The VMguy

Infrastructor Navigator has been released and can be found here.  Rather than go thru the details, I’ll repost the features from the release notes:

VMware vCenter™ Infrastructure Navigator is an application awareness plug-in to vCenter Server, and provides continuous dependency mapping of applications. Infrastructure Navigator offers application context to the virtual infrastructure administrators to monitor and manage the virtual infrastructure inventory objects and actions. Administrators can use Infrastructure Navigator to understand the impact of the change on the virtual environment in their application infrastructure. Infrastructure Navigator helps virtual infrastructure administrators perform the following tasks:

• Make accurate first-level triage to help either eliminate the problem or associate the problem with the virtual infrastructure when business service users report problems.
• Assess change impact, manage, and communicate virtual infrastructure issues for critical applications.
• Understand the application and business impact of changes to the virtual infrastructure on applications.

The Open Source Licenses (OSL) file for the virtual appliance is available at /root/open_source_licenses.txt. You can retrieve the file by running the scp root@<appliance IP>:open_source_licenses.txt command.

Infrastructure Navigator is supported on vCenter Server 5.0 with the vSphere Web Client. The supported ESX versions include ESX/ESXi 3.5 (build 425420), ESX/ESXi 4.0 (build 398348), ESX/ESXi 4.1 (build 433742), and all builds of ESXi 5.x.

Features

This section describes the key features for the Infrastructure Navigator 1.0.0 release.

Simplifies and automates the deployment and the discovery process and keeps manages Application Component Knowledge Base (KB) current

• Eliminates physical switch spanning or credential based discovery.
• Discovers and maps the application components and dependencies using KBs and presents this knowledge through maps or search for relevant use cases.

Provide Infrastructure Navigator data for vCenter Server and related solutions

• Ensures that the application and dependency data is available to the rest of the vCenter Server entities and its various solutions through the vCenter extensibility APIs.
• Supports SRM integration to set up more focused and accurate site recovery and backup plans.

The enterprise and standard editions of Operations Manager have been updated to v5 and can be downloaded here.  There’s not really a What’s new in the release notes, but rather a high-level summary of the features as so:

VMware vCenter Operations Manager is an automated operations management solution that provides integrated performance, capacity, and configuration management for highly virtualized and cloud infrastructure. Deep VMware vSphere integration provides the most comprehensive management of VMware environments. VMware vCenter Operations Manager is purpose-built for VMware administrators to more effectively manage the performance of their VMware environments as they move to the private cloud.

Key Benefits

• Actionable intelligence to automate manual operations processes
• Visibility across infrastructure and applications for rapid problem resolution
• Proactively ensures optimal resource utilization and virtual and cloud infrastructure performance

Fresh out of the app store comes the VMware vSphere Client for iPad v1.2.0.  You rush right over to the download section in iTues here.  If you already have it downloaded, visit the app store on your device and download the update.  Here’s What’s New from the App Store:

New in v1.2 (see notes below):

• Migrate virtual machines without downtime using vMotion.  This feature is available via Host & VM action menus.  Virtual machines can also be two-finger flicked/dragged from the Host detail view to enter vMotion mode
• Ability to email vMotion validation error details to others
• View task progress reporting on VM cards
• Ability to refresh vCenter host list
• Support of ESX 3.5
• Support for vSphere 5.0

Release Notes:

• This version requires vCMA 1.2, available at: http://labs.vmware.com/flings/vcma
• Min iOS version: 4.0

As you probably know by now SRM5 is just over the horizon.  You have probably heard me mention numerous times how SRM has always been my favorite non-vSphere product from VMware.  Some great news is that they have made some great improvements in SRM5 and added the most-requested functionality.  Here we go:

• vSphere Replication – The biggest feature add.  An additional replication option which allows you to replicate your VMs without having the storage perform the replication.  Even allows you to replicate to/from local storage on the ESXi hosts.  There are some important limits to vSphere Replication.  It’s not for everything/everyone but it does do quite a bit for the first release.
  • Requires vSphere 5
  • Managed from the vSphere client directly
  • ISOs and Floppys are not replicated
  • Powered off/Suspended VMs are not replicated
  • Non-critical files are not replicated (swap files, dumps, logs, etc.)
  • VMs can have snapshots on the protected side but they are automatically collapsed on the recovery side
  • Physical RDMs not supported (but virtual RDMs are)
  • Fault Tolerant VMs, Linked Clones and VM Templates are not supported
  • Automated Failback of vSphere Replicated VMs is not supported in SRM 5.0
  • Requires VM Hardware version 7 or 8 (required for Change Block Tracking)
  • Supports up to 500 VMs
  • Asynchronous only
  • Minimum replication frequency is every 15 minutes, max is every 24 hours
  • Initial copy can be seeded by sneaker net (taking the initial on a portable HD and importing at the destination, i.e. does not need to seed the initial copy over the wire)
  • File-level consistency (except for planned migration – see below) quiesces OS file system before sending changed blocks to the DR site (does not quiesce applications)
  • Included in both Standard and Enterprise Editions of SRM
  • vSphere Replication is not available outside SRM5
• Scalability Improvements
  • 1000 Total Protected VMs (Same as SRM4.1)
  • 500 Protected VMs in a single protection group (same as SRM v4.1)
  • 250 Protection Groups (Up from 150 in v4.1)
  • 30 Simultaneous running recovery plans (Up from 3 in v4.1 – this is the biggest improvement in scalability)
• Planned Migration – This is a big feature add.  This is another option when you are going failover.  In 4.1 the only option was to start up the VMs from the last good replication and go.  This option now allow you to migrate when there is an impending disaster and the protected side is still up.  Planned migration will shut down the VMs on the protected side then initiate a replication of the storage frames (or vSphere Replication) to get the last drop of changed data to the recovery side before powering on the VMs and bringing them up.  One extremely important advantage to this method: the VMs are always in a application-consistent state when they come up in DR.  (Absolutely love this feature)
• Failback – the single most-requested feature in SRM4.  Once a failover occurs, the admin clicks the “Reprotect” link to reset the recovery plan for failback and reverse replication.  Once completed, the recovery plan can be tested or run in the reverse direction and recovery the VMs to the origional protected site.  (This is outstanding for enterprises that are required to do a true failover for DR testing.
• User Interface improvements – Slightly different look and feel.
  • both sides are visible without vCenter linked mode
  • IP changes for VMs during recovery can now be entered in the GUI (thank you VMware!)
  • Placeholder VMs at the DR side now have a unique icon (with a thunderbolt thru it) to identify them easily in the DR vCenter.
  • Reports now include the user ID that initiated the Failover or DR test.
  • Reports now include more information about the storage steps (including the device friendly names)
• IPv6 Support – Ipv6 is now supported for all links.
• IP Customization performance increase – big performance improvement in the actual IP conversion in the VM
• In guest callouts – now you can run a script inside the VM, run a script on the SRM server or insert a breakpoint to post a message (these also now have maximum timeouts as an option) during the recovery plans
• New APIs on both the Protected and Recovery Sides – new commands for 3^rd party integration (note these are SOAP based and not PowerShell or PowerCLI)
• Dependency Improvements – There are now 5 priority groups for each recovery plan.  Each priority group has to finish completely before the recovery plan will start with the next group.  Within a single priority group, you can also set dependencies (similar to how Windows Services set dependencies) so that a particular VM will not recover before it’s dependencies have recovered (note-this is within a single priority group and cannot span priority groups.)
• Licensing – There are now two editions of SRM, Standard and Enterprise.  Both are feature identical.  Standard is for sites up to 75 VMs and Enterprise is for sites up to 1000 VMs (the technical limit).  All existing customers who maintain support will get SRM Enterprise when they go to SRM5.  SRM Standard is a new offering for SMBs and Remote Offices.  When customers need to grow beyond 75 VMs at a site, they can upgrade their existing VMs to SRM Enterprise and then continue buying SRM5 Enterprise VM-Packs.  Licensing still sold in packs of 25 VMs.  Only need to purchase for the VMs that you are going to protect.

As I was wading thru all of the new materials from yesterday, I thought it would be helpful to create a big list of all of the new features in vSphere 5.0.  There were really only a few named in the presentation (or else the preso would have been 3 hours and put the analysts to sleep).  While we wait for the release notes, I put together this list for you.  This is not every new feature, but rather as many as I could find or remember.  I’ve also added a quick blurb on what that feature does and my comments in parenthesis.  If you are aware of something that I missed, please add in the comments below (with your own comments/opinions of course).  Here we go:

VMware vSphere 5.0

• ESXi Convergence – No more ESX, only ESXi (they said they would do it, they meant it)
• New VM Hardware:  Version 8 – New Hardware support (VS5 still supports VM Hardware 4 & 7 as well if you still want to migrate to the old hosts)
  • 3D graphics Support for Windows Aero
  • Support for USB 3.0 devices

• Platform Enhancements (Blue Requires Hardware v8)
  • 32 vCPUs per VM
  • 1TB of RAM per VM
  • 3D Graphics Support
  • Client-connected USB devices
  • USB 3.0 Devices
  • Smart-card Readers for VM Console Access
  • EFI BIOS
  • UI for Multi-core vCPUs
  • VM BIOS boot order config API and PowerCLI Interface
• vSphere Auto Deploy – mechanism for having hosts deploy quickly when needed ( I’m going to wait and see how customers use this one.)
• Support for Apple Products – Support for running OSX 10.6 Server (Snow Leopard) on Apple Xserve hardware. (although I betting technically, you can get it to run on any hardware, you will just not be compliant in your license) Read the rest of this entry »