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
We all have come to love many free services that we have integrated into our daily lives. Things like free email, free voice mail, free open source applications, free video streaming, social networking sites, operating systems, and many other services that make our lives better. At dailyhypervisor.com we are working on a new type of free service that can help all of you in the technical community. A free community lab. A free community lab would provide access to an environment that would grant everyone the opportunity to learn IT hands on and provide the ability for those who don’t have the means to test and learn about new technologies.
Tackling something of this scale will not be easy, but with help from the community hopefully we can make this something extraordinary. I personally will be donating some of my own lab equipment to the first generation of this lab environment. I’m currently working on building the lab for early beta testing by the end of March 2010. The first generation of this lab will consist of 3 servers running ESX4i. The servers have limited resources but each one consists of a single Quad-Core AMD Phenom 9850 processor, 8GB of Memory and access to 1TB of NFS storage. Access to the lab in the beginning will be by invite only much like other beta offerings. If you are interested in participating and leveraging this opportunity please register with dailyhypervisor.com and post a comment to this blog post stating your interest in participating. In your post please provide a brief description of how you would leverage this and also anything you would like to see available in the lab. All early beta users will be also to provide feedback on the lab and may be asked to participate as environment moderators once the lab goes GA. Much like community forums the goal is to make this community driven and supported by user moderators and the such.
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Categories: Community Lab, Free Stuff, XenServer, automation, vSphere Tags: Desktop Virtualization, ESX, vCenter, VI4, virtualization, VMware, vsphere
“The desktop deployment productivity tools that NetApp and DynamicOps offer significantly increase the value of virtual infrastructures by improving performance, providing essential data management resources, and reducing costs,” said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Solutions and Alliances, NetApp. “Enterprises and service providers can now offer multiple, cost-effective service level options for virtual desktop deployments by leveraging the unique orchestration of virtual storage capabilities that are part of the new DynamicOps solution.”
The full release can be found at http://www.dynmaicops.com/news/
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VMware SRM is gaining a lot of traction and many companies are quickly making it the defacto choice for DR in their environments, but is SRM the right choice? For those of you who haven’t had the opportunity to get familiar with SRM (Site Recovery manager), it is a Disaster Recovery automation product from VMware that integrates into vCenter. Through the use of SRA’s (Storage Replication Adapters) SRM is able to integrate with many storage arrays making it aware of Datastores that are replicated. Some of it’s most popular fetures include the ability to group servers in to recovery groups giving you the ability to fail groups of servers or a whole datacenter. It also allows you to perform live failover tests on the the same groups of servers or an entire site. These are some of the most popular reasons companies are implementing SRM. The ability to easily run DR tests without impacting live running systems has made it a huge success. SRM also allows you to create DR run book automation through the use of linear workflows that you create to perform different steps and tasks involved with failing over from the primary site to a secondary.
All of this is great stuff right? What could possibly be better that this? What can’t SRM do?
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