:

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VMware , ,

Veeam Backup & Replication 6

30 November 2011
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Finally, after several weeks from the official announce, Veeam Backup & Replication 6 is available (from yesterday). About the new features see:

One of the biggest news of Veeam v6 is the Multi-Hypervisor support: as of version 6 Veeam will now support both VMware (of course it support vSphere 5) and Microsoft Hyper-V all from the same interface.

Other interesting features are:

  • Scalability – Veeam has completely redesigned their backup architecture in v6.  With that they have the addition of backup proxy servers which offload the backup and replication traffic to the proxy server instead of the actual backup target.  This will allow for the use of a load balancing algorithm that splits the load amongst proxy servers, and in turn, allows for more concurrent jobs to run and faster backup speeds.  In terms of replication, the on-site backup proxy server can now send data directly to the target backup proxy server, completely bypassing the Veeam server itself.
  • 1-Click Happiness – Veeam has simplified a lot of their processes by creating a bunch of 1-click functionality.  Veeam has added 1 click events to their Instant Level File Recovery, Failover, Failback, VM Restore, and Automated Upgrades.  Perhaps the most useful ‘1-click’ event will be with the Instant Level File Recovery.  Prior to v6 I found this to be a monotonous task involving many steps and approvals to restore a file to a VM.  It will be nice to be able to do this with 1 click.
  • Traffic Throttling – In essence this allows you to do just that…throttle the Veeam Backup traffic.  This can be done via time based or day based as well.  This way we can guarantee what bandwidth will be used for Veeam traffic, and guarantee that we are not interfering with other traffic that might be flowing across a WAN link.
  • Wan Optimizations – There has been a lot of work done with WAN optimization, it appears in quite a few of the enhancements on the What’s New document.  Essentially they have improved and optimized the protocol used to transfer data across a wan, allowed for multiple TCP/IP connections per job, and with the addition of the the traffic throttling, proxy architecture and windows targets you have no excuse to not get your data off-site.Active Rollbacks – The restore points of a replica are now stored as native VMware Snapshots, leaving you with the ability to revert to a previous point in time without using the Veeam Backup and Replication server.
  • Improved Seeding – You can now use previous VMs located at your target site, or backups at your target site as the seed for your replica job, allowing you to start replication in an incremental fashion, rather than waiting for the first big initial seed of your VM.
  • Re-IP – one of the biggest and coolest enhancements in my book.  The ability to automatically reconfigure your VM’s IP at a DR site to align with your networks there.
Veeam, vProducts

ESXi – RDM disks with SAS Storage (local or shared)

29 November 2011
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The RDM disks are a feature of VMware vSphere (but was present also in Virtual Infrastructure) to make a “mapping” between a LUN (or logical disk) to a VM (is similar to a disk pass-through). This feature can be used in different cases, for example: to support disk larger than 2 TB (only in vSphere 5 with physical RDM) and to implement guest clustering with shared storage (still only with physical RDM).

But there is an issue (or a feature :) ) that does not allow to add a RDM disk from the GUI for local disk, and this also with vSphere 5. But the “silly” thing is that also a shared storage based on SAS connection is threaded in the same way (for example, in a Dell PowerVault MD3x00 series).

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Highlights, VMware, vStorage

New in vSphere 5 – VMware HA

28 November 2011
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With vSphere 5, the VMware HA part has been completely change on the implementation part, but the nice aspect is that it seems still the change on the user part (this is a good example on how improve in a painlessly way).

In vSphere 5.0 the new HA agent is “FDM” (Fault Domain Manager) and replace the old AAM agent (from EMC Legato). But not only the agent has changed:

  • The old Primary / Secondary node concept has been replaced by a new and more simple Master/Slave node concept
  • A new Datastore Heartbeat function as been added (HA Architecture Series – Datastore Heartbeating)
  • No dependency on DNS
  • Syslog functionality

For more information see the well explained Duncan’s HA Deep Dive.

Storage failure
With the new Datastore Heartbeat seems possible handle also the datastore failure. But it’s not true, this functions is not used to detect a storage failure but only to improve the isolation detection. So actually the only way to handle a storage failure is with a strong design for the maximum  availability (and/or with specific storage solutions).

Mixed clusters
With vSphere 5 and FDM,  a good question is if a mixed cluster (with 5.0 and previous hosts) is supported or not.  Meaning what happens if there is an ESX 4 host in the cluster that has not been upgraded yet and how it will be handled.
There is an excellent blog on this by Frank Denneman.  The short answer is it is supported, and will get the FDM agent, but you should upgrade the host as soon as reasonable.

HA & DRS appear disabled when a Storage Profile is enabled / disabled on a cluster
This came up recently and it turns out that while HA and DRS appear disabled, it is not correct.  You need to re-enable HA and DRS to see things correctly.  However it is important to understand that HA and DRS are in fact working.  See http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2008203

Advanced options
See the previous post.

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