The VMguy

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

I’ve said time and time again that SRM has always been my favorite non-vSphere 5 product.  There are some great new features in SRM5 that definitely warrant an eval at the least (Failback, Host-based replication, etc).  I was also excited that VMware released a new licensing model with SRM5.  All existing customers would automatically upgrade to the new Enterprise Edition.  The cost for Enterprise edition was the same as it always has been for SRM, roughly $495 list price per-vm plus SnS and sold in packs of 25 VMs.  VMware wanted to take SRM down a notch to the SMB market which is why they created the new Standard Edition.  The new standard edition is priced much more SMB friendly at $195 list price per-vm, plus SnS and sold in packs of 25 VMs.  The Standard and Enterprise editions are feature-identical.  Host based replication, fallback, and all the new features are included in both editions.  The difference between the two editions is that Standard Edition can protect a site up to 75 VMs.  When a customer grows past 75 VMs at a site, they must upgrade to SRM Enterprise Edition to protect up to 1,000 VMs (a technical limit, 500 VMs is the technical limit if using Host Based Replication).

Here lies the problem and the reason for my post.  Remember that the licensing is sold in packs of 25 VMs so we can add SRM capacity in blocks of 25.  When we cross that 75 to 100 in capacity required, we need to upgrade our existing Standard Licenses to Enterprise and purchase a 25-pack of Enterprise to protect the additional VMs.    In list price terms, the 76th VM will cost $49,501.  That price includes 3 of the 25-VM Upgrade packs for SRM Standard to Enterprise (to upgrade the existing licensing for that site), a 25-VM Pack of SRM Enterprise and 4 x 1-year SnS for SRM Enterprise (the upgrade packs require SnS at purchase).

I created a chart showing List Prices and the acquisition cost and total investment in SRM.  From left to right shows the number of licensed VMs protected.  This chart assumes you start purchasing SRM Standard for a site with 75 or less VMs protected and then grow the site to larger than 75 VMs protected.

You can see from the greenish line that the total cost takes a significant jump from the 75-to-100 number of VMs protected.  Please keep in mind that these are list prices and assume that you are going to start with Standard Edition.

I was curious to know how this model would compare if we purchased SRM Enterprise licenses from the start.  I created this graph below for comparison.

You can see the blue 25-VM pack acquisition costs are a constant and predictable for each 25-VM pack.  The red total cost line is also a constant rate.   You’ll also notice that at 100 VMs and on, total costs are lower when you use Enterprise from the start.

There are a couple important observations that I have made from this analysis.  First, Standard Edition is a great way for customers to get into SRM at a much lower price point.  Please understand the risks if there is potential for that site to grow large enough to protect more than 75 VMs from it.

Second, and most important, this article is not meant as a criticism of VMware licensing practices (I’ll let others write those).  This article is meant to inform the customers:  If you need to protect a site with SRM and you think that you will eventually grow that site past the 75-protected-VM mark, you may want to consider purchasing SRM Enterprise now to balance out your costs and save some money in the end.  I really do not want to have to explain this licensing to you when started by purchasing SRM Standard Edition and now you need to protect the 76th VM.

Good luck and good computing.

VMWorld keeps rolling on and on.  VMware has made Site Recovery Manager 5.0 available for download here.  As I’ve mentioned time and time again, SRM is my favorite non-vSphere product from VMWare.  This one does not disappoint.  You can grab the download here.  Here’s the What’s New Section from the release notes:

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5.0 enhances your ability to build, manage and execute reliable disaster recovery plans for your virtual environment. With the release of version 5.0, VMware has expanded the capabilities of Site Recovery Manager to provide unprecedented levels of protection. New use cases have been made possible through the addition of the following capabilities:

• vSphere Replication. When used in conjunction with VMware vSphere 5.0, Site Recovery Manager 5.0 introduces a new capability to utilize the vSphere 5.0 host to perform replication of powered-on virtual machines over the network to another vSphere 5.0 host, without the requirement for storage array-based replication. As virtual machines change with use, the changed blocks are replicated to a shadow copy of the virtual machine resident at the recovery site, in accordance with a Recovery Point Objective set as a property of the virtual machine itself.
• Planned Migration. A new workflow designed to deliver migration while minimizing the risk of data loss. Planned migration will stop the workflow from continuing if an error is encountered, providing an opportunity to fix the problem, ensuring that systems are properly quiescent and that all data changes have been completely replicated.
• Automated Re-Protection. Re-protection is a new extension to recovery plans for use only with array-based replication. Automated re-protect enables the environment at the recovery site to establish replication and protection of the environment back to the original protected site through a single click.
• Automated Failback. Automated failback returns the entire environment to the originally protected primary site. This can only happen after re-protection has ensured that data replication and synchronization have been established to the original primary site. Failback will run the same workflow that was used to migrate the environment to the protected site, ensuring that the critical systems encapsulated by the recovery plan are returned to their original environment. Automated failback, like re-protection, is only available for use with array-based replication protected virtual machines.
• Enhanced Dependency Definition. This includes the addition of more (5) priority groups, and the ability to set virtual machine dependencies within a priority group. Virtual machine dependencies can be defined to ensure that required systems are available before dependent virtual machines are powered on. This enables highly organized workflow control, ensuring that required services are available before dependent virtual machines are powered on.

VMware View 5.0 has been released and can be downloaded here.  For those customers using View over slow WAN connections, you are going to want to take a close look at this release.  Here’s the What’s New from the release notes:

VMware View 5.0 includes the following new features:

• PCoIP WAN performance optimization – Improves PCoIP protocol performance in low-bandwidth WAN environments. Users who connect to their desktops over an external WAN have enhanced desktop experience.
• Support for 3D graphics on vSphere 5.0 – This feature provides View desktops with vGPU graphics enablement available on vSphere 5.0 platforms. View users can take advantage of desktop graphics enhancements provided by AERO (such as peek, shake, and Flip 3D) and the 3D capabilities of Windows Office 2010 (such as picture editing, slide transitions and animations, presentation-to-video conversion, video embedding, editing, and 3D rotations).
• View Persona Management – The View Persona Management feature manages user profiles in a secure and centralized environment. (User profiles include user data and settings, application data and settings, and Windows registry settings configured by user applications.) View Persona Management allows IT organizations to simplify and automate the capture and management of a user’s persona while providing a rich user experience. View Persona Management offers the following benefits:
  • Provides a user profile that is independent of the virtual desktop. When a user logs in to any desktop, the same profile appears.
  • Lets you configure and manage personas entirely within View. You do not have to configure Windows roaming profiles.
  • Expands functionality and improves performance compared to Windows roaming profiles.
  • Minimizes login impact by downloading only the files that Windows requires, such as user registry files. Other files are copied to the local desktop when the user or an application opens them from the local profile folder.
  • Copies recent changes in the local profile to a remote profile repository at configurable intervals, typically once every few minutes.
• Updated client certificate checking for View clients – View clients now follow the well-known browser model for handling certificates, displaying errors detected in the certificate presented by View Connection Server, or in the certificate trust chain. Administrators can set the Certificate verification mode group policy to enforce strict certificate checking; if any certificate error occurs, the user cannot connect to View Connection Server. Alternatively, administrators can use the default Warn But Allow mode, which supports self-signed server certificates and lets users connect to View Connection Server with certificates that have expired or are not yet valid. If necessary, administrators can also set a No Security mode that lets users connect without certificate checking.
• Support for vSphere 5.0
• Support for hardware v8 – Remote View desktops can be hardware v8 virtual machines. Hardware v8 is not supported for desktops that run in local mode.
• Removed support for HP RGS display protocol
• Localization support for Korean. – View Client and the documentation, online help, and release notes are available in Korean.

Note: The version of View Client for Mac that was bundled with View 4.6 is also bundled with the View 5.0 release. This is the latest View Client for Mac and is compatible with View 4.6 and View 5.0.

After much anticipation, VMware has finally released vSphere 5.0 with it’s new licensing model.  You can head right over to the download site and start plugging away here for ESXi and here for vCenter 5.0.

As always, here’s the what’s new section from the release notes:

With this release, the VMware virtual datacenter operating system continues to transform x86 IT infrastructure into the most efficient, shared, on-demand utility, with built-in availability, scalability, and security services for all applications and simple, proactive automated management. The new and enhanced features in vSphere 5.0 are listed below.

Platform Enhancements
Storage
Networking
VMware vCenter Server
Availability
Partner Ecosystem
Platform Enhancements

Convergence. vSphere 5.0 is the first vSphere release built exclusively on the vSphere ESXi 5.0 hypervisor architecture as the host platform. The ESX hypervisor is no longer included in vSphere. The vSphere 5.0 management platform, vCenter Server 5.0, supports ESXi 5.0 hosts as well as ESX/ESXi 4.x and ESX/ESXi 3.5 hosts.

VMware vSphere Auto Deploy. VMware vSphere Auto Deploy simplifies the task of managing ESXi installation and upgrade for hundreds of machines. New hosts are provisioned based on rules that the administrator defines. Rebuilding a server to a clean slate requires only a reboot. To move between ESXi versions, you create a new rule using the Auto Deploy PowerCLI and perform a test and repair compliance operation.

Unified CLI Framework. The expanded ESXCLI framework offers an extensible command set, including new commands to facilitate on-host troubleshooting and maintenance. The framework allows consistency of authentication, roles, and auditing, using the same methods as other management frameworks such as vCenter Server and PowerCLI. You can use the ESXCLI framework both remotely as part of vSphere CLI and locally on the ESXi Shell (formerly Tech Support Mode).

New virtual machine capabilities. ESXi 5.0 introduces a new generation of virtual hardware with virtual machine hardware version 8, which includes the following new features:
32-way virtual SMP. ESXi 5.0 supports virtual machines with up to 32 virtual CPUs, which lets you run larger CPU-intensive workloads on the VMware ESXi platform.

1TB of virtual machine RAM. You can assign up to 1TB of RAM to ESXi 5.0 virtual machines.

Software support for 3D graphics to run Windows Aero. ESXi 5.0 supports nonhardware accelerated 3D graphics to run Windows Aero and Basic 3D applications in virtual machines.

USB 3.0 device support. ESXi 5.0 features support for USB 3.0 devices in virtual machines with Linux guest operating systems. USB 3.0 devices attached to the client computer running the vSphere Web Client or the vSphere Client can be connected to a virtual machine and accessed in it. USB 3.0 devices connected to the ESXi host are not supported.

UEFI virtual BIOS. Virtual machines running on ESXi 5.0 can boot from and use the Unified Extended Firmware Interface (UEFI).

Graphical User Interface to configure multicore virtual CPUs. You can now configure the number of virtual CPU cores per socket in the Virtual Machine Properties view in the vSphere Web Client and the vSphere client. Previously this feature was only configurable through advanced settings.

Client-connected USB devices. USB devices attached to the client computer running the vSphere Web Client or the vSphere Client can be connected to a virtual machine and accessed within it.

Smart card reader support for virtual machines. Smart card readers attached to the client computer running the vSphere Web Client or the vSphere Client can be connected to one or more virtual machines and accessed in them. The virtual machine remote console, available in the vSphere Web Client and the vSphere Client, supports connecting smart card readers to multiple virtual machines, which can then be used for smart card authentication.

Expanded support for VMware Tools versions. VMware Tools from vSphere 4.x is supported in virtual machines running on vSphere 5.0 hosts. Additionally, the version of VMware Tools supplied with vSphere 5.0 is also compatible with ESX/ESXi 4.x.

Apple Mac OS X Server guest operating system support. VMware vSphere 5.0 adds support for the Apple Mac OS X Server 10.6 (“Snow Leopard”) as a guest operating system. Support is restricted to Apple Xserve model Xserve3,1 systems.

Host UEFI boot support. vSphere 5.0 supports booting ESXi hosts from the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI). With UEFI you can boot systems from hard drives, CD/DVD drives, or USB media. Booting over the network requires the legacy BIOS firmware and is not available with UEFI.

Support for up to 512 virtual machines per host. vSphere 5.0 supports up to 512 virtual machines totaling a maximum of 2048 virtual CPUs per host.

Support for larger systems. vSphere 5.0 supports systems with up to 160 logical CPUs and up to 2TB of RAM.

Improved SNMP support. With vSphere 5.0, you can convert CIM indications to SNMP traps. Check with your hardware vendor to see whether their CIM provider supports this functionality. In addition, vSphere 5.0 now supports the Host Resources MIB (RFC 2790) and allows for finer control over the types of traps sent by the SNMP agent.

Memory fault isolation. On supported platforms, ESXi 5.0 detects and quarantines physical memory regions that exhibit frequent correctable errors. This preemptive action reduces the risk of uncorrectable errors that result in VM or host downtime. Should an uncorrectable memory error occur, ESXi 5.0 quarantines the failed memory region and restarts the affected virtual machines. ESXi halts with a purple diagnostic screen only if the memory error affects the hypervisor itself. These enhancements deliver improved VM and host availability.

Image Builder. A new set of PowerCLI cmdlets lets administrators create custom ESXi images that include third-party components required for specialized hardware, such as drivers and CIM providers. You can use Image Builder to create images suitable for different types of deployment, such as ISO-based installation, PXE-based installation, and Auto Deploy.

Host Profiles Enhancements. Using an Answer File, you can configure host-specific settings to use with the common settings in the Host Profile, which removes the need to add host-specific parameters. This feature enables the use of Host Profiles to fully configure a host during an automated deployment. In addition, Host Profiles includes support for an expanded set of configurations, including iSCSI, FCoE, Native Multipathing, Device Claiming and PSP Device Settings, and Kernel Module Settings.

Metro vMotion. Ability to use vMotion to move a running virtual machine when the source and destination ESX hosts are more than 5ms round trip time latency apart. The maximum supported round trip time latency between the two hosts is now 10ms.

Enablement of Trusted Execution Technology (TXT). ESXi 5.0 can be configured to boot with Intel Trusted Execution Technology (TXT). This boot option can protect ESXi in some cases where system binaries are corrupt or were tampered with.

Improvement in scalability. ESXi 5.0 supports up to 160 logical processors.

Storage

Storage DRS. This feature delivers the DRS benefits of resource aggregation, automated initial placement, and bottleneck avoidance to storage. You can group and manage similar datastores as a single load-balanced storage resource called a datastore cluster. Storage DRS makes disk (VMDK) placement and migration recommendations to avoid I/O and space utilization bottlenecks on the datastores in the cluster.

Profile-driven storage. This solution allows you to have greater control and insight into characteristics of your storage resources. It also enables virtual machine storage provisioning to become independent of specific storage available in the environment. You can define virtual machine placement rules in terms of storage characteristics and monitor a virtual machine’s storage placement based on these administrator-defined rules. The solution delivers these benefits by taking advantage of the following items:

Integrating with Storage APIs – Storage Awareness to deliver storage characterization supplied by storage vendors.

Enabling the vSphere administrator to tag storage based on customer-specific descriptions.

Using storage characterizations to create virtual machine placement rules in the form of storage profiles.

Providing easy means to check a virtual machine’s compliance against these rules.

As a result, managing storage usage and choice in vSphere deployments is more efficient and user-friendly.

vStorage APIs – Storage Awareness. A new set of APIs that allows vCenter Server to detect capabilities of a storage device, making it easier to select the appropriate storage disk for virtual machine placement. Storage capabilities, such as RAID level, thin or thick provisioning, replication state, and so on, can now be made visible with vCenter Server.

VMFS5. VMFS5 is a new version of vSphere Virtual Machine File System that offers improved scalability and performance, and provides internationalization support. With VMFS5, you can create a 64TB datastore on a single extent. RDMs in physical compatibility mode with the size larger than 2TB can now be presented to a virtual machine. In addition, on SAN storage hardware that supports vStorage APIs – Array Integration (also known as VAAI), ESXi 5.0 uses the atomic test and set (ATS) locking mechanism for VMFS5 datastores. Using this mechanism can improve performance, although the degree of improvement depends on the underlying storage hardware.

iSCSI UI support. Configure dependent hardware iSCSI and software iSCSI adapters along with the network configurations and port binding in a single dialog box using the vSphere Client. Full SDK access is also available for these configurations.

Storage I/O Control NFS support. vSphere 5.0 extends Storage I/O Control to provide cluster-wide I/O shares and limits for NFS datastores.

Storage APIs – Array Integration: Thin Provisioning. Reclaim blocks of a thin-provisioned LUN when a virtual disk is deleted or migrated. You can also preallocate space on thin-provisioned LUNs and receive advanced warnings and error messages when a datastore on a thin-provisioned LUN starts to fill up. The behavior of a full thin-provisioned disk is also improved. Only virtual machines that are trying to allocate new blocks on a full thin-provisioned datastore are paused. Virtual machines that do not require additional blocks on the thin-provisioned disk continue to run.

Swap to Host Cache. The VMkernel scheduler is modified to allow ESXi swap to extend to local or network SSD devices, which enables memory overcommitment and minimizes performance impact. The VMkernel automatically recognizes and tags SSD devices that are local to ESXi or are on the network.

2TB+ LUN support. vSphere 5.0 provides support for 2TB+ VMFS datastores. Very large VMFS5 datastores with the size of up to 64TB can be created on a singe storage device without additional extents.

Storage vMotion snapshot support. Allows you to use Storage vMotion for a virtual machine in snapshot mode with associated snapshots. You can better manage storage capacity and performance by using flexibility of migrating a virtual machine along with its snapshots to a different datastore. A new Storage vMotion mechanism uses a mirror driver, which synchronizes the source disk to the destination disk, making the migration quicker.

Software FCoE. vSphere 5.0 introduces support for a software Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) driver. To enable this driver on an ESXi host, you must have a NIC that can support some FCoE offload capabilities.

Snapshot commitments. If a snapshot commit operation fails, this feature enables the vSphere Client to warn users that a consolidate operation is still required on the virtual machine.

Networking

Enhanced Network I/O Control. vSphere 5.0 builds on network I/O control to allow user-defined network resource pools, enabling multitenancy deployment, and to bridge virtual and physical infrastructure QoS with per resource pool 802.1 tagging.

vSphere Distributed Switch Improvements. vSphere 5.0 provides a deeper view into virtual machine traffic through Netflow and enhances monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities through SPAN and LLDP.

ESXi Firewall. The ESXi 5.0 management interface is protected by a service-oriented and stateless firewall, which you can configure using the vSphere Client or at the command line with esxcli interfaces. A new firewall engine eliminates the use of iptables and rule sets define port rules for each service. For remote hosts, you can specify the IP addresses or range of IP addresses that are allowed to access each service.

VMware vCenter Server

vSphere Web Client. A new browser-based user interface that is supported across Linux and Windows platforms. In the 5.0 release, the vSphere Web Client is a replacement for the Web Access product. The client is suitable for all console and virtual machine use cases, allowing administrators to manage their environments.

vCenter Server Appliance. A vCenter Server implementation running on a preconfigured virtual appliance. This appliance significantly reduces the time required to deploy vCenter Server and associated services and provides a low-cost alternative to the traditional Windows-based vCenter Server.

Inventory Extensibility. VMware customers and partners can extend vCenter Server in multiple ways, including the inventory, graphical user interface, and agents. vCenter Server includes a manager to monitor the extensions. By deploying extensions created by VMware partners, you can use vCenter Server as a unified console to manage your virtualized datacenter.

Enhanced logging support. All log messages are now generated by syslog, and messages can now be logged on either local or one or more remote log servers. A given server can log messages from more than one host. Log messages can be remotely logged using either the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or TCP connections. The vSphere syslog listener is available as an optional plug-in to vCenter on Windows. In the vCenter Virtual Appliance (VCVA), logging is accomplished using the native syslog-ng facility. With vSphere 5.0, log messages from different sources can be configured to go into different logs for more convenience. Configuration of message logging can also be accomplished using ESXCLI in addition to the vSphere Client.

Availability

vSphere HA. vSphere High Availability is now a cloud-optimized availability platform. Enhancements such as the elimination of the primary and secondary roles and removal of the dependence on DNS make configuration easier. New features, such as the ability to use shared storage as a backup communication channel ensure higher reliability of host failure detection.

vSphere Data Recovery 2.0. VMware increases the speed and reliability of backups expands with the release of Data Recovery 2.0. This release improves integration with vCenter and provides new manageability features including:

Automated generation and emailing of backup job reports.

Improved backup, integrity check, and reclaim operation performance.

Increased resiliency against transient network failures provides improved CIFS support.

Increased flexibility to schedule, pause, and cancel integrity check operations.

Partner Ecosystem

Expanded List of Supported Processors. The list of supported processors has been expanded for ESXi 5.0. To determine which processors are compatible with this release, use the Hardware Compatibility Guide. Among the supported processors are the the Intel Xeon E7-2800, E7-4800, and E7-8800 processor series, code-named Westmere-EX, and the Intel Xeon E3-1200 and i3-2100 processor series, code-named Sandy Bridge.

Support for Multi-queue Storage Adapters. The vSphere storage stack is enhanced to discover multi-queue capabilities of adapters and distribute the incoming I/O on these queues based on CPU affinity. This results in reduced CPU cost per I/O.