Since everyone else in the world is heralding the release of vSphere 4.1, I figured I would post some bad news. The stuff you may want to know BEFORE you jump into upgrading to vSphere 4.1. Before I start, I want to make it clear that vSphere 4.1 is a great product overall. And I have already been leaning to ESXi, so the announcement that this will be the last release with the “traditional” ESX has been expected. I will talk about ESXi and its improvements in a later post. I just want you to be aware of these rather significant Gotchas.
Gotcha #1 – Read Only Role allows members to add VMKernel NICs
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In case you have been living under a rock and haven’t heard, VMware is getting ready to release a new set of advanced certification exams that will take you along the path to become a VMware Certified Design Expert on vSphere 4 (VCDX4). Just like VCDX3, it starts with the requirement of being a VMware Certified Professional on vSphere 4 (VCP). You will then need to pass two exams before being able to submit and defend your design. VMware has decided to award new certification statuses for passing these exams. The exam to become a VMware Certified Advanced Professional on vSphere 4 – Datacenter Administration (VCAP-DCA) is currently finishing up its beta run. The exam to become a VMware Certified Advanced Professional on vSphere 4 – Datacenter Design (VCAP-DCD) is not yet in beta. The path to achieve VCDX4 status is laid out on VMware’s site and is illustrated below:
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Voting has opened for the VMworld Sessions. You can access it here.
I am “soloing” for these two sessions:
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OK..I’ll admit it: I am spoiled by the capabilities of vSphere. What other platform lets you schedule system updates that will occur unattended and without outages of the applications being used? I don’t mean the winders patches, they require a monthly reboot. I am talking about the hypervisor updates. VMware Update Manager coordinates all of this for you. Then along comes vShield Zones to break it all.
First, let me explain what I am trying to do. To simplify things, vShield Zones is a firewall for vSphere Virtual Machines. Rather than regurgitate how it works, take a look at Rodney’s excellent post. A customer has decided to use vShield Zones to help with PCI Compliance. The desire is that only certain VMs will be allowed to communicate with certain other VMs using specific network ports, and to audit that traffic. ’nuff said.
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Back in April I wrote a blog aimed and the differences between ESX and ESXi. The original post was written for ESX 3.5 and with the introduction of vSphere I think it’s about time i have revisited this topic and looked at the pros and cons of ESX4 and ESX4i. Now before we dig into the technical details there is one big thing you should all be aware of. The FAQ page published by VMware states “VMware ESXi is the recommended platform for both new and existing customers. Future hypervisor releases will solely be based on this architecture.”
For most that should be enough said. After reading that I would seriously start rolling out ESXi in a lab and start figuring out how I could maintain my needs without the service console most of us have become to know and love. I would also start brushing up on the RCLI as well as the PowerCLI if you are currently dependent on scripts that run in the service console. The good news is almost everything you do today in the service console can be achieved one way or another with ESXi as well. OK with that said lets talk about some of the other limitations.
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Categories: Cloud Computing, ESX 4, Other, VMware, networking, storage Tags: Cloud Computing, Desktop Virtualization, ESX4, ESXi, vCenter, VI4, virtualization, VMware, vsphere
I went to install the VMware SDK for vSphere 4.0 on to my desktop running Windows 7 64-bit, Visual Studio 2008, and .Net 3.5 SP1 and discovered the SDK setup is not friendly with these versions. According to VMware you need Visual Studio 2005 and .Net 2.0 if you want to run the SDK.
So like most of you reading this I turned to my trusted adviser…google to find the answer I was looking for. Much to my disappointment after 5 minutes of searching around I didn’t find any instant gratification for my problem so I decided to just go ahead and figure it out on my own.
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Categories: Other, Scriptng, VMware Tags: ESX 3.5, ESX4, ESXi, Installation, Script, scripting, SDK, vCenter, VI4, Virtual Center, VMware, VMware Workstation, vsphere
This morning I was informed that DynamicOps is going to donate the use of it’s flagship product VRM for use in the free lab. For those of you not familiar with DynmaicOps VRM (Virtual Resource Manager) it is a workflow automation product that boasts amazing flexibility for managing your virutal infrastructure. It will become the core of the lab. It will control user access, facilitate automatic provisioning of machines threw it’s self service web interface, control the duration of time a user can have access to a machines, distribute lab resources, assign lab moderators, allow for an approval process for requested machines, any many other functions based on it very wide set of features and functionality. VRM will also allow us to scale the lab out and make it very distributed by allowing others to host resources that will be made available to the community lab. VRM is so flexible and extensible that there is nothing we won’t be able achieve. I would like to thank the folks at DynamicOps for allowing us the use of this great tool to facilitate the creation and operation of the community lab, this is going to really make it something great.
I would also like to announce that a good friend of mine Tom Bonanno will be assuming the responsibilities of Lead Developer for the project. Even with great tools like VRM their will need to be a considerable amount of custom development to really make this lab a reality. Tom is a very talented programmer with extensive knowledge around PHP, .NET, C#, VB, and other languages. I’m very excited to have him on the project, he will be a great asset. Tom is also going to be given the ability to blog here on Dailyhypervisor so he can share some of his experiences while developing code for lab.
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I have decided to utilize XenServer5 as the Hypervisor for the First Generation of the Community Lab. I have chosen Xen because to the level of support it has for templates in the free version. Without template support the flexibility of the lab would be compromised and it would hold much value. I would have liked to have had initial support for vSphere but I don’t see VMware donating any licenses anytime soon…..
For storage I will be using a 1TB ReadyNas NV. I’m going to try and increase the storage to at least 2TB prior to opening up the lab beta but for now it will be 1TB. i can potentially add another 1TB using USB drives attached to the ReadyNAS but I prefer to only utilize drives that can be configured for RAID. I don’t foresee NetApp donating storage anytime soon so we will have to rely on home brew solutions until we gain some traction. Alliances like OpenFiler and FreeNas on custom built system with loads of storage is the growth plan at this time.
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As I progress through the design of the first generation of the community lab I need to make decisions on an implementation strategy. Not from a hardware and a virtual environment perspective, but form an automation perspective. Currently I’m looking at a number of community scripts and some of my own to provide automation within the environment. The challenge is creating a well oiled machine that will almost run itself with the help of community moderators.
Ideally it will be self service. A user will come and signup, get approval for an account and then be able to login to a portal where they can then request access to resources (vm in gen 1). From there they would get the resources they need but for a pre-defined period of time. I’m thinking 5 days in the gen 1 version of the lab. At the end of the 5 days the machines will be destroyed and the resources given back to the pool so the next request in the queue can be filled.
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I’m sure many of you have run into an issue with setting up Citrix Xen Desktop (DDC). As i was setting up a new “Desktop Group” I ran into a problem when trying to configure the vCenter SDK address. The configuration wizard show you an example that looks say ‘For example, https://VirtualCetner.example.com/sdk” which is what you would expect to use and you would also expect it to work. Think again. When you try to setup your vCenter SDK address you will be presented with and error “The hosting infrastructure could not be reached at the specified address.” Citrix takes security serious so unless you plan on replacing the default SSL certificate on your vCenter server you will need to hack out a work around. Now I would agree that in production you should replace the default SSL but if your just trying to spin up a demo or test environment it can be a hassle.
So I searched the web over and over and found a number of threads with many of ways to resolve the issue only none of them seemed to work for me. However a combination of a number of things that I found did. So I’m here to save you the trouble of finding all of various pages with partial solutions. Below you will find exactly what you need to do to make this work.
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Categories: Desktop Virtualization, ESX 4, VMware, vSphere Tags: Citrix, DDC, Desktop Virtualization, ESX 3.5, ESX4, Installation, Provisioning Server, PVS, vCenter, VI4, Xen Desktop
