Vmware

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. ...

One of my most frequently read articles is on how to use MBRAlign to align your virtual machine disks on Netapp storage. Well, after Netapp has released their new Virtual Storage Console (VSC4) the tedious task of using MBRAlign might be eased for some admins. Optimization and Migration The new VSC4 console for vSphere has a new tab called Optimization and Migration. Here you are able to scan all or some of your datastores to check the alignment of your virtual machines. The scan manager can even be set on a schedule so that changes to the datastore will be recognized. ...

If you’ve built a virtual infrastructure you’ve probably had to decide whether or not to use Beacon Probing when setting up your vSwitch uplink ports. But what is it, and why do we need it? Let me propose a scenario. Assume that we have a virtual switch with three uplinks, and one of those uplinks fails. If the uplinks are setup correctly, they will see the failed uplink and start sending their frames over the other active uplinks. This is standard network fault tolerance from vSphere. ...

VMware has lots of ways to setup networking on their ESXi hosts. In order to set this up in the best way for your needs, it’s important to understand how the traffic will be routed between VMs, virtual switches, physical switches and physical network adapters. Before looking at an example, we should review some networking 101. Machines on the same vlan on the same switch can communicate with one another (assuming there is no firewall type devices in the way). Machines on different vlans on the same switch cannot communicate unless the traffic passes through a router. ...

It’s important to understand how VMware ESXi servers handle connections to their associated storage arrays. If we look specifically with fibre channel fabrics, we have several multipathing options to be considered. There are three path selection policy (PSP) plugins that VMware uses natively to determine the I/O channel that data will travel over to the storage device. Fixed Path Most Recently Used (MRU) Round Robin (RR) Let’s look at some examples of the three PSPs we’ve mentioned and how they behave. The definitions come from the vSphere 5 storage guide found below. ...

Many storage providers have been working with VMware to improve performance of disks by giving VMware access to invoke capabilities of the storage system. There are basically three main primitives that VMware can invoke to do this. Full Copy Hardware Assisted Locking Block Zeroing Full Copy Lets look at what happens when you clone a VM without VAAI. The ESXi server will start to copy the blocks of the original VM and start to paste them in the new location. Below is an animation to describe this process. ...