Category: Virtualisation


A nice little graphic popped into my inbox the other day – as well as being quite informative , It marks a little bit of a swansong for Trainsignal – I’ve enjoyed their training videos for many years but they have recently been acquired by Pluralsight. I’m sure the calibre of the videos will remain the same , even if us IT Pro’s do have to share with the Devs Winking smile

 

 

Top virtualization skills to boost your career – An infographic by the team at Trainsignal

If there is one thing that all VMware monitoring solutions have in common , it is a connection to vCenter. The vCenter Web Service is a single point of contact between the outside world and the key performance API’s. What you do with that data once you have collected it varies from application to application , but they will all make that underlying connection to vCenter.

 

This puts vCenter into a bit of a special position within the infrastructure , namely a Single Point of Failure (SPoF)  As the ecosystem has grown up around vSphere , admins have become more and more reliant on vCenter – their backups depend on it , their monitoring depends on it and in some cases their orchestration layer depends on it. That’s a serious number of dependencies to have on a single box. Protecting vCenter from a hardware point of view is quite straightforward , just deploy it as a virtual machine. If you are going down the vCenter appliance route – this is your only choice.

Even if you do cover many of the bases when it comes to protection of the vCenter, there are still a few cases where you might loose it , e.g. storage corruption , back end database failure or even worse a catastrophic failure of the management cluster. When things are all going pear shaped , you still want someone to keep an eye on the business while you are fixing it.

This is where System Center really comes to the rescue – because it is an end to end monitoring framework , its going to be looking at the big picture , sometimes from the application stack downwards. The Health of the virtual infrastructure is simply a component of the picture. Letting the corporate central Operations Centre folk keep an eye on things while you concentrate on fixing the root cause of the outage is going to lead to a faster fix all round , with the subject matter experts doing what they do best !

However , if vCenter is down – how can we monitor the estate ? None of the tools will connect to a web service that isn’t there. With the Veeam Management Pack, we can make use of the Recovery Action feature and some PowerShell , in order to automate our own Veeam Virtualisation Extensions to go and talk directly to the hosts if they can’t talk to vCenter. Lets walk through an example.

 

image

Here is my little test setup – I have a couple of vCenters , with a few hosts and VM’s underneath. I’m monitoring it in SCOM 2012 quite happily.

image

The Veeam Extensions service is merrily talking away to vCenter, bringing in events , metrics and topology information.

Merrily that is until ( fanfare : Dun dun Dah! ) disaster strikes, or in my case I suspend my vCenter appliance.

image

 

At this point with the standard version of the management pack, You would see the following alert & you would be left without vSphere level monitoring until you could bring vCenter back to life. No host hardware information , no datastore health.

 

image

I have managed to persuade the R&D Wizards at Veeam to let me in on a very sneak preview of some upcoming functionality that should be appearing in the not to distant future. In the improved version , the alert above will trigger a Recovery Action . This action will run a PowerShell script to change connection points from the vCenter , to the hosts directly. SCOM has been configured with a credential profile for a root level account on each host.

 

image

 

Once this script is complete , the VESS connection looks like this. The vCenter connection has been disabled (unchecked) – no harm in that, as it’s offline anyway. And direct-to-Host connections have been automatically created by the monitor Recovery Action, using our PowerShell interface.

 

image

A short while afterwards , this change is reflected in the SCOM Topology.

 

image

note how we are looking at the hosts as individuals. Without  vCenter , there isn’t any vmotion so virtual machines will remain on the hosts they started when vCenter became unavailable. Monitoring teams can continue to keep an eye on the health of virtual machines and hosts for the duration of the outage.

 

image

 

Once vCenter is available again , the collectors run the recovery action in reverse in order to resume monitoring via vCenter.

 

image

 

Notice how the vCenter & datacenter names for the virtual machines have changed back.

 

image

 

As an added bonus , we are able to execute tasks on underlying virtual machines even when vCenter is not available ( such as power on / power off ) – giving us the ability not only to look at the environment , but administer it , even when the centralised administration function is not available. Admins can control power states and manage snapshots without having to manually connect to each host in turn. The rest of the System Center suite has no dependency on vCenter either , The Veeam MP is able to drive data into System Center Orchestrator and System Center Service Manager to maintain host / vm CMDB.

 

image

By using Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2012 , along with Powershell automation , we are enabling an Enterprise systems management team to continue to function during periods of vCenter outage. Keep watching for further releases and watch those SPoF’s !

It seems the world of homelabs has had a few innovations recently , especially with the advent of near silent hardware like the Intel NUC. However , what if you want to go beyond that ? We cant all afford colo hosting or have a lab at our place of work. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just rent some cloud resources for it ? the problem is that most virtual server hosting firms wont actually let you have an ESX environment unless you really shell out for the big bucks. It seems there is now an answer – baremetalcloud providing on demand , dedicated hardware. Thanks to some strong words , softly spoken by Lab Guru Mike Laverick , he’s managed to secure a bit of a discount for the first 100 folks to give it a spin. The platform supports pretty much anything you want , including the most excellent Autolab ( as sponsored by Veeam ) which could you Less than a dollar an hour to run. Given the average cost of a home lab that you have to pay for when you are not using it , this could work out quite effective. Head over to Mike’s site for a detailed guide and use the promo code [b]MAGICMIKE100[/b] for a potential discount !

After recent harasment by some friends of mine , I’ve decided that I really need to get back to some more regular updates. It has been reasonably tough over the fast few months as work has kept me pretty busy. I’ve spent my summer in a few different parts of the world , most recently South Africa – working with the Veeam Teeam based down there , meeting customers and eating some interesting game meats at a restaurent called…. crocadile anyone ?

Over the course of the last year or so , I’ve delivered a good number of presentations for work , but recently was asked to do something a little different. As part of an event, I was required to produce a Demo Video of one of our products , in this case , our management pack for Microsoft SCOM. This in itself is nothing new , we have a whole host of similar videos. The twist on this was that it had to be short , real short – in this case 3 minutes or so. This gave me a bit of a tricky situation – risk going fast and have the customer feel like they were in training for “the Matrix” , or only show what might prove to be an unrepresentative portion of the product.

After a little internal brainstorming with the rest of the technical team , I settled on a few keys points and started to record. Just like an iPhone advert, “some sequences may have been shortened” 😉

This is my first attempt at producing a video like this with camtasia , I hope to try and do some more – perhaps showcasing a few of the upcoming cool new features in the product.

Well the year is starting to wrap up – Twitter avatars look a little snowier and analysts are digging deep into their prediction boxes in the attic to see what 2012 is going to “be the year of <insert technology>”.

 

If you make no other resolutions in the coming 2 weeks or so , make this one , “I will attend a user group meeting” – for example the next London VMware User Group meeting is on the 26th of January, so its a nice early one to tick off the list. If you’d like to sign up for the meeting , head on over to here and sign up. If you feel you need a little more convincing on why a user group is for you, then read on.

 

7 Reasons why you should go to a usergroup

1. Its an educational event – Not only is there a chance to pick up some handy info from the sponsors and members presentations , for instance “how to build 1000 hosts in 10 minutes with VMware auto deploy” by Alan Renouf from VMware , or dabble in “A little orchestration after lunch" with Michael Poore – you could even brush up on those skills to complete a certification such as with Gregg Robertson’s VCP5 Tips & Tricks session.

2. Its a social event – a chance to meet with people who share similar sets of day to day issues as yourself , so its the perfect place to bounce an idea around with a peer group of very bright people

3. Its a fun event – from Alaric’s jokes at the welcome to the laughs and war stories at the pub afterwards its good humour all the way – just because we work in IT doesn’t mean that we’re socially crippled!

4. Its a free event! even lunch and a swift half at the pub later is covered

5. Its an interactive event – Its not just a day of PowerPoint overload , you can get involved with the hands on lab sessions , on this occasion sponsored by the guys over at Embotics, I’m sure you’ll have built a self service cloud portal before you can say “boo!”

6. Its a networking event – People pay quite a lot of money to marketing companies to be able to have “breakfast” with like minded peers for the purpose of networking – being in IT we’re much more practical , we’ll do it for free at the usergroup! Find out the gossip , who’s hiring & who wants to be hired. You might just find that next rockstar position you’ve been promising yourself!

7. Its a community driven event – think you can do better than the guy on stage ? got something worth saying ? well you have the opportunity to prove it at a user group – We love the sponsors, but what makes it a *user* group is the member driven content – it could be a panel / open roundtable or just an aspect of your day to day techie life that you think you’ve done well and would like to tell people about

 

Hopefully there is something that will strike a chord above – and I’ll see you on the 26th!

No I don’t have the date wrong – There’s a much better thing to do at the beginning of November than trying to blow up a bit of your garden with pyrotechnics. The London VMware User group as stepped up to produce what the committee hopes to be the first of many UK VMware User group days.

 

To be held at the National Motorcycle Museum in Solihull , West Midlands this full day event will have not only a Keynote from VMware’s Joe Baguley , but 4 Tracks of Partner & Community sessions with more Rockstars the Glastonbury !

 

The VMUG “scene” in the UK is going from strength to strength and I’m sure this event will be no exception. Best of all, its free to attend , including an evening reception the night before hosted by Veeam

 

To Sign up for the event , head over to The MyVMUG site for registration. Look forward to seeing you there !

I got wind of a new project launched by Veeam from one of the many, many, many tweets that flooded by tweetdeck during VMworld US week – when my fellow vExpert, Blogger & Colleague Rick Vanover hinted that Veeam was due to launch another free community resource, I was keen to discover !

 

Having made the transition to vendor world, finding content as a blogger can be a little bit more of a search. For some reason, many of Veeam’s competitors don’t seem to want to give me a sneak peak of their products Winking smile ,however in this case the product in question isn’t one that Veeam will be selling !

 

When we shifted into virtualisation, many of us from the physical server world had to make a little bit of a leap of faith into the new mind-set around virtualisation, now that we’ve made it, its is almost second nature to us. If you cast your mind back to those days of 7u file servers, imagine how alien the concept would be that they could be represented as a handful of files running of a single half height blade. Fast wording that concept to today and many people have yet to make that similar leap of faith when it comes to image based backup of VM’s

 

The Backup Academy as developed by Veeam to provide administrators with the foundations and fundamentals of Virtual Machine level backups, no matter who you choose for the solution. Veeam are by no means the first vendor to produce “neutral” training, EMC for example have paved the way with  Their Cloud Certifications last year.

The solution consists of a series of Videos produced by well known community contributors and trainers, such as David Davis, Eric Siebert & Greg Shields . The Academy Professors will be an ever growing list of subject matter experts around the backup and management of virtual machines.

Users of the site will be able to take an exam based on the content and even get a certificate for passing. I personally see the academy as a great way for current backup admins & virtualisation specialists to move to the next level – now that you have made game changing strategies to your production infrastructure, why not do the same for your backups ?

 

to find out more, head to http://backupacademy.com

Ok so I’ll take my tongue out of my cheek  – I have never heard Xangati’s summer refresh of their performance monitoring dashboard called by its Three Letter Acronym  (TLA) before, but I was lucky enough to be given a preview of the Xangati Management Dashboard (XMD) and to be shown some of the new ways in which it can gather information and metrics relevant to a Virtualised Desktop deployment.

When I first came across the product about 12 months ago, it’s main strength was in the networking information it could surface to a VI admin – by use of small appliance VM’s sitting on a promiscuous port group on a Virtual switch it was able to analyse net flow data going in and out of a host – when this was aligned with metrics coming form Virtual centre. The products “TiVo” like recording interface was able to capture what was happening to an infrastructure either side of an incident , be it a predefined threshold , or an automatically derived one – where a workload was suitably predictable for a given length of time , the application was able to create profiles for a number of metrics and record behavior outside that particular profile. As with other products that attempt to do dynamic thresholding , the problem comes in the form of an environment which is not subject to a predictable workload where is possible to miss an alert while the software is still “learning” – it also assumes that you have a good baseline to start with. If you have a legacy issue that becomes incorporated into that profile , then it can be difficult to troubleshoot. To this extent I’m glad that more traditional static thresholds are still able to be put in place. When monitoring environments with vSphere version 5 , there is no more requirement for the network flow appliances – the netflow data is provided directly to the main XDM appliance via a vCenter API. With a Single API connection , the application is focussed on much more than just the network data – allowing a VMware admin to see a wide view of the infrastructure from the Windows process to the VMware Datastore.

 

What interested me about the briefing was the level of attention being paid to VDI – I think Xangati is quite unique in terms of their VDI Monitoring dashboard and the latest release reinforces that. In addition to metrics that you would expect around a given virtual machine in terms of its resource consumption , Xangati have partnered with the developers of the PCoIP protocol , Terradici in order to be able to provide enhanced metrics at the protocol layer of a VDI connection. This offers a welcome alternative to the current method of having to utilise log analysers like Splunk.

 

VDI users are in my opinion much more sensitive to temporary performance glitches than consumers of a hosted web service. If a website is a little slow for a few seconds , people might look at their network connection or any number of alternative issues , but for a VDI consumer , that desktop is their “world” and would affect every application they use. Thus when it runs poorly they are much more liable to escalate than the aforementioned web service consumers. Use of the XMD within a VDI environment allows an administrator to trouble shoot those kinds of issues ( such as storage latency or badly configured AV policy causing excessive IO ) by examining the interaction between all of the components of the VDI infrastructure , even if the problem occurred beyond the rollup frequency of a more conventional monitoring product. This what Xangati views as one of its strengths , while I don’t think it is a product I would use for day to day monitoring of an environment – there is a lot of data onscreen and without profiles or adequate threshold tuning it would require more interaction than most “wallboard” monitoring solutions, I can see if being deployed as a tool for deeper troubleshooting. There is a facility which would allow an end user to trigger a “recording” of the relevant metrics to their desktop while they are experiencing a problem ( although if the problem is intermittent network connectivity , this could prove interesting ! )

 

As a tool for monitoring VDI environments it certainly has some traction , notably being used to monitor the lab environments for last years and this years VMworld cloud based lab setups , as well as some good sized enterprise customers. With this success I’m a little surprised at the last part of the launch, “No Brainer” pricing… In a market where prices seem to be on a more upward trend , Xangati have applied a substantial discount to theirs – with pricing for the VDI dashboard starting at $10 per desktop for up to 1000 desktops. I’m told there is an additional fee for environments larger than that. I’m no analyst but I’d love to explore the rationale behind this.. Was the product seen as too expensive ( although as with many things , the list price and the price a keen customer pays can often be pretty different – is this an attempt to make software pricing a little more “no nonsense ? “ I guess time will tell !

image

For more information on the XMD and to download a free version of the new product , good for a single host , check out http://Xangati.com

 

 

If you have been hiding under a rock for the last couple of weeks , you may not be aware that VMware held an online launch of its next generation Cloud platform , vSphere 5.0. It seems some of the announcements went down really well , and other parts , lets just say , not so well judging by the twitter reaction…

Have a listen to the show… here

I was very pleased to see a mail this morning from John Troyer – vExpert Program manager to say that I have been chosen this year as a vExpert. To quote the man himself !

 

We’re pleased to designate you as a vExpert 2011 as recognition of your contributions to the VMware, virtualization, and cloud computing communities. You’ve done work above and beyond, and we’re delighted to communicate more closely, to share resources, and to offer other opportunities for greater interaction throughout the year as we continue to grow knowledge and success in the community of IT professionals. Welcome to the vExpert 2011 Program!

The award was chosen by a wide group of VMware Staff – who had a lot of great applications to go over and I’m as pleased as punch to have been chosen !