VMware vSphere 5.5 Application High Availability – AppHA

VMware has introduced new Application HA in vSphere 5.5. It is a new feature which enables to protect tier one applications like SQL, or IIS against failures. Those applications are monitored and in case their service fails, the App HA is able to detect and restart this application. The product present itself as a virtual appliance which gets deployed to your environment as an OVF template.

There are already some vendors which leverages the API that has been introduced in vSphere 5, like Symantec Application HA or Neverfail.

The vSphere AppHA works in conjunction with vFabric Hyperic Server, so you must install/and configure Hyperic in order to use vSphere App HA, and you must deploy a small agent to the VM which allows the monitoring. The whole solution is managed through a plugin visible through the vSphere Web Client only.

There are policies which acts during the recovery process:

• When application fails, the service is restarted
• But if the service restarts fails, the VM gets restarted
• A vCenter Alarm gets triggered
• E-mail notification is sent.

vSphere AppHA – those current Applications supported:

• MSSQL 2005, 2008, 2008R2, 2012
• Tomcat 6.0, 7.0
• TC Server Runtime 6.0, 7.0
• IIS 6.0, 7.0, 8.0
• Apache HTTP Server 1.3, 2.0, 2.2.

The product is apparently very easy to setup and use. It takes only about 30-45 min to go.

You can create individual policy for each of the applications, or you can use the same policy for all of the applications. You can right click the application to put it into maintenance mode during which there is no remediation. And then when finished working with that application, you just switch back to the normal working mode.

vSphere 5.5 improvement

VMware vSphere 5.5 introduces many new features and enhancements to further extend the core capabilities of the virtualization platform.

vSphere ESXi Hypervisor Enhancements

·                     Hot-Pluggable SSD PCI Express (PCIe) Devices

·                     Support for Reliable Memory Technology

·                     Enhancements for CPU C-States

Virtual Machine Enhancements

·                     Virtual Machine Compatibility with VMware ESXi™ 5.5

·                     Expanded vGPU Support

·                     Graphic Acceleration for Linux Guests

VMware vCenter Server Enhancements

·                     VMware® vCenter™ Single Sign-On

·                     VMware vSphere Web Client

·                     VMware vCenter Server Appliance™

·                     vSphere App HA

·                     vSphere HA and VMware vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler™ (vSphere DRS)

·                     Virtual Machine–Virtual Machine Affinity Rules Enhancements

·                     vSphere Big Data Extensions

vSphere Storage Enhancements

·                     Support for 62TB VMDK

·                     MSCS Updates

·                     vSphere 5.1 Feature Updates

·                     16GB E2E support

·                     PDL AutoRemove

·                     vSphere Replication Interoperability

·                     vSphere Replication Multi-Point-in-Time Snapshot Retention

·                     vSphere Flash Read Cache

vSphere Networking Enhancements

·                     Link Aggregation Control Protocol Enhancements

·                     Traffic Filtering

·                     Quality of Service Tagging

·                     SR-IOV Enhancements

·                     Enhanced Host-Level Packet Capture

·                     40GB NIC support

More details : http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere/VMware-vSphere-Platform-Whats-New.pdf

Vblock Infrastructure

What is a Vblock Infrastructure platform ?

A Vblock infrastructure platform is an integrated solution that combines compute,network,storage and management components into a single package.

This package is a self-contained unit that can be utilized to deploy a single service, multiple service, or can be aggregated with additional Vblock platforms to support larger initiatives.

Best-in-class hardware and software from Cisco,EMC and Vmware.

Vblock platform was first introduced in late 2009, there were two models: Vblock 1, which was based on CLARiiON storage and Vblock 2, based on Symmetrix VMAX.

Now they introduced new models 300 and 700 on Unified storage that included the fully integrated. Over the year and a half, new UCS blades have been added, the addition of PowerPath/VE for automated path management, support for ESXi, and EMC UIM for single point of infrastructure management.

Vblock 100 Models

Vblock 200 Models

Vblock 300 Models

Vblcok 700 Models

VMware Workstation Technology Preview 2013

VMware Workstation 2013 Tech Preview

The news has come out few days back, that VMware Workstation Technology preview 2013 is available for testing. Anyone can download and test the Tech Preview of VMware Workstation with Virtual Hardware Version 10 (or vmx-10) which will be (or should be) part of the final release. Each major step forward in Virtual Hardware version introduces support for more RAM or CPU plus other enhancements. You could read my post about the current Virtual hardware version 9 in this post.

Interesting read if you ask me what were the previous versions of Virtual Hardware. If you want to see the history of  Virtual Hardware versions, there is a VMware Kb article for that: Virtual machine hardware versions.

The current VMware Workstation 9 has introduced the possibility to restrict and encrypt VMs too. A feature which gets further enhanced, where an encrypted VM with restrictions for modifications will expire in time. Useful when wanting to create restricted VMs for sharing with time as a limit.

What’s New in the VMware Workstation Technology Preview May 2013

Note that:

There are no guarantees that changes in this preview will be forward compatible with other VMware software, nor that these changes will be present in future supported releases of VMware Workstation.

New in this release - Virtual Hardware 10:

16 vCPUs – Quite monster, isn’t it? To be able to use it you’ll need a PC or server with at least 8 cores with hyper-threading enabled to create and power on a VM with this configuration

Expiring Virtual Machines

The encrypted VMs with restrictions, introduced in Workstation 9 has been enhanced to time limit restriction.  Pretty cool.

This feature establishes a secure connection to a web server at VMware.com to validate the current time and prevent users from rolling back their host clock.

New Converter built in

This Workstation Technology Preview includes a preview of the next version of VMware Converter.   The Converter enables users to make Physical machines virtual.  This version of the Converter includes support the following enhancements:

• Guest operating system support for Microsoft Windows 8 and Microsoft Windows Server 2012
• Guest operating system support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6
• Support for virtual and physical machine sources with GUID Partition Table (GPT) disks
• Support for virtual and physical machine sources with Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI)
• Support for EXT4 file system
• Support for vSphere 5.1 virtual machine hardware version 9

SSD passthrough

Windows 8 can optimize performances when run from SSD. VMware Workstation can detect when the Virtual Machine Disk file is being stored on an SSD drive and pass this information to the guest operating system to enable Windows 8 to make the same optimizations when it is running in a virtual machine.

Pre-Release OVF Tool

OVF tool is used when manipulating Open Virtualization Format (OVF) packaged VMs. The latest pre-release version of the OVFTool is included in this Technology Preview of VMware Workstation and is used by Workstation to upload and download virtual machines to and from vSphere.   The OVFTool is also used to import an .OVF file which may come in handy when importing virtual machines created using desktop virtualization software developed by Oracle.

Requirements before you install.

It’s pretty common today to have a CPU which is VT-x support, but still. If you have an Intel CPU that has VT-x support, you must verify that VT-x support is enabled in the host system BIOS. The BIOS settings that must be enabled for VT-x support vary depending on the system vendor. See the VMware knowledge base article at http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1003944 for information about how to determine if VT-x support is enabled.

When you install a 64-bit operating system, Workstation performs checks to make sure the host system has a supported processor. You cannot install a 64-bit operating system if the host system does not meet the processor requirements.

How to rollback ESXi 5.1 to 5.0

VMware vSphere ESXi 5.1 was released last month, after upgrading my hosts I had some really annoying issue’s, I couldn’t connect my iSCSI (QNAP) datastores and the hosts failed with a PSOD.. once I checked the HCL at the VMware website I saw that my HP DL360 G5 isn’t supported anymore.. time to rollback the latest installation.

Solution:

(Re)boot the host and press R to start the Recovery Mode..

Installed hypervisors:

HYPERVISOR1: 5.0.0-623860 
HYPERVISOR2: 5.1.0-799733 (Default)

CURRENT DEFAULT HYPERVISOR WILL BE REPLACED PERMANENTLY 

DO YOU REALLY WANT TO ROLL BACK?

Press Y to start the roll back

Output

The host is downgraded and back online again with VMware vSphere ESXi 5.0.0

VMware vCenter Converter Standalone 5.1

The VMware vCenter Converter Standalone 5.1 includes the following new functionality:

• Support for virtual machine hardware version 9
• Guest operating system support for Microsoft Windows 8 and Microsoft Windows Server 2012
• Guest operating system support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6
• Support for virtual and physical machine sources with GUID Partition Table (GPT) disks
• Support for virtual and physical machine sources with Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI)
• Support for EXT4 file system

Interoperability

Converter Standalone 5.1 supports the following sources.

• Physical machine running an operating system noted in Supported Guest Operating Systems
• VMware Desktop products

             Workstation 7.x, 8.x, and 9.0

             Fusion 3.x, 4.x, and 5.0

             Player 3.x, 4.x, and 5.0

• VMware vCenter virtual machines

           vSphere 5.1

        vSphere 5.0

        vSphere 4.1

          vSphere 4.0

Third-party backup images and virtual machines

• Acronis True Image Echo 9.1 and 9.5, and Acronis True Image Home 10 and 11 (.tib)
• Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery (formerly LiveState Recovery) 6.5, 7.0, 8.0, and 8.5, and LiveState Recovery 3.0 and 6.0 (.sv2i format only)
• Norton Ghost version 10.0, 12.0, and 14.0 (.sv2i format only)
• Parallels Desktop 2.5, 3.0, and 4.0 (.pvs and .hdd). Compressed disks are not supported
• Parallels Workstation 2.x (.pvs). Compressed disks are not supported
• StorageCraft ShadowProtect Desktop, ShadowProtect Server, ShadowProtect Small Business Server (SBS), ShadowProtect IT Edition, versions 2.0, 2.5, 3.0, 3.1, and 3.2 (.spf)
• The Microsoft VHD format for the following sources:
• Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 and Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 (.vmc)
• Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 and 2005 R2 (.vmc)

For conditions and limitations about converting Backup Exec System Recovery, ShadowProtect, and Consolidated Backup images, see the VMware vCenter Converter Standalone User's Guide. 

Parallels Virtuozzo Containers are not supported in Converter Standalone.

Depending on the selected source, you can convert it to the following destinations.

VMware vCenter virtual machines

• ESX 4.0 and 4.1
• ESXi 4.0, 4.1, 5.0, and 5.1
• vCenter Server 4.0, 4.1, 5.0, and 5.1

VMware Desktop virtual machines

• VMware Workstation 7.x, 8.x, and 9.0
• VMware Player 3.x, 4.x, and 5.0
• VMware Fusion 3.x, 4.x, and 5.0

Earlier releases of Converter Standalone (versions 3.x and 4.x) might not be compatible with VMware vSphere 5.x.

Supported Guest Operating Systems

Converter Standalone 5.1 supports the following guest operating systems:

• Windows XP Professional SP3 (32-bit and 64-bit)
• Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2 (32-bit and 64-bit)
• Windows Vista SP2 (32-bit and 64-bit)
• Windows Server 2008 SP2 (32-bit and 64-bit)
• Windows Server 2008 R2 (64-bit)
• Windows 7 (32-bit and 64-bit)
• Windows 8 (32-bit and 64-bit)
• Windows Server 2012 (64-bit)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.x (32-bit and 64-bit)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.x (32-bit and 64-bit)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.x (32-bit and 64-bit)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.x (32-bit and 64-bit)
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9.x (32-bit and 64-bit)
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10.x (32-bit and 64-bit)
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11.x (32-bit and 64-bit)
• Ubuntu 10.x (32-bit and 64-bit)
• Ubuntu 11.x (32-bit and 64-bit)
• Ubuntu 12.x (32-bit and 64-bit)

CAUTION: During cloning of powered on Linux machines, Converter Standalone 5.1 preserves the following source file systems on the destination: ext2, ext3, ext4, reiserfs, and vfat. All other source file systems are converted into ext3 file systems on the destination virtual machine.

VMware vCenter Operations Manager 5.7: Overview of What's New

VMware has announced the availability of vCenter Operations Manager 5.7 which is the key component of vCenter Operations Management Suite

Whats new in version 5.7?

• More Flexibility with Capacity Planning
• Improved Self-Monitoring
• Widgets with Improved Flexibility and Usability
• New Custom Relationship Widget
• Custom UI Import and Export Changes for Dashboards and Super Metrics
• Balanced Metrics Profile
• VMware vCenter Infrastructure Navigator Filtering Capability
• New Browser Support
• Security Hardening

The below table provide the overview of new features in different editions

Here is overview video on whats new vCenter Operations Manager 5.7 in by VMware.