VMware Hands-on Labs from VMworld 2012 are being offered online!

Guys,

if you have missed VMworld 2012 you still have an opportunity to access VMware Hands-On Labs online which were offered during the VMworld 2012. The registration has been opened a couple of days ago. So you still have a good chance to be amongst the first luckiest persons to play with new VMware products without tiresome and time-consuming process of building home lab for each of the scenarios.

So, proceed with the Registration and be ready to provide a good feedback :)

Personally, I have spent already half a day to rebuild my home lab with vSphere 5.0 so as to be able to test and to document the upgrade steps for vSphere 5.1. However, if you have a look at the list of possible labs you will understand how many efforts and time you will save using pre-configured and well-instructed labs from VMware.

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The new certification roadmap from VMware

Well, VMware is way more faster at generating news than I am at processing them. Still catching up with all interesting pieces of news I have missed while being on vacation.

In the shade of the bright and sparkling announcement of vSphere 5.1 the introduction of new Certification Roadmap has been overlooked by many bloggers.

Here is how it looks like now

The picture depicts four areas of certification

• Cloud - this is mostly to prove you are good at administering vCloud Director (vCenter Chargeback, vCloud Networking and vCloud Organizations)
• Datacenter Virtualization - this certification shows your expertise in administration of vSphere
• End User Computing - this is all about building Virtual Desktop Infrastructure
• Cloud Application Platform - purely developers' area.

Each category is divided into 2/3 levels showing different levels of skill sets. Some of the exams are not available yet, but coming out soon.

Currently I am trying to figure out my own certification roadmap for the next year and I still don't know which direction to go - Cloud or End User Computing. Both fields look very interesting, therefore first I need to understand which area has more prospects and potential demand on job market. Though first I have to site VCAP5-DCA which is fortunately now available to take in my country.


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Licensing changes brought by vSphere 5.1 release - no vRam entitlements

While I have been torn apart by temptation to learn all new features of vSphere 5.1 by creating a long list of documents and blogs to read I have missed probably the most important change in VMware vSphere Licensing model - the is no more vRAM entitlement/limitation.

VMware claims they have carefully listened to their clients:

"Our customers spoke clearly," VMware Chief Marketing Officer Rick Jackson said at a press conference after Monday's opening keynote. "They don't want to think about things like vRAM. We're changing it back to what our customers want."

To me it seems more like another answer to Microsoft Hyper-V 3.0 which is about to be released and has already changed the virtualization market's landscape. But I personally liked the fact that VMware has enough courage to admit they had made a mistake with presenting vRAM.

"Yes, it is an admission that we had made things overly complex, and we are rectifying that mistake," outgoing VMware CEO Paul Maritz says bluntly. "Mea culpa."

So, there is no more vRAM and Cores per CPU limits now. Plain and clear licensing model with only requirement to have 1 license per each CPU/Socket in your server. It is quite an improvement which definitely makes life of VMware customers and VMware salesmen easier. I guess the total number man-hours spent last year worldwide in debates about vRAM could have been sufficient to build a space ship.

Another significant benefit of new licensing and pricing model is that all vSphere editions (except Essentials Kit) have gotten plenty of nice features included:  vSphere Replication, vShield Endpoint, High Availability and Data Protection (previously known as VMware Data Recovery). 

Free vSphere Hypervisor's limitations have caused some confusion as different part of VMware website and documents were providing different information. Here is the latest and most precise information from GabesVirtualWorld

“There is no vRAM in vSphere 5/5.1, including the free vSphere Hypervisor. If a host licensed with vSphere Hypervisor has more than 32GB of physical RAM it will error when applying the license or on boot. Before the vSphere Hypervisor license is applied, it will be running in 60-day evaluation mode (functionally equivalent to Ent+).  So in the case of a host with more than 32GB of physical RAM, when assigning the vSphere Hypervisor license fails the host will remain in the evaluation mode. If they do want to proceed they either need to find a box with 32 or less or go into the BIOS of the offending machine and turn off the additional RAM.”

The last interesting new fact is the special vSphere Standard edition which includes vCenter Operations Management Suite Advanced and vCenter Protect Standard. I am wondering why there is no similar Enterprise Edition? 

Now I am looking forward to the 11th of September when vSphere 5.1 will be available for download so I can start rebuilding my home lab.


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VMware vSphere Replication

Just 1 week ago I have finished building Disaster Recovery solution using vSphere Site Recovery Manager product. At this time vSphere Replication was solely part of SRM, but not of the vSphere. That's why I was a bit surprised when I saw "Introduction to vSphere Replication" as a part of "What's New in vSphere 5.1" documentation. At first sight it looked as a competitive contradiction to a current Disaster Recovery solution - SRM. But when I started to read the documentation I suddenly remembered that when I was playing around with Windows 2012 Release Preview I noticed that Microsoft included new free feature called Hyper-V Replica, which was supposed to provide Disaster Recovery functionality. Considering that it was absolutely free of charge benefit it had at least one strong advantage over VMware SRM.

So now it has gotten clear that this is just an answer to Microsoft challenge on Virtualization Market. When I went further into What's New documentation I found some other obvious evidence that VMware is striking back on Microsoft Server 2012.

Now, after I have done some reading I can see that vSphere Replication can replace SRM in small companies only. Here are the reasons:

• Having it working in your infrastructure doesn't provide automation/orchestration of Disaster Recovery scenario. The same statement applies to Hyper-V Replica. You will need either powershell scripts or System Center Orchestrator to get automation options. 
• Each Virtual Machines at the Recovery Site has to be powered on manually
• You will need to reconnect each your VM to the correct network.
• There might be necessity to Renumber IP addresses of some VMs - again, manually.
• You will miss possibility to test your recovery plan during working hours since you cannot power on Replica VM if the original VM is still running and reachable.
• There is no failback option in vSphere Replication. 

Well, it must be admitted that if you have all your steps of Disaster Recovery scenario well-documented and throughly tested you may deal with it just fine with probably 10 to 100 virtual machines. 

However, every single manual action significantly increases risk of human error, especially when every minute matters. Multiply all steps need to be taken by hundred/thousand VMs running in big enterprises  and you understand why it is not applicable. You can also take into the account the fact that there is not always a qualified person at the Recovery Site who can take care of all DR procedures properly.

Nevertheless, it looks like an adequate answer to Microsoft, considering that you can protect all your VMs at no cost if you own license starting from Essentials Plus Kit to Enterprise Plus Edition. An ideal solution for small companies seeking how to cut expenses on Disaster Recovery.

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VMware vSphere 5.1 Clustering Deepdive is available now

Duncan Epping and Frank Denneman, two very probably the best VMware evangelists, have just released the new book covering every single bit of vSphere 5.1 Clustering.

I have bought and read both previous books of them (both in paper and in kindle format, for the simple reason that I can afford it :) and I can say that these books have significantly contributed into building my knowledge and clear understanding of HA and DRS cluster's mechanic and logic. I personally believe that HA/DRS functionality is a heart of all vSphere package and therefore the solid expertise of vSphere cluster is a must for anyone who sees his future in virtualization world.

So, choose your preferable format and enjoy reading.

• Paper copy – $ 24.95
• Kindle version – $ 7.49

vSphere 5.1 is released

Update:  The vSphere 5.1 and vCloud packages are available for downloading as of today.  Enjoy. I will have couple of sleepless nights for sure :) 

Being on vacation I have missed the release of my favourite product in IT world. I am trying to catch up now reading all "What's new" documents, but I definitely miss my lab to have some hands-on experience with all new fantastic features of vSphere 5.1.

Here are the links for all of the documents that can give you a brief overview of most interesting innovations in vSphere 5.1

• What's new in vSphere 5.1
• What's New in VMware vCenter Server 5.1
• What's New in VMware vSphere 5.1 - Platform
• What's New in VMware vSphere 5.1 - Networking
• What's New in VMware vSphere 5.1 - Storage
• Technical White Paper: What's New in VMware vSphere 5.1 - Performance
• Technical White Paper: Introduction to vSphere Replication
• Technical White Paper: Introduction to vSphere Date Protection

There are probably some other VMware products which have had new versions, but I think the links above cover most of the important topics.

Reclaiming Disk Space from Thin Disks

There are huge number of posts describing how to reclaim disk space and to decrease used storage for Thin Disks. However, very few pay attention or emphasize one precaution measure you have to take before proceeding.

Here is the whole story. There are situations when you temporarily COPY large amount of data on Thin Provisioned Disk. This action inflates disk's VMDK file on VMFS datastore. When you delete this data off the Thin Disk  the VMDK file size stays the same and that is because the data is not deleted, but simple marked to be overwritten. So you end up with situation when actual disk size in Virtual Machine is, let's say, 10 GB, but its VMDK occupies hundreds of GBs on VMFS Datastore.

Basically, this problem is resolved in two steps.

1. You run SDELETE utility (link) on your drive to zeroize all unused disk space. This way you will let vSphere distinguish between actually used blocks of disks and unused disk space.
2. Once it is over you need to start Storage vMotion of your Thin Disk. The main point here is that you have to move your Disk/VM to a VMFS Datastore with different Block Size. Under this condition only vSphere will invoke legacy datamover which doesn't copy zeroized data blocks. As usually, Duncan has the best explanation of the block size impact.

With VMFS-5 which has unified Block Size of 1 Mb this is not as easy as pie. First you will need to create a new VMFS-3 datastore with different block size and then it has to be upgraded to VMFS-5.

And here comes the  !Warning!

• Pay Attention to the amount of Free Space on your VMFS Datastore before running SDELETE.

As I have said  SDELETE will zeroize all free space on you Thin Provisioned Disk. That means it will inflate VMDK file to its maximum provisioned space. So you have to make sure that SDELETE will not gobble all your free space on a VMFS datastore.

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