VMWare Resolves Some Issues

VMWare 5.1 Resolves Some Issues

Abstract:
With the advent of simple and cost effective virtualization under Solaris 10, Zones, LDoms, and Virtual Box - pressure has been placed upon dominate virtualization vendors to create less expensive alternatives. VMWare, after being purchased by EMC, had decided to move in the opposite direction, making purchasing of VMWare very difficult, with odd pricing constraints in ESXi 5.0 in July 2011. The market has moved to 2012 and ESXi 5.1 has been released, fixing some of VMWare's problems.

Compatibility Issue Resolved:
If customers wanted to move an older VM to newer hardware, the VM's needed to be upgraded. In other words, there was compatibility issues which needed to be resolved. VM's created under ESX Server 3.5 and later will now run under ESXi 5.1 unchanged. This is good news for service providers.

No Longer Windows Bound:
Customers who had VMWare ESXi were required to use a lousy Microsoft Windows platform to manage the VMWare platform. When managing an ESXi server in a DMZ, this makes little sense for a service provider. This has now been resolved, with a web interface.

Memory Tax Issue Resolved:
The pricing constraints of ESXi 5.0 forced service providers to have to decide - is VMWare the correct hypervisor for the job... is Windows and/or Linux worth the aggravation of being nickel and dimed to death? When trying to determine hardware and hypervisor pricing for a new cluster where one does not know exactly how much memory will be required per instance because infrastructure is being purchased by a managed services provider before the first customer deal is sold, how does one know how much to buy?

Clearly, EMC's VMWare did not have a clue. The confusion that the pricing placed upon managed service providers negatively impacted purchasing of other EMC software products such as ITOI (aka Ionix, aka SMARTS) and RSA Archer, enVision, etc. If a managed service provider can not determine what to buy, they will not buy from that vendor. Solaris is clearly the better choice for Network Management, and other vendors are clearly the better choice for tools bound to VMWare & Windows.

The removing of the memory constraints for ESXi 5.1 was a good move, to simplify pricing. EMC Software is now in a better position to compete against other virtualized platforms.

Outstanding Core Issues:
For reasonable flexibility in the data center environment, when there is a spike in usage, there needs to be a way to easily migrate heavy usage live instances to lower utilized hypervisors. Dynamic migration with autobalancing is included with Oracle LDom's, but not quite there yet with VMWare.

When dealing with network virtualization, if one is trying to emulate a WAN environment, one could spin up dozens of zones under a Solaris 11 platform, and apply the WAN characteristics to the virtual network (latency, throughput, etc.) Technology like Solaris Crossbow is missing from VMWare.

Conclusions:
VMWare is a great benefit to the Windows and Linux world, but constraints by the vendor made purchasing difficult and implementation less desirable. Some of the issues have been resolved, but management is not yet what it needs to be for managed service providers.

EMC Ionix: Enabling ESM SNMP Polling

Abstract:

In a converged world of EMC, who purchased SMARTS and VMWare, bundling various vendors into a single Ionix umbrella - functionality is slowly being hidden and removed, making managed services and enterprise management more difficult from a standards perspective. The ESM / EISM or Server Monitoring product is the latest product to start being dumbed-down by EMC.

The History:

With ESXi being a product of VMWare and VMWare being owned by EMC, the combined company offers a different management solution called VirtualCenter, which is highly proprietary. VirtualCenter is not an Managed Services grade product, able to run under multiple operating system platforms. The EISM or ESM product has traditionally been cross-platform, enabling Managed Service providers to manage servers, hypervisors, and applications processes all from a highly scalable central platform.

The Problem:

EMC is starting the process of crippling managed services products in their portfolio, so enterprise products can be emphasized through it's VMWare subsidiary, and additional tools (which were formerly not required for monitoring) would be a required purchased product.

By default, in recent versions of EMC Ionix ESM (or EISM) - the Server Monitoring solution - VMWare required Virtual Center to manage ESXi platforms, out of the box.

The Solution:

For Managed Service Providers, this is not an optimal solution. To revert back to the "standards" based methodology of managing servers - SNMP VMWare Discovery can be re-enabled manually.

sun9999/root$ cd /opt/InCharge8/ESM/smarts/bin
sun9999/root$ sm_edit conf/esm/DISCOVERY_VMWARE.import

#----- Register VMware VCenter Probe with TopologyManager-------#
ICF_TopologyManager::ICF-TopologyManager
{
# We get ASL error 'duplicate row' when we try to add a row again.
# To avoid this ASL error, first remove (we don't get ASL error if not found)
# a row then add it later.
types -= { "VCenterDiscovery","Java Probe to Discover VMware VCenter" }
types += { "VCenterDiscovery","Java Probe to Discover VMware VCenter" }
}

Remember to restart the ESM domain manager upon completion.

EMC Ionix: Field Certification of VMWare ESXi 4.0

Abstract:

The standard management protocol for managing systems is Simple Network Management Protocol. Enterprise and Managed Services vendors must support SNMP to be considered a player in the data center. VMWare ESXi offers SNMP capabilities, but tools such as EMC Ionix ESM requires a field certification in order to manage the basic capabilities.

Field Certification:

The following commands are used to perform the field certification:

sun9999/root# cd /opt/InCharge8/IP/smarts/bin
sun9999/root# sm_edit conf/discovery/oid2type_Field.conf

The following entry should be added, in order to perform the field certification:

# VMware 4 ESX server (vSphere )
.1.3.6.1.4.1.6876.4.1 {
TYPE = Host
VENDOR = VMWare
MODEL = ESX4.0
CERTIFICATION = CERTIFIED
CONT = Generic-MIB2
HOSTRESRCS = MIB2

INSTRUMENTATION:
Disk-Fault = HostResources:DeviceID
FileSystem-Performance = HostResources:DeviceID
CPU/Memory = HostResources:DeviceID
Interface-Fault = MIB2
Interface-Performance = MIB2
}

VMware architecture Essentials !!

Since VMware vSphere 4.1 and its subsequent update and patch releases are the last releases to include both ESX and ESXi hypervisor architectures & future major releases of VMware vSphere will include only the VMware ESXi architecture, it is important to understand the differences between the conventional ESX and the lean ESXi virtualization products from VMware.

Difference between the VMware ESX and ESXi 4.1

Capability	VMware ESX	VMware ESXi
Service Console	Service Console is a standard Linux environment through which a user has privileged access to the VMware ESX kernel. This Linux-based privileged access allows you to manage your environment by installing agents and drivers and executing scripts and other Linux-environment code.	VMware ESXi is designed to make the server a computing appliance. Accordingly, VMware ESXi behaves more like firmware than traditional software. VMware has created APIs through which monitoring and management tasks – traditionally done through Service Console agents – can be performed. VMware has provided remote scripting environments such as vCLI and PowerCLI to allow the remote execution of scripts and commands. Tech Support Mode (TSM) provides a command-line interface that can be used by the administrator to troubleshoot and correct abnormal conditions on VMware ESXi hosts.
CLI-Based Configuration	VMware ESX Service Console has a host CLI through which VMware ESX can be configured. VMware ESX can also be configured using vSphere CLI (vCLI) or vSphere PowerCLI.	The vSphere CLI (vCLI) is a remote scripting environment that interacts with VMware ESXi hosts to enable host configuration through scripts or specific commands. It replicates nearly all the equivalent COS commands for configuring ESX. VMware vSphere PowerCLI is a robust command-line tool for automathing all aspect of vSphere management, including host, network, storage, virtual machine, guest operating system, and more. Note: vCLI, PowerCLI, and vSphere SDk for Perl are limited to read-only access for the free vSphere Hypervisor edition. To enable full functionality of vCLI on a VMware ESXi host, the host must be licensed with vSphere Essentials, vSphere Essential Plus, vSphere Standard, vSphere Advanced, vSphere Enterprise, or vSphere Enterprise Plus. Certain COS commands have not been implemented in the vCLI because they pertain to the management of the COS itself and not ESXi.
Scriptable Installation	VMware ESX supports scriptable installations through utilities like KickStart.	VMware ESXi supports scriptable installations using a mechanism similar to Kickstart, and includes the ability to run pre- and post-installation scripts. VMware ESXi also provides support for post installation configuration using PowerCLI- and vCLI-based configuration scripts.
Boot from SAN	VMware ESX supports boot from SAN. Booting from SAN requires one dedicated LUN per server.	VMware ESXi may be booted from SAN. This is supported for Fibre Channel SAN, as well as iSCSI and FCoE for certain storage adapters that have been qualified for this capability.
Serial Cable Connectivity	VMware ESX supports interaction through direct-attached serial cable to the VMware ESX host.	VMware ESXi does not support interaction through direct-attached serial cable to the VMware ESXi host at this time.
SNMP	VMware ESX supports SNMP.	VMware ESXi supports SNMP when licensed with vSphere Essentials, vSphere Essential Plus, vSphere Standard, vSphere Advanced, vSphere Enterprise, or vSphere Enterprise Plus. The free vSphere Hypervisor edition does not support SNMP.
Active Directory Integration	VMware ESX provides native support for Active Directory integration.	VMware ESXi provides native support for Active Directory integration.
HW Instrumentation	Service Console agents provide a range of HW instrumentation on VMware ESX.	VMware ESXi provides HW instrumentation through CIM Providers. Standards-based CIM Providers are distributed with all versions of VMware ESXi. VMware partners include their own proprietary CIM Providers in customized versions of VMware ESXi. These customized versions are available either from VMware’s web site or the partner’s web site, depending on the partner. Remote console applications like Dell DRAC, HP iLO, IBM RSA, and FSC iRMC S2are supported with ESXi.
Software Patches and Updates	VMware ESX software patches and upgrades behave like traditional Linux based patches and upgrades. The installation of asoftware patch or upgrade may require multiple system boots as the patch or upgrade may have dependencies on previous patches or upgrades.	VMware ESXi patches and updates behave like firmware patches and updates. Any given patch or update is all-inclusive of previous patches and updates. That is, installing patch version “n” includes all updates included in patch versions n-1, n-2, and so forth. Furthermore, third party components such as OEM CIM providers can be updated independently of the base ESXi component, and vice versa.
vSphere Web Access	vSphere Web Access is only experimentally supported in VMware ESX.	VMware ESXi does not support web access at this time.
Diagnostics and Troubleshooting	VMware ESX Service Console can be used to issue command that can help diagnose and repair support issues with the server.	VMware ESXi has several ways to enable support of the product: Remote command sets such as the vCLI include diagnostic commands such as vmkfstools, resxtop, and vmware-cmd. The console interface of VMware ESXi (known as the DCUI or Direct Console User Interface) has functionality to help repair the system, including restarting of all management agents. Tech Support Mode, which allows low-level access to the system so that advanced diagnostic commands can be issues.
Jumbo Frames	VMware ESX 4.1 fully supports Jumbo Frames.	VMware ESXi 4.1 fully supports Jumbo Frames.