Archive for the ‘Scott Sauer’ Category

 

 

Making career choices is never an easy thing to do as there is no manual or guide book that helps you along the way.  But like with most things in life, we take the millions of different pieces of information and form a conclusion that makes sense personally.  I have been with VMware for 3 years now, and words can’t describe how awesome the ride has been, and how great it has been to be a part of such an awesome company/technology.  I can’t speak highly enough of the great people and the personal friendships that I have had the opportunity to form while working here.  But opportunities do come along, and some you find a deep sense of magnetic allure that you just can’t shake.  Those are the opportunities that you have to go after.  I have decided to accept a position with Tintri as a senior systems engineer (pre-sales) covering my local patch.

Tintri has piqued my interest for quite some time now, and the more I dug into the technology I was literally blown away by the innovation that they are bringing to the table.  There is a lot of disruption in the storage industry recently, and Tintri is one of the newer players that is bringing a big change in the way that we look at VMware and storage.  Tintri has taken a step back from the normal methods and constructs in which we manage storage, and completely re-defined the approach on how we should be treating virtual machine workloads when they interface with the storage subsystem.  You are no longer are bound to conventional storage management mechanisms such as LUN’s and volumes, but actually now manage the virtual machines directly on the storage array, which simplifies a lot of the complexities in the storage stack.  Combine this new approach with a hybrid SSD/HDD array and does both de-dup and compression on the fly, and you have something that is quite remarkable.

The Tintri VMstore visualization is a very powerful tool for VMware administrators.  One can quickly gain insight into the top performance issues with the click of a button (in the VIC client).  See screenshot below.  Combine all of these things together (along with some other roadmap items that are coming) and you have a very powerful solution that will solve a big pain point that most of my customers deal with on a daily basis.

 

 

I am all in with Tintri.

-Scott

 

Introduction

VMware vCloud Automation Center is a very powerful tool that many of my customers are starting to deploy within their organizations. What is vCloud Automation Center you say?  Directly from our vCAC website: “Rapidly deploy and provision cloud services across private and public clouds, physical infrastructures, hypervisors and public cloud providers with VMware vCloud Automation Center. vCloud Automation Center allows authorized users access to standardized IT services through a secure self-service portal, acting as a service governor and helping enforce business and IT policies throughout the service lifecycle.”

 

Customizations

As I mentioned in my previous blog post after VMware first acquired DynamicOps, vCAC is a self-service interface that begins to hand off some of the manual provisioning tasks that many organizations deal with.  This allows your organization to become much more agile, spinning up physical/virtual/cloud resources on the fly.  Having a nice visual representation of your service catalog is important for your end users as we begin to make this shift to a self-service model.  You want your customers to have a nice experience as they begin to consume your services, to entice them to adopt and return back in the future.  Customizing this portal for your environment is critical.  vCAC ships with a few icons that represent your infrastructure and services, but they are very limited in nature.

I decided to pull together a lot of industry infrastructure icons that customers might find useful when they are building out their service catalog.  I have resized them to the correct format for vCAC 32×32, and saved them as .PNG files as supported by the product.

 

Why go with this?

 

When you can have this!

vCAC Icon Pack

To import the icon pack, simply login as your vCAC administrator that you have already defined.  1.  Goto the “vCAC Administrator” incon on the left side of the menu as shown.  2.  Select the menu option “Customization” within this menu category.

 

1.  Once you have selected the “Customization” menu option go to the upper right hand side of the screen.  2.  Select the “Icons” tab that is called out in the image above.  Extract the icon files from the zip file to a local folder on your machine.  3.  Select the browse button to import the icons that you find useful for your environment.

 

Ready for the vCAC Icon Pack?  Click the link below!

 

 

I was fortunate enough to get the opportunity to spend some time with the DynamicOps team at one of my customer accounts recently.  DynamicOps (Cloud Automation Center aka DCAC) is a very robust tool that provides many of the attributes that we need to run “IaaS” or “Infrastructure as a Service”.  The self-service portal, approvals, automation, support for physical/virtual/cloud is something that DynamicOps has mastered in their solution set.   I now see why VMware made the decision to add DynamicOps to the strategic vision that we are executing against.

I thought I would pull a short video clip together that showed some of the base functionality of DynamicOps and how it integrates with VMware vSphere.  This demo environment is based off the VMworld labs that some of you may have experienced in San Francisco 2012.  The remainder of you better be at VMworld 2012 Barcelona to get some stick time with DynamicOps!  I will be there how about you?

 

-Scott

 

 

Are you Ready?

Hopefully you read my last Socialcast blog post so you know that I have been working on developing the Socialcast hands on labs for VMworld 2012.  I also mentioned two other efforts I was working on to raise the visibility of Socialcast at VMworld 2012.  Reaching out to the Socialcast team to leverage Socialcast for the attendees of the VMworld conference, and the other was engaging one of my customers (one of the largest Socialcast customers) to present at a general session.  I am happy to report that I have successfully completed 3 out of 3 of my objectives and all of these components are going to take place.

 

Socialcast General Sessions

One of the largest customers that I support, happens to be one of the largest Socialcast implementations we have in production.  I reached out to Jeff Ross of Humana, and Jeff agreed to present this year at VMworld 2012.  Check out the two sessions that Jeff will be leading, I suggest you attend both of these if you are seriously considering the adoption of a corporate social networking platform.  Jeff has the experience and wisdom of what it takes to successfully bring Socialcast into production in a corporate environment.  Thanks for stepping up Jeff, I am looking forward to your sessions!  Sign up for either of Jeff’s sessions with the links below.

 

 

EUC2909 – Using Socialcast to Build a Successful Internal Social Collaboration Community
While a majority of employees participate in at least one social network outside of work, not all companies use the power of social networks internally to their own advantage. In this presentation, learn how the Fortune 100 company Humana Inc. went from zero to a dynamic internal community with 20,000 users and 1,000 groups in a two-year period using the Socialcast® platform. Learn from the things it did well and from its mistakes. Companies won’t succeed with a “build it and they will come” attitude when it comes to internal social platforms. It takes a strategy, sound online community principles, resources and constant effort to grow in quantity and quality, break down internal silos and foster a sense of community that transcends geographical and functional boundaries. This session will provide substantive detail of one company’s successful implementation so that your current or future implementation can succeed as well.
Jeff Ross – Community Manager, Humana Inc.

 

EUC2592 – Gain Competitive Advantage with Enterprise Social: Best Practices from Leading Companies on the Front Lines
Section 1 – Building the case for Enterprise Social Networks Provide a general overview of Social Technologies and their impact on organizations. •    The Social World – The world is being transformed by social technologies and new ways of working •    The Social Enterprise – An enterprise becomes social when it develops the skills and a strategy to apply mass collaboration to business challenges and opportunities •    The Promise of Socialcast – What we were hoping to gain by implementing an Enterprise Social Network (ESN) – Vision, strategy, features and benefits Section 2 – Evaluating and Implementing a Successful Enterprise Social Network Highlight key elements and best practices of the implementation process including business system integrations and governance. Section 3 – Driving Adoption, Engagement and Business Value Showcase key statistics, use cases and business value outcomes of a successful ESN journey.
Marc Fenner – Sr. Business Analyst, VMware, Inc.
Jeff Ross – Community Manager, Humana Inc.
Becky Graebe – Corporate Communications Manager, SAS
Joan Bodensteiner – VP Marketing, Socialcast, VMware, Inc.

 

Hands on Labs

Countless hours went into putting this lab together with my co-captain Patrick O’Brien, and I hope you enjoy some of the fun that we built into the lab. The goal was to give attendees quick visibility into the product, from both an end user perspective, as well as an application administration perspective. We were told to design two labs each 30 minute product overviews. Here is what you can look forward to when you come take my lab at VMworld 2012!! (shameless self plug goes here).

 

Look for special guest appearances in the Socialcast labs from a movie you have most likely seen!  Can you take a guess which character role you will be taking on?

Socialcast Lab 1 (HOL-EUC-07-01): VMware Socialcast Feature Walkthrough (30 min Abstract: This lab will introduce the participant to the advanced features of Socialcast, the market-leading enterprise social network. Socialcast allows your company to easily collaborate on ideas, documents, and projects. The participant will login to an interactive Socialcast environment to get a feel for what a production deployment of Socialcast might look like.

Socialcast Lab 2 (HOL-EUC-07-02): Administration of VMware Socialcast (30 min Product Lab) Abstract: This lab will introduce the advanced administration features of VMware Socialcast. Participants will learn how to configure and customize a Socialcast community, extend Socialcast into other business applications such as SharePoint, and utilize Socialcast’s advanced business analytics. Participants will login to the Socialcast Cluster Management Console (SCMC) and configure administrative tasks (setup backups, create support bundle).

 

Socialcast for VMworld attendees

I reached out to our CMO Rick Jackson to propose the concept of conference attendees have access to Socialcast for the actual conference. Rick informed me that we actually already had efforts underway to try to make this happen and pointed me to the team that was working this VMworld project.

The marketing team has given me the go-ahead to reveal that conference attendees will be able to login to a special VMworld 2012 SaaS version of Socialcast and collaborate between each other. This will give you another great way to hook up with friends, find out what’s going on, and post pictures of your friends on stage with Jon Bon Jovi!

Download the Socialcast mobile app for your device now, you will be able to access the site from the device of your choice to keep up with friends and colleges through out the entire event!  The Socialcast site should be opening up to registered attendees later this week.

Here is a screenshot of the Socialcast http://vmworld.socialcast.com attendee interface that you will soon have access too:

Here are a few of the initial groups that have been created, look forward to many more!

 

 

Conclusion

VMworld 2012 will be a great event offering attendees a wealth of VMware knowledge and information.  Set some time aside out of your busy agenda to examine Socialcast for your enterprise.  There will be several different ways to get technical information, and Jeff will take you through his journey at Humana and discuss some of the best practices around standing up a Social collaboration platform in a large corporation.  Come find me in the labs when you get some downtime and we can catch up!

Don’t forget, you can get 50 free seats of Socialcast for your business today so give it a shot, simply scan the QR code below!

 

Introduction

A couple of weeks ago I was presenting at the regional Columbus, OH VMUG on “Troubleshooting Storage Performance in vSphere”.  The content was put together by our internal storage guru Joseph Dieckhans and I modified some of the content along the way.  If you are interested in seeing the presentation, you can view it here.

The presentation covers a lot of great information on troubleshooting with ESXTOP and identifying the various subcomponents of the storage stack that are important to monitor.  When I deliver this presentation, it typically brings up some great questions and conversations.  One of the questions that was asked was around VMware vCenter Operations Manager and it’s ability to monitor storage.  My answer was yes, vCops will do a great job monitoring your storage infrastructure, as it uses analytics to understand your storage performance and will send smart alerts when there are anomalies.  But the customer wanted to know if we were specifically  monitoring all of the components in ESXTOP that we were covering in the session.  Good question!

vCops Metrics

I decided to dig into this one to see if there were any gaps between good old ESXTOP and vCops so let’s take a look.  Below is a screenshot of the vCops disks statistics that are being monitored for the various LUNS.  In this example I am showing you a iSCSI device being presented to the ESX host. 

As you can see vCops is monitoring latency, Kbps, and SCSI reservation conflicts.  That’s a pretty good list of metrics that you would want to know about if you suspected a problem with the storage infrastructure.  I think even CTU’s very own technical specialist, Chloe O’Brian, would be happy with those metrics.

Get more Detail

If you think you’re better than Chloe, and need more detail than what’s provided out of the box with vCops, have no fear.  VMware vCops is very flexible and you can customize the data feeds in a lot of different ways.  You might have recently seen Clint Kitson’s posts around injecting metrics into vCops.  This was the first phase of EMC integrating their storage specifics metrics into vCops for analysis and reporting (unsupported).  EMC is working on an official adapter that their customers will be able to leverage if they are a VMware vCops customer.  I expect we sill see more and more storage vendors offering up a supported adapter for vCops in the future.

Powershell is a great way to pull VMware performance data. You can utilize “get-esxtop” or the “get-stat” commands the get the same visibility as what is covered in the troubleshooting storage presentation.  Let’s see if we can add more details to vCops than what is given to us out of the box.

PowerCLI commands

Let’s start with an important metric we covered in the presentation.  Let’s get the metric “KAVG” from PowerCLI and have it display data back for a system we are interested in monitoring.  Here I am utilizing the PowerCLI command “get-stat” to pull some statistics on the VMKernel and it’s associated latency.  (Should be below 0 ms, if above 2ms you should investigate!).

Connect-VIServer -Server [YOUR HOST] -User root -Password [Your Password]
get-stat -instance [YOUR DEVICE] -Stat disk.kernellatency.average

Here are the returned values I get back from the above query:

Let’s format the data results for vCops just append the following to the end of the above command so it looks like this:

Connect-VIServer -Server 192.168.1.101 -User root –Password  REDACTED get-stat -instance naa.5000144f05346019 -Stat disk.kernellatency.average | sort timestamp -desc | select -first 1 | select @{n="name";e={$_.instance}},value

 

Ok great, now we have the data points I am interested in so let’s take it into vCops with the work Clint Kitson and Matt Cowger put together.  The following powershell script now takes the output and passes it off to vCops via a http post command.

C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\Infrastructure\vSphere PowerCLI> C:\Users
\ssauer\Desktop\kavg.ps1 | C:\Users\ssauer\Desktop\ps_vcops_httpost.ps1 -vcopsip
192.168.1.220 -devicename iSCSI -resourcedescription "iSCSI KAVG" -devicetype p
s-vmware-esxtop -protocol https -vcopsuser admin -vcopspass *REDACTED* -post;sleep
60

 

Let’s login to the vCops custom UI and check out our data to see if it’s posting correctly.  (https://(VCOPS-IP/vcops-custom).  Navigate to the environment tab at the top of the screen, then select the option “environment overview” to find the new http post.  It most likely will show a blue icon as vCops hasn’t had enough time to baseline the data to understand the dynamic thresholds.

The above data graph isn’t really that sexy, since my home ESX lab host isn’t being worked hard enough to calculate.You can now setup a task to run the powershell script every x amount of minutes to automate the data pull.  From here you can now create a customized dashboard for the specific data metrics you would like to present back to your operations team or possibly your manager to show him why you deserve a raise.

Conclusion

The question about getting ESXTOP data into vCops has now been answered.  With the example above you can now pull some specific ESXTOP or statistics into the product.  This is obviously not an approved or supported method, and certainly not a method I would recommend implementing in a large scale fashion.  It is a helpful utility that you can leverage for troubleshooting performance problems in your storage stack.  Not only do you have a visual representation of these data metrics, but you are now leveraging the vCops patent analytics to start getting smart alerts on data anomalies.

-Scott

 

 

 

 

VMworld 2012 is rapidly approaching, and believe it or not, it will be here before we know it!  Call for papers is open now, and you have till May 18th to submit your idea to the VMworld team.  Just in case you missed some of the details, VMworld US is to be hosted in San Francisco August 27-30 and VMworld Europe will be hosted in Barcelona, October 9-11.  It will be an amazing event as always, with some really awesome technology announcements from VMware.  Mark it in your calendar now, socialize the concept to your manager, inform the family, tell the neighbors, do what you need to do but get there!!

 

This year I wanted to participate in the creation process of the VMworld Labs as I think it’s such a remarkable component of the event.  In 2010 we delivered over 200+ thousand VM’s to customers across 27 different labs, that is an amazing accomplishment.  This years hands on labs will only be bigger, better, and even “more epic”.  I can’t reveal all the details yet but stay tuned, as we have some very exciting things in flight right now.

One of the labs that caught my interest was the Socialcast labs.  I wanted to do something outside my core knowledge base and pickup something that I haven’t had much exposure to.  Socialcast is something I have had a lot of experience with from an end user consumption aspect but nothing on the backend infrastructure perspective.  VMware has a great internal implementation of Socialcast that we have been using excessively for some time now.  I can’t underscore how important Socialcast has become for our company as a place where we can share technical product infromation, idea’s and concepts, presentations, status polls, and basic collaboration. (There is even a Pets of VMware Photo Group) 

 

 

“Socialcast software unites people, information and applications across the enterprise in a collaborative community. Help employees focus on meaningful work, share knowledge and discover data in real-time. Behind the firewall or in the cloud, Socialcast enables
secure enterprise collaboration in-context. “ 

Many people reading this blog post understand the power of collaboration and social media.  It is an important component of our being to give back to the larger community to help foster idea’s and innovation.  Socialcast is a framework that allows this collaboration to exist within the confines of your own protected environment. 

I will be working with the Socailcast team over the next several months to design a impactful lab that I am hoping many of you will take.  I have reached out to our CMO, and the VMworld team, to see if we can integrate Socialcast into the VMworld.com website so attendees of the event can actually utilize Socialcast during the convention.  (Idea is still being considered).  I am reaching out to one of my largest customers that has one of the biggest implementations of Socialcast in production to see if they are able to present at VMworld this year as an additional topic.

I’m looking forward to seeing you at VMworld, if your there please sign up for the Socialcast lab and give it a test drive!

-Scott

Introduction

VMware made an exciting announcement at VMworld 2011 that didn’t get much press or attention.  The VMworld labs were slated to be released for customers interested in doing technology previews of our software solutions in early 2012.  Notice I didn’t use the term “Proof of Concept” as this implies different things to different people.  Proof of concept could have business requirements, technical requirements, or users  that are associated to  your specific environment.  I am happy to report that the “VMware Virtual Customer Labs” (vCL) are now available for **selected customers.  I wanted to do a write-up about the vCL, what it is, and how it works as I think this is a unique offering that VMware is providing it’s customers.

 

What is the vCL?

The vCL is based off VMware vSphere 5, VMware vCloud Director 1.5 along with vCenter Orchestrator for automation.  This is something that VMware has been using internally for years called the “vSEL” or the VMware SE Labs.  vCL is designed to be a fully automated cloud solution where users can checkout VMware software solutions for 14 days of testing and training/education.  The vCL was built around the concepts of saving customers time (manual installs, deployments, infrastructure configuration) and hardware costs as VMware hosts the environment on behalf of our customers.

 

The Workflow Automation

Automation is part of any cloud solution, if you stop to think about it your really getting a demonstration of vCloud Director along with any of the other labs you check out!  Let’s kickoff the backend automation once a customer requests access to a lab environment.  In this example I am the customer and I am interested in selecting the SRM 5 environment to test out.  As a VMware systems engineer, I login (approval phase) and submit the request to the vCL system.

 

Below are the vCL options  that I am going to configure for the customer, this includes the customer name, which lab they are interested in and basic information like an e-mail address.  In this example I am using myself as the customer name to show some of this functionality.

 

Once I submit my request, I get an automated e-mail (below) indicating that my request has been accepted and the build process has been initiated.  As you can see this might take slightly longer than normal as we are delivering full cloned vApps to ensure performance and a great user experience.

 

Once my environment has completed it’s provisioning process, the customer along with the VMware engineer get an e-mail confirming the build is complete.  The e-mail contains the URL for accessing the environment, along with the custom username and password for authentication purposes.

Here comes the exciting part, let’s login!  Here is the main splash screen where I authenticate with my credentials I received in the previous step.  Note you need to accept the VMware EULA to access the environment or you will not be able to login and gain access.

 

I now have complete access to my personalized demo SRM environment where I can now begin testing SRM 5.0!  As I mentioned earlier, I get 2 weeks to walk-through the lab and complete any testing I would like to perform.  The lab manuals will be provided by the systems engineer that you work with when you request your access to the environment.

 

 

A Special Thanks!

I wanted to give special thanks and some recognition to the vCL team for all of their hard work and efforts that went into this project.  It is still a work in progress, but the team is in the process of adding more labs to the service catalog.  They are also planning on adding more back-end storage to accommodate supporting more customers and ensuring scalability from a performance perspective.  Great  work guys!

 

Note:

** Selected Customer indicates those that are supported by a pre-sales systems engineer.  The SE is the owner of the customer experience and is responsible for coordinating the customer requests and ensuring they are getting the desired results from the vCL.

 

Introduction

Virtualizing and running Java workloads on vSphere is absolutely a reality, but when I talk to customers I emphasize the same best practices as virtualizing Tier 1 workloads.  The rules are not the same as basic consolidation and containment and you need to understand, plan, and architect your virtualization platform if you want to be successful. 

I spend much of my time working with customer infrastructure engineers and architects, and when topics of Java come up, the conversation takes a turn.  The infrastructure teams typically don’t want to get into the application stack and I can’t say that I blame them.  Java and programming are a completely different skillset and the infrastructure engineers already have enough full time jobs keeping the datacenter running.  The purpose of the blog post is to help shed some light on a new technology in vSphere 5 called “Elastic Memory for Java” or EM4J and hopefully some other simple Java best practices and information as well.  The end state of this blog is to help you bring up an EM4J configuration of your own so you can begin to see the value and test your own JVM configurations.  I am also writing this to help educate some of the infrastructure engineers and help explain why this feature matters (Disclaimer = I am not a Java programming guy).

 

What is EM4J?

Hopefully you are somewhat familiar with the intelligent memory management features that come with the vSphere platform such as memory ballooning.  Ballooning is a great technique that allows you to reclaim memory from virtual machines if it’s not in use by the VM.  When dealing with Java workloads a VMware best practice has always been to set reservations for the virtual machine.  This means we are always guaranteeing (or backing) that the memory will be available to the VM when it needs it.  When a memory reservation is set for a VM the hypervisor won’t reclaim memory from this VM (which means VM’s memory won’t be ballooned, compressed or swapped to persistent storage) if memory is tight on the host.

If you consider the definition of JVM (Java Virtual Machine) the last two words are important to consider when talking VMware virtualization.  Running a VM on a VM creates somewhat of a problem for the hypervisor.  The JVM is essentially a black box to the hypervisor and it has no visibility into what’s going on inside it’s environment.  EM4J on the other hand allows one to reclaim memory through a much cheaper mechanism, and induces GCs at the moments when VM is handling relatively low load. It does not eliminate long pauses as VMs without full reservations can end up swapping, but it significantly reduces pause time and provides a more graceful performance degradation when running overcommitted, making workload’s performance more predictable.  Now that I have described some of the characteristics, here is the actual definition according to the VMware documentation:

 

“Elastic Memory for Java (EM4J) manages a memory balloon that sits directly in the Java heap and works with new memory reclamation capabilities introduced in ESXi 5.0. EM4J works with the hypervisor to communicate system-wide memory pressure directly into the Java heap, forcing Java to clean up proactively and return memory at the most appropriate times—when it is least active. You no longer have to be so conservative with your heap sizing because unused heap memory is no longer wasted on uncollected garbage objects. And you no longer have to give Java 100% of the memory that it needs; EM4J ensures that memory is used more efficiently, without risking sudden and unpredictable performance problems.”

 

As you can see VMware is taking the same underlying technology that has been used for years across our customer base and applying it to Java workloads to gain more/better efficiencies at scale.  The same performance characteristics apply to EM4J as they do to the ballooning in the VMware ESX hypervisor.  Ballooning will only be invoked if the system is over committing memory, and has to begin utilizing its advanced memory management techniques.  The benefit of EM4J is when the host is under memory pressure, the end user experience will be the same as if the VM was hard backed with physical RAM as we discussed earlier.

 

Getting started

EM4J is a product that works in conjunction with vSphere 5 and vFabric tc Server that is bundled with vFabric Standard and Advanced.  EM4J can also work directly with Apache Tomcat.  You might be asking yourself what is vFabric tc Server at this point and why the hell do I care about that?    vFabric tc Server is a Java application server based on Apache Tomcat that VMware maintains and supports.  This is a competitive product to a IBM WebSphere or an Oracle WebLogic, but is a much lighter weight Java container that allows faster deployments in development as well as production environments.   As a systems infrastructure engineer it is imperative that you understand these types of Java workloads from a high level.  Your success in moving these workloads into a virtual infrastructure depends on it and is irrelevant to EM4J.  Before I jump in and show you how to set this up there are a few things we need to get out of the way first.  Here is what your going to need to begin utilizing EM4J for your own testing, grab it now:

• VMware vSphere 5
• VMware vFabric tc Server 2.6
• VMware vSphere 5 Web Console (for reporting visibility)
• VMware vFabric EM4J Documentation
• VMware vFabric EM4J web console UI plug-in
• Redhat RHEL 5 operating system (Officially supported OS today)
• JVM Hotspot 1.6

Making it work in vSphere

As noted in my disclaimer above, I am not a Java guy so this took me some time to get my lab environment up and running with the right components since I am new to vFabric.  RHEL is the officially supported operating system today, but Linux is Linux so I chose to grab the latest Ubuntu 11 distribution for my testing.  Work with your internal Java guru to get vFabric tc Server setup and running on your Linux VM for testing.  Once you get through setting up and installing your operating system and vFabric tc Server, there are some technical pre-requisites you need to accomplish in order to enable EM4J balloon driver and gain visibility into the JVM itself.

The first step you need to perform in your testing is to enable an advanced parameter within the Linux VM your are testing with.  The virtual machine will need to be powered down to perform this action.  Right click on the virtual machine, select edit settings, and the select the options tab.  Go down to the advanced section and select “General” and then select the “Configuration Parameters” button that is now visible:

 

Once you select the “Configuration Parameters” button you are going to select the “Add Row” button and add the following configuration parameter to the VM:

sched.mem.pshare.guestHintsSyncEnable and set the value to “true” as shown below:

 

Making it work in tc Server

Once you have enabled the virtual machine for EM4J, you also need to ensure your instance of tc server utilizes the EM4Jbaloon driver.  Execute the command listed below to create a new instance, in this example my instance name is “scott” and the “elastic memory” option is what enabled the EM4J balloon driver.  Once you have created the instance, go ahead and start it up!

 

Next we will configure a few parameters within out instance so we can  monitor them via the VMware vSphere web console interface which I will show you next.  Add the following parameters to the setenv.sh file of your new instance name as follows:

 

JVM_OPTS="-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote=true
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.port=6969
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=false
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false"

 

Next step we need to setup what is called the Console Guest Collector (CGC).  The CGC is a process that allows the vSphere web console to pull data from the EM4J balloon driver and place it with each VM so the web client can then display performance data about the current workloads.  This needs to be setup via a cron so we can continuously pull real-time data into vSphere.  The cgc.sh script can be found in the /opt/vmware/vfabric-tc-server-standard-2.6.0.RELEASE/templates/elastic-memory/bin/ directory.  Here is a command to add an entry to the crontab for every 5 minutes:

*/5 * * * * /opt/vmware/vfabric-tc-server-standard-2.6.1.RELEASE/templates/elastic-memory/bin/cgc.sh >
/dev/null 2>&1

 

Making it work in the vSphere Web Client

You downloaded the EM4J UI plug-in earlier and now we need to extract it and set it up on your vSphere 5 Virtual Center server.  Extract the contents of the following directory then re-start the vSphere Web Client Service:

C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\vSphere Web Client\plugin-packages\em4j-client

 

 

The data!

Now that we are through the tedious stuff we can actually see some of the more interesting performance data, and frankly the reason you are probably reading this blog post!  Log-in to your Virtual Center’s web interface and navigate to your virtual machine you are using to test with.  Select the fourth tab at the top of the options section which is titles “Workloads”.  You should now see something similar to this and the EM4J Agent Enabled should be selected if you setup everything correctly:

 

 

Selecting the “Alerts” tab will give you any relevant data and tell you if any issues are occurring.  This will also display some Java Best Practices and instruct you on how to fine tune your JVM.  Selecting the “Resource Management” tab will display much more performance centric detailed information which gives you full visibility into the JVM itself.  Excellent performance visibility into that problematic Java workload:

 

Conclusion

From the documentation, “EM4J helps the system behave gracefully and predictably when memory becomes scarce. It helps you to more easily determine the over-commit ratio that provides acceptable performance at peak loads.”  Hopefully you learned a little bit about what Elastic Memory for Java is and how it works within vFabric and VMware vSphere 5.  As with most technology features and functionality I suggest understanding the best use cases for EM4J and how it fits into your own environment.  The documentation that I linked to, gives plenty of examples of when EM4J should be utilized effectively.  Look for more performance benchmarks around optimal overcommit ratios as our vFabric team completes some great performance testing on this exciting new technology.  The EM4J architecture will not only allow you to run your JVM’s more efficiently, but will also provide you some great performance visibility and give insight into your Java workloads.

 

Introduction

VMware is in a perpetual state of change if you haven’t noticed.  Virtualization and the hypervisor will never not be a core competency of ours but we are continually expanding into other areas of IT software solutions for our customers.  I think Paul Maritz states it best with his quote “When we see a management problem, we will be replacing it with an automation solution”.  Take a look at what VMware vCloud Director is accomplishing by delivering the automation of IT services at the Infrastructure layer for our customers and service providers.  Take a look at what Horizon App Manager is doing to create and deliver a self-service enterprise application store to consume SaaS based applications.  One of the best parts about moving towards a self-service model, the system engineers can now have part of their lives back to focus on more important projects for the business since the end users can now consume services on demand. 

When I talk with my customers, half of my challenge is educating them on what we are doing to enable them to operate more efficiently from a solution perspective.  We are no longer just a hypervisor company.  Don’t get me wrong, I love talking speeds and feeds and can geek out and get distracted with the best of them on the “tech cool factor”.  Alas, at the end of the day isn’t it about finding a solution that is going to make you (systems engineer) be able to do more with less while also delivering value back to the business?  This is why our customers love us so much into the “infrastructure corner”. We have helped them to maintain happy lines of business by providing IT faster to their customers with virtualization.  As our former friend Patrick Swayze (RIP) once said,  “Nobody puts baby in the corner!”

 

 

Enter vFabric Data Director

Let’s think out of the traditional infrastructure box, there are challenges with virtualizing databases from a management perspective.  No it can be done, and many customers are out there deploying Oracle and Microsoft SQL databases on VMware vSphere.   It’s not the traditional I/O workload conversation that one must consider when going after these tier 1 workloads.  It’s more about the long term management of these resources that are constantly being requested, deployed, copied, backed-up,  and the backend management that goes into this entire process.  Database sprawl is a real world problem that many organizations struggle with.

Why not create a portal where a non-DBA type IT user can login and tear off a database by answering a few simple questions?  Why not pre-configure the DBA repetitive tasks from a list of options or a “catalog” and allow them to choose the correct combo meal they would like to consume?  Why not give the DBA’s back time in their day to do more productive forward thinking activities and take the easy operational stuff off their plates?  Enter vFabric Data Director (The artist formerly known as Project Aurora).  Notice the following features and functionality as your watching the clip.

• Self-Service Provisioning
• Linked Database Clones
• SQL Statement Execution from the Web Portal
• Backup and Recovery simplification

 

 

vFabric PostgreSQL

The vFabric Data director portal probably makes sense to you now that you have seen it in action.  The first database we have enabled on top of this platform is a vSphere-optimized PostgreSQL database, the most enterprise-ready open source database.  We have specifically custom tuned this fork of Postgres to make it virtualization aware and to run more efficiently.

 

 

The vFabric Postgres database  is delivered to the IT environment in the form of a virtual appliance that is intelligent and can self-tune itself as workloads change.  Database buffer sizes can scale up and down as I/O characteristics change, a special ballooning database driver can be invoked for more memory efficiencies within the virtual appliance.  The database us a standard SQL database that supports ODBC connections and supports JDBC tools to query the database just like the open source version.

What’s next?

Expect much more!  I can’t say a ton here in this forum, but know this is just the beginning for this product/solution.  EMC’s Chad Sakac put together a great video for VMworld 2011 (and apparently is allowed to say much more than I am) on his blog site.  Watch towards the end of the video for futures and where you can expect to start to see the flood gates open up as we take it to the next level! 

- Scott

 

 

 

Introduction

With vSphere 5 comes a plethora of new features and functionality across the entire VMware virtualization platform.  One of the core components that got a nice upgrade was the vSphere Distributed Switch (vDS).  For those of you that have not had the chance to use the vDS, it is a centralized administrative interface that allows access to manage and update a network configuration in one location as opposed to each separate ESX host.  This saves vSphere administrators or network engineers a lot of operational configuration time and/or scripting activities.   The vDS is a feature that is packaged with Enterprise Plus licensing.  Here are some of the new features that are included with the vDS 5.0:

• New stateless firewall that is built into the ESXi kernel (iptables is no longer used)
• Network I/O Control improvements (network resource pools and 802.1q support)
• LLDP standard is now supported for network discovery (no longer just CDP support)
• The ability to mirror ports for advanced network troubleshooting or analysis
• The ability to configure NetFlow for visibility of inner-VM communication (NetFlow version 5)

 

NetFlow Basics

I could do a write-up on each one of these components as they are all worth discussing in more detail, but I wanted to focus on the NetFlow feature for this post as I think it’s an awesome addition.  NetFlow has had experimental support in vSphere for some time, but now VMware has integrated the functionality right into the vDS and is officially supported.

NetFlow gives the administrator the ability to monitor virtual machine network communications to assist with intrusion detection, network profiling, compliance monitoring, and in general, network forensics.  Enabling this functionality can give you some real insight into what is going on within your environment from a network perspective.  Having “cool features” is a nice to have, but having features that you can utilize and show value back to the business is a completely different value add.

Let’s look at how to setup NetFlow on the new vDS, then take a look at the data you can extract from NetFlow with a third party NetFlow viewer.  Once you see the value of the data, you can then make some important IT business decisions on how you need to mitigate risk and protect your investment by getting ahead of the curve (aka VMware vShield or some other third party software).

 

Setup your vDS 5 Switch

Ensure you are running VMware vSphere 5.0 and have activated Enterprise Plus licensing to setup the vDS switch in your environment.  You can see below the new option to deploy a vDS 5.0 switch, and of course we offer backwards compatibility for those that need to deploy to their 4.x environments.  Select the 5.0 version and hit next.

 

In the “General” section give the vDS a name, in this example I am giving him “dvSwitch5”.  Select next the number of network interface cards you want to participate in the switch and then select next.

 

For each host in your cluster that you wish to participate in the vDS, you will need to configure the network interfaces that will support this vDS implementation.  In this example I have selected vmnic 4 and vmnic 5 to be members of the vDS 5 switch.  Select next.

 

That’s it, review the summary and select finish for your vDS configuration to come online and begin configuring NetFlow.

 

 

Setup Netflow on the vDS 5

Now you have a fully functioning vDS 5.0 switch, you can actually start to use it!  First let’s go ahead and configure NetFlow on the dvPortGroup, then we will move some virtual machines over to the new vDS so we can get some real data flowing.  Right click on your newly created dvSwitch and select “edit settings”.  Go to the “NetFlow” tab across the top of the page.  You will need to give your vDS an IP address so your NetFlow tool will know where to collect the data from.  Populate an IP address for the vDS, then you will need to enter the IP address of the collector you plan on using to pull the data from.  Make sure you enter the correct port number (default is 1) for how you setup your NetFlow application to communicate.

 

Right click on the dvPortGroup within the vDS and select the “monitoring” option and enable NetFlow so you can begin to collect data.

 

Move a few VM’s over to the new vDS so you can begin to capture some real data within your newly established NetFlow configuration.  I have highlighted below how you can change the network connection on a VM to now utilize the dvSwitch5 we created earlier.

 

Pull Some Data

You will need to utilize a third party NetFlow analysis tool to parse the data we have started to generate.  In the example below I am using a pretty nice application called Manage Engine Netflow Analyzer.  I won’t be covering how to install or setup this application here, as your organization might already have some network tool that they have standardized on.  Once you have moved some virtual machines over to the new vDS, ensure you start to create some traffic so there is some relevant data to examine.  Below I ran a few speedtest.net downloads, and hit some websites to make traffic appear below.

 

Below you can see the different virtual interfaces on my vDS that are being monitored.  You can see our application is showing us what type of traffic we are examining, and the consumption of the different tcp/udp ports that are communicating both inbound and outbound on the switch.

 

The “under the covers” reporting is great stuff, but let’s start to look at how this can help the business.  Consider a VMware View environment where you are supporting hundreds if not thousands of desktop images.  You can use the NetFlow data to start to examine if certain VM’s are communicating to production systems that they shouldn’t be communicating to at all.  How about reducing the overall workload on your VMware View ESX server?  Many of the NetFlow products like the one I am showing here will produce reports on where users are going externally on the internet.  See the report below.  YouTube is probably a website you want to keep an eye on, as streaming video can greatly impact a virtual desktop environment.

 

From an intrusion detection and compliance perspective, you can now gain visibility into the vSphere environment to begin to understand some of the network communications that are taking place.  See below:

 

 

From a risk mitigation perspective, VMware can help you eliminate these security vulnerabilities that you are beginning to gather data on.  VMware vShield has three different solutions that can help protect your environment from the edge to the core.  I would suggest to examine segmenting and protecting your internal workloads to eliminate these security risks.  From a virtual desktop perspective, the desktop workloads are better served being contained in their own protected segment (VLAN’s are broadcast domains not protected segments).  Below is an example of how a logical vShield configuration can begin to help you segment your virtual infrastructure.

 

Conclusion

VMware vSphere 5 offers some great new features that are integrated into the new vSphere 5 Distributed Switch.  Start to leverage your existing investment by examining your network infrastructure with the NetFlow data you can now begin to extract.  Once you have gathered this data, begin considering how you can mitigate some of the security and compliance risks within your organization.  VMware vShield is a product that can help you in this regard and will integrate into your current environment.

 

-Scott

 

 

Introduction

 

This is a follow-up blog post to a write up I did last year on upgrading your virtual hardware.  The post I did was really trying to show people how easy the virtual hardware to version 7 was, and that despite it being a manual effort, it wasn’t all that painful.  There have been several other write-ups in the community that cover how to automate this task to save you time and effort.  In the end, there was no easy automated way to accomplish this task that was officially supported.

There are so many great new features that are being released with vSphere 5 that some of the small stuff might get missed.  As a former VI admin, this is one of the small ones that can’t be overlooked for those of you in the trenches.  There is another new feature that is introduced with vSphere 5 called “VMware Auto Deploy” that somewhat competes with VUM from a ESX deployment methodology.  If you would like to learn more about Auto Deploy, check out Gabe’s write-up here.

 

In a Nutshell

• VUM can be used to upgrade your ESX 3.x hosts and vSphere 4 hosts to 5.0 (3.x makes a pit stop at 4)
• VUM can be used to upgrade your vSphere “Classic” hosts to ESXi
• VUM can now remediate multiple ESX hosts at the same time rather than queuing up (think multi-threaded)
• VUM can automatically upgrade VMtools at a scheduled maintenance window
• VUM can automatically upgrade Virtual Hardware at a scheduled maintenance window
• VUM can no longer be used to patch guest operating systems
• VUM requires a Windows Operating system and can not be installed on the VMware vCenter Server Appliance
• VUM can automatically upgrade your Virtual Hardware from version 4 or 7 to version 8 (vSphere 5)

 

Update Manager to the rescue

You can now use vSphere Update Manager to perform orchestrated upgrades to upgrade the virtual hardware and VMware Tools of virtual machines in the inventory at the same time.  Not only can you use VMware update Manager (VUM) to upgrade your ESX hosts to version 5 you can also leverage it assist with the hundreds of VM’s you need to address as part of the upgrade process!  This is a huge time saver and will help eliminate configuration drift across your environment, as I am sure your virtual infrastructure has only grown bigger since the last time we went through this. 

Let’s walk through what this process looks like, and how you can now configure update manager to accomplish this.  I am going to assume you have already setup or upgraded your Virtual Center to version 5, and you have also updated or installed VUM 5.

Automate the VMware Tools upgrade

The first step in upgrading your virtual infrastructure is to crate a plan of attack.  Most of my customers group their virtual machines by applications or by lines of business.  This typical grouping won’t lend itself well to our virtual machine updating that we need to do.  I suggest creating a few folders in the “VM’s and Templates” view that you can use to help facilitate this upgrade.  As you can see below I created three different folders that you can use to temporarily move the vm’s into for their scheduled maintenance.   I suggest creating different upgrade windows that you will attach to these three folders (after getting change management approval of course!).  Yes there is downtime required for this process!

 

For each of these folders you are going to want to configure it to apply the VMware Tools upgrade first.  You can see below that this option is selected for my first patch management window.

 

After I have selected my VMware Tools upgrade, I can now scan the VM’s that I have moved into this folder to discover which ones need be upgraded.

 

Now you want to select “Remediate” on the new baseline that we have configured.  You will be prompted to create a schedule for the VMware Tools installation as shown in the capture below.  I have configured my first VMtools patching to occur at 2:20 a.m.

 

VMware Update Manager gives you the option of taking a snapshot prior to the tools upgrade in case something goes sideways during the upgrade procedure.  Here you can also select if you want to retain your snapshots or have VUM remove the snapshots after a configured period of time (hours):

 

Automate the Virtual Hardware upgrade

Now let’s run through the same process again, this time we are going to select the “VM Hardware Upgrade” which will then bring your VMware virtual machine hardware version up to version 8.  As I mentioned above, you can be running at either version 7 or even version 4 for VUM to update your virtual hardware.

Same as before, but this time make sure you stagger your virtual hardware upgrade for 30-40 minutes later:

 

Same options as before, feel free to take snapshots of the vm’s in case you need to revert for some reason.  Be aware, if you are doing snapshots across hundreds of virtual machines, you should consider the disk space that they will be consuming in both the short and long term.

Below you can see in the recent tasks that our upgrades are taking place automatically which should give you some of your personal time back to do other more important things in your environment.

 

 

Conclusion

Leverage VMware Update Manager as part of your upgrade path to vSphere 5.  Automation is critical as your virtual environment continues to grow exponentially.  I haven’t spoken with one customer that is hiring more VMware engineers to their team, so we need to leverage tools/technology to automate whenever possible.

Hope this helps!

-Scott

Welcome back, I hope you found our first newsletter helpful in some way shape or form.  The newsletter seems to be getting larger and larger which is a great thing.  It might soon start to qualify as a magazine rather than a newsletter.

We got some good feedback so we are going to keep going with this for a while.  Please let us know via the comments section if you are enjoying it, would like to see different content,  or just want to say hello.

-Scott

When talking about VMware virtualization bottlenecks, 9 out of 10 customers answer their number one bottleneck is memory. Notice how I said bottleneck, not problem. This relates to capacity planning or trying to understand and right size the environment so you can gauge when you need to order more physical infrastructure. Their number one problem is storage, which is quite a different story altogether and I won’t be covering storage in this article (this time). Since memory is such a common point of discussion with my customers, I thought I would dig a little deeper on this topic and share some information around utilization and what it all means.

 

My customers typically track their utilization in the most common area of vSphere that one might expect to find this information, the DRS Resource Distribution graph at the cluster level.

 

From the image displayed above, one might think that I am close to memory capacity and I should look at ordering more hardware for my cluster. While in a general sense that might not be a bad idea to begin planning for growth, but let’s take a closer look at what we are seeing.  Notice the blue informational icon and how it’s telling us that the displayed information is based on memory consumption. Let’s do a mouse over on the chart that’s being displayed to get some more granular information and what this means.

 

 

You can see in the above image that my Virtual Center VM is “Consuming” ~4GB of memory, but in all reality the active memory being used is sitting at ~700MB. DRS entitlement is a measurement that calculates what the load or demand is on the vSphere host/cluster over time, and then projects an average entitlement number for planning purposes. You can use the DRS entitlement numbers as a general planning/forecasting number, but to be honest you still have some capacity within the cluster.

Now I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t make you aware of an easier way to track this information by using software rather than brain power. For those of you that haven’t seen Capacity IQ yet, I would highly encourage you to evaluate the product. Capacity IQ was built for this specific reason, to help you understand when you will need to start thinking about more hardware. It can also help you run your environment more efficiently. There are some great reports that help you identify which virtual machines are not using the resources that were allocated to them.  Take them back!

Coming from a VMware system engineer end user position, I can tell you that as your environment begins to grow, capacity management and planning becomes critical. I evaluated Capacity IQ when I was still on the customer side, and did a write up if you are interested in my thoughts on the product.

There are a lot of the customers I cover in my region that are really starting to see the value in VMware’s management tools.  As virtual machines now outnumber physical machines, customers need some tools to help report against their existing infrastructure as well as predict and prepare for future virtual machine workloads.  One of my favorite VMware tools that I liked when I was on the customer side was a product called Capacity IQ.  I wrote up a blog post that I think people found useful that was basically an overview of the benefits of the product.  You can check that post out here.  I tell most of my customers about it, because it’s simple to setup (virtual appliance) and it gives you loads of great information about your existing infrastructure.

One of my customers that is moving forward with a CapIQ implementation e-mailed me about what types of storage metrics are available from the product.  I was happy to inform him that Capacity IQ 1.5 was just released and provides some great storage statistics that can now be reported against.  Much to my dismay, he told me that he wasn’t seeing the storage report data, the metrics were all blank.

Here are the requirements to get the reports to produce storage related information:

You  need the vCenter management webservices running for CapIQ to collect some of the storage metrics. The storage IO metrics require you to have ESX 4.1.  When you use ESX 4.0 or earlier hosts, the following metrics appear with dashes (–) and affect the Dashboard, the Datastores – List view, the Virtual Machine Capacity – Summary view, and the Virtual Machine Capacity Usage – Trend view:

* Disk I/O read/write
* Disk I/O reads/writes per second
* Disk I/O read/write latency
* VM Disk I/O read/write latency

-Scott

Introduction

VMware recently announced the general availability of a Zimbra virtual appliance that VMware customers can simply import into their existing infrastructure and get “e-mail in box”.  This is a great concept for administrators because the operating system is pre-configured and purposefully built for the application that is packaged with it.  The virtual appliance will import into the virtual center management console and will have the standard "OVF” (Open Virtualization Format) file extension for those that are new to virtual appliances.

I am no e-mail administrator, so I wanted to see how easy setting up the Zimbra virtual appliance would be and provide some instructions for those out there that are looking to test out Zimbra.

 

Get the Bits!

First things first, go out and grab the download of the Zimbra virtual appliance by clicking on the icon below.  Yes you will need to register to download the bits…

Import the Virtual Appliance

There are two methods of importing a virtual appliance, you can enter the url, which is supplied by the Zimbra website once you register, or you can download the appliance locally and import it locally.  I grabbed the full download in case I hosed something up I would have a copy of the ovf locally so I could start over from scratch.  I guess a snapshot would work as well, so it’s up to you how you would like to proceed here.  Below is a screenshot of the import:

Configure the Zimbra Virtual Appliance

The Zimbra virtual appliance is pre-configured to ask you the basic configuration parameters you will need to get the appliance up and running.  You can see below are the questions that you will to answer, pretty common stuff if you a IT administrator.  Make sure you use the FQDN for the hostname.

 

Power it up

Now that you have configured your basic system information you can now power up your new virtual appliance.  You can see below that it will automatically configure the appliance based off your information you have previously populated.  Very nice for a hands off approach and a streamlined installation process.

 

Finish it off

Now that you are powered up and on the network, you can login to the administration console to finish your configuration.  Point your web browser to https://<hostname>:5480  The administration console will be the place where you can create user accounts, configure licensing information, pull diagnostic data for troubleshooting and update the virtual appliance itself.

DNS is a big component of e-mail.  If you are doing split DNS or Dynamic DNS, I suggest  to reference this link to assist your efforts.  I am using a dynamic DNS service at home along with split DNS, so I had to go and update my host entry with a MX record so the world new where to route my e-mail traffic.  Once that was done correctly I was up and running and able to send/receive e-mails with no problem.

 

Licensing

The last thing you will want to to is license your installation, the nice folks over at Zimbra will give you a 10 user license free of charge.  Click the link below to go license your configuration or view some sample pricing on what a fully licensed configuration would look like.  Enjoy!

 

-Scott