Everything-Virtual

Author: Simon

  • What’s new in vSphere 5.5

    VMware has just announced the vSphere 5.5 product at VMworld 2013. Here are the new features and enhancements.

    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 can be found in the What’s New in vSphere 5.5 Platform Guide

  • vCenter 5.1 Logbrowser Error – Unauthorised access fix

    After a recent upgrade to our vCenter 5.1 infrastructure we discovered that we were getting the following error when trying to use the log browser component of the web client.

    image

    Having tried a number fixes from the usual sources (Derek Seamans excellent blog) none of them seemed to resolve the issue, a reboot of the infrastructure, a re-install of the Web Client all resulted in the same error cropping up. In the end it took the eyes of a VMware BCS Engineer to have a look at our ca_certificates.crt file and discover some white space present.

    image

    The strange thing here is that there wasn’t any date change on the file since the initial deployment back last year and we had no issues with the log browser working before the upgrade.

    If you experience any issues with the log browser it may be worth checking the C:\ProgramData\VMware\SSL\ca_certificates(_2).crt file to make sure that there isn’t any white space present in the file first.

  • Home Lab 2013 – Storage

    With the change to my Home Lab environment recently I decided to take a fresh look at my storage capabilities and came to the conclusion that whilst the home brew solution was nice I now wanted something a little more dedicated to my vSphere environment that would allow me to play with the likes of VAAI because although FreeNAS claims to be looking at implementing this in a future release but there are no current dates on the roadmap for this.

    Having looked at the likes of Qnap and Synology I decided to go down the route of Synology for my new home lab storage, there were a couple of deciding factors in this which include the 4x1GB NICs and the nice web interface (so much nicer than the Iomega IX4 interface).

    A couple of days spent looking over various blog\forum posts all seem to indicate that this was a good choice and when I discovered that both of my colleagues had gone down this route it made more sense to do the same.

    It should be mentioned that the Synology is not a cheap unit with prices ranging from £620 – £700 per unit (excluding disks) so you have to make sure that you’re making the right decision before spending that much money.

    In the end I decided to go for a Synology DS1513+ unit, this 5 bay device is expandable to a total of 15 disks with the additional purchase of the DX513 expansion unit so offers a lot of capacity if required.

    Synology DS1513

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  • Condusiv V-locity VM Testing

    image

    During the recent vForum event at Wembley I had an interesting meeting with Condusiv Technologies (formally Executive Software\ Diskeeper).

    They were showing off the latest release of V-Locity VM.

    V-locity VM is classed as a Performance Accelerator which offers benefits such as :-

  • Increase application performance by 50%
  • Reduce latency by 50% for faster file access
  • Eliminate bottlenecks without expensive hardware
  • True "set and forget" management

    What struck me was the performance potential for VM’s running on potentially limiting storage (it happens, in fact our storage at work is about on par with the performance one of our guys get’s from a Synology Diskstation 1513+ and yes we have fine tuned and tweaked).

    I had a chat with their Technical Director and asked about an NFR or Evaluation license to allow me to do some testing in my home lab to see what kind of performance improvements can be gained from running V-locity VM in my environment.

    It should be noted that the V-locity software is limited to the Microsoft platform of OS’s starting with Windows XP (SP2) all the way up to Windows 2012, it also supports both vSphere (ESX\i 4.0 or later) and HyperV as the host virtualisation platform.

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  • Petition to Microsoft about the recently announced TechNet cancellation.

    Someone has started a petition to try and get Microsoft to offer a cheaper MSDN solution in place of the just announced TechNet cancellation.

    Microsoft Petition about MSDN \ TechNet

  • Microsoft drops the bomb about TechNet Subscriptions

    Microsoft dropped the bomb last night about the retiring of the TechNet Subscription service from the 31st of August 2013 with the added news that subscribers may still activate purchased subscriptions up until the 30th of September 2013.

    I for one have been a big champion for the yearly subscription service from Microsoft and in fact have petitioned VMware to bring back their VMTN offering a while ago so this announcement comes as a big disappointment Sad smile

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  • VMware Converter 5 Error – No Source Disk

    During a recent VMware Converter P2V conversion I ran across an issue where I was getting an error and the conversion process would fail to obtain hardware information from the source machine. I could install the client just fine but once installed it didn’t see the local disk.

    image

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  • vShield Endpoint – Not applicable to ESX version below 4.1 Patch 3

    Came across a little issue today when trying to install the vShield Endpoint on to a number of our ESXi hosts today, with the hosts evacuated I clicked on the vShield tab to install the Endpoint onto the host and came across the message “Not applicable to ESX version below 4.1 Patch 3”, strange as we are running ESXi 5.1 on the hosts Smile.

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  • Installing ESXi to a USB key using VMware Player or Workstation

    I recently had to install ESXi onto a server without a cdrom drive fitted, the quickest and easiest method for me to do this was installing ESXi using VMware Player or Workstation and installing it directly onto the USB key.

    SNAGHTML1b03413

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  • 2013 vExperts – Free one year subscription to TrainSignal

    What can I say, TrainSignal have a BIG gift for all of the 2013 vExperts (all 581 of us, btw who was the 581st?? as it was originally only 580) and that’s a years subscription to their Training Library.

    • Over 1,500 hours of IT pro video training
    • Over 200 hours of VMware video training
    • 30 VMware courses that include topics like vSphere 5.1, vSphere Advanced Networking, vCenter Operations Manager, vCloud Director 5.1, vSphere Performance, vSphere Troubleshooting, vSphere Design and new courses on the way (including VCAP-DCA5, EMC Storage Essentials, and more)
    • Certification practice exams (including the VCP)
    • Offline viewer (Win/Mac)
    • iPad compatible streaming

    A BIG thanks to TrainSignal for this.

    vExperts to find more information and to register for your subscription please go here