Virtualization on The IT Hollow

vShield Endpoint - Trend Micro Deep Security (Part 1)

Mon, 24 Mar 2014 13:03:24 +0000

If you’re a vSphere Administrator and have compliance regulations to deal with, vShield Endpoint might save you a lot of hassle. From my own experience with PCI-DSS, it was important to limit the cardholder data environment scope. The fewer devices that touch credit card data, the fewer items that had to be protected. In the same breath, it was important to have Anti-Virus, malware protection, firewall rules and file integrity monitoring. vShield Endpoint allows for all of these things to be handled in a single package. This post looks specifically at Trend Micro’s Deep Security Product.

vShield Endpoint - Trend Micro Deep Security (Part 2)

Mon, 24 Mar 2014 13:02:02 +0000

In the first post in this series, we deployed the vShield Endpoint host driver and installed the Trend Micro Deep Security Manager on a Windows VM.

Trend Micro Deep Security Appliance Deployment

First, we need to login to the Deep Security Manager which is conveniently accessed as a web page. Go the the DNS name of the Manager that you entered during the setup wizard in part 1 of this series. Log in with the username and password that you specified.

vShield Endpoint - Trend Micro Deep Security (Part 3)

Mon, 24 Mar 2014 13:01:49 +0000

The first parts of this series focused mainly on how to install the Trend Micro Deep Security product and how to prepare your environment. This post shows you a bit more of what can be accomplished with the product.

vShield Endpoint Part 1 vSheidl Endpoint Part 2

Policies

This is the guts of the product. All the configurations you’ve done up to this point have been leading up to a solution that can help secure your environment and possibly make it comply with a regulatory body.

Atlantis USX with VMware VSAN?

Thu, 13 Mar 2014 12:45:12 +0000

Last week I attended the Virtualization Field Day 3 put on by the amazing staff at GestaltIT. One of the sessions was hosted by the folks at Atlantis Computing and they were giving us an overview of their Atlantis USX product.

All travel expenses and incidentals were paid for by Gestalt IT to attend Virtual Field Day 3. This was the only compensation given.

Atlantis USX Overview

Before we get to the crux of the issue, a quick refresher on what Atlantis USX does. The USX product will utilize existing SAN, NAS and DAS and combine it with a server ram to do caching. The value proposition is that Atlantis USX can carve out RAM to be used as either a whole datastore (SUPER FAST) or combine it with existing storage and have it act as a cache. Keeping the cache so close to the processor without having to go across a bus or HBA, which can add additional latency, can be an important addition to a performance strapped storage solution.

vCenter HA Datastore Heartbeats

Mon, 03 Mar 2014 15:00:02 +0000

High Availability is a great reason to virtualize your servers. It can help reduce downtime by automatically rebooting virtual machines in the case of a host failure. But, a relatively minor host issue should not cause the reboot of all of your virtual machines. This is where vCenter HA datastore heartbeats are useful. Let’s first look at a basic example of HA. Below is our normal environment with no failures. We have a few VMs on each host and the hosts are connected to a pair of datastores and a network switch. Now assume we have a host failure, we now need to have HA kick in and reboot the virtual machines on the failed host, over on the still working hosts. HA is working great and is a great feature, but lets take a look at what happens if the Management network were to fail. Without datastore heartbeats involved, the two hosts wouldn’t be able to communicate with each other over the network so the two of them would assume that the other was failed. But by looking at the example below we can see that even though the Management network is down, the virtual machines and their network is working just fine. This means that no outages are being noticed by end users so we DON’T want HA to kick in because the virtual machines will restart.

VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.5 Guide

Mon, 04 Nov 2013 14:02:37 +0000

This is a Site Recovery Manager 5.5 Guide to help understand the design, installation, operation and architecture of setting up VMware SRM 5.5

SRM 5.5 Architecture SRM 5.5 Installation SRM 5.5 Site Configuration SRM 5.5 VM Replication Configuration

SRM 5.5 Array Replication Configuration

SRM 5.5 Virtual Appliance Replication SRM 5.5 Protection Groups SRM 5.5 Recovery Plans SRM 5.5 Bulk IP Customizations SRM 5.5 Test Recovery SRM 5.5 Recovery SRM Gotchas

Official Documentation Links

SRM 5.5 Release Notes SRM 5.5 Compatibility Matrix SRM 5.5 Documentation Center SRM Port Numbers SRM Product Page

VMware Fault Tolerance (FT)

Mon, 21 Oct 2013 13:00:53 +0000

I think the Olsen twins have been using FT longer than VMware has.

Awesome! So you’ve got your brand new shiny VMware cluster all setup with HA and think, “Man, I’m in great shape now. Downtime is a thing of the past!”.

Well, not so fast! VMware High Availability just means that if a physical host fails, the virtual machines can reboot on another host which LIMITS your downtime. What if your machines are so critical that you can’t have this reboot time in the case of a host failure? The answer might be VMware Fault Tolerance (FT).

Are you thin or thick? Where at?

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 13:47:47 +0000

I’m often asked about how to provision virtual machine disks. This almost always comes down to, “Should I use thick or thin disks?” and then “Should I do thin provisioning on the array or on the hypervisor?”

So here we go: Thin vs Thick

Thin provisioning:

Thin provisioned disks don’t allocate all of the space during the provisioning of the storage. Instead, they allocate the space on demand. This is a great way to get more bang for you buck out of your storage. Let’s take a closer look with an example.

Are you Prepared for Disaster?

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 14:10:58 +0000

Disaster Recovery has never been easier to manage than it is right now. Virtualization has given engineers a tremendous tool to allow us to almost effortlessly move workloads between datacenters. Now that we’re virtualizing workloads, we’re now capable of standing up exact copies of our servers in two offices and have them up and running in very short RTOs.

In the past year we’ve seen two major storms hit the East Coast causing severe power outages as well as making commutes difficult or impossible for users to get to work. Thanks to the cloud we have many more mobile users than we used to and even if they’re not considered mobile, their servers may not be located in their office. Cloud presents some great options for disaster recovery that should be taken advantage of, no matter what your geographic location. If you’re in a SMB and you don’t have a DR plan, GET ONE NOW!

Understanding VMware Slot Sizes

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 14:45:12 +0000

VMware slot sizes are an important topic if you’re concerned with how many ESXi hosts are required to run your environment.

What is a Slot?

To begin this post, we need to understand what a slot is. A slot is the minimum amount of CPU and memory resources required for a single VM in an ESXi cluster. Slot size is an important concept because it affects admission control.

A VMware ESXi cluster needs a way to determine how many resources need to be available in the event of a host failure. This slot calculation gives the cluster a way to reserve the right amount of resources.

VMware Ballooning explained

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 14:20:29 +0000

In my last post I explained a memory reclamation technique called Transparent Page Sharing. This post is dedicated to the Balloon driver method.

The first thing to be clear about is that Memory Ballooning is a technique that is only engaged when the host is running low on physical memory. If you have a host with 60 GB of physical memory available and the virtual machines are only allocated a total of 30GB of memory, then you may never need to know what memory ballooning is all about. However if you are over committing your hosts then this is an important topic to review.

HP 3PAR for midrange business

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 16:44:06 +0000

HP Enterprise class storage has just entered the mid range market. Today HP announced the HP 3PAR StoreServ 7000 class which includes two devices; the HP 3PAR 7200 and the HP 3PAR 7400. The 7200 starts at $25k for the 2U device and the 7400 (seen below) is less than $40K for a 4U device.

I’m very excited about this announcement because now HP has a storage device with the features that everybody wants and it’s now affordable for a smaller sized organization. HP has seemingly targeted one of it’s own devices with this announcement (the HP EVA) since it has been very popular with the mid-range business. They’ve even included some tools to migrate data from the EVA to the new 3PAR. I seriously doubt that the EVA will entirely go away, but the new big brother is going to steal some of their thunder.

VMDirectPath I/O Basic Setup

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 00:46:36 +0000

While I was studying for the VCAP-DCA I realized that many people might not have access to a lab that includes the capability to do VMDirectPath I/O. My own lab is using nested ESXi hosts inside of VMware Workstation so I don’t have access to DirectPath either, but I was able to borrow some equipment in order to test my skills.

If you don’t have access to this type of equipment but want to study for the VCAP5-DCA, the below setup should suffice for you to learn it, as the setup is not very difficult.

Poor Man's SRM Lab (Whitebox)

Thu, 03 May 2012 12:32:17 +0000

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.)

Virtual Routing for Bubble Networks

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 14:13:57 +0000

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?

Virtualization vs Emulation

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 15:00:21 +0000

Emulation and Virtualization are not the same thing. In many cases you’ll hear them used interchangeably but they are different concepts.

Emulation

Emulation consists of taking the properties of one system and trying to reproduce it with a different type of system. When it comes to computers, you may have seen some software emulators that you can install and run on a PC or MAC, that will reproduce the characteristics of an older system such as a Nintendo or other gaming console. As an example you could then perhaps run Super Mario Bros. on your work desktop (I am not advocating the playing of video games at work). In this case the software emulator is mimicking the gaming console so that the game could be run inside the emulator, even though the underlying hardware is an x86 architecture.