Category: vSphere

vSphere

VMware vSphere 5.0 Product Documentation

New Features and Release Notes

What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.0

VMware vSphere 5.0 Release Notes

Compatibility and Configuration Limits

Hardware, Host, and Guest Operating System Compatibility Guides

VMware Product Interoperability Matrix

Configuration Maximums for VMware vSphere 5.0

ESXi and vCenter Server Product Documentation

VMware vSphere Basics Guide

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vSphere Installation and Setup Guide

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vSphere Upgrade Guide

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vCenter Server and Host Management Guide

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vSphere Virtual Machine Administration Guide

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vSphere Host Profiles Guide

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vSphere Networking Guide

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vSphere Storage Guide

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vSphere Security Guide

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vSphere Resource Management Guide

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vSphere Availability Guide

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vSphere Monitoring and Performance Guide

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vSphere Troubleshooting

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VMware vSphere Examples and Scenarios Guide

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Command-Line Product Documentation

Getting Started with vSphere Command-Line Interfaces Guide

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vSphere Command-Line Interface Concepts and Examples

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vSphere PowerCLI User’s Guide

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VMware vSphere Update Manager PowerCLI Installation and Administration Guide

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vSphere Management Assistant Guide

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VMware vSphere 5.0 Documentation

VMware vSphere™ 5.0 (“vSphere”) introduces many improvements and new features to extend the benefits and capabilities of vSphere 4.1. These advancements build on the core capacities in vSphere to provide improved scalability; better performance; and easier provisioning, monitoring and troubleshooting. This paper focuses on the following new features and enhancements:

• Virtual machine enhancements
• Improved SSD handling and optimization
• Command-line enhancements
• VMware® ESXi™ firewall
• vSphere Image Builder
• vSphere Auto Deploy server
• vSphere Host Profiles
• VMware vCenter™ Update Manager

Clipboard Copy and Paste option is disabled in vSphere Client 4.1

I upgraded my home test server to ESXi 4.1 and I the Clipboard Functie is disabled by default and that is so annying

Solution:

Starting with vSphere 4.1, the Copy and Paste options are, by default, disabled for security reasons.

To be able to copy and paste between the guest operating system and the remote console, you must enable the Copy and Paste options using the vSphere Client. Alternatively, you can use RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) to connect to the Windows virtual machines.

To enable this option for a specific virtual machine:

  1. Log into a vCenter Server system using the vSphere Client and power off the virtual machine.
  2. Select the virtual machine and click the Summary tab.
  3. Click Edit Settings.
  4. Navigate to Options > Advanced > General and click Configuration Parameters.

  5. Click Add Row and type the following values in the Name and Value columns:

    • isolation.tools.copy.disable – false

    • isolation.tools.paste.disable – false
      Note: These options override any settings made in the VMware Tools control panel of the guest operating system.

  7. Click OK to close the Configuration Parameters dialog, and click OK again to close the Virtual Machine Properties dialog.
  8. Power on the virtual machine.

Note: If you vMotion a virtual machine to a host where the isolation.tools.*="FALSE" is already set, the copy and paste options are automatically activated for that virtual machine.

To enable this option for all the virtual machines in the ESX/ESXi host:

  1. Log in to the ESX/ESXi host as a root user and open the /etc/vmware/config file using a text editor.
  2. Add these entries to the file:
    isolation.tools.copy.disable="FALSE"
    isolation.tools.paste.disable="FALSE"
  3. Save and close the file. The Copy and Paste options are only enabled when the virtual machines restart or resume the next time.

For more information, see the Limiting Exposure of Sensitive Data Copied to the Clipboard section of the  ESX Configuration Guide.

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1026437

Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 4.1

VMware has released another great “technical paper” regarding Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 4.1. It can be found in the Technical Resource Center which by the way contains a lot of awesome docs.

The technical paper, Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 4.1, provides performance tips that cover the most performance-critical areas of VMware vSphere 4.1. It is not intended as a comprehensive guide for planning and configuring your deployments.

Chapter 1 – “Hardware for Use with VMware vSphere,” provides guidance on selecting hardware for use with vSphere.

Chapter 2 – “ESX and Virtual Machines,” provides guidance regarding VMware ESX™ software and the virtual machines that run in it.

Chapter 3 – “Guest Operating Systems,” provides guidance regarding the guest operating systems running in vSphere virtual machines.

Chapter 4 – “Virtual Infrastructure Management,” provides guidance regarding resource management best practices.

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/Perf_Best_Practices_vSphere4.1.pdf

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Free Hyper9 GuessMyOSToo Plug-in for VI3 and vSphere4

This plug-in replaces generic VM icons in the VI3 and vSphere4 client inventory trees with OS-specific icons for both Windows and Linux guests.

gos-02
System Requirements
The only requirement is Virtual Center 2.5 or higher. The Hyper9 product is NOT required.

Download HERE

Exchange 2007/2010 Performance settings on vSphere.

When install a Exchange 2007 or Exchange 2010 Server on vSphere there are some settings that will increase de performance.

– Use de VMXNET 3 Adapter
– Use per Disk a SCSI Controller
– Store the Log & Database files on physical Lun on a SAN
– Use the LSI LOGIC SAS controller for Windows 2008 & 2008 R2
– Use the VMware Paravirtual SCSI (PVSCSI) Controller for Every physical Raw Device Mapping (RDM).

Another TIP.  Exchange 2007 & Exchange 2010 needs a lots of Memory. When choosing the size for the OS partition, swap file need also al lot of space.

Vizioncore release free VMware Management Pack for OpsMgr

Vizioncore, a wholly owned subsidiary of Quest have released a free Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 which enables the monitoring of VMware virtual infrastructures.  Now, before I get into the features and capabilities of what the MP gives you, it’s important to point out that this is the first free MP to deliver these capabilities, and may stir things up a little over at both Veeam and Bridgeways, who both have established MP’s for OpsMgr to enable monitoring of VMware environments.  It’s important to say, both Veeam and Bridgeways offer trails of their solutions, so it would be important to compare the different MP’s for yourselves, however looking at a high level, one of the key elements that Veeam seems to have today, is that it’s PRO-enabled, thus provides more automated, dynamic and agile responses within the environment based on changing conditions.  That’s not to say both Bridgeways and Vizioncore won’t evolve their technologies in the future, and bring in PRO capabilities, however today, you would have to classify it as a differentiator for Veeam.  One you have to pay for however.

ScreenshotVizioncore Logo

So, what are the key features of the Vizioncore MP?

  • Essential alerts from the virtual infrastructure to reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR) of problems
  • Integration to System Center Operations Manager to centralize and consolidate monitoring efforts
  • Low cost and simple to use while allowing administrators to work in their familiar System Center Operations Manager views
  • Native management pack delivers alert and event management as well as trending inside the SCOM console
  • Agentless architecture for simple deployment and low overhead
  • Performance monitoring & availability event monitoring for fast resolution in the virtual environment
  • Out-of-the-box reports for host and guest metrics provides flexibility and clear communication between stakeholders

There’s even more features here…

What’s nice from my perspective, is the growth of the ecosystem around the Microsoft virtualisation platform, from Partners that have, in the past, been quite VMware focused.  That’s more Vizioncore than Quest, but still, it’s moving in the right direction.

If you’re interested, you can get all the info, and download the MP, from here.

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VMware vSphere 4.1 Released

WHAT’S NEW:

Installation and Deployment

Storage

  • Boot from SAN. vSphere 4.1 enables ESXi boot from SAN (BFN). iSCSI, FCoE, and Fibre Channel boot are supported. Refer to the Hardware Compatibility Guide for the latest list of NICs and Converged Adapters that are supported with iSCSI boot. See the iSCSI SAN Configuration Guide and the Fibre Channel SAN Configuration Guide.
  • Hardware Acceleration with vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI). ESX can offload specific storage operations to compliant storage hardware. With storage hardware assistance, ESX performs these operations faster and consumes less CPU, memory, and storage fabric bandwidth. See the ESX Configuration Guide and the ESXi Configuration Guide.
  • Storage Performance Statistics. vSphere 4.1 offers enhanced visibility into storage throughput and latency of hosts and virtual machines, and aids in troubleshooting storage performance issues. NFS statistics are now available in vCenter Server performance charts, as well as esxtop. New VMDK and datastore statistics are included. All statistics are available through the vSphere SDK. See the vSphere Datacenter Administration Guide.
  • Storage I/O Control. This feature provides quality-of-service capabilities for storage I/O in the form of I/O shares and limits that are enforced across all virtual machines accessing a datastore, regardless of which host they are running on. Using Storage I/O Control, vSphere administrators can ensure that the most important virtual machines get adequate I/O resources even in times of congestion. See the vSphere Resource Management Guide.
  • iSCSI Hardware Offloads. vSphere 4.1 enables 10Gb iSCSI hardware offloads (Broadcom 57711) and 1Gb iSCSI hardware offloads (Broadcom 5709). See the ESX Configuration Guide, the ESXi Configuration Guide, and the iSCSI SAN Configuration Guide.
  • NFS Performance Enhancements. Networking performance for NFS has been optimized to improve throughput and reduce CPU usage. See the ESX Configuration Guide and the ESXi Configuration Guide.

Network

Availability

  • Windows Failover Clustering with VMware HA. Clustered Virtual Machines that utilize Windows Failover Clustering/Microsoft Cluster Service are now fully supported in conjunction with VMware HA. See Setup for Failover Clustering and Microsoft Cluster Service.
  • VMware HA Scalability Improvements. VMware HA has the same limits for virtual machines per host, hosts per cluster, and virtual machines per cluster as vSphere. See Configuration Maximums for VMware vSphere 4.1 for details about the limitations for this release.
  • VMware HA Healthcheck and Operational Status. The VMware HA dashboard in the vSphere Client provides a new detailed window called Cluster Operational Status. This window displays more information about the current VMware HA operational status, including the specific status and errors for each host in the VMware HA cluster. See the vSphere Availability Guide.
  • VMware Fault Tolerance (FT) Enhancements. vSphere 4.1 introduces an FT-specific versioning-control mechanism that allows the Primary and Secondary VMs to run on FT-compatible hosts at different but compatible patch levels. vSphere 4.1 differentiates between events that are logged for a Primary VM and those that are logged for its Secondary VM, and reports why a host might not support FT. In addition, you can disable VMware HA when FT-enabled virtual machines are deployed in a cluster, allowing for cluster maintenance operations without turning off FT. See the vSphere Availability Guide.
  • DRS Interoperability for VMware HA and Fault Tolerance (FT). FT-enabled virtual machines can take advantage of DRS functionality for load balancing and initial placement. In addition, VMware HA and DRS are tightly integrated, which allows VMware HA to restart virtual machines in more situations. See the vSphere Availability Guide.
  • Enhanced Network Logging Performance. Fault Tolerance (FT) network logging performance allows improved throughput and reduced CPU usage. In addition, you can use vmxnet3 vNICs in FT-enabled virtual machines. See the vSphere Availability Guide.
  • Concurrent VMware Data Recovery Sessions. vSphere 4.1 provides the ability to concurrently manage multiple VMware Data Recovery appliances. See the VMware Data Recovery Administration Guide.
  • vStorage APIs for Data Protection (VADP) Enhancements. VADP now offers VSS quiescing support for Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 servers. This enables application-consistent backup and restore operations for Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 applications.

Management

  • vCLI Enhancements. vCLI adds options for SCSI, VAAI, network, and virtual machine control, including the ability to terminate an unresponsive virtual machine. In addition, vSphere 4.1 provides controls that allow you to log vCLI activity. See the vSphere Command-Line Interface Installation and Scripting Guide and the vSphere Command-Line Interface Reference.
  • Lockdown Mode Enhancements. VMware ESXi 4.1 lockdown mode allows the administrator to tightly restrict access to the ESXi Direct Console User Interface (DCUI) and Tech Support Mode (TSM). When lockdown mode is enabled, DCUI access is restricted to the root user, while access to Tech Support Mode is completely disabled for all users. With lockdown mode enabled, access to the host for management or monitoring using CIM is possible only through vCenter Server. Direct access to the host using the vSphere Client is not permitted. See the ESXi Configuration Guide.
  • Access Virtual Machine Serial Ports Over the Network. You can redirect virtual machine serial ports over a standard network link in vSphere 4.1. This enables solutions such as third-party virtual serial port concentrators for virtual machine serial console management or monitoring. See the vSphere Virtual Machine Administration Guide.
  • vCenter Converter Hyper-V Import. vCenter Converter allows users to point to a Hyper-V machine. Converter displays the virtual machines running on the Hyper-V system, and users can select a powered-off virtual machine to import to a VMware destination. See the vCenter Converter Installation and Administration Guide.
  • Enhancements to Host Profiles. You can use Host Profiles to roll out administrator password changes in vSphere 4.1. Enhancements also include improved Cisco Nexus 1000V support and PCI device ordering configuration. See the ESX Configuration Guide and the ESXi Configuration Guide.
  • Unattended Authentication in vSphere Management Assistant (vMA). vMA 4.1 offers improved authentication capability, including integration with Active Directory and commands to configure the connection. See VMware vSphere Management Assistant.
  • Updated Deployment Environment in vSphere Management Assistant (vMA). The updated deployment environment in vMA 4.1 is fully compatible with vMA 4.0. A significant change is the transition from RHEL to CentOS. See VMware vSphere Management Assistant.
  • vCenter Orchestrator 64-bit Support. vCenter Orchestrator 4.1 provides a client and server for 64-bit installations, with an optional 32-bit client. The performance of the Orchestrator server on 64-bit installations is greatly enhanced, as compared to running the server on a 32-bit machine. See the vCenter Orchestrator Installation and Configuration Guide.
  • Improved Support for Handling Recalled Patches in vCenter Update Manager. Update Manager 4.1 immediately sends critical notifications about recalled ESX and related patches. In addition, Update Manager prevents you from installing a recalled patch that you might have already downloaded. This feature also helps you identify hosts where recalled patches might already be installed. See the vCenter Update Manager Installation and Administration Guide.
  • License Reporting Manager. The License Reporting Manager provides a centralized interface for all license keys for vSphere 4.1 products in a virtual IT infrastructure and their respective usage. You can view and generate reports on license keys and usage for different time periods with the License Reporting Manager. A historical record of the utilization per license key is maintained in the vCenter Server database. See the vSphere Datacenter Administration Guide.
  • Power Management Improvements. ESX 4.1 takes advantage of deep sleep states to further reduce power consumption during idle periods. The vSphere Client has a simple user interface that allows you to choose one of four host power management policies. In addition, you can view the history of host power consumption and power cap information on the vSphere Client Performance tab on newer platforms with integrated power meters. See the vSphere Datacenter Administration Guide.

Platform Enhancements

  • Performance and Scalability Improvements. vSphere 4.1 includes numerous enhancements that increase performance and scalability.
    • vCenter Server 4.1 can support three times more virtual machines and hosts per system, as well as more concurrent instances of the vSphere Client and a larger number of virtual machines per cluster than vCenter Server 4.0. The scalability limits of Linked Mode, vMotion, and vNetwork Distributed Switch have also increased.
    • New optimizations have been implemented for AMD-V and Intel VT-x architectures, while memory utilization efficiency has been improved still further using Memory Compression. Storage enhancements have led to significant performance improvements in NFS environments. VDI operations, virtual machine provisioning and power operations, and vMotion have enhanced performance as well.

    See Configuration Maximums for VMware vSphere 4.1.

  • Reduced Overhead Memory. vSphere 4.1 reduces the amount of overhead memory required, especially when running large virtual machines on systems with CPUs that provide hardware MMU support (AMD RVI or Intel EPT).
  • DRS Virtual Machine Host Affinity Rules. DRS provides the ability to set constraints that restrict placement of a virtual machine to a subset of hosts in a cluster. This feature is useful for enforcing host-based ISV licensing models, as well as keeping sets of virtual machines on different racks or blade systems for availability reasons. See the vSphere Resource Management Guide.
  • Memory Compression. Compressed memory is a new level of the memory hierarchy, between RAM and disk. Slower than memory, but much faster than disk, compressed memory improves the performance of virtual machines when memory is under contention, because less virtual memory is swapped to disk. See the vSphere Resource Management Guide.
  • vMotion Enhancements. In vSphere 4.1, vMotion enhancements significantly reduce the overall time for host evacuations, with support for more simultaneous virtual machine migrations and faster individual virtual machine migrations. The result is a performance improvement of up to 8x for an individual virtual machine migration, and support for four to eight simultaneous vMotion migrations per host, depending on the vMotion network adapter (1GbE or 10GbE respectively). See the vSphere Datacenter Administration Guide.
  • ESX/ESXi Active Directory Integration. Integration with Microsoft Active Directory allows seamless user authentication for ESX/ESXi. You can maintain users and groups in Active Directory for centralized user management and you can assign privileges to users or groups on ESX/ESXi hosts. In vSphere 4.1, integration with Active Directory allows you to roll out permission rules to hosts by using Host Profiles. See the ESX Configuration Guide and the ESXi Configuration Guide.
  • Configuring USB Device Passthrough from an ESX/ESXi Host to a Virtual Machine. You can configure a virtual machine to use USB devices that are connected to an ESX/ESXi host where the virtual machine is running. The connection is maintained even if you migrate the virtual machine using vMotion. See the vSphere Virtual Machine Administration Guide.
  • Improvements in Enhanced vMotion Compatibility. vSphere 4.1 includes an AMD Opteron Gen. 3 (no 3DNow!™) EVC mode that prepares clusters for vMotion compatibility with future AMD processors. EVC also provides numerous usability improvements, including the display of EVC modes for virtual machines, more timely error detection, better error messages, and the reduced need to restart virtual machines. See the vSphere Datacenter Administration Guide.

Partner Ecosystem

  • vCenter Update Manager Support for Provisioning, Patching, and Upgrading EMC’s ESX PowerPath Module. vCenter Update Manager can provision, patch, and upgrade third-party modules that you can install on ESX, such as EMC’s PowerPath multipathing software. Using the capability of Update Manager to set policies using the Baseline construct and the comprehensive Compliance Dashboard, you can simplify provisioning, patching, and upgrade of the PowerPath module at scale. See the vCenter Update Manager Installation and Administration Guide.
  • User-configurable Number of Virtual CPUs per Virtual Socket. You can configure virtual machines to have multiple virtual CPUs reside in a single virtual socket, with each virtual CPU appearing to the guest operating system as a single core. Previously, virtual machines were restricted to having only one virtual CPU per virtual socket. See the vSphere Virtual Machine Administration Guide.
  • Expanded List of Supported Processors. The list of supported processors has been expanded for ESX 4.1. To determine which processors are compatible with this release, use the Hardware Compatibility Guide. Among the supported processors is the Intel Xeon 7500 Series processor, code-named Nehalem-EX (up to 8 sockets).

You can download VMware vSphere 4.1 HERE

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