Virtualization Team

As lately I have been testing several of our Enterprise Management Solutions, & I have been sharing them more often with our customers. After the announcement of vRAM, vCenter CapacityIQ is one of the products that seems to grab attention quickly. After delivering several POCs to customers, most of them have came back to me and asked me on the procedure to Grant a User Access to vCenter CapacityIQ. Most of them want to ensure that they can create a user name & password for their monitoring team that does not have access to anything else in vCenter. As the steps are not too clear in our documentation, I have decided to share it on here with few snapshots:

Capacity Management importance has been on the rise since Virtualization started becoming a main stream. In earlier days in the physical world, Capacity Planning/Management used to end at the time the hardware was purchased. In most cases, the hardware was over-sized to ensure it can handle the workload as well future growth of the application. Though as that over-sized box is dedicated to a single application, it did not matter how you sized that application as long the server has enough resources to run it. Though when virtualizing the story is fundamentally different, as now you have multiple VMs per server. If VMs are over-sized that means your consolidation ratio & other VMs performance can be affected. If Virtual machines are under-sized, then they will not perform well. Idle & unused VMs can be of a huge waste of expensive storage and need to be avoided.

Most organization today has different complains about their current performance monitoring tools. These problems are put under the magnifier when Virtualization or Private Cloud is implemented. Below are few of the main complains getting heard & VMware is trying to respond to by vCenter Operations Manager:

• Our Performance Management/Monitoring tools report too many metrics that is hard to make sense of & track.
• Our Performance Management/Monitoring tools report too many false positive events, which getting to be a nightmare for our admins.
• Our users are the first to notice performance problem before our admins can use our current Performance Management/Monitoring tools trying to find out the problem source.

One of the most asked questions lately by partners and customers when it come to VMware View 4.6 Implementation (I believe its applicable for older versions of View as well) is that when creating a Windows 7 Desktop Pools that utilize Linked Clones & try to utilize Quick Prep the deployment of desktop fails at the customizing stage. In the other hand, if they use SysPrep instead of Quick Prep the Desktop Deployment succeed & Desktops work normally though its much slower than Quick Prep can customize a Desktop VM. Further, Windows XP Pools work just fine with Quick Prep at the same setup. To be honest this has hit me before and that how I found out the solution.

Note: VMware vSphere 5 vRAM has dramatically been amended since the original announcement. For more info about what was amended then please check my following article: vSphere 5 vRam Licensing Amendment. Further, this article has been updated accordingly.

While others have decided to cover up all the nice features that is coming up with vSphere 5 & vCloud Director 1.5, I was quite busy explaining to customers that most of them are not affected by the new vSphere 5 vRAM Licensing Schema. Actually none of the existing customers who called me asking about the licensing change was near being affected by the new licensing schema. Let’s be honest when I first heard about the new licensing schema I had panicked too, but only few hours laters of research I have discovered it actually make sense and not as bad as it look at first glance.

For all of those Android Tablets fans who had a VMware View environment and wanted to connect to, but had no official VMware View Client that support Android this post is carrying out the good news to you. Now VMware has officially released a VMware View Client for Android Tablets, which finally will give us the same functionality iPAD users has enjoyed for a while. I believe now I can move on and buy an Android Tablets my self and be sure it will work with VMware View with the full functionality without any problem. Getting the VMware View Client up and running on your Android tablet is nothing more than a quick visit to your Android Market and download the client from there. You hear it correctly, VMware has just pushed the VMware View Client into the Android Market for ease of availability.

If you are an Ubuntu user like I am, a VMware View PCoIP Client for Ubuntu has been long waited for. Unfortunately, officially it still not released by VMware so if you want the official release then you just have to wait. Though if you are looking for a work around then its here, and you don’t need to get stuck with the disastrous RDP protocol. Before I mention anything further, how about watching the below video as a teaser. A real teaser!



I have noticed many partners lately complaining about their Capacity Planning report having below expected VM per server Density, & has normally been granted access to their Capacity Planning Project to optimize the report. I have decided I will share the info on here on which parameters to change in order to  get a decent VM per Server Density in your CP report. Although I have been using these numbers successfully During my job for a while, and I know that many of my colleagues are following the same I provide no explicit/implicit guarantee of the results nor my employer. If you think your capacity planner report got out of hand on results (Ex 1000 vm per host), then please check what you have done wrong or contact your local VMware SE, or feel free to leave me a comment below. I will repeat use at your own risk, & ensure to use your judgement before submitting the report to customers.

Note: If you have read this article earlier, please read this revised version of it as after getting multiple comments from different readers I have noticed that although the over all statement of the article was correct the calculation example was not fully accurate so I have gone through the Microsoft Licensing and the comments all over again and accommodated for this in my revised version.

In this post, I will show you a secret that you need to know if you are already using VMware vSphere or if you are planning to buy VMware vSphere. One call to Microsoft to recalculate your Windows/SQL licenses can give you a licenses cut on Microsoft licenses that will pay for VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus and still save you tons of money a side. That means you don’t show management that you got vSphere Enterprise Plus for no Extra cost, but as well saved them a huge amount on Microsoft Licenses renewal. I was going to name this post:

Lately vShield seems to gain much popularity due to all the security benefits it offer in a virtual environment. Further, the security concern of merging 10s and (maybe 100s in the near future) of VMs on the same host seems just to push the demand for similar security capabilities in the Enterprise.  It seems there is a lot of confusion on which version of vSphere you require to run vShield products. This has been specially raised up with vShield Zone being a part of vSphere Advanced Edition and above, & people assuming the rest of the vShield Family will only work with vSphere Advanced and above. To be honest I had the question about a week back from one of our partners, and I did not know the answer and was trying to look it up on the net. Though I had no official answer in any of our documentation even internal one but found multiple blogs that posted different answers. Though my colleague @wibrahim had an e-mail from our security team with the official answer that I would like to share it with you. First thanks to @wibrahim for sharing the info, & being kind enough to take the time and share the original e-mail with me.

I have order the “vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS Technical Deepdive” by @DuncanYB most famous by 007 & @FrankDenneman about 3 months back on Amazon. I received the book about one month after ordering due to the distance the book had to travel I guess, although I paid for shipping more than I paid for the book. I can not blame the authors for the long shipping time, as I had this same problem with Amazon with every book I have ever ordered.  So if you are in rush for the book, then you might want to look at buying the e-book edition at even a cheaper price than the paper back. This was not available at the time I ordered, though hey having the paper back was worth the wait.

As many organization today are in the process for moving from VMware ESX to to ESXi, it has been important to VMware to educate its partners & customers of the process and difference.  For that VMware is offering a free web training “Free Transition to ESXi essential training” to everyone who want to learn more about ESXi. The training can be found at:   Free Transition to ESXi essential training Link . I hope you wall enjoy this free training. Free as in free Beer .

Ah below are the description of the training as officially was posted on the VMware site:

Title: Transition to ESXi Essentials

Summary

- Format: Self-Paced

- Length: 4 Hours

As more and more companies offer different way of doing cloud computing, the concept it self is getting fuzzier to the consumer. Further, after VMware has prompted the idea of Hybrid Cloud Computing, many other companies have copied the road map as usual and started to talk about it as being the first to promote it. The funny part is when you look about how to move workload between the Private & Public cloud which was one of the matters discussed in VMware original Hyprid Cloud plan, you will find not much of an answer or plan at most vendors. VMware VCloud Connector was the first part of the answer to this strategy, but not yet the full solution. Things that are coming in the future should enable the workload to move across the Private and Public Cloud with zero downtime to enable a real Hybrid Cloud. This will require a long distance vmotion to work across datacenters. Today many solutions are out there to enable VMware Long Distance VMotion between datacenters, & it get me wondering how thing will look like when these are fully integrated with vCloud Director/vCloud Connector out of the box in the future. That seems to give us a real Hybrid Cloud Computing that we were talking about.

For all of you vExperts out there I am sure you have already received an e-mail from John Troyer informing you to fill the forum for VMware vExpert 2011. The nomination/registration process for the VMware vExpert 2011 program has already started, & the last day for registration will be: May 6th, 2011. If you have been a vExpert for 2010, then make sure you fill the required forum to be considered for vExpert 2011 as being a vExpert 2010 does not automatically register you for vExpert 2011. Further, I have noticed the registration form for VMware vExpert 2011 require you to fill much more info about your actual contribution than it did in 2010. Further, even if you nominate someone he will still have to fill the form him self. It seems the vExpert 2011 criteria will be tougher than vExpert 2010.

While VMware Compatibility Guide has always been quite helpful in finding the compatibility between different part of the virtual infrastructure. Vmware are currently working on releasing a next generation of the tool which can provide more details and better search options. You can start utilizing the tool by trying it out in beta at: http://partnerweb.vmware.com/comp_guide2/search.php

Enjoy the ride, & make sure to take the survey to help the development team enhance it with features you require. Make the difference & contribute!!!