VMware vCloud Director 5.1.2 Released

April 28, 2013 by 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 by 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 by 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 by 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 by 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 by 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 Backup/restore and disaster recovery, VMware solutions, Windows Azure, Azure Virtual Machine

vOpenData gives insight in VMware infrastructure statistics

April 18, 2013 by 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

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