VMware vSphere is the leading server virtualization platform having features competitors do not offer. But to stay ahead VMware will need to deliver new features. Most of those features will likely focus on datacenter deployments, automation and resource abstration which enables cloud computing.

This posting gives an overview on possible new features in VMware vSphere. Mind the author does not have any inside information. Suggestions in this posting are based on public announcements done by VMware and features of competing products.

vSphere roadmap
VMware releases a major release of vSphere  every two years. An update to a major release is done 1 year after. So it is likely vSphere 5.1 is released in 2012. As reported earlier most likely VMware will  make vSphere 5.1 general available (GA) during VMworld 2012 USA end of August. Probably there will be no prior announcement of the GA. This would be perfect timing as Microsoft is expected to release Hyper-V 3 between Q3 2012 and beginning of 2013.

An update (x.1) release has a few new features and many enhancements of current features.
The image below shows the release of VMware Virtual Infrastructure and vSphere in the last years including the features released.

Suggested features for vSphere 5.x (expected to be announced VMworld 2012)

• Fault Tolerance support for VMs having multiple vCPU’s (very likely)
• Support for virtualized Microsoft Domain Controllers  allowing cloning and snapshot restore. (likely)
• VMware HA will be able to monitor application health and restart services/applications running inside  virtual machines if applications are not responding. Currently VMware HA will notice if the guest operating system is not responding and will reboot the VM. Public API’s are available to hook into  VMware HA  which can be used to force certain HA actions. I expect that no programming skills or third party solutions are needed anymore for HA application monitoring (likely)
• upgraded number of multiple vMotions
• boot from FiberChannel over Ethernet

Suggested changes in editions for vSphere 5.x
Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V 3 will offer a lot of new features which will be very interesting for the SMB market. As a reaction VMware might respond.

•  vSphere Essentials plus will be uplifted to max 5 hosts and 10 CPU’s with upgraded vRAM entitlement. (suggestion)
•  vSphere Standard and higher editions will have a price drop, a bundled  tool for free  (for instance vCenter Operations) or higher vRAM entitlement.(suggestion)

Suggested features for vSphere 6 (to be released in 2013?)

• Support for virtual disk files (VMDK) larger than 2 TB. (likely)
• ESXi hosts accessing vmdk’s instead of LUN’s enabling more granular storage management. This feature is titled VM volumes and explained here. (likely)
• Support for VXLAN improving virtual machine mobility. A virtual machine will retain it’s IP-configuration when vMotioned to another site having another IP-subnet. (likely)
• SLA policies for applications allowing to guarantee uptime and performance for application running on a set of virtual machines.
• RDMA support
• Multiple templates using a single VMDK file. Templates can be used to assign different roles and features to Windows Server guests. Offered by SCVMM 2012.
• Automated deployment of applications using vCenter Server.
• vCenter Server will have more integrated automation using Orchestator (likely)
• Long distance vMotion support. Stretched VMware clusters are becoming more popular allowing to perform disaster and downtime avoidance. Currently there are heavy requirements for long distance vMotion like latency and maximum distance between datacenters (around 100 km). Expect the distance to be much extended without having to buy third party equipment.(likely)
• Redesigned snapshot mechanism. Currently commiting a snapshot can hurt performance as commiting needs a lot of disk i/o.
• Improved VMware High Availability. More granular startup priority and a single runbook targeted at SMB like Hyper-V Replica. Use SRM instead for multiple runbooks and multiple site protection.
• Enhanced support for VMware stretched clusters and metrocluster storage configurations allowing more control of which vm runs on white cluster and is located on which datastore.
• IP Address Management for vCenter Server. Centralized IP management for private cloud

Stephen Herrod, CTO of VMware did a presentation for the Italian VMUG at April 4, 2012. He had a few interesting quotes which were  discovered by Microsoft in online videos.  They blogged about it here. Also The Register reported about the presentation.

Herrod says the company is “pretty much done” on the next release of vSphere and usually works on three releases at a time. 2013’s version is “pretty far along” and work has commenced on 2014’s edition. So we could see the next release of vSphere somewhere in Q4 of 2012 I guess.

What Herrod said about VMware Cloud Infrastructure Suite :

“VMware Cloud Infrastructure Suite is really more of a marketing term. Those of you know our products deeply know that they don’t fit this well together as they need to. Some of them have multiple databases, some don’t look the same, some install differently, and what I can’t stand that is Site Recovery Manager doesn’t currently work with vCloud Director. So, what we are basically able to say is that we created and acquired companies that led to a lot of individual products that don’t work well enough together yet.”

See the video’s of Stephen Herrod presentation at VMUG Italy here.
The slides can be downloaded here.

This posting is the second  in a serie by Altaro about backup for Hyper-V. The first posting can be read here. It gives a good insight about backup, VSS and redirected access mode.

When is Application-Consistent Backup Vital? Not all situations require an application-consistent backup. Things such as file and print servers will be fine with crash-consistent and possibly inconsistent backups. If your application doesn’t provide a VSS writer, there might not even be a way to get an application-consistent backup of it while its containing machine is live. The most common need for application-consistent backups is the usage of database-backed applications.

Continue reading at Altaro.com

Recently a hacker was able to get source code of VMware ESX and as a proof posted a file on a website. The hacker announced he will post all source code at May 5. Read more about this here.

As a result VMware posted several blogs about this and accelerated the delivery of a set of software patches.

Taken from this posting at VMware.com

On April 23, 2012, our security team became aware of the public posting of a single file from the VMware ESX source code dating back to 2004, and the possibility that more files may be posted in the near future. Ensuring customer security is our top priority. As a matter of best practices with respect to security, VMware strongly encourages all customers to apply the latest product updates and security patches made available for their specific environment. As part of its regular program of providing patches for security and other issues, VMware has accelerated the delivery of a set of software patches for specific product releases that may be exposed to increased risk. We encourage all customers to view the following links to determine if appropriate patches are available for products in their environment: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2019941 and http://www.vmware.com/security/advisories/VMSA-2012-0009.html.

Continue reading at source

Today VMware announced Project Octopus Beta is open for all. Project Octopus can be seen as Dropbox for the Enterprise. It allows users to access data from anywhere and any device. IT department has control over who is able to access data, can set quota’s and can wipe the data from devices remotely when the device is lost or stolen.
Deployment is using a virtual appliance running on vSphere. All data stays in the datacenter of the organization unlike Dropbox.

The beta is open to all and will last through VMworld. Due to limited support resources, priority will be placed on customers with active engagements.

One of the main drivers for many organizations to start using server virtualization is the ability to simplify and perform disaster recovery. Server virtualization allows servers to be recovered on different server hardware while testing and actual recovery procedures can be highly automated. Sys-con media recently published an interesting article on DR titled Virtualization Simplifies Disaster Recovery

Still disaster recovery (DR) is for a lot of organizations that ugly duckling that never gets addressed till it’s too late. DR is often considered too expensive, risks of a total disaster are low while solving ad hoc high priority  issues bugging the infrastructure is consuming all the available resources of the IT-staff leaving no time for enhancements like solid DR software and procedures. Mostly organizations which are forced to have a proper disaster protection by law (think of banks and government) and large companies have a well thought protection against disasters.

Vendors like VMware, Zerto and VirtualSharp have been offering DR software for some time which allows efficient, easy to use and cost effective disaster recovery and testing. These software solutions are increasingly adding features which enables a recovery to a secondary recovery datacenter operated by a service provider. Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is seen as a stepping stone for organization using cloud computing. It makes DR a lot more cost effective than buying and maintaining your own secondary datacenter, hardware and software.

This posting will give an overview including features of three major solutions on disaster recovery for VMware vSphere infrastructures which are targeted at SMB, enterprises and cloud providers. The links will bring you to my earlier postings about VMware Site Recovery Manager, Zerto Virtual Replication and VirtualSharp ReliableDR.

What is disaster recovery (DR)?
DR is a set of techniques and procedures to recover an IT-infrastructure in an alternate location when the primary location is not available or not preferred because a disaster made it (partly) unavailable. A disaster could be caused by an earthquake, fire but more likely human error or major hardware or software failure.

In most cases a protection for disasters requires data to be replicated to another (offsite) location. Replication means transferring the data in the same format as the original data. A backup and restore is in most cases not sufficient for DR as restore means transferring data from the backup repository format to a virtual machine format. This takes a lot of time and probably will also mean data is not very current.

Replication of data can be done at different levels:

-at the storage level
-at the hypervisor level
-at application level. Examples are Active Directory replication, Exchange Database Availability Groups, SQL Database Mirroring.
-third party tooling Novell PlateSpin Protect

What is needed for DR?
Making sure the data is replicated to another site is one thing. More important is to verify it can recovered to a fully functional virtual infrastructure in an acceptable time and with acceptable or none lose of data. Basically three approaches are possible:

1. fully manual recovery.
Data is replicated by the storage level. In case of a disaster IT staff has to reconnect replicated volumes to ESX hosts in the recovery site. Then register the virtual machine .vmx files in vCenter and manually start the virtual machines in the correct order. This obviously needs a lot of time, is error prone and time consuming to test on a regular base.

2. semi automated recovery.
Often VMware HA is seen as a way to perform disaster recovery. Using a stretched VMware cluster, synchronous replication and storage cluster over two sites VMs can be restarted on the remaining site if one site fails. However VMware HA is not designed to recover from a failure of many hosts/a datacenter. Restart sequencing is not very granular. HA’s primary design purpose is to recover from a single host failure. Using scripts organizations might built their own orchestration but this will need maintenance. Also semi-automated recovery does not offer automated testing of DR procedures.

3 fully automated recovery (with or without DR Assurance).
In this scenario software tooling is used to fully orchestrate the steps needed to attach storage to ESX hosts, register VMs in vCenter and boot virtual machines using a runbook to make sure VMs are started in the designated order. Tooling even allows verification of the time needed to recover (RTO) and the maximum allowed loss of data (RPO).

The rest of this posting will focus on the three mostly used software tools for automated DR and DR Assurance.

VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 5
VMware SRM current release is 5.0. SRM has been available since version 1.0 was released in summer 2008. It is by far market leader for DR software in VMware environments. It is also the most versatile solution available. It has a lot of features, is able to replicate using the storage layer as well as using hypervisor based replication (vSphere Replication). It can be used in the SMB space as well as in enterprise environments. Hypervisor based replication was added in the 5.0 release and this features allows for storage-agnostic replication. This means storage in the DR site can be off another vendor and brand than storage in the primary site. vSphere Replication does have some limitations. While storage based replication allows automated failback, vSphere Replication does not. Also when a protected VM has moved to another host because of VMware HA the virtual disks needs to be re-synced again. Host based replication needs to be mature and its main focus is the SMB market at the moment. Strangely enough VMware decided to not support SRM for vSphere Essentials and Essentials Plus Edition which are targeted at the SMB market.
SRM 5 is available as a Standard Edition and an Enterprise Edition. Both editions have exactly the same features, Standard Edition however is limited to protection of 75 virtual machines. Standard Edition is attractively priced with a list price of around Euro 160/ $ 213 per virtual machine available in 25-Packs.

Zerto Virtual Replication 1.0
Zerto released its Virtual Replication 1.0 version in April 2011 . It offers enterprise near-synchronous replication at the hypervisor lever. The solution does not support storage based replication but is able to deliver near-synchronous replication with an RPO of as little as a few seconds. Since its release Zerto got a lot of attention and some awards. Its unique selling point is its ability to protect any virtual machine running on any kind of VMware supported storage without the restrictions of vSphere Replication of SRM 5.0. Zerto has mature features on managing replication using compression and being able to prioritize replication of important virtual machines. Zerto is adding new features in updates on release 1.0 which are made available every couple of months. Its runbook features have been improved over the last months.

VirtualSharp ReliableDR 2.6
VirtualSharp Software is a relative unkn0wn player in the DR field. They have been around from some time offering DR Assurance to selected number of customers mainly banks and insurance companies. Recently they expanded the focus from Spain to the rest of the world. The current customer base is  still small compared to SRM but the solution gets more attention from customers and the industry.

Gartner has selected VirtualSharp Software as a Cool Vendor in Gartner’s “Cool Vendors in Business Continuity Management and IT Disaster Recovery Management, 2012″ report.
ReliableDR is able to replicate both on storage layer and on hypervisor. Its unique selling point is DR Assurance. It does not only verify at an infrastructure level (does your VM boot and can it be reached over the network) but more importantly, ReliableDR automatically verifies your applications on RTO and RPO. It does so by booting up your VMs in an isolated network and times when all VMs *and* applications are up and running (RTO) and if the data is current according to the RPO. This is done to send queries to databases, Exchange or webservers and verifies if an expected response (ie text) is returned or not. It is very easy to install as it only needs a single software module in the DR site and needs only one instance of vCenter Server.

Cloud DR
Cost effective protection for disasters can be done by outsourcing the recovery infrastructure to a service provider. Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) has got a lot of attention. The service for virtual machines started about one year with a couple of US based service providers started to offer SRM protection for their customers. All three vendors now offer features which enable DRaaS. Features like rental of licenses and support for vCloud Director are available or are on the roadmap for the next release.

Feature overview
Which solution fits best the needs of the organization depends on budgets, requirements, size of the infrastructure etc. All three solutions have their strong unique features. The image below shows the features of the three mentioned solutions. I contacted all three vendors and supplied them a list of features which they filled in. All vendors also added some additional features.

All three offer a free trial download which can be used to test the solution.

Very happy and proud to announce that I was awarded the vExpert 2012 title by VMware for the second time.

The VMware vExpert Award is given to individuals who have significantly contributed to the community of VMware users over the past year. vExperts are book authors, bloggers, VMUG leaders, tool builders, and other IT professionals who share their knowledge and passion with others. These vExperts have gone above and beyond their day jobs to share their technical expertise and communicate the value of VMware and virtualization to their colleagues and community.

VMware vExpert Benefits:

• Public recognition of the vExpert award with a certificate, gift, permission to display a logo, and inclusion in any public vExpert listing
• Access to a private vExpert community of your peers
• Free subscription to conference session materials on VMworld.com
• Access to exclusive events, beta programs, software licenses, and other exclusive opportunities to participate in activities with VMware. vExperts do not represent VMware and are not required to participate in any activities

Congratulations to all vExperts and many thanks to Alex and John of VMware for making this great program possible.

For a complete list of all vExpert 2012 title holders see this posting at VMware.com

For a nice overview with lots of data on vExperts compiled by Jeramiah Dooley (see his posting titled 2012 vExpert Group, By the Numbers An example :

• The vExpert group is still predominately US-based, but the gap is shrinking.  I’m still working through populating the final data, but the number of new vExperts from outside the US is fantastic.  It really reflects the growth of VMware internationally.
• 349 of 433 vExperts are on Twitter!  I’ve created a Twitter list that automatically updates whenever one of the vExperts updates their information, you can see it here and follow it if you’d like.
• 298 of 433 vExperts indicate some on-line presence like a website, online profile or blog.