Product Releases

VMware Press Releases “Managing and Optimizing VMware vSphere Deployments” For Pre-Order

July 24, 2012 by Josh Townsend Leave a Comment

VMware Press has released Managing and Optimizing VMware vSphere Deployments by Sean Crookston & Harley Stagner for pre-order on Amazon. The book is billed as “The Complete Guide to Planning, Deploying, and Operating High-Performance VMware vSphere 5 Virtual Infrastructure.” The description of the book on Amazon (copied below) sounds like this title will be well worth the price ($15 on the Kindle, $25 for the paperback).

To make the most of VMware’s vSphere 5, IT professionals need knowledge, tips, and insights they’ll never find in the manuals–or in any book, until now! In Managing and Optimizing VMware vSphere Deployments, two world-class VMware experts offer start-to-finish lessons for vSphere planning, implementation, operation, management, and troubleshooting: expert insights drawn from their unsurpassed “in-the-trenches” consulting experience.

Writing for experienced VMware professionals, the authors focus on high-value techniques optimized for the new vSphere 5, helping you establish frameworks that support your virtual infrastructure’s evolution for years to come. They present scenarios and examples drawn from real-world data, helping you address crucial issues ranging from sizing and performance to redundancy. The book concludes with a full case study that walks you through a design from inception through implementation and explores the reasons for each key decision.

Coverage includes:

Building a strong foundation for virtual infrastructure: design considerations and best practices

Smoothly integrating vSphere 5 into current environments and considerations

Establishing a more stable infrastructure

Choosing hardware and making optimal configuration decisions

Transforming your VMware design from blueprint to completion

Operating vSphere solutions more efficiently on a day-to-day basis

Automating tasks and maximizing availability

Streamlining the installation of updates, patches, and upgrades

Forecasting and planning capacity on an ongoing basis to support growth

Overcoming roadblocks on the journey to 100% virtualization

Monitoring vSphere 5 with tools provided by VMware and its community

Discovering the most valuable and current online VMware resources

Examples using Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) are provided throughout the book

I’ve got a good queue of books lined up already, but I’ll be ordering this book for my library.

VMware View 5.1 Announced

May 6, 2012 by Josh Townsend Leave a Comment

On May 2, 2012, VMware launched several new and updated products that comprise the End-User Computing Solutions. These products include Horizon Application Manager 1.5, VMware Project Octopus, VMware Zimbra 7.2, vCenter Operations for VMware View, and VMware View 5.1. All of these products together help IT take the next evolutionary step in the Post-PC era. Clearpath Solutions Group will be breaking down the full solution set for you, but today we want to focus on the first building block of the new End-User computing environment – VMware View 5.1. In VMware View 5.1, VMware introduced several new features that further reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) associated with deploying a virtual desktop infrastructure, promising increased performance with lower hardware costs, and simplified migration of desktops and user data into your company’s desktop computing cloud. A host of new storage-centric features introduced in VMware View 5.1 are the following:

VMware View Storage Accelerator – provides a ‘Content Based Read Cache’ for commonly read storage blocks. This will improve storage performance of Linked Clone desktops while reducing storage costs.

NFS Scaling – More vSphere ESXi hosts (up to 32) can be combined in a cluster connected to NFS storage to increase scalability of your virtual desktop cloud.

View Composer API for Array Integration (VCAI) – VCAI leverages native NFS capabilities to offload storage operations in a VMware View environment to the storage array.

Ability to place View Disposable Disks on datastores separate from View Linked Clone disks – this allows administrators to contain Linked Clone disk growth without consuming high-tier disk for disposable data.

Additional features introduced in this release improve both the View IT administrator and end-user experience. These enhancements include:

View Persona Management – Extended to physical desktops, simplifying the process of migrating user profile data from physical XP desktops to virtual Windows 7 desktops.

VMware vCenter Operations for VMware View – Automated deep insight into VMware View performance metrics with automated self-learning and alerting.

View Media Service – Ability to connect more types of peripherals to the View Desktop, adding multi-monitor support to View Local Mode.

New VMware View Clients – Updated versions of View clients will be made available for Mac, Windows, Linux, thin/zero clients, Apple iPad, Android, and Amazon Kindle Fire tablets. These new clients will further improve the user experience with optimized PCoIP support.

RADIUS Support – Enables more 2-factor authentication options.

View Administrator enhancements provide increased performance, simplified AD-object creation, and scalability for tens-of-thousands of View desktops.

View Composer component can be installed separate from vCenter, providing greater scalability and design choices for your View environment.

Stay tuned to the Clearpath Blog for more information on how these new features will help you realize improved IT operational efficiency while delivering optimized desktops services to users.

VMware Workstation 8.0.3 Released – Security Update

May 4, 2012 by Josh Townsend 2 Comments

VMware released an update to VMware Workstation 8.0.3 Build 703057 yesterday (May 3, 2012). The update is a security update addresses two vulnerabilities that would allow out-of-bounds memory writes on floppy and SCSI devices under certain conditions. The vulnerabilities may allow specially crafted attacks to crash the VMX process (i.e. crash the running VM) or theoretically execute commands on the host. The VMware Workstation 8.0.3 release notes can be found here: https://www.vmware.com/support/ws80/doc/releasenotes_workstation_803.html.

VMware’s security advisories for these vulnerabilities can be found here: https://www.vmware.com/security/advisories/VMSA-2012-0009.html.

Users of VMware Workstation should be prompted to update to the latest version when launching the application:

If you are not automatically prompted to update VMware Workstation, manually check for updates from the Help menu:

You can also download the full install package of VMware Workstation from https://www.vmware.com/products/workstation.

While not specifically mentioned in the release notes, I wonder if this update was prompted by the VMware source code leak described in the VMware Security Blog: https://blogs.vmware.com/security/2012/05/vmware-security-note.html. If so, kudos to VMware’s security and engineering teams for quickly identifying, fixing, and releasing updates to correct flaws that may be exposed through this code leak.

Free SAN Monitor for DS3300, MD3000i and others

May 7, 2010 by Josh Townsend 4 Comments

One of my most popular posts to date had been IBM DS3300 Write Performance Problem Solved. I am pleased to have upgrade my internal environment to an EMC Clariion CX4 array, but still have customers using the DS3300 and the MD3000i from Dell. For that reason, I keep an eye out for news on these arrays. You’ll recall that these arrays are based on the same LSI kit. Truth be told, properly designed and configured, these arrays are a technically proficient and cost efficient solution for SMB’s looking to get their VMware environments going.

While reviewing my email today I found an email from SolarWinds about their new Free SAN Monitor. I have used several products from SolarWinds in the past, and so thought I would give this a quick try. This tool can monitor the LSI-based arrays from Dell (including the MD3000 series), IBM (DS3000, DS4000, and DS5000), and SunStorageTek 2000 and 60000. Installation and configuration were both fast and easy. A wizard asked me for the array’s IP address, monitoring interval, and some thresholds (which I left blank). Once I clicked Finish the app launched on my desktop and immediately began to display data.

This screen-shot is of the app running on my Windows 7 x64 workstation. You’ll notice that the array is reporting performance, in terms of IOPS, and response time for individual LUNS. The health of my array is also displayed. You’ll see that my ‘Controller 2’ shows a failure. I do not have a dual-controller configuration (hence my wildly popular post on performance being in the tank due to a disabled write cache). The SAN Monitor incorrectly reported that I had two controllers, and that the 2nd is failed.

This is not bad for a free tool, in my opinion. I would love to see SolarWinds add some info on write cache status for the array (cache hit %, cache enabled per LUN, etc.) as well as LUN utilization in terms of free space remaining. For a free desktop GUI, it’s worth the 5 minutes to download and setup.

Reporting on I/O Response time (in milliseconds) is helpful in determining if your array is stressed. If response times are consistently above 15ms, you ought to look at adding some spindles. If you are over 25ms on a regluar basis, you’re likely feeling some pain on the servers generating the workload against your array.

If you are into the whole free tool thing, SolarWinds also has a free VM Monitor that is capable of monitoring a single ESX server via SNMP and it’s associated VM’s. It too runs as a desktop application, requiring minimal setup and configuration. While it won’t monitoring your whole VMware Essentials (3 ESX servers + vCenter) environment, it’s a start.

You might also check out Nick Weaver’s vSphere Mini Monitor for basic real-time alerts and monitors, as well as NetWrix’s Change Reporter for VMware. A final free (and nothing short of awesome) tool is Alan Renouf’s vCheck Daily Report PowerShell Script.

Do you have free tools, scripts or utilities for your VMware environment? I’d love to hear more about them in the comments section!

VMware Fusion Updated to 2.0.5

June 29, 2009 by Josh Townsend 3 Comments

While setting up a new 17″ MacBook Pro today I found that an update to VMware Fusion has been released. The update, version 2.0.5, has a release date of June 23. According to the release notes, the update includes:

Support for Mac OS X Server guest operating systems on Macs with Intel Xeon 5500 and 3500 Series processors (based on Nehalem micro-architecture)
Provides experimental support for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Server as a guest operating system (32-bit only)
Provides experimental support for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard as a host operating system (32-bit only)
Supports Ubuntu 9.04 as a guest operating system, including features such as VMware Tools pre-built modules and Easy Install
Reduces CPU usage when a virtual machine is idle under VMware Fusion
Contains fixes for more than 80 bugs

Download a trial version or update your purchased copy here: https://vmware.com/download/fusion/.