Now VMware strikes back claiming Sphere delivers dramatically lower operational costs compared to Microsoft Hyper-V. This to earliers claims by VMware that vSphere will cost about the same as one built using Microsoft Hyper-V and System Center (or even much less when vSphere’s proven VM density advantage over Hyper-V is factored in.)

To have a fair comparision of tocal cost of ownership both he acquisition costs /capital expense (CapEx) and operational expense costs (Opex) should be calculated.

A posting on VMware.com titled Sorry Microsoft; Not Only Does vSphere Cost Less to Buy, It Also Costs Less to Operate writes about a research done by Principled Technologies which measures time needed for certain tasks done by system administrators on Hyper-V and vSphere 5.

The tasks tested were:

1. Shifting virtual machines off a host to accommodate physical maintenance
2. Adding storage volumes and redistributing virtual disk files across the new storage
3. Isolating storage-intensive “noisy neighbor” virtual machines
4. Provisioning new hosts
5. Performing a non-disruptive disaster recovery failover test

Over a two year period in a datacenter with 1000 VM’s, vSphere’s operational costs are 91 percent less than Microsoft Hyper-V and System Center according to Principled Technologies. More about it at CRM.com

The report written by Principled Technologies was commissioned by VMware. This means VMware ordered and paid the research. While this is a common way to perform marketing it is obviously  a biased report. Someone who  pays for a report will have influence on the content.

Having said that it is clear to me VMware vSphere 5 outperforms Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V in operational costs. I have worked with both solutions in design and management for some years.

While this is true for Windows Server 2008, for Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V 3 this could be a different story. Hyper-V 3 promises to deliver an unlimited number of concurrent Live Migrations. Currently Hyper-V is limited to a single concurrent live migration. Moving virtual disk files in Hyper-V 3 will be much more efficient and no downtime involved  as in Hyper-V 2. These missing features have a heavy influence in the TCO calculation performed by Principled Technologies.

The report is very detailled in describing the tasks that were performed. Worth the download and reading it. Take a look for yourself at the full test report by Principled Technologies here (registration required.)

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

Several sources confirm that VMware is almost ready with this release. At a VMUG event in Italy  Stephen Herrod (CTO of VMware)  said 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.
Also someone working for VMware sent a Tweet at march 27 indicating  a beta on the new relaease is currently being tested.

What features this new release will have is yet unknown. VMware does not reveal features in to be released products as it has a policy to under promise and over deliver. This contrary to the policy of Microsoft which has a tradition to promise features of which some of them are removed from the final version.

One of the features which are likely to be included  is Fault Tolerance support for virtual machines running multiple vCPUs. At VMworld 2011 VMware already gave a demo of a SMP virtual machine using Fault Tolerance.

Another feature could be boot from Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE).

Another guess for a new feature is support for virtualized Microsoft Domain Controllers. Windows Server 2012 running as  a virtual Domain Controller is virtualization aware. This means a snaphot of the virtual machine can be made and restored if needed without getting issues in AD because of the USN rollback (explained here).  This is currently advertised as a feature of Windows Server 2010 Hyper-V.

It leverages an ability that Microsoft has added to Hyper-V called VM-Generation ID  .  This new feature explained here allows a virtual domain controller to know whether or not it’s the latest version of AD.  This same technology also enables administrators to clone virtual domain controllers, making the DC deployment process much easier.   Microsoft is working with other hypervisor vendors implement Gen ID in their own products to bring this capability to all users of virtual domain controllers.

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.

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

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

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.

  Altaro has a good posting about crash versus application consistent backups here.

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.

Microsoft did not want to develop a new filesystem as all the tools for NTFS would need to be re-developed. Instead a filter driver called Cluster Shared Volume was invented. This is a kind of orchestrator making sure only one Hyper-V node can do certain actions on a file. This node is called the coordinator mode.

In certain conditions like backup only the coordinator mode is able to write to the CSV volume. All other  nodes will have to sent data over the LAN to the coordinator mode. This situation is called redirected access mode. Redirected mode is much slower than direct mode and should be this avoided.

An issue exists when using McAfee on Windows Server 2008 R2 (SP1) system and Hyper-V CSV.

After you install McAfee VirusScan Enterprise (VSE) 8.7i Patch 5 Repost or VSE 8.8 Patch 1, HyperV servers on Windows 2008 R2 show Cluster Shared Volumes as:    Online (Redirected access)

If you try to bring the shared volume online, you see the following error:   The Action ‘Turn off redirected access for this Cluster Shared Volume’ did not complete.

This issue is explained in this article on the McAfee site.
Microsoft has a hotfix available which solves this issue. The hotfix is described in Article ID: 2674551  titled

Redirected mode is enabled unexpectedly in a Cluster Shared Volume when you are running a third-party application in a Windows Server 2008 R2-based cluster

CSV is a technology in Microsoft Failover Clusters that allows all nodes of a cluster to access the same disk at the same time. CSV is implemented as a filter driver. Each filter driver has an altitude value that determines its position in the stack. Lower values are loaded later in the stack. CSV operates in two modes, direct mode and redirected mode. In direct mode, CSV uses NTFS pinning to allow a node to perform I/O directly to a file. In redirected mode, all I/O is sent through Server Message Block (SMB) to the owning node. Redirected mode is much slower than direct mode.

VMware vCenterInfrastructure Navigator is an application awareness plug-in to vCenter Server, and provides continuous dependency mapping of applications. Infrastructure Navigator offers application context to the virtual infrastructure administrators to monitor and manage the virtual infrastructure inventory objects and actions. Administrators can use Infrastructure Navigator to understand the impact of change on the virtual environment in their application infrastructure. Infrastructure Navigator helps virtual infrastructure administrators perform the following tasks:

• Make accurate first-level triage to help either eliminate the problem or associate the problem with the virtual infrastructure when business service users report problems.
• Assess change impact. Manage and communicate virtual infrastructure issues for critical applications.
• Understand the application and business impact of changes to the virtual infrastructure on applications.

The Open Source Licenses (OSL) file for the virtual appliance is available at /root/open_source_licenses.txt. You can retrieve the file by running the scp root@<appliance IP>:open_source_licenses.txt command.

Infrastructure Navigator is supported on vCenter Server 5.0 (build 455964 or later) with the vSphere Web Client (build 423753 or later). The supported ESX versions include ESX/ESXi 3.5 (build 425420), ESX/ESXi 4.0 (build 398348), ESX/ESXi 4.1 (build 433742), and all builds of ESXi 5.x.

More info at source.

The infrastucture has three Windows Server 2008 R2 hosts with Hyper-V enabled. Shared storage is a HP StorageWorks P2000 G3 MSA connected using iSCSI.

When the power was restored the Hyper-V hosts booted automatically. Three of the four Cluster Shared Volumes were back online without any problems. However the fourth CSV was not online. Trying to bring the volume online manualy resulted in a failed status. Event ID 1069 was shown in the eventlog of Failover Cluster Manager. Mmm, problem as a couple of critical virtual machines were running on this volume before the power failure. Houston, we have a problem.

In the iSCSI initiator paths to all four volumes were re-established automatically after the reboot. So the iSCSI fabric seemed to be functional.

Looking in the c:\clusterstorage  the volume4  (the missing volume) was not shown anymore on any of the three Hyper-V nodes.

The Windows eventlogs did not give much information on a possible cause of this issue. So we decided to run the  cluster.exe log /g command. The logfile with filename cluster.log is created in %systemroot%\cluster\reports. More info on cluster.exe on Microsoft.com

The cluster.log file showed for the failed volumesthis line PR reserve failed, status 170 . Other errors shown in the log were
Failed to preempt reservation, status 170
OnlineThread: Unable to arbitrate for the disk. Error: 170 OnlineThread: Error 170 bringing resource online

What we did next was using this PowerShell command on all of the Hyper-V nodes. To find out the number after Disk use Disk Management and find the disk id of the failed volume.

Cause
Not sure what caused the problem. It could be that because all three nodes where booting at the same time multiple nodes were trying to claim ownership of a LUN and corrupted the registration table of the HP MSA 2000.

I earlier explained Cluster Shared Volumes in a post titled Clustered Shared Volumes explained, design impact and best practises

HP has an article explaining PR registration.

RESOLUTION   The HP StorageWorks P2000 MSA Disk Arrays count total PR registrations on a system-wide basis until a limit of 1024 is reached. There might be one PR registration for every LUN up to a maximum of 128 per LUN until the 1024 system limit is reached. Reducing the number of PR registrations will eliminate the error and allow path failover to work correctly.

an explanation of reservations can be read in this thread.
Check the source for more information http://itinfras.blogspot.com/2010/03/storage-architecture-changes-for.html

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.

A great tool. Download here.

New in version 3.3:

•  GetWebResponse timeout value changed from 5 minutes to 10 minutes (for very big environments)
•  New tabpage with HBA information
•  On vDatastore tab the definition of the Provisioned MB and In Use MB columns  was confusing! This is changed now.
•  RVToolsSendMail accepts now multiple recipients (semicolon is used as separator)
•  Folder information of VMs and Templates are now visible on vInfo tabpage
•  Bugfix: data in comboboxes on filter form are now sorted
•  Bugfix: Problem with api version 2.5.0 solved
•  Bugfix: Improved exception handling on vCPU tab.
•  Bugfix: Improved exception handling on vDatastore tab.

Host: Scott Lowe, CTO, VMware Affinity Team, EMC
The abstract:

EMC VPLEX’s AccessAnywhere functionality, when coupled with the industry-leading virtualization solution VMware vSphere, enables new topologies, like stretched clusters. But is a stretched cluster the best solution? In this webcast, we’ll examine stretched clusters and VMware’s own Site Recovery Manager to determine which solution is the right solution for your organization.

Attend this session to learn to:

• Distinguish between stretched clusters and SRM-based topologies.
• Gain a better understanding of the technical requirements of each solution.
• Select the right solution based on your specific business requirement.

Registration at emc.com

Recently Veeam changed this policy. Veeam Essentials can be used to protect and manage (monitor & report)  any vSphere edition. It can be purchased in 2-socket bundles (used to be 6-socket bundle). The maximum number of sockets is still limited to six. Also Hyper-V costs can be protected since the release of version 6 of Veeam B&R.

More info at Veeam.com 

As I am always interested in stories from Microsoft about their solutions versus VMware I decided to view the recorded session. My review is at the end of this posting. For more features comparisons see my posting titled Microsoft Hyper-V 3.0 compared to VMware vSphere 5 

Summary of the session: with Window Server 2012 and System Center 2012 customers get a lot more functionality for a lower cost compared to VMware solutions.

The session  which lasts 1 hour 14 minutes can be viewed for free for all by going to the MMS2012 site. After login select Keynote and Sessions in the top menu, then Application Management. If you do not to bother about login:
The recording of session AM-B323 can be viewed here.
The PowerPoint slides can be downloaded here.

The abstract of the session is:
With the launch of Microsoft System Center 2012, Microsoft is bringing to market the most comprehensive and integrated datacenter and cloud management solution. When combined with Hyper-V, it enables customers to build autonomous, efficient and cost effective private clouds, and enables customers to focus on what’s important to them: their applications and services. In this session, we compare and contrast the Microsoft technologies with vSphere and vCenter from VMware, and showcase why Microsoft offers the best solution for your datacenter today and in the future.  (Speaker(s): Matt McSpirit; Vlad Joanvic)

I think it is a very good session. Everyone currently focused on VMware vSphere should spent some time to see what Microsoft is delevering with Hyper-V and SC2012. Although presented by a Microsoft employee I did not find much bias or incorrect information on the competitor. Ofcourse in all marketing only the current and future features of Hyper-V/SCVMM are compared to those of vSphere. Besides Fault Tolerance which was kind of downgrade the speaker did not notice vSphere features like SDRS, Storage I/O Control etc etc.

Matt McSpirit clearly explains what Hyper-V and SCVMM 2o12 has to offer and what VMware has to offer. The session explains a lot of about functionality and vision of Microsoft on private cloud and management of it. It explains the restrictions in functionality of vCenter Operations Suite. vCOPS is focused on the virtual machine and does not have knowledge of the workload running in it (Exchange, SQL, SharePoint etc).
The sessions explains the current features of Hyper-V version 2, the free Windows Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 SP1. Noticed a small mistake where a slide mentions ESXi 5.0 being the free hypervisor offer from VMware. Obviously the free hypervisor is called vSphere Hypervisor. In the last part of the session the new features of Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V are discussed. Lots of new features!  Even distributed switches seems to be a new feature of Hyper-V which I was not aware of. This is a version of Cisco’s Nexus 1000V Series switch designed to support Hyper-V. It is a distributed virtual switch that fits Hyper-V virtual machines with virtual Ethernet cards that can be managed via another component of the switch, Cisco’s Virtual Supervisor Module. Also I/O controls seem to be included in Hyper-V. See the slide at the end of this posting. I /think Microsoft will offer network i/o control but not storage i/o control.

Finally the costs of Microsoft versus VMware solution are compared. This is the typical apples to oranges compare which I discussed earlier in this posting: Mythbusting:Can a VMware private cloud cost 5 to 16 times more than Microsoft private cloud?

I do believe Microsoft has a strong valueable and cost effective solution for private cloud using Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012. We will have to see how well these new features will perform and work together. I am very curious how VMware will respond to this.

The slide below is taken from the session and shows the features of vSphere versus Hyper-V R2 and Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V.

This posting will describe some of the best practices I learned for designing and building a  MetroCluster and will give a high level overview of a NetApp Metrocluster.

If you are interested in this workshop: Altimate will organize the same workshop at May 8 in the Netherlands. See for more info of this free event at NetApp MetroCluster Best Practices & Installation Workshop 

Slides of the same sort of workshop can be downloaded here. The content of these slides:
Causes of Downtime
MetroCluster Overview
MetroCluster Deployment Scenarios
MetroCluster Failure Scenarios
New Features

Mind when using NetApp MetroCluster this configuration is not supported by VMware as it is not listed in the HCL. So far the only metrocluster storage supported for vSphere 5 is EMC vPLEX.

What is a MetroCluster?
MetroCluster allows for synchronous mirroring of volumes between two storage controllers providing storage high availability and disaster recovery. A MetroCluster configuration consists of two NetApp FAS controllers, each residing in the same datacenter or two different physical locations, clustered together. It provides recovery for any single storage component or multiple point failure, and single-command recovery in case of complete site disaster.

Designing and building a Metrocluster needs to be done with lots of care. The components used most be certified by NetApp or Brocade. Metrocluster might be marketed as easy and cost-effective but I do not agree for at least the setup and design part. Things like a witness site to prevent a split brain are not mentioned in the workshop.

These are the best practices and guidelines I learned:

-at April 20 NetApp released ONTAP 8.1. When 8.1 is installed the array could be complaining about incorrect cabling. NetApp requires to follow the guidelines in the Universal SAS and ACP Cabling Guide. Only way to get rid of the error/warning is re-cabling.

-check and double check the day you start assembling a MetroCluster the document titled ‘MetroCluster Compatibility Matrix’. Make sure only components listed in this document are used.

-make sure components used are listed in the Brocade Compatibility Matrix. If not listed and still used there is a good chance you are on your own when technical issues happen.

-roundtrip time or latency for a MetroCluster should be a max. of around 2 to 3 ms.
-SATA and SAS drives are supported. SSD drives not supported.
-currently only Brocade fiber switches are supported in a MetroCluster. In future when ONTAP 8.1.1 is released NetApp might support Cisco switches as well.

-a maximum number of  spindles is supported. 840 spindles when using ONTAP 7.35 and 8.0.1 or later
-for distances over 10 km you need an extended fabric license for the Brocade fiberswitches. I believe this enables the use of more buffer credits. Costs are around Euro 9000,- .  Mind Brocade/NetApp uses a 1.5 multiplier. If the distance of the fiber connection between two sites is more than 6.5 km you need to purchase an extended fabric license (6.5 x 1.5 = 10 km)
-if DWDM (transport multiple colours/wavelengths of fiber over the same connection) the DWDM most be 100 % transparent. No dynamic adjustment of buffers.
-if DWDM or CWDM are used make sure these are supported by Brocade
-support for Brocade is not done anymore by NetApp but only by Brocade itself.
-the full bandwith between two sites needs to be made available for storage replication traffic. Traffic shaping is not supported.
-only use OM3+ or better optical cables. OM1 and OM2 are not supported!
-make sure optical cables are cleaned before being installed. Even new cables. Special cleaning tools are available.

NetApp has a whitepaper available titled Best Practices for MetroCluster Design and Implementation (TR-3548), It can only be downloaded using an account which can be obtained for free by registering.
VMware had a nice KB article titled VMware support with NetApp MetroCluster

MMS is all about Microsoft System Center solutions, deployment tools and other management of a Microsoft infrastructure.  It offers over 175 breakout sessions across 5 technical tracks. That is a lot of content to take in! If you are unable to attend the event, or even if you will be there in person, you’ll be able to view any sessions, including keynotes, you may have missed within 24 hours of the live presentation on the Digital MMS site. Access is easy – just log in with your preferred social credentials, find the session you want, and click the Play icon.

To see the sessions go to http://www.mms-2012.com/digitalmms

If you like to download recorded sessions (.wmv format) for offline viewing see this PowerShell script by Stefan Roth.
If you like to download the PowerPoint presentations, see this download for a ZIP file containing all PPT files.

Mind not all sessions presented at MMS are listed in sessions.txt file. See for more sessions www.mms-2012.com/topic/list

Some examples of sessions presented at MMS2012:

Hyper-V Storage and Networking in Windows Server  8
Windows Server “8” Hyper-V revolutionizes the way your IT will use networking and storage. In this session, we cover the changes to the Windows Server “8″ Hyper-V storage and networking stack. We dive into the enhancements around the new virtual disk format, integrating new storage industry innovations around offloaded data transfer and large sector disks, and detail the new storage options for Hyper-V including Storage spaces and SMB file storage. We also overview Networking Virtualization, and new networking enhancements including NIC teaming, Quality of Service and the new Hyper-V Extensible Switch.

Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 to 2012: Things You Need to Know

Using Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 and want to get to know all the new features of System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager? Then this session is for you. This session provides a technical overview of Virtual Machine Manager 2012 to kick start your understanding of all new features and take your virtualization management to whole new levels. Relate the major capabilities of Virtual Machine Manager 2012 with your technical pain points in your environment, and learn about the full power that the System Center 2012 can now provide your virtualized environment.

Re-IP can be performed automatically using DR-tools like VMware Site Recovery Manager, Zerto Virtual Replicati0n or VirtualSharp ReliableDR.

To change IP-configuration of virtual machines Site Recovery Manager used the VIX API. This enables copying data to and from the VM and do all kind of adjustments. Nice but this could be a security issue. If your security policy says the VIX API should be disabled there is no way  SRM is able to change the IP-configuration.

Alternatives are using scripts or using DHCP and leases based on MAC-address of the VM.

Read more about this at the blogposting of  Michael Webster, a VMware Certified Design Expert and director of IT Solutions 2000 Ltd., a VMware consultancy based in Auckland, New Zealand.

Also reas this posting on blogs.vmware.com about issues on re-IP of vCenter Server using SRM

Techtarget.com has a posting about it titled VMware SRM 5 encounters potential security conundrums