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 the summer, I saw Stu’s Post about automating the installation of ESXi. I was reminded again by Duncan’s Post. Then, I found myself in a situation when a customer bought 160 blades for VMware ESXi. With this many systems, it would be almost impossible to do this without mistakes. I took the ideas from Stu and Duncan and created an ESXi automated installer that works from a PXE deployment server, like the Ultimate Deployment Appliance. I took it a step further and added the ability to use a USB stick or a CD for those times when PXE is not allowed. The document below is a result of it.
This is a little different than the idea of a stateless ESXi server, where the hypervisor actually boots from PXE. This is the installer booting from PXE so that the hypervisor can be installed on local disk, an internal USB stick or SD card. You could also use it for a “boot from SAN” situation, but extreme care should be taken so you don’t accidentally format a VMFS disk.
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Categories: Cloud Computing, ESX 4, ESXi, Scriptng, VMware, automation Tags: Automated Deployment, ESXi, Installation, VI4, VMware, vsphere
VI:OPS is was a VMware Forum that dedicates dedicated itself to providing information related to operations surrounding a VMware Infrastructure. The “Proven Practice” documents are were submitted and reviewed by moderators before they are published. The published documents allow for peers to comment on the documents.
I made it point to meet Stevie Chambers because he used to be the driving force behind VI:OPS. When he took his helmet with the big red plume and his sword and armored kilt over to Cisco, everything seemed to just freeze at VI:OPS. It took a week to have my last post approved. PMs were not returned quickly. It just died. No gladiator to defend it.
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Since VI:OPS seems to have died and the content was gobbled up and reindexed my the main VMware communities site (They miss you Stevie!), I am posting my VCB proven practice here. It is dated, since its last version covered ESX 3.5, but most of it still applies in ESX4. If you have comments or changes that you wish to see, please comment here.
You can get it here -> http://www.dailyhypervisor.com/?file_id=8
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OK, so my last post brought on a blizzard of remarks questioning some of the validity of the data presented. I used what I was told during a presentation was a “Gartner recommended” configuration for a VM. My error was that I could not find this recommendation anywhere, but the sizing seems fairly valid, so I went with it. I went back to some of the assessments I have done and took data from about 2,000 servers to come up with some more real-world averages. I wanted to post these averages tonight. Remember what I said previously: This is just a set of numbers. You must ASSESS and DESIGN your virtual infrastructure properly. This is only a small piece of it.
I apologize for the images instead of tables, but I spent way too long trying to get tables to lay out properly in Wordpress. Click on the images for larger views. I can post the raw data if someone wants to look at it, but I have to work on stripping away proprietary data first. So, here we go:
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I attended the second day of the HP Converged Infrastructure Roadshow in NYC last week. Most of the day was spent watching PowerPoints and demos for the HP Matrix stuff and Virtual Connect. Then came lunch. I finished my appetizer and realized that the buffet being set up was for someone else. My appetizer was actually lunch! Thanks God there was cheesecake on the way…
There was a session on unified storage, which mostly covered the LeftHand line. At one point, I asked if the data de-dupe was source based or destination based. The “engineer” looked like a deer in the headlights and promptly answered “It’s hash based.” ‘Nuff said… The session covering the G6 servers was OK, but “been there done that.”
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The vSphere 4.0 Quick Start Guide: Shortcuts down the path of Virtualization
has finally arrived!
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I received a pre-release edition of the book at VMworld 2009. This guide has a great selection of shortcuts, tips and best practices for setting up and maintaining vSphere 4. I would be an excellent addition to any VMware administrator’s bookshelf. The book’s size also makes it a great reference for consultants as well. It will easily fit into your backpack.
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