Virtualization

You never know when you’ll need to script something and PowerCLI gives you the tools to do it. I decided to see if I could script some of the VMware Update Manager (VUM) tasks while I was reviewing section 5.2 of the VCAP5-DCA Beta Blueprint and found that the procedures were quite easy. My next thought was, “Why would I want to script this when I can use the GUI, and on top of that I can schedule scans and remediation already?” My answer was, “You never know.” Who knows when you’ll need to use the PowerCLI to accomplish a task. Maybe, you’re scripting something so someone else can run it without really knowing how to perform the task, or you’re trying to get a report, or who knows. ...

Unlike many operating systems, VMware ESXi gives you a nice tool to upgrade their hypervisor to the latest version. VMware Update Manager gives you the ability to grab the latest build and apply it to your existing ESXi hosts. I should mention that VMware Update Manager is not the only solution to upgrade your ESXi hosts. Hosts can also be upgraded manually by booting the host to the latest build and performing an upgrade, or by utilizing the new autodeploy features in vSphere 5. VMware Update Manager is a simple tool that can automate the installs on several hosts in sequence and is available with all editions of vSphere 5. ...

If you need to backup some of your virtual machines, maybe it’s time to consider VMware Data Recovery 2.0. This VMware appliance provides an easy way to backup some virtual machines for free, but if you’re looking for a large scale backup solution it might be necessary to use more traditional backup solutions from Symantec or Veeam. To get started, download the VMware Data Recovery iso from vmware.com. The iso includes a plugin for vCenter as well as an OVF for deploying the appliance. Once you’ve deployed the OVF template and installed the vCenter plugin, you can open the vDR from the solutions and applications section of the vCenter console. ...

Suppose you have multiple virtual machines that you would like to distribute load across that are housed inside of your virtual environment. How do we go about setting up Network Load Balancing so that it will still work with things like DRS and VMotion? Switch Refresher In most networks we have switches that listen for MAC addresses and store them in their MAC Address Table for future use. If a switch receives a request and it knows which port the destination MAC address is associated with, it will forward that request out the single port. If a switch doesn’t know which port a MAC Address is associated with, it will basically send that frame out all of it’s ports (known as flooding) so that the destination can hopefully still receive it. This is why we’ve moved away from hubs and moved towards switches. Hubs will flood everything because they don’t keep track of the MAC Addresses. You can see how this extra traffic on the network is unwanted. ...

I really wanted to test out some VMware Site Recovery Manager scenarios and realized that buying SANs, servers and networking equipment was quite expensive. I also didn’t have a lot of space in my house that was available for running all of this equipment. After completing my VCP5 I was given a copy of VMware Workstation 8 and thought that I might be able to build a nested virtual environment, where the ESXi hosts themselves were virtualized inside of workstation. (Don’t worry, virtualizing a virtual host doesn’t warp time or space, it’s safe.) ...

Netapp has released their vStorage APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA) provider 1.0 to their support site. http://support.netapp.com If you’re not that familiar with the VASA concept, this article should explain what it is and how it’s used in regards to VMware vSphere 5. What is VASA? VASA Providers collect information about your storage systems and present that information to vSphere. In previous versions of vSphere, an administrator might need to keep track of hisher datastores in a spreadsheet or have a naming convention that showed the properties of an individual datastore. For example, if your storage system had both SSD and Sata disks, the Datastore might be named VMFS01_SSD or something similar. ...

Recently, I wrote a blog post about how to setup and configure VMware Site Recovery Manager for vSphere 5.0. This setup included using array based storage replication to transfer data and it ignored the new VMware replication engine that is included with Site Recovery Manager 5.0. This post is intended to cover the setup and configuration of the vSphere replication. If you’re not familiar with it, the vSphere Replication Management Server handles individual replication of powered on virtual machines, to a secondary site. This is a free vSphere appliance with the purchase of VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.0. Traditionally, vSphere required that the storage providers were replicating the virtual machine data for SRM to work, but that has all changed with 5.0. Now VMware can do the replication for you. ...

Finally, the idea of running a Disaster Recovery test is manageable. VMware Site Recovery Manager combined with vSphere has made it possible to test a failover to a warm site without worrying that the DR test itself will cause an outage. Setting up Site Recovery Manager and performing a site failover sounds like a daunting task, but VMware has made this very simple, assuming you are familiar with vSphere already. If you already have a virtual environment setup at both your production site and a secondary site, SRM is pretty simple to get started with but allows for almost any DR Plan you can think of to be run. ...

A question often comes up about what to do when you have a segmented virtual network that needs to be able to traverse subnets. This might happen if you’re doing some testing and don’t want the machines to contact the production network, or perhaps doing a test SRM failover and having the virtual machines in their own test network. Virtual machines in subnet (A) might need to contact other virtual machines in subnet (B) but don’t have access to the physical router any longer, so they can’t communicate. To solve this issue, how about we try a virtual router? ...

We’re probably all aware of the benefits of clustering things like SQL Server in order to provide highly available data. But shared storage clustering has some drawbacks on VMware ESXi clusters such as not being able to vMotion. • Database Mirroring – SQL Server database mirrors utilize a non-shared storage availability solution, using built-in SQL Server replication technology to create and maintain one or more copies of each database on other SQL Servers in the environment. SQL Server database mirrors provide application-aware availability, and the lack of a quorum disk makes this a VMware-friendly solution, allowing the full use of vMotion, DRS, and HA. ...