IBM launches dVS for vSphere 5.0

So this is an interesting announcement....I would not have guessed that IBM would market a distributed virtual switch for the vSphere 5.0 platform. When I think of networking gear IBM is not a brand that springs to mind. They did acquire BNT a little while back, but that was blade server focused. Expensive servers, storage, and mainframes yes....networking gear, no. According to the press release the IBM® System Networking Distributed Virtual Switch 5000V features:

• Manageability - Telnet, SSH, SNMP, TACACS+, RADIUS, Industry Standard CLI
• Advanced networking features - L2-L4 ACLs, Static and Dynamic port aggregation, PVLAN, QoS, EVB (IEEE 802.1Qbg)
• Network troubleshooting - SPAN, ERSPAN, sFlow, Syslog, VM network statistics

It is not surprisingly licensed on a per-socket basis. No word on price, but availability is February 23, 2012. Should be interesting to see some competition for the Cisco Nexus 1000v. You can read the full spec sheet here.

HP releases ProLiant Gen8 details

Last week there was a leak regarding HP ProLiant Gen8 servers, but today the entire cat is officially out of the bag. The cat really should be a tiger, the changes are so significant. G7 servers were fairly incremental improvements over G6, with only a few minor changes. Gen8 appears to me to be the biggest overhaul of the ProLiant server line in 10 years. They claim over 150 design innovations. Features include:

• Agentless server monitoring (finally!)
• Optimized for SSD storage (over 500K IOPS per server)
• Lower power usage ~10%
• 66% faster time to problem resolution
• Tool-less design for most parts
• Locking front covers (why did it take them so long to copy Dell?)
• HP Insight Online, which is a cloud based service for ProLiant monitoring 
• New drive carriers with big green status lights
• HP Smart SSD wear Gauge
• Boot to video in just three seconds (no more blank screen for minutes white booting!)
• Up to 50 percent more drives per server
• Up to 50 percent more memory capacity
• Reduced RAID re-build times (they cite 42 days to 5 hours for one client with a huge array)
• Real-time application tuning and performance reporting
• HP Active Health monitors 1,600 system parameters and 100 percent of configuration changes
• Export Active Health data in 3-4 minutes to submit to HP professional support services
• HP Intelligent provisioning takes strengths from HP SmartStart, Smart Update Manager and ProLiant Support packs and puts them on the system board. Firmware, drivers and tools are pre-loaded with no CDs needed.
• Smart Drive carrier proactively warns you if you try and pull the wrong drive from an array, resulting in data loss.
• HP Smart Socket guide, allows you to add processors without pending pins.
• HP SmartMemory that tracks errors, identify trends, and proactive resolves issues
• And a lot more!

Check out their well done web site complete with videos and PDFs here.

New HP Service Pack for Proliant Released

One of the challenges with managing a lot of virtualized HP servers is firmware updates. Unlike Windows or Linux hosts where you can perform relatively simple on-line updates, ESX(i) hosts must be done offline. Traditionally you boot from the HP Firmware DVD and apply the updates. The update process was painfully slow, would sometimes freeze, and wouldn't always get all updates applied on the first past. In addition, HP releases firmware updates so regularly that it's hard to keep pace. The smart array controllers have had more critical updates than I can count.

Today HP launched a radically new update product based on HP Smart Update Manager 5.0. It promises "vastly improved update speeds" for HP blade systems, new GUI, and online updating of QLogic HBA firmware. It's the HP Service Pack for ProLiant 2012.01.0 and you can download it here.

You can "burn" the ISO to a USB stick for faster booting, by using the HP USB Disk tool found here. If you use HP servers, now is the time to download the new update ISO and try it out. Firmware updates, particularly for blade systems, are critical for system stability, security, and avoiding unplanned downtime. At least twice a year you should review the lastest HP firmware updates and see if they apply to your environment, then schedule their deployment.

VCP5 Upgrade Deadline Looms

For those of you that have a VMware VCP4 and want to take the VCP5 exam without additional classroom training requirements, your time is short! February 29th, 2012 is the last day you can take upgrade exam. For some good study material, I recommend the vSphere Resource Kit site. It has a great interactive VCP5 practice exam. Is it worth the nominal fee? Yes!

VMware does have a 7-day waiting period for re-taking the exam. So I would encourage you to book your exam ASAP, so if you do fail you can retake before the end of the month. Slots may fill up very quick, so check with your nearest exam provider and book your test today.

In the interest of full disclosure I know the primary author, Chris McCain, and he graciously listed me as an author. But I get no kick back whatsoever. I just think it's an excellent tool for your journey to a VCP5.

Microsoft Security Compliance Manager 2.5 Beta hits the streets

Microsoft SCM can be a great tool for configuring and maintaining security baselines for various Microsoft products such as Windows operating systems, Exchange, IE and Office. In the past I've used it to establish golden OS security baselines that then get exported and baked into our VM templates and physical image discs.

Two major issues I've had with past releases was no easy way to import existing GPO state data from a "model" computer. So you had to either start from scratch with SCM and define your baseline or use a MS baseline and modify as needed. Neither way was very time efficient. Configuring standalone machines was easier, as they included a "localgpo" tool. But the process could be easier.

SCM 2.5 beta addresses these issues, and adds other enhancements as well. The release notes mention the following new features:

• Integration with the System Center 2012 IT GRC Process Pack for Service Manager-Beta:Product baseline configurations are integrated into the IT GRC Process Pack to provide oversight and reporting of your compliance activities.
• Gold master support: Import and take advantage of your existing Group Policy or create a snapshot of a reference machine to kick-start your project.
• Configure stand-alone machines: Deploy your configurations to non-domain joined computers using the new GPO Pack feature.
• Updated security guidance: Take advantage of the deep security expertise and best practices in the updated security guides, and the attack surface reference workbooks to help reduce the security risks that you consider to be the most important.
• Compare against industry best practices: Analyze your configurations against prebuilt baselines for the latest Windows client and server operating systems.
• NEW baselines include:
• Exchange Server 2007 SP3 Security Baseline
• Exchange Server 2010 SP2 Security Baseline
• Updated client product baselines include:
• Windows 7 SP1 Security Compliance Baseline
• Windows Vista SP2 Security Compliance Baseline
• Windows XP SP3 Security Compliance Baseline
• Office 2010 SP1 Security Baseline
• Internet Explorer 8 Security Compliance Baseline

I've found previous versions of SCM to be a valuable tool, and these enhancements make it all the better. You can find the beta on Microsoft connect here. If you haven't used it before, I would encourage you to try it out, if you value standizing your security baseline for a variety of MS products.

VMware Workstation 8.02 Released

VMware just released Workstation 8.0.2, up from 8.0.1. This is not a major release, but has a few enhancements:

• Ubuntu 11.10 is supported as a host.
• Fedora 16 is supported as a guest.

Fixed bugs include:

• The ACLs on the PID files needed improvement. VMware thanks Inode0 for bringing this to our attention.
• Releasing input from the guest to the host, for example, moving the cursor from the virtual machine window to the host screen, failed with an unrecoverable error.
• Copying and pasting from a guest to an Ubuntu 11.10 host failed.
• Shared folders did not work in Fedora 16 and OpenSuse 12.1 guests.
• In Ubuntu 11.10 hosts, key repeat was disabled after ungrabbing or quitting VMware Workstation.
• On a Windows host, a virtual machine configured to use a physical disk or partition failed to power on if the host had a volume backed by more than one physical disk, for example, a RAID system.
• On a machine with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 SP1, vix-perl installation failed with dynamic link errors.

This is a free update for all Workstation 8.0.2 owners. Workstation 8.0.1 included dramatic graphics acceleration with IE9, so if you are still on 8.0.0 and using IE9 in guests, you really should upgrade.

You can download Workstation 8.0.2 from here and view the release notes here.

Get your free 2 socket Veeam Backup 6.0 License key

Veeam is once again running a Christmas special where you can get a free NFR (not for resale) Veeam Backup 6.0 license key for 2 sockets which is good for 1 year. You can select VMware, Hyper-V, or both. All you need to do is fill out this form and wait for the email with the license key.

For home labs or just trying out Veeam without their more limited timed trial versions, this is a great opportunity. Even if you don't think you will use the key, I'd grab one anyway since you never know what may come up over the next year where it could come in handy.

Veeam is targeting the offer at certified VMware professionals such as VCP, but they don't require any identifying information.

Schedule VMware UMDS Downloads with Windows Task Scheduler

VMware UMDS (Update Manager Download Service) is a product which ships with vCenter that allows you to download patches for VUM, then use them in air-gapped networks where VUM can't directly download updates from the internet. UMDS 5.0 has some nice enhancements from 4.x, which helps limit the amount of unnecessary patches it downloads.

If you work in an environment where you need to utilize VMware UMDS you probably want the download process to be as automated as possible. One of the missing features in UMDS is a scheduler, so that's where you can leverage the Windows Task Scheduler to make life easier. I'm assuming you are using Windows Server 2008 R2 and have already installed UMDS on a server. Creating the task is pretty quick and simple.

1. Launch the Task Scheduler. To keep the tasks more organized, I created a folder at the root level under Microsoft called VMware.

2. Right click on VMware and select Create Task. On the General tab you configure the basic task information. I recommend you change the task to use a privileged account, such as SYSTEM, and check the box to run the task with highest privileges. You could configure service account with only the required rights and use that instead, if running a task with SYSTEM rights doesn't sit well with you.

3. Click on the Triggers tab and add a new trigger. I like to run the task once a day, at 4AM.

4. On the Actions tab create a new action and configure it as shown below. Change the path as needed to the location of the vmware-umds.exe file. Be sure to add the argument of -D or nothing will happen with the task runs.

5. On the Settings tab I changed the parameter that limits how long the task can run, but this is optional, and you can use any value you want.





6. At this point the task is configured and you can click OK. To test it out you can right click on the task and Run it. Monitor the download directory you configured and make sure it is being populated. For ESXi 4.1.0 and ESXi 5.0 patches, the UMDS repository at this time of this article was about 1.5GB.

Once the download task completes, you then need to "export" the repository into a directory, copy to removable media, and upload to the air-gapped instance of VUM. You can find all of the gory details in the Installing and Administering VMware vSphere Update Manager 5.0 Guide.

XenDesktop 5.5 Resource Calculator

Of course after a weekend of creating my own spreadsheet to calculate my storage requirements for XenDesktop Andre Leibovici created a XenDesktop version of his View calculator. This is a great resource for sizing your storage, calculating IOPS, number of datastores, and other details. A sample of the fields is below.

If you are using XenDesktop MCS, this is a must-use calculator. He says a PVS version is coming as well, so if you aren't a MCS user then check back with his site for an update.

Tips for measuring Windows 7 VDI IO Requirements

When sizing your storage subsystem for a VDI implementation, it's extremely critical to understand how your VMs will behave and the resulting IO load. Miscalculate and you will suffer poor performance and angry users. Oversize your array and you will waste money. However, measuring your VM performance may not be as straight forward as you think.

A few months ago I posted a script here that let you dump basic IO performance stats for a VM on vSphere 4 and 5. But as you will see, the applications you load into your image and when you measure the performance has a significant impact on the collected metrics.

For my first round of tests I wanted to focus on the boot performance of Windows 7 64-bit. Booting can be one of the most taxing events (aside from full virus scans) on your VDI storage subsystem. Even if you stagger your VM boots over a few hours as a normal practice, what if you have a power outage or significant hardware failure and you need to rapidly power on hundreds of VMs? Will your storage array melt under the load? Will Windows boot so slowly that it will blue screen (hint: Windows 7 VMs should boot under 5 minutes to avoid problems.) SLAs play an important role here and you need to be mindful of them and verify they can be met.

The test environment is pretty basic and includes vSphere ESXi 5.0, XenDesktop 5.5, and Windows 7 64-bit. The IO measurements were performed over a five minute period after powering on the VM, and metrics were collected via my script. The measurements are only for boot IOs, as no user logged into the VM during the collection process. Tests were performed four times for each scenario and the results averaged. Five scenarios were tested:

• Base Image: Windows 7 64-bit, Office 2010, VMware tools, joined to a domain
• VDA Only: XenDesktop 5.5 Virtual Desktop Agent
• VDA/Symantec: Citrix VDA and Symantec End Point Protection 12.1
• Optimized: Quest vWorkspace Desktop Optimizer applied with all settings enabled except 15, 26, 27, 30; most VMware Windows 7 optimizations applied.
• XenDesktop VM: VM created with XenDesktop 5.5 MCS from the optimized template

Drum roll for the results please!

As you can see in the table above, the base Win7 image required an average of nearly 15,000 IOs to boot. 15% of those IOs were writes, while the remainder were reads. Simply installing the XenDesktop VDA decreased the number of write IOs, but increased overall IOs by 17% over the base image. Next up is installing Symantec 12.1, and wow look at those numbers jump! 212% increase in IOs over the base image. Using the Quest and VMware recommended optimizations IOs dropped a bit, but nothing substantial.

What I found to be very interesting is what happened to the IOs when the optimized VM template was cloned by XenDesktop MCS and booted as part of a desktop pool. Zero changes were made to the VM, so the only difference is how the VM behaves when under the control of the Citrix Desktop Studio. Approximately 8000 more IOs are required during the boot process, and a lot more writes are taking place. I would not have guess that large of a delta, so this is an interesting find. The read/write ratio also drops to approximately 80/20.

So what does all of this mean? First, every environment is very unique and you should not use my results, or anyone elses, to estimate the IO load for your environment. Second, take your metrics from a provisioned VDI VM (VMware View, XenDesktop, etc.) and don't just take measurements from your VM template. Third, booting a VM is very IO intensive and if you only size your storage for steady-state IOPS, then boot storms will cause you major headaches.

Depending on the script/method you use to gather the VM IOPS stats, VMware may not always return the read/write stats in the same fashion resulting in the same order, so you may see inverted data. From my observation this happens on a per-VM basis, even through reboots and power on/off cycles. So if your data looks odd, question it, don't assume everything is legit.

Unattended vSphere Utility Installs

Sometimes you may want to install the various vSphere utilities (PowerCLI, vSphere CLI, vSphere Client, and VUM PowerCLI) to non-default directories, or use a silent/unattended installation to automate the process.

Below are four batch files that you can run which will install the respective tool to the custom installation directory specified. What's cool about the batch file is you can double click on the batch file from any path and it will CD to the location of the installer and run it. If you are using Windows Server 2008/R2 with UAC, you will be prompted to elevate to do the installation, but otherwise there is no interaction required.

The VUM PowerCLI extensions can't be configured for a custom installation directory, so it will just silently install to the default location. You could of course also combine all of the commands and install all of the tools with a single click, silently.

I also included a silent installation of OpenSSL, which can be handy for creating ESXi, vCenter and VUM certificates.
----
cd /d %0\..
start /wait VMware-PowerCLI-5.0.0-435426.exe /q /s /w /L1033 /V" /qr INSTALLDIR=\"D:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\Infrastructure\vSphere PowerCLI\"
----
cd /d %0\..
start /wait VMware-viclient-all-5.0.0-455964.exe /q /s /w /L1033 /v" /qr INSTALLDIR=\"D:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\Infrastructure\"
----
cd /d %0\..
start /wait VMware-VSphere-CLI-5.0.0-422456.exe /s /v"/qb INSTALLDIR=\"D:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\Vmware vSphere CLI\\""
----
cd /d %0\..
start /wait VMware-UpdateManager-Pscli-5.0.0-432001 /q /s /w /L1033 /V" /qr 
----
cd /d %0\..
Vcredist_x64.exe /q /norestart
Win64OpenSSL-1_0_0d.exe /verysilent /sp-

vSphere 5.0 Documentation Links

For those of you that want easy access to vSphere 5.0 documentation, I stumbled upon a location that has well organized PDF and e-book resources. No more need to search all over VMware's site for a specific piece of documentation. You can check out the link here.