With the announcement of vSphere 5 this week brings many new features, I attend to be picking of features one by one and looking at them with a bit more depth.

With vSphere 5 is a completely new vSphere vCenter web interface, previously the web interface was slow and extremely limited with what could be done with it, to be honest I don’t think I ever really used it apart from when I couldn’t get near a Windows PC to start the vSphere Client.

The new web client is written in Adobe Flex the same as the View and vCloud Director user interfaces, I believe in the long term this is the way we will see the full client heading. The new interface isn’t designed to fully replace the functionality of the Windows Client at the moment but has most functionality that you will use from an administration perspective.

The new web interface is installed as a separate component to the vCenter, also notice the shiny new installer!

The vSphere Web Client (server) can be installed on a server with network connectivity to the vCenter, in my demo lab I have it installed on my vCenter but I haven’t found the best practise regarding this yet.

Once the web client server is installed you need to configure it to be able to see your vCenter, this is achieved by going to the URL below direct from the server where the Web Client is installed.

https://127.0.0.1:9443/admin-app

Once at the above page you need to register your vCenter with the web client server

We can now see the registered vCenter in the list

Once you have registered the vCenter you are able to login using the web client from any machine with Adobe Flash 10.1.0 installed. The web client is accessed from the following address

https://%5Bwebclientserver%5D:9443/vsphere-client/

In the bottom left you can install the client integration plug-in, this is a Windows only plugin, this is responsible for the console view I haven’t found any other uses for it yet.  Once in you should find most day to day tasks can be completed here.

Creating a new virtual machine

Looking at performance

Editing a VM

Resource Management

Conclusion

Being a Mac user an improved web client is a very welcome addition for me, after using it for a while I feel I could happily do most daily admin with it. Moving forward if the Windows client were to reach end of life I would have to see how some of the more complex elements would port over to this web client.

There are some nice features like the arrows in the top right of the windows can be used to minimise a task into the work in progress panel while you do something else

I would hope to see cross platform support for the client integration plug-in in a future release as well.

It happened we can finally talk about vSphere.next vSphere5!

Now that I have got the licensing post out the way >> https://virtualisedreality.com/2011/07/13/understanding-vsphere5-licensing/ I am going to concentrate on the technology inside vSphere5 as after all thats what being a vExpert is all about, the passion for the technology! I am going to start with a general overview of vSphere 5 and then over the next few days and months will expand on the technology. I was lucky enough to be part of the vSphere beta and this gave me a great chance to get some hands on with the new release before general availability, unfortunately as I have increasingly been doing work with View 4 I have had to have vSphere 4 installed in my home lab more than vSphere 5.

During the vSphere 4 announcement it was described as “The first cloud operating system” during the vSphere 5 announcement it was described as the first comprehensive cloud infrastructure suite. The suite is made up of vCloud Director, vShield Security, vCenter Operations, vCenter SRM and vSphere 5. For the moment I will be concentrating on the vSphere 5 release.

Below are some of the key aspects of the new vSphere 5 release, by no means is it an extensive list and I will be adding to it over the coming days.

• The first point that we were all aware of is that ESX is no longer a choice with vSphere 5 and ESXi is now the way forward.

• vSphere Auto Deploy – Allows you to PXE boot your ESXi OS from the Auto Deploy Server meaning no need for boot disks, sharing a standard ESXi image
• Hardware Version 8, which now introduces 3D graphics support for WIndows Aero and USB 3.0 support

• Support for Apple Xserve Servers running OS X Server 10.6 (Aren’t Xserver servers end of life now?)

• New VMware HA Architecture – HA has been completely rewritten from the ground up and utilises a new agent called the fault domain manager, there is also a new concept of datastore heartbeating that allows vSphere to differentiate between a host that is isolated and a host that has failed. Gone is the concept of primary and secondary nodes with a limit on the amount of primary nodes, it now uses master and slaves and an election process.

• vMotion enhancements with the introduction of a new “Metro vMotion” feature that now allows vMotions to work and be supported over networks with latency of unto 10ms. Previously vMotion was only supporting on links with latency less the 5ms.

• ESXi Firewall that supports restriction of services based upon IP and subnet amongst other features

• Larger virtual machine support with VM maximums increased to 1TB RAM and 32 vCPU’s

• vSphere Web Client – The web client has been completely updated and is now installed as a separate component to vCenter, the new web client is built on Adobe flex the same as the View and vCloud Director clients, the functionality should meet all the requirements for day to day administration with the full fat vSphere client still being required for most configuration tasks. I personally can see this being the only client available in future version of vSphere.

• VMware vCenter Appliance – There is now a linux based vCenter appliance available for those wishing to not have a Windows based vCenter, there are some limitations regarding the usage of the vCenter appliance and I will do a separate blog post on this

Some of the major changes and announcement are surround storage these are

• Storage DRS offers smart virtual machine placement and load balancing, vSphere 5 introduces a new concept of datacenter clusters, within the Storage DRS configuration you are able to select the space and latency thresholds for the virtual machines. IO is analysed every 8 hours by default. This is a huge new feature and I will be doing a dedicated blog post on this feature in the future.

• Profile Driven Storage – Allows you and or the array vendor to tag the storage with a capability on each datastore, these capabilities can be added to different storage profiles, for example tier1, tier2 and tier3. When creating your virtual machines you will then be able to choose which capability your virtual machine requires, this maybe based upon RAID type, SnapShot schedules and or Replication schedules. You are then able to review compliance of your virtual machines to ensure that they are compliant on a regular basis. This is a simple but brilliant new feature, this is something I spend a lot of time talking through customers with at the moment and we normally end up using Excel to formulate the profiles.

• VMFS5 File System is now based on GPT instead of MBR and has a maximum size of 64TB, block sizes are now all set at 1MB whilst maintaing the benefits of the previous larger block sizes, upgrading from VMFS3 to VMFS5 is a non disruptive process unlike previous VMFS upgrades.

• vStorage API’s have been enhanced with thin provisioning reclamation of unused space, monitoring of space usage for thin provisioned volumes and hardware acceleration for NAS’s amongst over features.

• There is now a virtual storage appliance (VSA) that is aimed at SMB users, the VSA utilises the local storage in the ESXi host and creates 1 replicated NFS datastore per host. As the datastore is replicated to another host it also other failover, management is through the vSphere client to ease administration. Again I will be doing a dedicated blog post on this

Below are links to documents that will help you get up to speed on the new release

• What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.0: Platform
• What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.0: Storage
• What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.0: Performance
• What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.0: Networking
• What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.0: Availability

Full lists of the resources can be found here >> http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/mid-size-and-enterprise-business/resources.html

Bloggers, VCDX’s, VMware Gurus, Duncan Epping and Frank Denneman have just released their second book together covering Clustering in vSphere 5! Their previous book VMware vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS was a huge success and the must have for vSphere admins and consultant over the world.

The latest book covers

HA node types
HA isolation detection and response
HA admission control
VM Monitoring
HA and DRS integration
DRS imbalance algorithm
Resource Pools
Impact of reservations and limits
CPU Resource Scheduling
Memory Scheduler
DPM
Datastore Clusters
Storage DRS algorithm
Influencing SDRS recommendations

So if you are wanting to learn more about what happens under the hood, studying for any of the key VMware exams or looking to get up to speed with the changes and new clustering features such as Storage DRS in vSphere 5 I would highly recommend getting this book.

I have just purchased my copy on the Kindle store and look forward to starting reading it on the way to the London VMUG tomorrow!

Kindle Version – http://www.amazon.co.uk/vSphere-Clustering-Technical-Deepdive-ebook/dp/B005C1SARM/ref=sr_1_3?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1310583878&sr=1-3

Anyone that knows me or has worked with me will know I like to stay at the technology end of the business and will happily leave the others to worry about the licensing and cost. With VMware’s latest release they are making this somewhat more difficult for me as we are now licensed on not only physical CPU’s but also allocated memory. I thought I would put together a blog post to explain the new licensing model in some detail and what this will mean generally for the customers I work with.

Please note a good place to start when trying to understand the new licensing models yourself is the VMware vSphere 5.0 Licensing, Pricing and Packaging white paper

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere_pricing.pdf

vSphere 4 Licensing

Currently in vSphere 4 we have 6 different levels of licensing, these are as follows

What this has meant in recent years is that the amount of RAM allocated to ESX(i) hosts has been increasing alongside consolidation ratios without the customer needing to purchase any additional licenses from VMware, so increasingly with the higher core counts available today we have seen in some cases that actual amount of physical hosts going down along with the amount of VMware licensing required to run the same amount of virtual machines. For this reason it was to be expected that VMware would be making some form of change to the licensing model.

vSphere 5 Licensing

So moving on to yesterdays announcements and the change in licensing for vSphere 5, VMware are moving to a model where you are no longer restricted to the amount of cores each version supports but to a model where it is still licensed on a per physical CPU basis, but are also licensed on the amount of allocated vRAM across your pooled resource.

The first part to note is that the Advanced licensing is now end of life and actually managed to out live Enterprise that was supposed to be retiring, anyone with an existing advanced license with support and subscriptions will be upgraded to Enterprise. An important part to understand for the new licensing model is the amount of vRAM allocated is calculated across the pooled resource, this means over your vCenter and more importantly can also mean vCenter’s linked with Linked Mode. This means you are only having to license what is actually being allocated in total to your virtual machines and not what amount of memory the physical host contain and equally and more importantly if you have a DR environment that is largely sat there dormant the vRAM entitlement that you get with these can actually be used by the hosts in your production clusters.

Scenarios

Let’s look into a few scenarios and see how this end’s up working based on some end users.

Essentials Plus

We will start with Essential Plus as my guess this will be the most popular of the essentials bundles.

With your average two way ESXi Host (HP DL360 / 380, Dell R610 / 710 etc)

With this licensing level and the 3 host maximum you would be entitled to 144GB (24GB x 6) of allocated RAM for all our virtual machines in your clusters. In a N+1 configuration and taking a maximum figure of 4GB’s allocated for each of your virtual machines this would allow you to run 36 servers in this configuration, in a real life scenario this would probably be more between 36 and 72 right sized VM’s.

From a point of view of all of my customers with Essentials Plus I don’t think any of them have an environment today that would not fit within this new licensing model.

Enterprise

The majority of my customer in the next tier of licensing generally have Advanced or Enterprise licensing so I will concentrate on looking at the Enterprise licensing next. Again I will concentrate on your average two way ESXi Host (HP DL360 / 380, Dell R610 / 710 etc)

With this licensing level and a cluster of 7 hosts you would be entitled as standard to 448GB (32GB x 14) of allocated RAM. In a N+1 configuration and taking a maximum figure of 4GB’s allocated for each of your virtual machines this would allow you to run 112 servers in this configuration, but again in a real life scenario this is more likely to be somewhere between, 112 and 224 right sized VM’s.

For the majority of my customer in this space this would also more than meet their existing requirements, the few customers that I do have that this doesn’t potentially meet their requirements for also have another aspect to look into. These larger customers tend to have a DR environment that is largely (Not completely) sat dormant and connected to the production vCenter using linked mode. This means that potentially they have another 7 hosts licensed and sat in a DR datacenter not generally being pushed during the working day. For these calculations I will assume that 1/2 of the physically available resource is allocated to test and dev outside of a DR event. So based on that these customers have available to them a further 224GB of vRAM that will be in the pool available for the production servers to utilise. I now believe that all of my customers requirements are met with standard allocations of vRAM.

Customer Conclussions

Time will tell as I start discussing the new licensing model with my customers if these calculations actually do make sense for them and I imagine a few may still end up having to increase their licensing from Enterprise to Enterprise + to get the further vRAM allowance or purchasing additional Enterprise licenses to allow them to allocate vRAM,

Points to remember to doing the math

* vRAM does not equal pRAM (physical RAM)

* Consider your DR environments licensing in your pooled resource

* This is probably the right time to ensure that your VM’s are right sized (Does that VM really need 4, 8, 16,24 or more GB of RAM!?)

* This is a good time to review chargeback and ensure the people requesting more RAM in their server understand the cost.

Conclusion

That is my considered thoughts on the new form of licensing, it is never going to be popular VMware restricting the licensing in anyway but I think we can all see why it had to be done, I am sure there are going to be many more Enterprise customers effected with their larger environments but from a quick look at the SMB / SME space things don’t look too bad from here. I would be pleased to hear your comments and will update the post with any new findings etc.

Updates

Something that has been bought to my attention is what happens when you need to do a DR test, will this mean you go over your licensed limit. I will see if I can get some clarification on this from someone at VMware.

To confirm the limits are soft limits, so theoretically you could still complete your DR failover test I need to confirm with VMware if this is acceptable in terms of the license agreement though.