An introduction to VMware vCloud Automation Center

May 13, 2013 Leave a comment

One of the less known solutions of VMware is vCloud Automation Center or vCAC for short. The foundation of vCAC is based on DynamicOps Cloud Automation Center 4.5 software. DynamicOPS  was acquired by VMware in July 2012. The current version of vCAC is 5.1

vCAC enables automated provisioning of both virtual machines and physical servers (including the guest operating system). Provisioning of both on-premises and cloud infrastructures is supported. vCAC enables authorized end-users to quickly have access to servers without IT having to perform the provisioning. Provisioning is so reduced from days to minutes.

Agility, speed of provisioning and reducing costs are the top 3 business drivers for companies looking to deploy private and hybrid cloud infrastructures.

Typical use case scenario’s for vCAC are service providers, large organizations and organizations which do a lot of testing and development. Those environments are very dynamic with relatively many changes.
Supported resources (vCAC calls them endpoints) are VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V 2008 and Citrix XenServer. KVM support is on the roadmap for first half of 2013. Supported public clouds are all cloud providers which support VMware vCloud standard (over 150 providers worldwide) and Amazon Web Services Elastic Cloud Computing EC2.  Supported physical servers are those equipped with HP iLO, Dell iDrac and Cisco UCS.  There is no out of the box Windows Azure endpoint available. However  integration with vCAC can be provided via VMware Professional services.  For IBM bare metal server support VMware Professional services can be approached as well. Also offered is interfacing to VMware vCenter Orchestrator 5.1 and Powershell.

vCAC does lifecycle management as well. At request for a new VM the end of life of the VM can be set. At the end of the use period the VM is deleted automatically by vCAC.  Also chargeback is possible.

vCAC supports a wide range of image deployment tools. Microsoft SCCM and Citrix Provisioning Server are a few examples. See the image below for a complete overview.

vcac-image-support
For a full overview of supported systems see the vCloud Automation Center Support Matrix.

vCAC enables IT-departments to serve as a  broker service for internal cloud consumers. End-users are able to create virtual machines/physical servers from a self service portal consuming the resources that have been allocated to them by the IT-administrator. Gartner predicts that IT organizations will increasingly be assuming internal “cloud services brokerage” roles — overseeing  the provisioning and consumption of  heterogeneous and often complex cloud services for “their internal users and external business partners.”

You can think of vCAC as a abstraction layer above hypervisors, public clouds and physical servers. It’s functionality pretty much looks like vCloud Director. Only vCloud Director is limited in its support; it supports VMware infrastructures (vCenter, ESX) only. cVAC can connect to vCloud Director and to vCenter Server. vCAC will be integrated with  VMware vFabric Application Director in 2013 to be able to perform Platform as a Service.

In an IT-world in which hybrid clouds are becoming the standard it is interesting to see what the roadmap  of vCloud Director and vCAC will be. Will VMware continue develop both solutions?

vCAC is available as a standalone license and as well as part of the VMware vCloud Enterprise suite.

More information

VMware has a free online eLearning course available on vCAC. Register here.

Viktor van den Berg has a detailed posting on vCloud Automation Center here.

Dailyhypervisor.com has a series of postings on how to install vCloud Automation Center. vcacteam.info also has a lot of information.

Randy Stanley, VCDX #94 and blogger at Killerclouds.com has a series of postings on vCAC as well.

VMware vCloud Automation Center – vCAC Posts

VMware documentation

YouTube video: vCloud Automation Center Product Overview
vCloud Automation Center Reference Architecture
vCloud Automation Center Operating Guide
vCloud automation Center Frequently Asked Questions

Filed under VMware solutions

Free ebook: Flash Storage for Dummies

May 11, 2013 Leave a comment

NetApp released a free e-book titled Flash Storage for Dummies. The 51-pages book gives a high level overview of technologies, where and how to use flash and benefits on costs, performance. Mind the book is sponsored by NetApp so is used as a marketing tool.

Download via registration here.

flash-storage-for-dummiesflash-storage-for-dummies-back

Filed under Uncategorized, VMware solutions

Virtual lab for replicas announced as new Veeam Backup & Replication v7 feature

May 8, 2013 Leave a comment

In Q3 2013 Veeam will introduce Veeam Backup & Replication (B&R) version 7. In the meanwhile Veeam has announced some of the new features. See this posting for an overview of previously announced features; support for tape one of them!

Today Veeam announced another feature to be introduced in v7 of Veeam B&R : Virtual lab for replicas. This feature will be available for VMware only for the time being.

Veeam B&R has two methods to protect applications: backup and replication. Backup stores the data in a backup repository. Replication creates another virtual machine in another location which is ready to make operational without a restore.
It is not about the backup or replica, it is about being able to successfully restore the application/data. Since Veeam B&R v5 a feature named ‘SureBackup’  is available which verifies backup jobs. The SureBackup process starts the VM from the backup repository in an isolated network. Veeam B&R full automates verifies if the VM is able to start. The result is written to a logfile, can be sent by email etc.

Veeam B&R v7 introduces a feature named SureReplica which does the same for replicas: verify that a replica of a VM can be made operational successfully. SureReplica verifies if the VM starts, if the operating system starts and if the applications behave like expected. All is reported in a log and by email.

U-AIR for replicas is also a new feature. It allows granular item-level recovery of any application and provides wizards for SQL Server, Exchange and Active Directory. This without the need for agents. U-AIR is already available in current versions of Veeam B&R for virtual machine data stored in the backup repository.

The On demand sandbox allows administrators to test software updates on replicas before putting those on production servers. This is a very efficient, low-cost alternative to having a dedicated infrastructure for testing.

A short video explaining the new Virtual Lab for Replicas can be watched here. 
See also the Veeam blog for more information on this feature.

Filed under Veeam solutions, VMware solutions

Error 32010 when installing vCenter Server 5.1

May 7, 2013 Leave a comment

When installing vCenter Server 5.1.0 on a Windows Server 2012 machine while selecting the supplied SQL Server Express edition for database error 32010 is displayed.

Error 32010. Failed to create database users. There can be several reasons for this failure.

sql-error

The logfile vmMSSQLCmd.log revealed that the passwords used for the RSA_user and RSA_DBA where not complex enough.

After setting a more complex password in the screens below the installation continued without any issues.

It is beyond me why VMware does not provide a check immediately after typing in the password. There is a check on complexity of password for the vCenter Single Sign On administrator database useraccount.

 

Filed under VMware solutions, vSphere 5

Internal error 28173 when installing vCenter Server 5.1.0

May 7, 2013 Leave a comment

When installing vCenter Server 5.1 (VMware-VIMSetup-all-5.1.0-1065152.iso) on a Windows Server 2012 server you might get error ‘Internal error 28173′  when using the Simple Install or during installation of the Single Sign On component.

setup2-internal-error

This is caused because one of the requirements of vCenter Server install is missing: .NET Framework 3.5

To resolve, go to Server Manager , select the Add roles and features wizard and install .NET Framework 3.5 features.

After completion start the installation of vCenter Server again.

.NET-features

Filed under VMware solutions, vSphere 5

Microsoft IaaS Product Line Architecture Guides on Server 2012 and System Center 2012

May 3, 2013 Leave a comment

Microsoft published two very interesting documents which assist in designing and understanding  Infrastructure as a Service based on Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1.

  • Infrastructure-as-a-Service Product Line Architecture Fabric Architecture Guide (Windows Server 2012).
    This 112 pages document provides specific guidance for developing fabric architectures (compute, network, storage, and virtualization layers) of an overall private cloud solution. All of the Windows Server 2012 features are discussed.
    Very much recommended reading if your task is to design a Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V infrastructure.
    Download here.
  • Infrastructure-as-a-Service Product Line Architecture Fabric Management Architecture Guide (System Center 2012)
    Fabric management is the concept of treating discrete capacity pools of servers, storage, and networks as a single fabric. The fabric is then subdivided into capacity clouds, or resource pools, that carry characteristics like delegation of access and administration, SLAs, and cost metering. Fabric management allows centralizing and automating complex management functions that can be carried out in a highly standardized, repeatable fashion to increase availability and lower operational costs.
    This document discusses sizing, databases used for the various System Center components, requirements like vCPU, RAM and storage for System Center components, ITIL and MOF. It also describes at a functional level features of System Center.
    The document also has a picture showing all System Center connections.
    Download here.

 

The goal of the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) product line architecture (PLA) is to help organizations develop and implement private cloud infrastructures quickly while reducing complexity and risk. The IaaS PLA provides a reference architecture that combines Microsoft software, consolidated guidance, and validated configurations with partner technology such as compute, network, and storage architectures, in addition to value-added software components.

The private cloud model provides much of the efficiency and agility of cloud computing, with the increased control and customization that are achieved through dedicated private resources. By implementing private cloud configurations that align to the IaaS PLA, Microsoft and its hardware partners can help provide organizations the control and the flexibility that are required to reap the potential benefits of the private cloud.

The IaaS PLA utilizes the core capabilities of the Windows Server operating system, Hyper-V, and System Center to deliver a private cloud infrastructure as a service offering. These are also key software components that are used for every reference implementation.

system-center-connections

 

Filed under System Center 2012, VMware solutions, Windows Server 2012

VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.1.1 and vSphere Replication 5.1.1 released

April 28, 2013 Leave a comment

VMware released Site Recovery Manager 5.1.1 and vSphere Replication 5.1.1 at April 25.
This release does not contain new features but has many bugfixes.

More info at the VMware blog site.

SRM 5.1.1 release notes are here.
vSphere Replication 5.1.1 release notes are here.

Filed under Site Recovery Manager, VMware solutions, vSphere 5

VMware vCloud Director 5.1.2 Released

April 28, 2013 Leave a comment

VMware released vCloud Director 5.1.2 at April 25.

What’s New

  • Rights for creating, reverting, and removing snapshots: Rights for creating, reverting, and removing snapshots have been added, allowing system administrators to configure these rights for all roles.
  • Allocation pool organization virtual datacenters can be elastic or non-elastic: Starting with vCloud Director 5.1.2, system administrators can configure Allocation Pool organization virtual datacenters with Single Cluster Allocation Pool (SCAP), making them non-elastic. This is a global setting that affects all Allocation Pool organization virtual datacenters. By default, Allocation Pool organization virtual datacenters have Single Cluster Allocation Pool enabled. Systems upgraded from vCloud Director 5.1 that have Allocation Pool organization virtual dataceters with virtual machines spanning multiple resource pools have Single Cluster Allocation Pool disabled by default. 

    To change the Single Cluster Allocation Pool setting go to System > Administration > General > Miscellaneous. Before enabling Single Cluster Allocation Pool, migrate any virtual machines on secondary resource pools to the organization virtual datacenter’s primary resource pool.

  • vCloud Director is now supported on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3
  • Support for Microsoft SQL Server 2012: vCloud Director now supports Microsoft SQL Server 2012 databases.
  • Additional guest operating system customization support: vCloud Director now supports customization of the following guest operating systems:
    • Microsoft Windows Server 2012

 

Get the release notes from here.

Download the update from here.

Filed under vCloud Director, VMware solutions

VMware ESXi 5.1 Update 1 released

April 27, 2013 Leave a comment

VMware released ESXi 5.1 Update 1 at April 25. The update contains mainly bug fixes and some enhancements. No new features.
See the release notes here.

Storage enhancements of Update 1 are discussed in this great blogpost by Cormac Hogan.
Interesting adjustments are an increased maximum heap size. This allows to have an ESXi host a much larger amount of open VMDK files on VMFS volumes. More info on heapsize and how to increase it for vSphere 5.0 can be read in my earlier posting. 

Also it is again possible to rename VMDK files while performing a storage vMotion. Frank Denneman has written a blogposting about this.

Before performing the upgrade, make sure other VMware components are compatible with Update 1. Viktor van den Berg has a short posting about this here.

Also mind that upgrading VMware solutions needs to be done in a certain sequence. VMware has details in a post titled Update sequence for vSphere 5.1 Update 1 and its compatible VMware products (2037630)

supported-update-sequence

Filed under Uncategorized, VMware solutions, vSphere 5

New enhancement to Windows Azure : point to site VPN with client and remote Powershell

April 26, 2013 Leave a comment

Scott Guthrie of Microsoft announced some enhancements to Windows Azure today. Enhancements on infrastructure as are:

  • Virtual Networks: New Point-to-Site Connectivity (very cool!), Software VPN Device and Dynamic DNS Support
  • Virtual Machines: Remote PowerShell and Linux SSH provisioning enhancements.

Microsoft added an awesome new feature that allows you to setup VPN connections between individual computers and a Windows Azure virtual network
without the need for a VPN device. This feature is called Point-to-Site Virtual Private Networking

 

Another new feature is the ability to automatically enable PowerShell access to Windows virtual machines.

Read more at Scott Guthrie’s post titled Windows Azure: Improvements to Virtual Networks, Virtual Machines, Cloud Services and a new Ruby SDK

 

 

Filed under Azure Virtual Machine

VMware vCenter Server 5.1 Update 1 Released

April 26, 2013 Leave a comment

VMware released  vCenter Server 5.1 Update 1 at April 25.

This release  offers the following improvements:

  • vCenter Server is now supported on Windows Server 2012
  • Additional vCenter Server Database Support: vCenter Server now supports the following databases.
    • Microsoft SQL Server 2012
    • Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 SP2
  • Additional Guest Operating System Customization Support -vCenter Server now supports customization of the following guest operating systems:
    • Windows 8
    • Windows Server 2012
    • Ubuntu12.04
    • RHEL 5.9
  • vCenter Essentials no longer enforces vRAM usage limit of 192 GB With vSphere 5.1 Update 1, the Essentials and Essentials Plus licenses no longer restrict virtual machine power-on operations when the vRAM usage limit of 192 GB is met.
  • Resolved Issues – This release delivers a number of bug fixes that have been documented in the Resolved Issues section.

More info here
Release notes here.
Download here

Filed under VMware solutions, vSphere 5

Windows Azure Virtual Machines support policies & lessons learned

April 26, 2013 Leave a comment

Microsoft made Windows Azure Virtual Machines general available end of April 2013. This new service allows to cloud consumers to  provision virtual machines from a catalog or upload your own VHD virtual disks. Supported operating systems are Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2012 and various Linux distributions.

MVP Nuno Filipe Mendes Godinho posted an interesting blog about some lessons learned while running virtual machines on Windows Azure.
The post can be read here.

A summary of his findings are:
1. Place each data disk in a single storage account to improve IOPS
2. Always use Data Disks for Read/Write intensive operations, never the OS Disk
3. Use striped disks to achieve better performance
4. Configure Data Disks HostCache for ReadWrite
5. Always create VMs inside a Affinity Group or VNET to decrease latency
6. Always leverage Availability Sets to get SLA
7. Always sysprep your machines
8. Never place intensive read/write information on the Windows System Drive for improved performance
9. Never place persistent information on the Temporary Drive (D:)

Microsoft published its Microsoft server software support for Windows Azure Virtual Machines here.

The article states:
Microsoft supports Microsoft server software running in the Windows Azure Virtual Machine environments:

Microsoft BizTalk Server Microsoft BizTalk Server 2013 and later is supported.
Microsoft Dynamics GP Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 and later is supported.
Microsoft Dynamics NAV Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 and later is supported.
Microsoft Forefront Identity Manager Microsoft Forefront Identity Manager 2010 R2 SP1 and later is supported.
Microsoft Project Server Microsoft Project Server 2013 and later is supported.
Microsoft SharePoint Server Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 and later is supported on Windows Azure Virtual Machines. For more information, please see http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj154957
Microsoft SQL Server 64-bit versions of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and later are supported. Please see http://support.microsoft.com/?id=956893 for details.
Microsoft System Center System Center 2012 SP1 and later is supported for the following applications:

  • App Controller
  • Operations Manager
  • Orchestrator
  • Server Application Virtualization
  • Service Manager

Microsoft Team Foundation Server Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2012 and later is supported.
Windows Server Roles Windows Server 2008 R2 and later versions are supported for the following roles.  This list will be updated as new roles are confirmed:

  • Active Directory Domain Services
  • Active Directory Federation Services
  • Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
  • Application Server
  • DNS Server
  • File Services
  • Network Policy and Access Services
  • Print and Document Services
  • Web Server (IIS)
  • Windows Server Update Services

The following roles are not supported on Windows Azure Virtual Machines:

  • Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol Server
  • Hyper-V
  • Remote Access (Direct Access)
  • Windows Deployment Services

Windows Server Features Notable features that are not supported:

  • BitLocker Drive Encryption (on the OS disk – may be used on data disks)
  • Failover Clustering
  • Internet Storage Name Server
  • Multipath I/O
  • Network Load Balancing
  • Peer Name Resolution Protocol
  • SNMP Services
  • Storage Manager for SANs
  • Windows Internet Name Service
  • Wireless LAN Service

Filed under Azure Virtual Machine, Windows Azure

Backup to the cloud using Windows Azure Backup

April 22, 2013 Leave a comment

One of the use cases of cloud computing Infrastructure as a Service is data recovery. IaaS service models have unlimited compute and storage capacity without upfront investments. More and more vendors are adding support for backup to the cloud. Some examples are Microsoft who acquired StorSimple. Storsimple is a hardware appliance which offers local storage and a gateway to various cloud storage providers. Veeam Backup & Replication Cloud Edition offers the same kind of functionality delivered in software.

Windows Azure has a preview feature named Azure Backup  which offers an unlimited storage capacity for backup purposes. This post will give some insights in this feature and how to connect to it.

azure-backup

Read more of this post

Filed under Azure Virtual Machine, Backup/restore and disaster recovery, VMware solutions, Windows Azure

vOpenData gives insight in VMware infrastructure statistics

April 18, 2013 Leave a comment

vOpenData is a cool project that gives insight in statistics like: what is the average size of a VMDK, what is the average physical memory per host and what guest operating system is used most. The project started around 2 weeks ago and already data over 65000 vms has been uploaded.

Taken from vopendata.org

vOpenData is an open community project that grew from the question “What is the average VMDK size for deployed virtual machines?” We wanted to create an open community database that is purely driven by users submitting their virtual infrastructure configurations. Leveraging the powerful virtualization community and applying simple analytics we are able to provide various trending statistics and data for virtualized environments. This is 100% community driven and the results will be available for everyone to view and hopefully you will contribute to the overall dataset!

To contribute, you simply have to register into the website and add the infrastructures you have access to. Consultants have the possibility to upload data about their several customers, so they can increase even further the database.

Results are freely visible, even without registration, at this web page, and you can see an example down here.

Below an impression of the data! Looks very cool!

vopendata

Filed under Uncategorized, VMware solutions

Get a free ticket for Star Trek Into Darkness movie

April 18, 2013 Leave a comment

Join Nutanix and its partners for the premiere of one of the most anticipated films of the year – Star Trek Into Darkness.  Before viewing the film, attendees will learn about the next-generation computing platform from Nutanix that is transforming the enterprise datacenter.  This event is by invitation only, so please fill out the form to request admission to this event.

Locations are all over the USA and also in:

Amsterdam, Auckland, London, Melbourne, Ottowa, Singapore, Sydney and Toronto.

Registration , locations and dates are here. 

Nutanix-StarTrek-movie

Filed under Nutanix, VMware solutions

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