Copyright © 2012 - IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved.
When should N+1 not Equal 1 Host with VMware HA?
May 13, 2012
12 comments
High Availability is a key consideration for any VMware vSphere Design. VMware HA is a very easy and effective tool that you should always enable to improve VM availability. vSphere 5 introduces a considerably enhanced mechanism to achieve high availability that removes the limitations of the previous versions. As a result it is much more easily achievable to have clusters that contain a far larger number of hosts.With the enhancements to VMware HA in vSphere 5 there are some considerations that are important to take into account, especially in blade environments, to achieve adequate availability in different failure scenarios. With much larger clusters and also with clusters that will contain business critical workloads it’s important that you consider HA not just in terms of N+1 hosts, but also when N+1 does not equal 1 host.
Categories: VMware, Business Critical Applications
VMware, vSphere 5, VMware HA
Meet the new VMware vExperts for 2012
April 30, 2012
Leave a comment
All the submissions are in and have been processed and the new vExperts of 2012 have been announced. I am very fortunate and honored to have been awarded vExpert for 2012. This is in recognition for all of the work I do in the VMware Community, and behind the scenes, and across the globe. So who else is on the list, why should you care, and how do you get to be on the list yourself?
An Unbroken Chain of Trust is of Paramount Importance
April 29, 2012
1 comment
There has been a lot of coverage over the past week about Anonymous’ Hardcore Charlie releasing some old 2003/2004 code of the VMware ESX Hypervisor on the Internet. The release of the code may not cause anyone any immediate increased risk of attack. If you want to know why keep reading.
vSphere 5 Security Hardening Guide – Public Draft
April 19, 2012
1 comment
The vSphere 5 Security Guide has been released publicly in draft form for comment. There are a number of changes and enhancements and you should go through each to review the applicability to your environment. Here is one of the highlights of the new version from my perspective and links through to the documents. It’s hard work putting this hardening guide together so thanks to Charu, Ben, Grant and Kyle, and the rest of the VMware Team for all their hard work on this.
Categories: Business Critical Applications, VMware
CA Certificates, Custom CA, SSL Certificate, VMware, vSphere 5
Problem with vSphere 5 HA and Storage vMotion when VM on vDS
April 13, 2012
1 comment
There is a problem with svMotion in vSphere 5 when the VM is on a vDS that causes HA to be unable to restart the VM in case of a failure. This has implications for anyone using svMotion and especially for anyone making use of Storage DRS. If you are currently using vSphere 5 or are planning to use vSphere 5 you need to know about this problem and how to work around it.
Categories: Business Critical Applications, VMware
Storage DRS, Storage vMotion, vMotion, VMware, vSphere 5, vSphere HA
vSphere Security Hardening Policy and SRM 5
April 13, 2012
14 comments
VMware is in the process of working on the vSphere 5 edition of the Security Hardening Guide and will shortly make a public draft available for comment (I’ll let you know when it’s available). This will be great news to the many people who have been waiting patiently for it since the vSphere 5 release. A lot of work is going into making this edition of the Security Hardening Guide much more user friendly and easier to use and implement. Many of the locked down items will be the same as in 4.1, and of course some changes and enhancements too. Another difference this time around is there are now new implications and restrictions on functionality introduced by the recommendations due to changes at least one popular VMware vCenter Management Tool. This is where Site Recovery Manager (SRM) v5 comes into the picture.
Blueprint for Successful Large Scale Oracle Virtualization on vSphere
April 11, 2012
4 comments
I recently attended a Webinar on the topic of Virtualizing Business Critical Oracle systems presented by a very large company that had started their journey back in 2004 and so far successfully virtualized 86% of their systems, including some of the most critical Oracle systems. After the Webinar I decided to go back and re-read the whitepaper they had published regarding their journey a few months ago to refresh myself on it’s contents. The whitepaper is one of the best I have read, and the presentation on the Webinar was one of the best I had attended. What they laid out was a successful blueprint and framework for how any company might successfully virtualize business critical Oracle systems, and it is definitely a must read. I’ll discuss some of the main points I think are important and what I got out of it, then you can read it yourself and make up your own mind.
Categories: Business Critical Applications, VMware
Oracle, Oracle 11i, Oracle RAC, VMware, vSphere EMC
Etherchannel and IP Hash or Load Based Teaming?
April 10, 2012
9 comments
Etherchannel or Load Based Teaming has been a popular topic of conversation ever since Load Based Teaming was introduced in vSphere 4.1. Generally the consideration for Etherchannel starts because people are not aware that Load Based Teaming exists as an option, they are not familiar with how virtual networking in vSphere works, or they’ve just always used it. It is quite common for non VMware Admins to think the virtual networking in vSphere acts just like a normal server in which one uplink is active and the others are strictly for failover with no load balancing capability. This is not the case with vSphere and of the five available teaming options only one provides failover only without any load balancing, the four other options all provide load balancing of multiple host uplinks. If you want to know if you should use Etherchannel or Load Based Teaming, and why, keep reading.
Categories: Business Critical Applications, VMware
Etherchannel, IP-Hash, LBT, Load Based Teaming, VMware, vSphere 4.1, vSphere 5
Updating SSL Certificate in vShield Manager Made Easy
March 31, 2012
3 comments
I was contacted recently by Maish Saidel-Keesing (@maishsk), who is a vExpert, fellow tweeter and top 50 virtualization blogger at technodrone.blogspot.com asking if I had updated the SSL Certs in vShield Manager at all. At this point I have updated quite a lot of certs for customers and in my lab but vShield wasn’t one of them and it was still firmly on my To Do list. He challenged me to see if I could get it working, so I set about updating my vShield Manager SSL Certs and helped Maish do the same in his environment. It wasn’t quite as hard as some of the other tools when it comes to changing SSL Certs, but it wasn’t entirely straight forward either. If you want to know how to do it the easy way, read on.
Categories: Business Critical Applications, VMware
Custom CA, SSL Certificates, VMware, vShield
Using vCenter Heartbeat to Protect Non-vCenter SQL DB? Think Again!
March 30, 2012
Leave a comment
I’ve been doing a lot of work with vCenter Heartbeat recently, which is a product I really like and my customers appreciate and see a lot of value from. I was very fortunate to get an opportunity to speak to the product manager about the product in quite a lot of depth. While I can’t tell you anything that is covered by NDA, I can tell you some interesting and important information that has come out of these conversations. This is extremely relevant to vCloud Directory environments where SQL is being used as the database, and also Enterprise environments using vCenter Heartbeat that have other VMware Management Tools such as Site Recovery Manager.
