Capacity Planner for Hyper-V Replica will create a test VM with a VHD file and will then start replication. Metrics on CPU consumption, WAN consumption and storage usage will be collected during the replication. A report will be presented giving the administrator insights in things like:

Estimated storage to store the initial copy
Additional storage required on the replica server when only the latest recovery point is preserved
Additional storage required per recovery point on the replica server when multiple recovery points are preserved
Average network bandwidth required
Additional space required on the primary storage
Estimated additional IOPS during initial replication
Estimated additional IOPS during delta replication
Estimated memory requirements on the primary and replica servers, by enabling replication
on the selected VMs
Estimated CPU impact on the primary and replica servers, after enabling replication on
the selected VMs.

Download and more information here. This tool is being offered ‘as is’ with no official Microsoft support.

vCenter Server 5.1 Update 1 has  been removed from the VMware download   site due to issues encountered when  logging in to  vCenter Server 5.1 Update 1 with domain credentials. See the alert about Update 1 here.

vCenter Server 5.1 Update  1 is replaced by vCenter Server 5.1   Update 1A, which is functionally identical  to vCenter Server 5.1   Update 1A resolves  the issue encountered  when logging in to  vCenter Server 5.1 Update 1  in a set up where the vCenter Server login domain user account is associated with a large   number of domain groups and multiple domains are configured as SSO   identity sources. See KB 2050941 and the Resolved Issues section of the release notes for more information.

Customers are urged to read the README included with the new update before they apply the update.

release notes of VMware vCenter Server 5.1 Update 1a are here.

Download VMware vCenter Server 5.1 Update 1a here.

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.

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.

• vCloud Automation Center – What to know before you install!
• vCloud Automation Center – vCAC Manager Installation
• vCloud Automation Cetner – DEM Installation
• vCloud Automation Center – Laying the foundation

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

• The Unofficial vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) FAQs
• VMware vCAC 5.1 Install Process – Overview
• vCAC – Running Manager and DEM Service in Console Mode
• VMware vCAC 5.1 Prerequisite & Fix Scripts
• VMware vCloud Automation Center 5.1 – How to Get Started
• A Brief Introduction to VMware vCloud Automation Center 5.1 (vCAC)

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

Download via registration here.

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.

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

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.

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.

• 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.

More info at the VMware blog site.

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

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.

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)

• 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

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

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

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.

Windows Azure Backup  is currently in Preview. This means it does not have support and a SLA and cannot be used for production purposes.   A backup client needs to be installed on Windows Server 2012 to connect to the vault and make backups and do restores. Support for Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager is also available although I have not tested it nor found information on this.

Windows Azure Backup has a limit of 850 GB per volume of data that can be backed up in one backup operation.

Installation
There are quite a few blogpostings on how to configure Azure Backup. The basis steps are:
1. enable the Azure Backup Vault in the Azure Management Portal
2. create a certificate. I used makecert.exe which is part of the SDK for Windows 8.
3. download and install the backup client. Add the Windows Azure backup agent in the MMC
4. register the backup server on Azure using the certificate
5. configure a backup job

The most time consuming step for me was trying to download makecert. The other steps are very easy.
Detailed instructions on how to backup to the cloud using Azure Backup:

awsomedevsigner Windows Azure Recovery Services – Now Available!
Trond’s Working! How to set up Azure Recovery Services Backup
Thomas Maurer Using Windows Azure Backup Vault (Preview)
TechMike2KX’s Blog Protecting your online and on premises assets IaaS style!: Introducing #windowsazure Online Backup
James van den Berg System Center blog Installing and Configuring #WindowsAzure Backup agent part 1 of 2 Hybrid #Cloud

Backup client
The backup client has the features listed below:

-include and exclude files and folders
-set a backup schedule (max three backups per day)
-encrypt the backup data
-configure a proxy server
-throttle bandwidth during work hours and/or non-work hours
-set the backup retention. Files deleted in the backup set will be kept available for max. 7 days.

Restore is a very easy process. Basically a next next finish job.

I played a bit with the software in my lab and found it easy and straightforward to use. Hope to give some details on upload/download speed later.

Pricing
Costs are calculated based on the average storage usage per month. Microsoft does not  charge additionally for bandwidth, storage transactions, compute, or other resources associated with providing the Backup service.

Costs depend on the contract. There is a pay as you go pricing model. Here you pay what you consume.Price=  $0.50 per GB per month

Alternatives are 6 or 12-month plans. Here you agree to consume an minimum amount of storage. Pricing per GB is a bit lower than the Pay-as-you-go model.

Windows Azure Backup is currently in preview and Microsoft  provides a 50% discount during the preview period.The first 5 GB per month is free.

Calculate the costs here.

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!

Locations are all over the USA and also in:

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

Registration , locations and dates are here. 

Archive to Tape in Veeam Backup & Replication v7 supports virtual tape libraries (VTLs), tape libraries and standalone drives.Working with VTLs, tape libraries and standalone drives is easy with v7. As long as the tape device can be seen in Windows Device Manager, it is automatically picked up by the software.

Much more information on tape support at this blog of Veeam Software.

Earlier announced feature for Version 7  is support for VMware vCloud Director Also announced is the plug-in for VMware vSphere Client.

Veeam also announced Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SharePoint

With the help of this kind of solutions the hybrid cloud becomes reality.

This technology preview offers standard based secure connectivity to Microsoft Azure. With this enhancement, a customer can  connect their enterprise data center to the Azure VPN gateway and access the IaaS and PaaS offerings from Microsoft.

The following are the key points to note :

• Secure L3 connection to Azure VPN gateway
• CloudBridge deployment on the enterprise data center only. It is not running inside Azure
• No WAN Optimization or L2 extension supported in this solution since it needs deployment of CloudBridge on the Azure end as well.

CloudBridge provides connectivity between your enterprise datacenters and the Microsoft cloud hosting provider, Azure, making Azure a seamless extension of the enterprise network. CloudBridge encrypts the connection between the enterprise datacenter and Azure cloud so that all data transferred between the two is secure. CloudBridge is a complete network solution—available as a standalone physical or virtual appliance, or integrated into NetScaler Platinum edition—enabling enterprises to transparently shift web and application servers to the cloud while keeping the database safely within the enterprise datacenter.

The CloudBrige software appliance (CloudBridge VPX) can currently only be run on Citrix XenServer hypervisor (xva image). I guess support for Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere will be added soon as those have the largest marketshare in enterprise infrastructures.

The CloudBridge MPX is the hardware appliance. For setting up a CloudBridge tunnel between your datacenter and Azure, you must install CloudBridge VPX/MPX in your datacenter, configure Microsoft Azure for the CloudBridge tunnel, and then configure the CloudBridge appliance in the data center for the CloudBridge tunnel.

The image below shows the Azure Management Portal with a configured secure connection between the private datacenter and Windows Azure.

Click here to download CloudBridge for Microsoft Azure (requires a valid mycitrix.com account)

Go to the CloudBridge discussion forum to get help from the community.

For additional questions on CloudBridge, please contact CloudBridge-PM@citrix.com

Azure Virtual Machines is an Infrastructure as a Service service model. That means the consumer of the service is responsible for managing the operating system and all software running on that operating system. So far Windows Azure was a Platform as a Service only  service model.  Developers could use the platform to create and execute applications using a fixed set of tooling like SharePoint, SQL server or .NET. If the preferred tool was not made available by Microsoft it could not be used. The consumer was not responsible for managing the operating system.

That changes with Windows Azure Virtual Machines. Customers can now create a guest VM running a selected number of supported operating systems. Now they can run any application they want on that virtual machine. Besides provisioning using an Azure  management portal, virtual machines can also be provisioned using System Center Orchestrator, using PowerShell and using System Center App Controller. Also VHD (VHDX not supported on Azure) virtual disks can be created on-premises on Hyper-V and then uploaded to Azure.

Also via the VM Depot many images are available of Linux distributions preloaded with a lot of different applications. Just a few examples are Drupal, Joomla!, Ruby Stack and WordPress.

To learn more about Azure Infrastructure Services see this short video.

Since the general availability of Windows Azure Virtual Machines some things are improved compared to the Preview:

1. Two additional sizes for virtual machines are added. Available now are 7 sizes including two Monster VM’s. Those 2 monster VM’s have 4 or 8 cores and 28 GB or 56 GB of internal memory.
2. Additional images are available. Images (or templates) contain a pre-installed operating system and software like SQL Server or SharePoint. Supported operating systems are Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2012, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE and Openlogic CentOS

3. Costs for some of the Azure services are reduced with 21 to 30 percent.

Microsoft today also announced they will follow price reductions of Amazon. So when Amazon lowers prices, Microsoft immediately will do so too.

What not has changed is the availability in the SLA. The SLA states that Microsoft agrees to deliver connectivity to the virtual machine  during 99,95% of the billing month. To meet the SLA the customer needs to have at least 2  instances of a virtual machine running which are part of the same availability set.

Suppose a customer want to runs a legacy application which does not have availability features in the application and does not support clustering. The VM the application is running on  is a single point of failure. When the virtual machine goes down (Microsoft performing scheduled maintenance on Azure involving downtime for the host, host hardware issues, networking issues) Microsoft does not violate the SLA even when 99,95% is not reached. Simply because there is no SLA for a single instance virtual machine.

An Azure Availability set ensures that virtual machines instances are not running in the same fault domain. A fault domain is the same host or the same rack. An availability set makes sure members (virtual machines) of that group never run on the same single point of failure. It is the same as anti-affinity rules in Hyper-V/SCVMM or vCenter Server.

Much more on Azure availability sets can be read here in a post titled Windows Azure Host Updates: Why, When, and How

The Service Level Agreement for virtual machines can be downloaded here.

1. “Maximum Connectivity Minutes” is the total accumulated minutes during a billing month for all Internet facing Virtual Machines that have two or more instances deployed in the same Availability Set.  Maximum Connectivity Minutes is measured from when at least two Virtual Machines in the same Availability Set have both been started resultant from action initiated by Customer to the time Customer has initiated an action that would result in stopping or deleting the Virtual Machines.

Below a nice infographic of Windows Azure. The full version can be seen here at dotnetsolutions.co.uk