Vmware

Now that we’ve entered the virtualization age, we’ve become accustomed to moving workloads between hosts in order to get better performance. We’re so used to it, that VMware DRS will move workloads around automatically and many administrators don’t even care what host is running their virtual machines. Hosts are now more like a resource container, where we move our servers to the resource that is most available. VMware lets us take DRS one step further, where if we have extra resources available that aren’t being used, we can power off the hosts in order to save on power consumption. If we have 50 hosts running, but only using the resources of 30 of them, let’s power off the remaining 20 hosts to save on power and cooling. Over a year, these types of savings can really add up. ...

Sometimes we need a quick set of statistics to see what is going on inside a vSphere host. Sort of like using Microsoft’s task manager on a Windows server, we can quickly take a look at what some performance stats on the VMware hosts. A couple of the tools to do this are the esxtop and resxtop commands. Esxtop and resxtop are basically the same with the exception that esxtop must be run directly on the vSphere host by connecting via SSH. Resxtop can be run remotely from the vMA perhaps. Below is a screenshot of the two tools running side by side. Aside from the refresh rates not being matched up, you can see that they are both showing the same information. ...

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. ...

Setting up a disaster recovery site can be a costly endeavor. VMware Site Recovery Manager has made disaster recovery much simpler, but it’s still expensive to get a DR site up and going. Rack space, power, cooling, bandwidth, storage and compute can all add up pretty quickly, not to mention that hopefully you’ll never have to use this equipment. Replication Bandwidth Bandwidth could be very expensive depending on how much data needs to be replicated. Consider some of these techniques to make the best use of your bandwidth. ...

vSphere AutoDeploy always seemed like a lot of work to setup just to deploy a few VMware hosts, but in my current job I don’t setup hosts very often. If you are constantly deploying new hosts to get out in front of performance issues, or are building a new datacenter and deploying many hosts at once, AutoDeploy can be a great way to get up and running quickly. Prerequisites In order to use AutoDeploy, you’ll first need vSphere5, the AutoDeploy Install (which is on the vCenter Media), the vSphere5 Offline Bundle, PowerCLI, a DHCP Server and a TFTP server for starters. ...

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.) ...