You can go to VMworld’s website and cast your vote. The public voting opened earlier today. Once there, simply filter the sessions and type in the session IDs provided below in the keyword fields. That should speed up things. However, its always a good idea to look for other sessions that may interest you. The important thing is for you to cast your vote. Of course, if that vote is for one of my sessions thats even better. You will need a VMworld ID in order to vote. You can also enter my name “bilal hashmi” in the keywords field to display both sessions like the screenshot below. From here onwards, its a matter of simply clicking the thumbs up. If its green like mine that means you voted. Yes, I voted for myself

My sessions:

vCenter: The Unsung Hero (Protecting the Core) – Session ID 4873

This session will be regarding the challenges we face with vCenter in 2013. This will cover topics like the importance of keeping vCenter up at all times. With new dependancies in the stack that rely heavily on vCenter to be available at all times, it has become challenging to keep all peices of vCenter running at all times. As we all know we now have more moving parts in vCenter. This session will cover the gotachs, and how you can secure your vCenter in order to keep the dependent services up at all times. I will be co-presenting this with a fellow vExpert James Bowling @vSential. Please vote for this session 4873.

Reports, Mashups and Analytics for your Datacenter – Session ID 5852

The other session is among my favorite topics to talk about. And what better place to talk about it than VMworld. Its the topic of reporting and analytics for your datacenter. We have found ourselves busy with a variety of different techniques to retrive the all importnat reports. Some of us get to use expensive tools that simply dont deliver or are too complicated to use. We also have the brave ones among us who would put powerCLI to work, and of course the good ole excel spreadsheets are never too far from a reporting discusion. We will be going over a different approach on retrieving critical information across your environment. This is not the one to miss. We will be unveiling some new capabilities of CloudPhysics for reports, mashups and analytics for your Datacenter. I plan to co-present this with another fellow vExpert Anthony Spiteri @anthonyspiteri. Please vote for this session 5852.

Obviously there are other great sessions that one should probably vote for as well. My suggestions are below. I think these are all great topics and would definitely be great addition to the VMworld this year. Good luck and I hope to see you all later this year.

It’s one thing to have a long list of training video’s but Trainsignal has really put out some top quality material. Only now they have made all this very very affordable. For only $49/month or if you prefer anual subscription thats only $468/year for all the training videos they offer. What are those courses? Here is a list.

Of course, you can stream all their videos online which I have been able to do in the past with no hiccups on my laptop and even my ipad. What they also have is offline viewing where you may download a video and view it offline like on a long flight perhaps. The only catch is for now the offline viewing is limited to windows and OS X platform only due to the silverlight dependency. Hopefully that functionality will come to mobile devices soon. Go ahead and sign up for more training than you will ever find the time for.

Last year I was completely new to PHD Virtual and had figure out all the moving parts, which weren’t many to be honest. The post from my last review is here. The one thing I loved about the product was its simplicity where I really didn’t have to sit down and figure out what was needed in order for it to work. I just followed the screen instruction and taadaaa!.. it worked.  So, I have huge expectations this year and won’t be going into the details of how to setup and install.

Install:

The overall procedure to do the install is still pretty much the same. You are working with two pieces here.

1. VBA (appliance)
2. Console (windows installer)

In order to get the backup tool going, you will install the console on a windows machine and deploy the VBA appliance. From that point some initial configurations are needed and you are all set to go. Configuration like the IP address for the VBA, storage to be used for backup, email notification, retention polices, write space etc.. What is write space? Good question, hold your horses.

You will also create your backup jobs here and kick off a manual or schedule a backup job.  All of this is pretty basic and I don’t plan on going into the details of how to complete these tasks. Once you have the VBA deployed, you will realize you don’t need anyone to blog about the how to steps. And if you really need that, click on the “question mark” on the top right of the console window and you will have access to all the help you will ever need. 

The documentation is embedded within the console and its pretty good and detailed.

So what’s the big deal?

When I reviewed this tool last year there were a few things that really impressed me. Its simplicity in deployment, creating backup jobs and recovering from backups. After all what’s the point of a backup tool if you are unable to use it to recover your data.

Just like before, your backups can be used to do both file level restore (FLR) and for the lack of a better term bare metal restore. What’s even better is the de-duplication ratio, which they market for it to be around 25:1 and my test last year, and this time around confirmed that as well.

So what’s the big deal? Are they simply re-releasing the older version with a new version number? Not really.

Instant Recovery:

One of the features I absolutely adore. This first came out with 6.0. What it does is pretty awesome.

The feature gives you the ability to recover a VM with little to no downtime. Yes you heard me right. Little to no downtime. How? What it does is pretty straightforward. Instead of retrieving from backup and doing a bare metal type restore, with Instant Recovery you are basically turning on the VM in a temporary data store that is created on the backup storage itself and presented to the ESXi host.

As soon as your VM turns one, you can simply storage vMotion it into the desired data store or its final resting place. But what if you are not licensed for storage vMotion? No problem, someone thought about that already. In comes “PHD motion” which will move your VM from the temporary storage to the production storage and yes it will merge all the changes during the move as well. All changed data is written to a place called “write space” which is used to make sure the PHD motion moves your VM to its final location with all the changes in place.

But there is new feature that the write space serves as well. And this by far is my favorite feature in this product. Now there is another type of recovery that I will be going over later in this post. This new recovery method can really work great with our next feature.

CloudHook:

For the last few years, everyone has fallen in love with the word cloud, even those of us who don’t really know what it means. Now that the definition of cloud is beginning to take some shape and it has been demystified for the most part, the next logical thing is to make use of cloud in our organizations.

Ever had to ship backup tapes to remote locations due to requirements that were set? In my experience dealing with tapes, tracking them and maintaining their rotation, delivering and receiving these bad boys isn’t something anyone looks forward to. But how else can we place our backups in a remote location and meet all the business requirements? Perhaps by storing our all-important data in the cloud?

That’s right –  all those things that you can do with the VBA today. Imagine if your underlying backup storage was not managed by your SAN/NFS admins but instead resided somewhere in the cloud. Guess what? It’s possible now. With PHD Virtual Backup 6.2 you now have the option to backup your data into the cloud. Popular storage providers like Amazon’s S3, Google’s Cloud storage, RackSpace, CloudFiles and OpenStack can all serve as your backup now.

Of course the next question is how hard is it to setup? Not hard at all. To give you an idea, I basically did a few tests on my local storage first before deciding to use up the limited bandwidth from my home connection. And it worked flawlessly. You are really not doing anything else besides telling the VBA where in the cloud this needs to be backed up.

Once you select your appropriate provider you will then provide some specific information like your access key ID, secret key and your bucket name. For my tests, I used the S3 option (This is not an endorsement. It just turned out to be the best option for me. Please do your own research). One gotcha right away was my bucket name. I was having issues getting my cloud info entered and it kept complaining about not being able to access the storage. Turns out if you are using S3 as your storage and your bucket name is all caps, you will have this issue. The fix is to not use caps. Obviously this was covered in the release notes that I was supposed to read but silly me. I wanted to point out this little known issue because I am sure there are more people out there like me who deploy first and read later or only when they hit a wall.

One more thing to keep in mind is the de-duplication ratio with PHD Vrtual. With cloud storage we are not only talking about disk space in the cloud but also the bandwidth to push that data around. I think this is where this product really comes in handy. It backsup all that you need without taxing you for resources as one may expect. And with cloud storage, that becomes even more important. 25:1 is what they market, and that is around the number that I have confirmed in my tests also.

Remember I mentioned another task that’s handled by the write space? So here it is. The write space is also used for caching data locally before shipping it out in the cloud. So the two jobs write space is responsible for are instant VM recovery and cloud storage backup.

So how much space should be allocated to the write space? That’s a good question and it really depends on what’s happening in your environment, how much data is being changed everyday and such. Below is extracted from the help document that discusses on how to figure out how big this space should be.

“A guideline for selecting the right size Write Space disk is to calculate at least 50% of your daily changed data, then attach a disk that can accommodate that size. Typically, changed data is about 5% of the total of all virtual disks in your environment that are being backed up. So for example, if you were backing up ten VMs every day that totaled 1 TB, you should attach a virtual disk that is at least 25 GB (Changed data is approximately 5% of 1 TB, which is 50 GB; of which 50% is 25 GB). Write Space can be expanded at any time by adding additional attached virtual disks.”

Of course, because this space will be shared by two tasks (cloud backup and instant recovery), it only makes sense to set thresholds on each task so that one doesn’t bully the other. With the slider in the configuration for write space, you can set how much of the write space can be used for cloud backup. The rest is used for Instant Recovery. Pretty simple aye!

Rollback Recovery:

With the backups being sent to the cloud, it would only make sense to have the ability to do restores from cloud as well. Most other products struggle to do this well for VMs, as they sometimes want you to pull all the backup files locally first, and then you can recover from them.

With Rollback recovery, you can restore your VMs to a previous point in time recovering only the changes from the selected backup over the existing VM. This feature first came out in 6.1. and will certainly compliment the CloudHook feature in 6.2. This obviously means a few things.

• Restores will be super fast
• They will consume less bandwidth as less data will be sent across your site and the cloud storage provider
• And last but not they least, you can finally meet those RTO RPO that always seemed unrealistic

The only thing to note here is that its highly recommended to take a snapshot of the VM before doing a rollback recovery on it. With this approach if the communication between you and the cloud breaks, you can at least revert the VM back to its original state. Obviously the brains at PHD virtual already thought about this, which is why the default behavior is to take a snapshot.

How can you select between the types of restores that are available? Pretty simple, select the appropriate radio button in the screenshot below and move forward.

Of course, rollback recovery is also available if you don’t employ cloud storage for your backups. You can still use it for your on-site backup, I just used the example of cloud because it appears to sound more fruitful in the case where our backup data maybe sitting thousands of miles away.

Conclusion:

I am absolutely not a backup expert and this review is definitely not a full review of the entire features this product offers. I have basically extended on my previous review of the tool from a previous version and only discussed two new features that I think are very good. As I mentioned before, the best thing for me is the products simplicity where a person like me who does very little with backups and restore in his day job is able to deploy and test a product like this one.

Part of what’s happening in IT today is convergence of technology. With it, the next thing that will soon follow will be the convergence of roles we have today. With the silos being taken down all around us, its important that we as IT professionals are capable of exploring tools that do tasks other than what we specialize in. Though I may not be a backup expert, I can fully test and deploy a tool like this within minutes. This helps bring the convergence of roles to life to some degree.

This is a great solution for an environment that is a 100% virtualized. But if you are like most organizations that have at least a few physical machines (other than those oracle boxes hehehe), you should have some other ideas in mind about how to go about backing up the physical machines.  PHD Virtual backup is only for VMs. You are on your own for the physicals or will have to invest in another backup solution for that.

Each VBA can only let you select a single type of storage for backups. What this means is if you want your data to go to your cloud storage and also have a backup locally available, you will have at least two VBAs. One will backup data to the cloud the other will do it to a local NFS, CIFS or VMDK attached to the VBA. The good thing is you can manage both using the same console as both VBAs will be part of the same vCenter. The bad thing is that your VMs will be backed up twice in order to go to two different places. Would have been nice if there was a way to backup only once and send it to two destinations.  From what I have been informed, in Q2 with the release of 6.3 this issue will be addressed.

Cloud Storage is a great idea for storing your backups. Like everything else, one must do a cost benefit analysis figure out the amount of data changes, the bandwidth needed to push backups into the cloud, the cost for purchasing space in the cloud and most importantly the value of data that is being backed up. You have a few very good choices in service providers that work with the product already. In any case, I personally believe the tapes have served us well and now lets put them where they belong, in a museum that is. Using cloud storage for backup is definitely looking into the future and PHD Virtual backup does an excellent job in simplifying a very complex task. And with rollback recovery, restores also become very fast. After all, why backup when we cant restore within a workable window. I urge you to try out the product in your labs. You will be pleasantly surprised as I have been for sometime now. Just be sure to remind yourself that you are not a backup expert, this product has a tendency of making you feel like one.

Obviously if its not already mentioned in the links below, dont forget to update your ODBC DSN (DataSource Name) settings if your application is using one (example vCenter, VUM etc). The links cover mostly what to do on the application side before/after moving the databases. Not so much on how to perform the data migration. You can rely on your DBAs for that.

Move vCenter Database

Move SSO Database

Move vCloud Database

Though I have never done this, my gut tells me that view composer DB move requires an ODBC update. I am looking for both the composer and event DB migration instructions to add to the list above. If anyone already has a link please share that with me.

As always, be sure to look at the versions in the links and the version you are working with in order to produce the desired results.

A colleague of mine pointed me to a this page that clearly states the following:

How does SSO integrate with the vSphere Client?

SSO does not integrate with the vSphere Client. However, when you log in through the vSphere Client, vCenter Server sends the authentication request to SSO.

Once I read that I started doubting my thought process and the importance of SSO in 5.1 Apparently all access to vCenter must be down once SSO is down (both via web and vSphere client).

After doing a lot testing this is what I found (vcenter 5.1 build 799731). When SSO is down,

• access via web-client is down as expected 
• access via vSphere client is flakey

This also meant any new account that was created or granted access couldn’t login using the vSphere client. Rememeber we only had luck with accounts that were able to login succssfuly prior to SSO service going down. And that too required the checkbox to be checked. If the account was just created or granted access after SSO went down, the screen showed the beautiful message on the right. The same message was received if the account didn’t successfully login while SSO was up. Why cant this message say the SSO cannot be reached is beyond me. By the way the web-client will tell you “Failed to communicate with the vCenter Single Sign On server” when SSO is down. So thank you VMware for doing that. 

Another thing to keep in mind. When SSO service is down, your vCenter service continues to run. However, if you attempt to restart your vCenter service you will find yourself in trouble. I was unable to get the vCenter service to start with SSO being offline. Which makes SSO even more important. Yes even with vCenter down your VMs continue to work but there are other vCenter specific features that will not function like DRS, sDRS for example. And if this vCenter is connected to a vCloud instance thats another can of worms.

So the bottom line is, SSO is very very important. It has two parts, the application and the DB part. VMware has done a great job in giving the option to install SSO as single, clustered or even multi-site type deployments. The high availability in the application side is thought out there. However, the problem is DB. VMware does not fully support SSO DB on a SQL cluster. As a matter of fact, there have been known issues that have come about when trying to deploy SSO using a SQL cluster. So the real option with full support is a stand alone SQL node. But that also creates a single point of failure. When the DB goes down, you are unable to login using the web-client, you maybe able to login using the vSphere client and all other things we discussed above.

So building redundancy is extremely important. VMware’s recommended solution is to use vCenter Heartbeat. We all know that can be a pricey solution. However, if full support along with redundancy is importnat to you, that is the way to go. I hope VMware extends their full support to at least allow running DB on a SQL cluster for all their products including vCenter (which is still a grey area). That would be the right thing to do. Heartbeat provides added functionality and there will always be a market for that as well. I hope full support on DB residing on SQL clusters is not further delayed in the interest of the vCenter Heartbeat product.

In the end I will borrow Tom Petty’s words to tell VMware “Don’t do me like that”…

Anyways, sticking to the topic here. Kemp Technologies is introducing there Edge Security Pack (ESP) which will enable you to continue deploying solutions like Sharepoint  MX etc securely. I am not an expert in this area but I try to keep up with whats happening around me. You can read up more on the solution here. Remember, just because your solution is virtual or in a cloud, doesn’t mean you no longer need security. It’s still required, and it has to be up to par with todays technology. Below is the introductory video of what the Kemp ESP is expected to do.

So let’s say you have a share that users access. The share resides on a file server that runs Windows 2003. The share has 50 folders and not all users have access to all folders. When a user tries to access a folder to which access is denied, an access denied message appears. Awesome! Now you decide to take advantage of a newer OS and we will use Win 2008 R2 as an example. So you migrate the data over to the 2008 R2 file server and enable the share. Suddenly pigs starts flying,  your wife starts agreeing with you and Patriots start beating the Giants in the Super Bowl game. What happend?

So you start hearing things like, “Hey, I can only see 20 folders, before I was able to see 50″. You have people throw out all kinds of different numbers and your initial reaction is what in the world! Of course the folders are all there and you can confirm that when you login to the server yourself with your Administrative access. So what happened? Why are users not able to view all folders in the share? Well, your windows server just got a little more secure.

What you will start noticing is users are only able to see folders they have access to. So, if a user only has access to the “Finance” folder in the share, when this user accesses the share the only folder that will appear out of the 50 folders this share has is the “Finance” folder. Pretty nifty aye! So, if one doesn’t have access to a folder, the folder will be invisible. This is happening due to a feature called “Access-based Enumeration”. You can read more about it in this article. And yes, this is enabled by default. 

So the obvious question is, can this be disabled? Well without getting into why would you want to do this and all, the simple answer is YES. On the 2008 R2 file server, you will basically go to the properties of the share using the “Share and Storage Management” console.

Once there click the “Advanced” button in the “Sharing” tab and there it is. Unchecking the checkbox will disable this feature and your environment will be vulnerable once again. Your users will start seeing folders they dont have access to. My advise, leave it enabled. Why tease them when they can’t access it?

A lot has changed in a few months obviously. SSO has come around, and more importantly it works (finally ). I know low blow, oh well. Using SSO one can add multiple identity sources (AD, Open LDAP etc). You can have multiple AD identity sources added to the same SSO. So what does that mean?

When you install SSO on a windows server, the domain this server is on automatically gets added as an identity source in SSO. You can then pick users and group from here and assign them privileges. In addition to that, you can also add additional domains to the identity sources and assign entities in this domain access to vCenter as well. And its so simple that even I can do it. But I figured I will still write up a few steps and summarize the process as I can very easily forget what I did to make this work.

1. In order to add users/groups from a domain, the domain needs to be added to the SSO identity sources
2. The domain the SSO server is on gets added to the identity sources (in my case, the SSO server is on a domain called cloud)
3. Login to SSO with Admin permission (default user admin@system-domain works but you can use a different account with same privileges as well)
4. Click on Administration
   
5. Click on “Configuration” under “Sign-on and Discovery”
   

6. Click the plus sign on the top left 
   

   
   

7. Add the appropriate info (In my case, I am adding a domain called “sunny.bilalhashmi.com” with an alias “SUNNY”) – I am using IP for the server URL as I dont have DNS resolution between the SSO server and the SUNNY domain. Ideally you would want to use the DNS name.

   
   

   
   

8. Once you have entered the info, test the connection and hit OK, you should be able to add users/groups from the new domain (SUNNY domain in my case)
9. When adding new users/groups, click on the drop down and you should be able to see the new domain. Select the new domain add the new permissions and you should be all set. Why do I have “Cloud” along with other things in the list? As I mentioned in Step 2, “Cloud” is the domain my SSO server is on, so it gets added automatically. 

   
   

   
   

10. Again, no trust requirements between the domain. This is all happening due to our new friend SSO.

So make that assessment for yourself. Just because you have the option doesn’t mean you have to do it. It is definitely more secure but then again the most secure network is the one with no user. Understand what it takes to manage the replacement certs, what does it mean for future hosts that need to be added, how will these certs be renewed, is their a compliance that you need that require you to have CA signed or self signed certs. All these are good questions to assess if this is the route you want to take. Also, this is not something new with 5.x, the ability to replace certificates have existed for a long time.

This morning, I came across Duncan’s post  where he compiled a list of very helpful links to those painful processes. Again, the process may not be as painful to some. It really depends on the size of the environment that could make this process either a few minute thing or a project within a project. While I was going through the KB articles, I remembered an awesome product I saw around the VMworld SF 2012 time. vCert Manager was by far the simplest way I have seen to manage certificates for vSphere. I don’t recall sharing this information earlier so I figured now would be a good time to do so. Below is an introductory video of what the tool is capable of doing. It is excepted to be released later this year.

As you may already know by now, CloudPhysics included a HA simulation tool which is my favorite card as of now (but I know many more are coming). What it does is saves you time and ultimately money. Ever wondered what your available capacity is and will be if you were to change your admission control setting? Well you can read a few posts I wrote about that topic here or here for example, or you can simply head over to CloudPhysics and save you a lot of time and pain. Its really that simple. And oh did I mention that it will factor in the version of vCenter/ESX(i) you are running so there should not be any gotchas.

Recently, CloudPhysics released two more cards:

• VM reservations and Limits
• Snapshots Gone Wild

I like these guys, the cards do exactly as their names suggest. The first one will look at your environment and list out any VM that may have a limit or a reservation. Pretty good aye! Whats even better is that it will flag any VM that may have limits of more than 50% or even less that 50% of whats configured. Both of these could pose an interesting situation. Luckily for me, I only have one reservation in my setup as its pointed out.

The other card is the snapshot police which will list out a list of VMs with their snapshot information. Information like when these were created, number of child, snapshot name to name a few. If you are getting excited about this, you have probably been burned by the snapshot brigade at least once or know what it means. A lot of times that happens beacuse there has not been a simple way to keep track of these. Well now you do.

Head over to CloudPhysics, there are over 900 cards suggested by the community and pretty soon we will start seeing a bunch of them making all our lives a lot simpler so we can do even bigger better things.

Then I had a rude awakening which triggered me to write this post. Basically, even though you could access the web-client via the browser on OS X, there is still an element called the “Client Integration Plug-in” that cannot be installed on OS X. . This and a few more things just killed all my motivation to use the web-client. I figured if I was going to run a VM to access a fully functional client, I might as well run the C# client. But now things have changed a bit.

To start off, the client integration part has still not changed, it still does not fully work on OS X. I just tried it on 10.8 with no luck. So what does this really mean? Lack of inability to install this will keep at least two options away from you that I know of.

1. Ability to launch the console of the VM
2. Ability to transfer files to and from datastores

Another one that I find very useful is the log browser. Basically it gives you the ability to view the logs for your vCenter and all yours hosts in one place. Isn’t that nice? Single pane of glass is what we always wanted. And yes it will let you see all the logs of your host, and you can switch between the type of logs using the drop down list as shown below.

These are simply some of the new features that the web-client has to offer among so many more. During the beta, I noticed the OS X compatibility issue but was hopeful for it to be fixed before GA. That didn’t happen but at least its on the road map. The VUM plugin is coming soon along with most other third party plug-ins. Keep in mind, dont be shocked if future third party plug-ins are only available for the web-client. It only makes sense for the vendors to develop for the client that will stay.

Lastly, if you want to make use of all the enhancements in 5.1, the web-client is a must. I was originally not too impressed by the original web client last year, but I must say the 5.1 is not just as good as the traditional c# client but better. Moreover as mentioned above, the traditional client is going away, now will be a good time to get to know your new friend.

All the 5.1s that have been the talk of many vGeeks is finally out. I thought, about compiling a list of links together, but my man Duncan has already have me beat, so I will just borrow his list. He says he didn’t set an alarm but I don’t buy that. Enjoy the new products below, hopefully I will have sometime to blog about some of the new features that are being introduced. This is major update, I would suggest going through the enhancement documentation below that go over the new features. Most new releases go through a vigorous beta, but I will recommend one runs them in a lab first. The vCloud Suite 5.1 is now GA.

Download links:

• ESXi 5.1.0 Installable
• vCenter Server 5.1.0 and modules
• VMware vCloud Director 5.1.0
• VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5.1.0
• VMware vCenter Infrastructure Navigator 1.2.0
• VMware vCenter Operations Management 5.0.3
• VMware vCenter Configuration Manager 5.5.1
• vSphere Data Protection 5.1.0 
• vSphere Replication 5.1.0
• vSphere Storage Appliance 5.1.0 
• vCloud Networking and Security 5.1.0
• vSphere PowerCLI 5.1
• vSphere CLI 5.1
• vCenter Orchestrator Appliance 5.1.0
• vSphere Management Assistant 5.1

What’s new docs:

• What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1
• What’s new in VMware vCenter 5.1
• What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1 – Networking
• What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1 – Platform
• What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1 – Storage
• What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1 – Performance
• Introduction to VMware vSphere Replication
• Introduction to VMware vSphere Data Protection
• What’s new in VMware vSphere Storage Appliance
• What’s new in vCloud Director 5.1

So what is enhanced vMotion? Ever tried to storage vMotion and vMotion a VM at the same time while it was powered on? You must have realized you could only change the host, or the datastore. enhanced vMotion combines that and allows you to do both those tasks at ones on a running VM. Moreover, it can also vMotion and storage vMotion a VM from a local datastore of a host to a local datastore of another host. Pretty cool right. Obviously this does not mean that we don’t need shared storage anymore, HA would still rely on shared storage.

To make things clear. Lets look at what vMotion has traditionally been. I am using the graphics from a presentation that was used by VMware to introduce the feature. Notice, how moving a VM from one host to another relied on shared storage as one of the requirements.

Now lets look at the graphic below. The VM in this case is running on the host on the left and is also using its local datastore. With enhanced vMotion, I can

• move this VM to either the shared storage and switch the host
• move to shared storage and keep the same host
• Or even move the VM to the local datastore of the host on the right (obviously that would mean the VM would also be running on that host)

So what else is left to talk about? Lets look at some of the requirements:

• Hosts must be managed by the same vCenter
• Hosts must be the part of the same datacenter (which is also the requirement for a regular vMotion)
• Hosts must be on the same layer 2 network (and same switch if VDS is used)

Other operational considerations that were:

• It’s a manual process – DRS and SDRS will not leverage the new enhanced vMotion
• Maximum of 2 concurrent enhanced vMotion per host (these will count against the max vMotions Storage vMotion allowed)
• Will leverage multiple nics when available

So there. That’s everything I have known about it. From what I understand, this is not being offered as a new feature but more of an enhancement of whats already in place. If you have the license to vMotion, you can count on having the enhanced vMotion capability with 5.1

In comes Mirage from an acquisition of a company names Wanova. Steve Herrod, covered the issue with disconnected users in View at times. Mirage has the promise to keep this in sync to where the deployed desktops are always in sync with the central location. Now keep in mind, a lot of skeptics believe that running PCs on expensive servers and SAN is not not cost effective. However, its the running cost that includes supporting these PCs is really what makes VDI a vey viable option.

The demonstration for Mirage was pretty awesome. In the demo, an XP user was in the middle of a presentation and received a call from IT who were looking to upgrade him from XP to Windows 7. Yes, in the middle of the presentation, the client started to run and within seconds the user was prompted to restart which came back with windows 7. What made this really seamless was the background, the documents and all personal data stayed intact on the new OS. The user then ends up dropping the laptop, but because mirage keeps info in sync, the image was then accessible via his tablet until it was deployed to his newly purchased macbook.

Speaking of tablets and view, I have been a skeptic myself simply because of the lack of touch screen optimized interface. My prayers were answered in a sneak peak of a windows 7 connection from a tablet that lists out browsing applications in almost an iOS/Android type layout that is native to the tablet and something we all are used to. Hopefully Apple does not have a patent over that :p. Besides that, switching between applications is also how we are used to switching applications on a tablet. I think this will certainly be a more practical approach to adapting View on tablets.

Another improvement thats were discussed was Horizon, another promising approach to truly deliver IT as a service with incredible SLAs. You can now manage not only your web apps, but also your thin apps and mobile Apps. Speaking of Mobile Apps, an awesome thing came up. I have been a big fan of VMware mobile because I hate carrying two different devices. VMware mobile was really geared more towards Android based phones, but VMware has now figured out how to deliver that opportunity to  iOS as well and follow the Apple way of things.

Yep, you will not be running a VM like the approach is on the Android side of things. On the iOS side, you will have individual apps that are deployed to you by horizon that are marked with a logo that shows these are secure apps with an encrypted link. The IT department will be at ease because even if this will run on the same device as your facebook and other personal apps, the corporate apps will be completely secure. You will not be able to even copy out of these encrypted apps if that tells you anything about how secure this apps will be. At launch, it will prompt you for an additional password as an additional layer of security. Think about it, you publish an App in horizon and give a user group access to it. The users can then deploy this app on their desktops, or even on their iPhones using the Horizon App Store just like they install apps on their iPhones today. I think this step is certainly in the right direction and will gain a lot of love and support.

All this will tremendously reduce cost, again dont think about the implementation cost as a whole. Think about the cost to run and support the on demand self-healing self-serving environments. Thats the promise that have been made, a lot of what I mentioned above promises to deliver that. Great stuff, and great times to be living in.

The new CEO announced the end of the four letter word they invented last year. The end of vRAM. There will be no capacity based licensing for vSphere, nor any limits on the number of cores. Simply CPU based where you would license all the CPUs on your host like good ole times. When VMware announced vRAM originally, I understood why they would have done it and obviously it was a big PR nightmare for VMware. But now its all behind us and simple CPU based licensing has come back. Obviously the announcement was followed by a big applause.

These were some of the initial notable announcements along with discussions over Project Serengeti and Hadoop.

Oh and did I mention that all the 5.1 are out now? I will try and cover some of the new\enhanced cool features that have been released with it in the coming days. For now, Duncan has complied a nice list of links for all the 5.1 enhancements here.

If you are attending VMworld, I urge you to stop by and check out CloudPhysics. Look for them on the showroom floor with their partner in the Fusion-io booth. You may have heard Duncan and a few others talk about it recently as well. I had an opportunity to play around with their tool and I must say it’s pretty impressive.

In a nutshell you will deploy an appliance that collects data (don’t worry it’s really operational data and nothing to be concerned about), and sends it over to CloudPhysics where they analyze your environment and tell you if your settings are following certain universally accepted best practices. It knows the versions you are running and will make recommendations based on that information which I think is pretty awesome. Things, like VMware tool status, datastores, HA just to name a few. There are several other things that are being worked upon which I can’t share at this time, but I will say take it for a spin and see for yourself.

I was impressed by the UI which is very simple but presents very complex information. The install and setup is so simple. To be honest I don’t even know if there is a user manual, but you will NOT need one.

Moreover they also have a challenge going on where you will not only have a chance to have an impact on the product but also get an opportunity to win a Macbook Pro, MacBook Air or one of the four Nexus 7 tablets. There is no catch, it’s a win win.

Head over to CloudPhysics, no prior knowledge of calculus is required.

You can find CloudPhysics at their web site, or @CloudPhyics on Twitter. You can also follow these two rockstars (Irfan @virtualirfan and Luke @LukeCongdon) who are some of key people behind this product. They are both extreamly accessible.

Whatever the case might be, it’s generally not the best thing in the world and not a lot of fun. Unless it’s your first one, then I can understand the excitement and the anxiety. I came across this awesome post that I must share. It has a list of some very useful kb articles related to PSOD. Yes, this is also my way of bookmarking this awesome post. I would recommend you bookmark that link as well for a rainy day when your screen goes purple. I am hoping they will keep this post updated.

Btw, I really like how they prefer calling it the “Purple screen of diagnostics” vs the “Purple screen of death”. Pretty creative aye.

Not too long ago I got an opportunity to test drive PHD virtual’s Backup tool for vSphere version 5.4.2. They also have one for Citrix that I will not be discussing as I have not had a chance to look at that. To simply summarize what I think about the backup utility that PHD virtual makes for vSphere, I will say its a very good product and will help you sleep better at nights. However keep in mind that it only does virtual. So if you are looking for all in one solution that lets you backup both physical and VMs, you may want to look elsewhere. But wait, I would say you should still take a look at this for what it has to offer.

What is PHD Virtual backup?

PHD virtual backup is really a virtual appliance that runs in your pre-existing ESX/i cluster and helps you backup your environment. It is configured with 1GB or memory and single vCPU. It doesn’t stop there, it also helps you replicate the backup to another site or whatever your preference is. I wish I could say a few complicated things here and there but it’s really that simple. One thing I would like to point out is that PHD virtual has been evolving their backup tool for sometime now, at least since 2006. Bottom line – they are not new, but they are good.

The virtual appliance runs linux and is called the virtual backup appliance (VBA). This setup is designed with scalability in mind and allows you to have multiple VBAs running within the same vCenter. Now the backups rely on snapshots to work and we wont go into the details of that here. But just so that we don’t go on a freaked out state here, like most other good backup tools, the VBA will also delete the snapshot of the VMs. We obviously don’t want snapshots lying around. Once the snapshot has been taken, the data can be stored on a locally attached disk (locally attached to the appliance – a vmdk), a NFS or CIFS location. So there is that flexibility of where to store the data.

One of the things I like about this product was it’s deduplication ratio. PHD virtual markets this to be around 25:1 on an average. My tests revealed and confirmed the marketed numbers and this was without doing any fine tuning at all. I did a standard out of the box install and it simply worked. Mine came to a ratio of 24:1 which is pretty good and close to whats being marketed. We all know how expensive storage is and the example below should tell us how valuable a tool like this can be to an organization. Data saved = $$$ saved AND Storage saved = more $$$ saved . You can read more about its deduplication here.

Setup install

This is the section that I think will be fairly quick and short. I wish I could make this longer tell you how you need to hire a consultant to get this going but then sooner or later I will be busted. Seriously, the setup and install process is very Apple like. To sum it, you install the PHD virtual backup console, deploy the virtual appliance, you power on the appliance, IP it and allow it to talk to vCenter. Upon completion of that a few very basic configuration choices and you are now ready to pick your VMs to backup.

I could post screenshots here of the entire setup process, but like I said it’s really straight forward. So here, instead of re-inventing the wheel let me use a video from a good friend and a fellow vExpert Antone Heyward who covers the entire process of setup and install in this video.

Backup / Restore

The backup and restore process are also pretty simple using this product. I say this because backups and restores are not something I personally work with from day-to-day, however, I was able to create the backup jobs, and do a few test restores with no issues. As I already mentioned the dedepulication ratio is a great money saver here. Apart from that, one can do a file level restore (FLR) or even a complete VM restore using the same backup. Change block tracking is something that can be employed during backups, this will help you speed up your backups.

Again creating a backup job is as simple as picking your VM in the VBA console, and going through the backup wizard which will ask you for the schedule you want your VMs to be backed up at and finally the following options before your backup job is ready to fire away:

• Verify backup: None, New blocks only, All blocks
• Backup powered off machines: If you have a need to backup these guys, select this check box
• Set backups as archived: Basically you will still have and your retention policy will be ignored
• Quiesce the VM before backing up (Windows only): Will employ VSS for application consistent backups
• Use Changed Block Tracking: This will speed things up for you

From here on you can either wait for your backup to begin when its scheduled for or if you are impatient like me, simply right click on the job and start the job on demand. You can obviously monitor the progress of the job in real-time as it happens.

Speaking of speed and how long a backup can really take, take a look at a few jobs below. Granted this is a lab environment and the initial job took around an hour or so, its pretty amazing my VMs are being backed up in under 2 minutes on an iSCSI datastore thats mounted as a vmdk to the VBA. These backups ran on 1Gb network and the storage used was a QNAP appliance in a lab setting. Obviously I am not suggesting that one should use this in their production environment and that they will expect the same results as I did, I am simply trying to share what my environment is like and what kind of performance I am getting in my lab. You should certainly do your own testing. If you are curious about the errors in the screenshot, that was because my lab had a wth moment and the snapshots were failing on VM. This was an ID10T error and not due to the backup tool.

Let’s talk about restores for a second. As I mentioned earlier, you can do a FLR or even a complete VM restore which basically creates a new VM with an appended name and gives you a few choices for you to pick from.

• It lets you append the VM name
• Select the datastore you want the VM restored to
• Choice to generate a new MAC address (some application may require the same MAC or else you may go through some licensing hell)
• Select the network you want the VM connected to (one use case might be to restore the VM on an isolated network)

Replication

One thing I want to add is the ability this tool has to replicate backups to other sites. This could potentially be a part of a bigger DR plan, but to put it simply, your backed up data can be replicated to another site for instance and because it’s really your backed up data and not your production server that are being replicated, your replication schedule becomes really flexible all of a sudden. Below is a diagram of how replication works. The image below is from PHD virtual’s official documentation. I will not be going in detail of how well or bad this works because I did not test this part of the tool. But if it is anything like the rest of the tool, then I am sure it would definitely be worth looking at.

Conclusion:

In conclusion I think PHD Virtual has a very good product that works and does what it says it will do. There are a few things to keep in mind. The VBA can backup VMs as long as it can see the shared storage. That means if your VMs are stored locally on a host, then a VBA must be deployed on this host in order to backup these VMs. If the VMs are running on shared storage in a cluster (like they should be), then a single VBA should be able to backup these VMs as it would be able to see all the storage. However, what about the other clusters? So depending on how your environment is setup, you could end up having multiple VBAs. Moreover as the image
above suggests, if you are looking to replicate between sites you will have at least two VBAs (unless you have the same vCenter managing hosts on both sides. Two VBAs will also enhance the performance if replicating between two sites).

This brings up the question for management and unfortunately there is no single place to manage all your deployed VBAs if you are running multiple VBAs under multiple vCenters. All VBAs under the same vCenter instance can be managed, configured and monitored using the same PHD console interface. But if you have multiple vCenters, then your single pane of glass for management will be limited by your vCenter boundary. Though they don’t really need a lot of management really, but single pane of glass across all VBAs deployed across multiple vCenters will simply add more value and turn the skeptics into believers. If you only have single vCenter, then you are all set.

In most cases, you will end up with two backup solutions. I say this because as much as we love virtualization, I have yet to see a 100% fully virtualized datacenter. There are still some physical servers almost always and will probably be around for some time. With that being said, since PHD Virtual’s solution only lets you backup virtual you will end up looking at another solution for the physical. This is obviously not in most of ours wish list. We usually want one tool that does our backup and makes our coffee once the backups are verified.

The ability to add more than one type of storage to a single VBA would also be a plus. Or else, this would be another reason for one to have multiple VBAs. Again, you can manage multiple VBAs from the same PHD console as long as it’s all in the same vCenter.

With the exception of what I have mentioned above and if none of that really concerns you, I think PHD virtual backup for vSphere is a very useful tool and performs and delivers exactly likes its promised by the company. Btw I have been told that some of the limiations mentioned above are being researched and will probably be addressed in the near future. No promises of course but I figured I would share that. If you haven’t tried this tool, I would suggest you run it in the lab and get amazed by its simplicity. If I had to use one word to describe it, that word would be “simple”. You can download your trail copy here and its licensed per host.