What's new in vSphere 5.1

Mike Laverick's Blog

What's new in vSphere 5.1

Posted by Mike_Laverick 

VMware (the company I now work for) have released the .PDFs which outline what's new in vSphere5.1...

I've got 12 blogposts that I will be releasing daily that outline each area:

• What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1
• What’s new in VMware vCenter 5.1
• What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1 – Networking
• What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1 – Platform
• What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1 – Storage
• What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1 – Performance
• Introduction to VMware vSphere Replication
• Introduction to VMware vSphere Data Protection
• What’s new in VMware vSphere Storage Appliance
• What’s new in vCloud Director 5.1

Vsphere 5 New Features

1. Storage DRS

2. Storage I/O Control for NFS

3. VMFS-5

4. ESXi Firewall

5. VMFS Scalability and Performance enhancements

6. 2TB+ pass-through RDM support

7. vCenter inventory extensibility

8. Storage APIs -- VAAI T10 Compliancy

9. Storage APIs -- VAAI Offloads for NAS

10. Storage APIs -- VAAI Thin Provisioning

11. Storage APIs -- Storage Awareness/Discovery

12. Storage APIs -- Data Protection compatible with MN

13. APD, Permanent APD Survivability Enablement

14. Snapshot enhancements

15. Storage vMotion scalability improvements

16. iSCSI Enablement: iSCSI UI Support

17. iSCSI Enablement: Stateless Support

18. Multi-queue Storage IO adapters

19. Increase NFSv3 Max Share Count to 256

20. SATA 3.0

21. Software FCoE initiator support

22. Enhanced logging support

23. Enhanced Storage metrics

24. Profile-Driven Storage

25. Storage vMotion support for snapshots

26. vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA)

27. SSD Detection and Enablement

28. vSphere Replication

29. vSphere Data Recovery 2.0

30. VADP enhancements

31. vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) Enhancements

32. vCO -- Library extension and consolidation

33. vCO -- Scalability

34. Network I/O Control (NIOC) Phase 2

35. NIOC -- User Defined Resource Pools

36. NIOC -- HBR traffic type

37. NIOC -- 802.1p tagging

38. Network Traffic Stats for iOPS

39. Improvement to UDP and Multicast traffic types

40. New networking drivers for server enablement

41. vDS support for Port mirror, LLDP and NetFlow V5

42. vDS Manage Port Group UI enhancement

43. Hot-Insert/Remove of Filters

44. Enhanced vMotion Compatibility

45. Storage vMotion support for Linked Clones

46. vMotion scalability (dual-NIC & longer latency support)

47. vNetwork API enhancements

48. vNetwork Opaque Channel

49. Support for 8 10GbE Physical NIC ports per host

50. Add Host Resources MIB to SNMP offering

51. Metro vMotion

52. Host Profile for DRS to support Stateless ESX

53. HA interop with agent VMs

54. DRS/DPM interop with agent VMs

55. DRS enhancements for Maintenance Mode

56. Enhanced processor support for FT

57. vSphere 5.0 HA aka "FDM / Fault Domain Manager"

58. vSphere HA - Heartbeat Datastores

59. vSphere HA - Support for partitions of management network

60. vSphere HA - Default isolation response changed

61. vSphere HA - New Status information in UI

62. vSphere HA - IPv6 support

63. vSphere HA - Application Awareness API publicly available

64. Extensions to create special icons for VMs

65. ESX Agent Management

66. Solution Management Plugin

67. Next-Gen vSphere Client

68. Host Profiles Enhancements

69. vCenter enhancements for stateless ESXi

70. vCenter Server Appliance

71. vCenter: Support for FileManager and VirtualDiskManager APIs

72. Virtual Hardware - Smartcard support for vSphere

73. Virtual Hardware Version 8

74. Virtual HW v8 -- 1TB VM RAM

75. Virtual HW v8 -- 32-way Virtual SMP

76. Virtual Hw v8 -- Client-Connected USB Devices

77. Virtual HW v8 -- EFI Virtual BIOS

78. Virtual HW v8 -- HD Audio

79. Virtual Hw v8 -- Multi-core Virtual CPU Support UI

80. Virtual HW v8 -- New virtual E1000 NIC

81. Virtual HW v8 -- UI and other support

82. Virtual HW v8 -- USB 3.0 device support

83. Virtual HW v8 -- VMCI device enhancements

84. Virtual HW v8 -- xHCI

85. Support SMP for Mac OS X guest OS

86. Universal Passthrough (VMdirect path with vMotion support)

87. Guest Management Operations (VIX API)

88. Guest OS Support -- Mac OS X Server

89. VM Serial Port to Host Serial Port Redirection (Serial Port Pass-Through)

90. Passthrough/SR-IOV

91. VMware Tools Portability

92. VMRC Concurrent Connections enhancements

93. Scalability: 512 VMs per host

94. ESXCLI enhancements

95. Support SAN and hw-iSCSI boot

96. Hardware -- Interlagos Processor Enablement

97. Hardware -- SandyBridge-DT Processor Enablement

98. Hardware -- SandyBridge-EN Processor Enablement

99. Hardware -- SandyBridge-EP Processor Enablement

100. Hardware -- Valencia Processor Enablement

101. Hardware -- Westmere-EX Processor Enablement

102. Platform -- CIM Enhancements

103. Platform -- ESX i18n support

104. Host Power Management Enhancements

105. Improved CPU scheduler

106. Improved scalability of CPU (NUMA) scheduler

107. Memory scheduler improvements to support 32-way VCPU's

108. Swap to host cache

109. API enhancements to configure VM boot order

110. VMX swap

111. Support for ESXi On Apple XServe

112. Redirect DCUI to host serial port for remote monitoring and management

113. UEFI BIOS Boot for ESXi hosts

114. Scalability -- 160 CPU Threads (logical PCPUs) per host

115. Scalability -- 2 TB RAM per host

116. Scalability -- 2048 VCPUs per host

117. Scalability -- 2048 virtual disks per host

118. Scalability -- 2048 VMs per VMFS volume

119. Scalability -- 512 VMs per host

120. Stateless -- Host Profile Engine and Host Profile Completeness

121. Stateless -- Image Builder

122. Stateless -- Auto Deploy

123. Stateless -- Networking Host Profile Plugin

124. Stateless -- VIB Packaging Enhancement

125. Stateless -- VMkernel network core dump

126. Host profiles enhancements for storage configuration

127. Enhanced driver support for ESXi

128. Intel TXT Support

129. Memsched policy enhancements w.r.t. Java balloon

130. Native Driver Autoload support

131. Root password entry screen in interactive installer

132. vCenter Dump Collector

133. vCenter Syslog Collector

134. VMware Update Manager (VUM) enhancements

135. VUM -- Virtual Appliance enhancements

136. VUM -- vApp Support

137. VUM -- Depot management enhancements

138. vCLI enhancements

139. PowerCLI enhancements

140. VProbes -- ESX Platform Observability

Using VMware vCenter Operations Manager to pinpoint and solve issues

By Lauren Malhoit

 

Takeaway: Lauren Malhoit walks us through a couple of demos of using VMware vCenter Operations Manager to pinpoint and then solve annoying problems.

I had the pleasure of attending VMware’s VMworld conference this past week in San Francisco and sat in on several sessions. One of my favorites was called Troubleshooting Using vCenter Operations Manager, given by Kit Colbert and Praveen Kannan. They did a live lab in the session that turned out really well and showed how useful vCenter Operations Manager can be. I thought I’d take this opportunity to share some of what they showed us in the lab.
Before we get started, it might be useful to share some introductory details on vCOPS (vCenter Operations Manager). It can be installed as a plug-in in your current vSphere environment. After some minimal configuration it will be up and running. vCOPS works best after it has been in the environment for at least a few weeks. Its usefulness does not necessarily lie in finding outright errors (although it can do that), but in finding anomalies in your environment. It “learns” the environment and can point out what is out of the norm. There are three core scores that are given on the main dashboard as shown in Figure A.

Figure A

VMware calls these core elements badges. There’s the health badge that shows immediate problems, the risk badge that shows future problems, and the efficiency badge that shows opportunities to optimize. There are then subcategories under each of these badges which contribute to the scores.
In the live demo, they offered up three scenarios to show the value of the tool. The first showed how to find what’s causing the slow performance of a workload as shown in the steps below.

1. In the search field found in the upper-right corner, type in the name of the VM that is slow.
2. Under the Alerts pane there is an option to filter by workload. Click on the workload filter.
3. Find the workload alert and then click on it.
4. From here you can see the symptoms, such as heavy disk I/O.
5. Now click on the Operation Tab.
6. Check out the Workload section and you can see that the datastore “skittle” (icon representing the datastore) is red.
7. Click on the datastore skittle and click details.
8. Click on the Analysis tab and select Storage as a focus area then filter by VM.
9. You can see that the color is based on latency, and if your problem is storage latency you’ll see it in here.
10. You can deduce that you either need faster storage or more spindles because the current datastore can’t handle the VM workload.

The next scenario dealt with capacity constraints. vCOPS can show you which of your VMs are undersized, meaning they don’t have enough memory, CPU, etc., configured. Here are the steps you can follow to find out if you have a sizing problem with your VMs:

1. Search for the problematic VM by name.
2. By looking at the dashboard you will be able to see the workload is very high and it’s hitting the memory pretty hard. Although you can see this right in the dashboard, you may want to see if this is a common issue with this machine.
3. Click on the Planning Tab. then click on the Stress badge
4. Here you’ll be able to see how much of the time memory has been undersized. So if your memory is showing that it’s been undersized for 80% of the time, it may be time to add more memory!

The last scenario was the most interesting to me. It demonstrated how you can find out which changes to a VM may have caused downtime. It’s such a useful thing to be able to narrow down, and even reverse, changes in one click if you have vCenter Configuration Manager. Here are the steps:

1. Search for the problematic VM
2. Click on the red VM skittle under the Operations tab.
3. Click on the host of the VM and you’ll be able to see the CPU is showing as red.
4. Click on the CPU
5. Click on the Events tab
6. There is a time window that can be changed if necessary. You’ll want to look for the time where the graph changes from green to red. This is most likely when the change was made to your VM.
7. Drill in to where the change is and look at the events list.
8. In the events list, you’ll be able to see if something was installed, like an antivirus. This installation or restart, etc., will most likely be the reason the CPU kept spiking and started showing red in vCOPS.  As mentioned above, if you combine this with vCenter Configuration Manager, you can actually find out which user made the change and roll it back in one click!

VMware's First Cloud Certification

VMware's First Cloud Certification

By: David Davis From http://blogs.vmware.com/vcloud/2012/07/vmwares-first-cloud-certification.html

Recently VMware’s first certification around cloud computing quietly went into beta. Let’s learn more about this new certification option, the VCP-Infrastructure as a Service (or VCP-IaaS) certification…

Top 10 Must-Knows for the New VCP-IaaS

As this certification is still in beta, as of today, we don’t have a lot of official information yet but here’s what we do know:

1. VMware Education confirmed the existence of this new certification on their blog, here.
2. The VCP-IaaS will focus on Installing, Configuring, and Administering Infrastructure as a Service clouds based on vCloud Director.
3. It’s expected to be launched in late-July.
4. It requires that you already have a VCP so it’s the second form of the VCP with the VCP-DT being the other.
5. According to Eric Sloof from NTPRO.NL, the current beta exam consists of 115 questions and a short pre-exam survey consisting of 8 questions. The passing score for this exam is 300, using a scaled scoring method. Eric said that the scoring scale ranges from 100 to 500.
6. Also according to Eric, “Candidates interested in this certification should be capable of installing and configuring vCloud Director and related components, utilizing vCD to create and manage vApps, Service Catalogs, Organization/provider VDCs, and administering cloud enabled networking and storage.”
7. If you don’t already have your VCP5, that is where you need to start on your way to this new VMware vCloud certification.
8. If you do have your VCP5 then I recommend that you get started learning vCloud Director by trying out either myTrainSignal vCloud Director Essentials video training course or the VMware Education vCloud Director Fundamentals course.
9. You can try vCloud Director (and vSphere with vCenter) FREE for 60 days, here.
10. If you are already a vSphere user, vCloud solutions – either via private cloud with vCloud Director or public cloud through vCloud providers – are what you need to be considering next.

To sign up to receive notification when the new VCP-IaaS is publicly available, click here.

My Take on the VCP-IaaS

I am super-excited about the VCP-IaaS and look forward to its public release. One of the best ways for the some 100,000+ VCPs out there to learn about vCloud Director is to do it through a certification program. As vCloud Director becomes more prolific in the datacenters of today, look for more great blog posts, certifications, books, and video training about it (in fact, I know of a vExpert current producing an upcoming vCloud Director Organizational Admin video training course). VMware is smart to create their first cloud certification and I hope that they won’t stop there and decide to follow this up with a VCAP and VCDX on cloud infrastructure and vCloud Director. Exciting times!

Note: I’ll be following up with more information about the VCP-IaaS on this blog as soon as it is released. To stay up to date, be sure to follow @vCloud on Twitter.

David Davis is a VMware Evangelist and vSphere Video Training Author for Train Signal. He has achieved CCIE, VCP,CISSP, and vExpert level status over his 15+ years in the IT industry. David has authored hundreds of articles on the Internet and nine different video training courses for TrainSignal.com including the popular vSphere 5 and vCloud Director video training courses. Learn more about David at his blog or on Twitter and check out a sample of his VMware vSphere video training course from TrainSignal.com.

VMware vSphere Fault Tolerance

VMware Fault Tolerance (FT) is a new feature that is available with vSphere 4.0. VMware FT is based on vLockstep technology and aims to provide zero downtime, zero data loss, and continuous availability for applications. FT provides this continuous availability for applications by creating a secondary, live shadow instance of a virtual machine (VM) that is in virtual lockstep with the primary VM instance.

Next, VMware FT builds on VMware High Availability (HA). Therefore, HA has to be running correctly in order to enable FT. VMware FT can be turned on or off for individual virtual machines with a click of the mouse. In addition, since it leverages existing VMware HA clusters with a maximum node limit of 16 servers, any number of virtual machines in the cluster can be protected with VMware FT.

Finally, if you have set up VMware HA cluster and meet the Prerequisites and Requirements below, enabling FT is only a few mouse clicks away. Check out the step-by-step screen captures of enabling FT and testing failover with FT enabled at FT Example Down Below.

VMware vSphere FT Prerequisites

For VMware FT to perform as expected, it must run in an environment that meets specific requirements.

• The primary and secondary fault-tolerant virtual machines must be in a VMware HA cluster.
• Primary and secondary virtual machines must not run on the same host. FT automatically places the secondary virtual machine on a different host.
• Virtual machine files must be stored on shared storage.
• Shared storage solutions include NFS, FC, and iSCSI.
• For virtual disks on VMFS-3, the virtual disks must be thick, meaning they cannot be thin or sparsely allocated.
• Turning on VMware FT automatically converts the virtual machine to thick-eager zeroed disks.
• Virtual Raw Disk Mapping (RDM) is supported. Physical RDM is not supported.
• Multiple gigabit Network Interface Cards (NICs) are required.
• A minimum of two VMKernel Gigabit NICs must be dedicated to VMware FT Logging and vMotion.
• The FT Logging interface is used for logging events from the primary virtual machine to the secondary FT virtual machines.
• For best performance, use 10Gbit NIC rather than 1Gbit NIC, and enable the use of jumbo frames.
• VMware FT requires that Hardware Virtualization (HV) be turned on in the BIOS. The process for enabling HV varies among BIOSs. Contact your vendor for specifics.

VMware vSphere FT Requirements

There are a number of requirements which must be met before FT can be set up:

• CPUs: limited processors must be the same family (no mix/match).
• Requires Intel 31xx, 33xx, 52xx, 54xx, 55xx, 74xx or AMD 13xx,23xx, 83xx series of processors.
• SMP virtual machines are not supported.
• Hardware Virtualization must be enabled in the BIOS.
• Hosts must be in a VMware High Availability-enabled cluster.
• Storage: shared storage (FC, iSCSI, or NAS).
• Network: minimum of 3 NICs for various types of traffic (ESX Management/VMotion, virtual machine traffic, FT logging).
• GigE required for vMotion and FT logging.
• Minimized single points of failures in the environment. For example, NIC teaming, multiple network switches, storage multipathing.
• Primary and secondary hosts must be running the same build of ESX.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&externalId=1010601&sliceId=1&docTypeID=DT_KB_1_1&dialogID=29660642&stateId=1%200%2029664181

Guest Operating Systems

The following table displays guest operating system support for VMware FT. For specific guest operating system version information, see the Guest Operating System Installation Guide at http://www.vmware.com/pdf/GuestOS_guide.pdf.

The following values appear in the table:

• Yes - Virtual machine can be FT-enabled while powered on.
• Yes/Off - Virtual machine must be powered off before FT is enabled.
• No - Not supported by VMware FT.

Guest Operating System	Fault Tolerance Support with Intel Xeon Based on 45nm Core 2 Microarchitecture	Fault Tolerance Support with Intel Xeon Based on Core i7 Microarchitecture	Fault Tolerance Support with AMD 3rd Generation Opteron
Windows Server 2008	Yes	Yes/Off	Yes/Off
Windows Vista	Yes	Yes/Off	Yes/Off
Windows Server 2003 (64 bit)	Yes	Yes/Off	Yes/Off
Windows Server 2003 (32 bit)	Yes	Yes/Off	Yes/Off (Requires Service Pack 2 or greater)
Windows XP (64 bit)	Yes	Yes/Off	Yes/Off
Windows XP (32 bit)	Yes	Yes/Off	No
Windows 2000	Yes/Off	Yes/Off	No
Windows NT 4.0	Yes/Off	Yes/Off	No
Linux (all ESX-supported distributions)	Yes	Yes/Off	Yes/Off
Netware Server	Yes/Off	Yes/Off	Yes/Off
Solaris 10 (64-bit)	Yes	Yes/Off	Yes/Off (Requires Solaris U1)
Solaris 10 (32-bit)	Yes	Yes/Off	No
FreeBSD (all ESX-supported distributions)	Yes	Yes/Off	Yes/Off

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1008027

VMware vSphere FT Step by Step Example

1. Image depicting the Network configuration.




2. Turning on FT.



3. 54% through setting up FT.



4. FT setup complete.



5. vLockstep Interval and Log Bandwidth information are now updated.



6. Primary VM is located on 10.10.10.146.



7. Secondary VM is running on the Secondary Host- 10.10.10.145.



8. Testing FT using the built in Test Failover command.



9. Failover test completes. Notice that 10.10.10.146 has become the secondary location.



10. After the Failover Test, the primary host server is now 10.10.10.145 and the primary VM is running on it.



11. Furthermore, after the Failover Test, the secondary VM runs on the secondary host server, 10.10.10.146.



12. Failover test completion will result in showing the primary VM on the new primary host server and the new secondary host server with the accompanying vLockstep Interval and Log Bandwidth.



13. Finally, VMware vSphere FT is ready to provide continuous protection to your VMs.
 

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