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ESXi Chronicles: VMworld 2010 Wrap-up

Planet VMware - Wed, 2010-09-08 11:49

It sure was a busy week at VMworld 2010 for the ESXi team at VMware, what with the big focus on ESXi migration. Numerous sessions (including several by yours truly) focused on ESXi and related topics, such as vMA and scripting. In case you missed them, and have a VMworld account, here is a (partial) list of ESXi-related sessions that you can view as soon as they are posted.

TA9767: Why You Should Migrate to ESXi with vSphere 4.1 – we had one of our customers, Travis Goodfellow of Medtronic, on stage with us to talk about his experience with ESXi, which they’ve been running in production for quite some time now.
SS8222: Transitioning to ESXi – this session was more technical, and provided a survey of the differences between ESXi and ESX, focusing on aspects that affect day-to-day management.
TA8245: ESXi Internals: Better Understanding for Better Management and Troubleshooting – one of the principal ESXi engineers, Olivier Cremel, presented a deep dive into the inner workings of ESXi.
MA6580: Bridge the ESX/ESXi Management Gap Using the vSphere Management Assistant (vMA) - Tips & Tricks Included – the presenters gave a very nice overview of vMA, including instructions and recommendations for deploying and configuring, as well as examples of how to use vMA to manage ESXi hosts.

Of course, there was more: hands-on lab exercises on ESXi management (part of the vSphere 4.1 lab) and scripting, as well as even more sessions and labs on PowerCLI (which represents a much more powerful alternative to COS scripting).

We all had a great time meeting our customers and talking about ESXi. Everybody I met said that, once they learned about the new features of ESXi in vSphere 4.1 (as described in an earlier blog), they felt comfortable about making the transition. Even long-time, die-hard adherents to the classic ESX version told me that they felt ready to move on. Plus, the fact that you can mix ESXi and ESX hosts in the same cluster, and can mix both 4.0 and 4.1 hosts in the same cluster as well, makes it possible to have a smooth transition.

Next, it’s off to Copenhagen for VMworld Europe 2010 on October 12!

Categories: VMware

Office of the CTO Blogs: Beyond Infrastructure

Planet VMware - Wed, 2010-09-08 10:19

Welcome to the VMware CTO community site! I'm really excited to join forces with the other members of the office of the CTO in what I hope will be an open, interesting discussion about VMware's future.

Since I'm one of the new faces in the CTO office, perhaps I should start by offering a bit of background. I've been at VMware for just over a year, having joined the company as part of its acquisition of SpringSource last year. Prior to SpringSource I was the CEO and co-founder of Hyperic, a web infrastructure monitoring and management product which is now part of the vFabric Platform. Over the last 13 years I've been fortunate to work as an engineer and architect on a number of innovative enterprise software companies (Netscape was my first job out of college!) as well as a number of startups. Throughout this period I've been involved in the design and development of new infrastructure technologies like application servers and management platforms. I’ve also lived through the difficult task of implementing and supporting them at scale. It's been a great opportunity to witness the giant steps we've taken in IT as well as experience some of the ugliness that comes with such rapid innovation and change in such a critical part of a business. This experience, for better or worse, has shaped my views on the real changes that IT needs to make in order to get ahead of the game.

The last year since I've joined VMware has been an incredibly interesting time for the company. 18 months ago few would have imagined that VMware would be able to evolve from a leader in virtualization infrastructure into areas beyond its traditional expertise. With the help of some extremely talented people and the support of our customers VMware has expanded its leadership to include new development, runtime, and management technologies that are delivering the same revolutionary changes to IT that our core virtualization technology has offered for the last decade. It was amazing to witness this excitement and support firsthand at last week’s VMworld 2010 here in San Francisco.

Our stated mission (which Paul shared in his keynote speech) is to enable the delivery of IT as a service; reducing complexity and helping our customers deal with their infrastructure, applications, and services as "a secure, manageable, compliant whole". In order to fulfill this mission, it is crucial for VMware to recognize that IT today is comprised of much more than the servers and applications that live inside a company's own datacenter. Today's IT includes a wide (and growing) range of technologies delivered and consumed with minimal touch points with existing infrastructure. From things like Gmail and Google Apps that provide alternatives to existing desktop apps, to more business focused applications like Salesforce.com and Workday that are used to manage some of the most important functions in a company. Rather than resist this inevitable new force in IT, VMware plans to seize the opportunity to help define how applications and services that are delivered via this now well proven model can be built, provisioned, managed, and consumed by our customers. Key strategic partnerships like VMforce and the recent acquisition of Tricipher are good examples of our commitment to take an active role in the growing world of software as a service.

I’m very excited to work with VMware’s many technology leaders to help define the evolution of our strategy from infrastructure leadership into new SaaS & application services. In keeping with the great examples set by my colleagues in the CTO office, I look forward to engaging each of you in an open dialogue as we go through this journey.

Categories: VMware

VROOM!: HPC Application Performance on ESX 4.1: Stream

Planet VMware - Wed, 2010-09-08 09:11

Recently VMware has seen increased interest in migrating High Performance Computing (HPC) applications to virtualized environments. This is due to the many advantages virtualization brings to HPC, including consolidation, support for heterogeneous OSes, ease of application development, security, job migration, and cloud computing (all described here). Currently some subset of HPC applications virtualize well from a performance perspective. Our long-term goal is to extend this to all HPC apps, realizing that large-scale apps with the lowest latency and highest bandwidth requirements will be the most challenging. Users who run HPC apps are traditionally very sensitive to performance overhead, so it is important to quantify the performance cost of virtualization and properly weigh it against the advantages. Compared to commercial apps (databases, web servers, and so on), which are VMware’s bread-and-butter, HPC apps place their own set of requirements on the platform (OS/hypervisor/hardware) in order to execute well. Two common ones are low-latency networking (since a single app is often spread across a cluster of machines) and high memory bandwidth. This article is the first in a series that will explore these and other HPC performance subjects. Our goal will always be to determine what works, what doesn’t, and how to get more of the former. The benchmark reported on here is Stream, which is a standard tool designed to measure memory bandwidth. It is a “worst case” micro-benchmark; real applications will not achieve higher memory bandwidth.

Configuration

All tests were performed on an HP DL380 with two Intel X5570 processors, 48 GB memory (12 × 4 GB DIMMs), and four 1-GbE NICs (Intel Pro/1000 PT Quad Port Server Adapter) connected to a switch. Guest and native OS is RHEL 5.5 x86_64. Hyper-threading is enabled in the BIOS, so 16 logical processors are available. Processors and memory are split between two NUMA nodes. A pre-GA lab version of ESX 4.1 was used, build 254859.

Test Results

The OpenMP version of Stream is used. It is built using a compiler switch as follows:

gcc -O2 -fopenmp stream.c -o stream

The number of simultaneous threads is controlled by an environment variable:

export OMP_NUM_THREADS=8

The array size (N) and number of iterations (NTIMES) are hard-wired in the code as N=108 (for a single machine) and NTIMES=40. The large array size ensures that the processor cache provides little or no benefit. Stream reports maximum memory bandwidth performance in MB/sec for four tests: copy, scale, add, and triad (see the above link for descriptions of these). M stands for 1 million, not 220. Here are the native results, as a function of the number of threads:

Table 1. Native memory bandwidth, MB/s

Threads

Copy

6388

12163

20473

26957

26312

Scalar

5231

10068

17208

25932

26530

Add

7070

13274

21481

29081

29622

Triad

6617

12505

21058

29328

29889

Note that the scaling starts to fall off after two threads and the memory links are essentially saturated at 8 threads. This is one reason why HPC apps often do not see much benefit from enabling Hyper-Threading. To achieve the maximum aggregate memory bandwidth in a virtualized environment, two virtual machines (VMs) with 8 vCPUs each were used. This is appropriate only for modeling apps that can be split across multiple machines. One instance of stream with N=5×107 was run in each VM simultaneously so the total amount of memory accessed was the same as in the native test. The advanced configuration option preferHT=1 is used (see below). Bandwidths reported by the VMs are summed to get the total. The results are shown in Table 2: just slightly greater bandwidth than for the corresponding native case.

Table 2. Virtualized total memory bandwidth, MB/s, 2 VMs, preferHT=1

Total threads

Copy

12535

22526

27606

27104

Scalar

10294

18824

26781

26537

Add

13578

24182

30676

30537

Triad

13070

23476

30449

30010

It is apparent that the Linux “first-touch” scheduling algorithm together with the simplicity of the Stream algorithm are enough to ensure that nearly all memory accesses in the native tests are “local” (that is, the processor each thread runs on and the memory it accesses both belong to the same NUMA node). In ESX 4.1 NUMA information is not passed to the guest OS and (by default) 8-vCPU VMs are scheduled across NUMA nodes in order to take advantage of more physical cores. This means that about half of memory accesses will be “remote” and that in the default configuration one or two VMs must produce significantly less bandwidth than the native tests. Setting preferHT=1 tells the ESX scheduler to count logical processors (hardware threads) instead of cores when determining if a given VM can fit on a NUMA node. In this case that forces both memory and CPU of an 8-vCPU VM to be scheduled on a single NUMA node. This guarantees all memory accesses are local and the aggregate bandwidth of two VMs can equal or exceed native bandwidth. Note that a single VM cannot match this bandwidth. It will get either half of it (because it’s using the resources of only one NUMA node), or about 70% (because half the memory accesses are remote). In both native and virtual environments, the maximum bandwidth of purely remote memory accesses is about half that of purely local. On machines with more NUMA nodes, remote memory bandwidth may be less and the importance of memory locality even greater.

Summary

In both native and virtualized environments, equivalent maximum memory bandwidth can be achieved as long as the application is written or configured to use only local memory. For native this means relying on the Linux “first-touch” scheduling algorithm (for simple apps) or implementing explicit mechanisms in the code (usually difficult if the code wasn’t designed for NUMA). For virtual a different mindset is needed: the application needs to be able to run across multiple machines, with each VM sized to fit on a NUMA node. On machines with hyper-threading enabled, preferHT=1 needs to be set for the larger VMs. If these requirements can be met, then a valuable feature of virtualization is that the app needs to have no NUMA awareness at all; NUMA scheduling is taken care of by the hypervisor (for all apps, not just for those where Linux is able to align threads and memory on the same NUMA node). For those apps where these requirements can’t be met (ones that need a large single instance OS), current development focus is on relaxing these requirements so they are more like native, while retaining the above advantage for small VMs.

Categories: VMware

VMware Support Insider: vCloud Director KB articles

Planet VMware - Wed, 2010-09-08 07:20

During the VMworld conference in San Francisco last week we went live with 60 KB articles and 12 videos to coincide with the vCloud Director announcement. Some of you have already shown your appreciation for content so soon after general availability.

As customers and TSEs become more familiar with vCloud Director, we will be creating and publishing even more content. In the meantime, this first batch is designed to help you get started with the product.

This launch was a truly a coordinated effort that was made possible by the hard work of many individuals. Thanks go to Arunkumar Pandey and Anand Prakash, who worked diligently to create the bulk of the articles, and to Ganesh Shetty, who made sure that licensing information for vCloud Director and Per Virtual Machine licensing was available.

We’ve never gone GA before with this many videos, and thanks for that go to Graham Daly, who coordinated the effort, and to Feidhlim O'Leary, who assisted him.

1026090

Licensing VMware Cloud Director

1025768

Configuring Oracle databases for VMware Cloud Director (video)

1026084

VMware Cloud Director 1.0 installation requirements (video)

1026312

Collecting diagnostic information for VMware Cloud Director (video)

1026313

Creating Microsoft Sysprep packages on VMware vCloud Director cell (video)

1026299

Creating External (Provider) Networks (video)

1026300

Creating network pools in VMware vCloud Director (video)

1026168

vShield Manager Installation for VMware vCloud Director (video)

1026316

Creating an Organization in VMware vCloud Director (video)

1026324

Catalogs in VMware vCloud Director (video)

1026339

VMware vCloud Director components (video)

1026866

Attaching a vCenter Server to VMware vCloud Director (video)

1026381

Installing VMware vCloud Director software on the first server (video)

1026382

Installing VMware vCloud Director software on additional servers

1026296

Creating a Provider Virtual Data Center in VMware vCloud Director

1026320

Creating an Organization Virtual Data Center in VMware vCloud Director

1026314

Lifecycle of a Provider Virtual Data Center and Organization Virtual Data Center

1026297

Checking logging for successful creation of a Provider Virtual Data Center

1026286

VMware vCloud Director Architecture and Terms

1026288

VMware vCloud Director and VMware vCenter Lab Manager Comparison

1026310

Stopping, starting, or restarting the VMware vCloud Director service

1026317

Troubleshooting guest operating system customization issues using VMware vCloud Director

1026322

Viewing the virtual machine console in VMware Cloud Director running 32-bit Mozilla Firefox on 64-bit Unix

1022259

Creating additional cells in VMware vCloud Director fails with errors

1025709

Accessing a VMware vCloud Director cell fails with the error: A remote error was encountered

1026088

VMware vCloud Director 1.0 network requirements

1026298

VMware vCloud Director networking

1026384

Configuring network and database connections for VMware vCloud Director

1026264

Verifying that an ESX/ESXi host is configured for network isolation

1026309

Generating SSL certificates for VMware vCloud Director

1026290

Allocation Models for Organizations using vCloud Director

1026291

VMware vCloud Director OSGi Container

1026292

VMware vCloud Director Cell Architecture

1026293

VMware vCloud Director Remote Console Proxy

1026294

VMware vCloud Director multi-cell features

1026295

Database support in VMware vCloud Director

1026735

Supported browsers for VMware vCloud Director

1026328

Virtual switch support for VMware vCloud Director

1026322

Viewing the virtual machine console in VMware vCloud Director using 32-bit Mozilla Firefox running on 64-bit Unix

1026326

Joining a Windows guest domain using VMware vCloud Director

1026337

Configuring the VMware vCloud Director cell maintenance message

1026327

Deploying a vApp from a vApp template

1026379

Customizing a Solaris vApp Template

1026377

Customizing a Windows NT vApp Template

1025716

Unable to remove vCenter Server or an ESX host from vCloud Director

1026815

Configuring logging for VMware vCloud Director cells

1026351

Hourly usage data in VMware vCloud Director

1026548

Per Virtual Machine Licensing

1026479

Assigning a vShield for VMware vCloud Director license key in vCenter Server

1026454

vCloud Data Collector in VMware vCenter Chargeback 1.5

1026412

Key features of VMware vCenter Chargeback 1.5

1026395

VMware vCenter Chargeback 1.5 components and services

1026068

Purging samples before upgrading to VMware vCenter Chargeback 1.5

1026347

Minimum system requirements for installing VMware vCenter Chargeback 1.5

1026746

Disabling Security Center anti-virus notifications for vShield Endpoint

1022135

Backing up the vShield Manager database

1026257

Command Line Interface for vShield Manager 4.1 and vShield Edge 1.0

1026259

Installing vShield Edge fails with the error: Edge is powered-off

1026255

Overview of vShield Manager 4.1 logs

Categories: VMware

VMware Support Insider: Ask Support Anything video series

Planet VMware - Wed, 2010-09-08 05:37

If you could request anything you could imagine from VMware Support, what would it be?

We want to expand our video collection on KBTV to include more than just Knowledge Base articles. We have very some knowledgeable staff keen on answering your questions in a video format – we just need your questions!!

Is there part of our technology you'd like a better understanding of?
What are the essential pieces that helped you put it all together, that someone else could benefit from?
Do you have a certain scenario you want help with?

Just one rule – no questions about future products or timelines. We're not allowed to answer those. Other than that, most everything goes!

Leave your suggestion in the comment space below, or tweet me @vmwarekb

Categories: VMware

Rethink IT: Virtual Data Centers -- The Goldilocks of Enterprise Cloud Computing

Planet VMware - Wed, 2010-09-08 02:00

It’s no surprise that just about every customer likes the on-demand, rapid scale nature of cloud computing.

More interestingly, we also heard from enterprises with public cloud experience that this was a double-edged sword. Dynamic and on-demand can also mean unpredictable and hard to control. As one customer explained to me, “We have no idea what the credit card bill is going to be at the end of the month, and we have a finite budget”. In other words, dynamic is great if your budget is dynamic too – which isn’t the nature of budgets and finance folk. And this was for one application. Just imagine a situation where an IT department is providing raw compute to many different business units, and wants to delegate administration to them but also stick to a budget.

Fundamentally, the tension between on-demand infrastructure and predictable costs isn’t going to go away anytime soon. But I do believe that the concept of virtual data centers can provide a “Goldilocks” middle ground solution. Within vCloud Datacenter Services from VMware’s partners, enterprises can subscribe to committed VDCs of a given size. The cost of that VDC is fixed and predictable -- related to the amount of resources that are now committed. This puts a control boundary on costs, and your service provider can tell you exactly what that will be – so you get predictable spending against your budget.

Within that VDC, you and your user population can run, start and stop as many VMs as you like – truly dynamic self-service. End-users can never run up a massive bill through over-consumption, because they can never consume more resources than the VDC provides (and vCloud Director offers automated policy controls to clean up forgotten VMs). If it turns out you need a bigger or smaller VDC, you open a ticket with your service provider to make that change. So you haven’t had to give up on-demand compute infrastructure, either.

Perhaps not surprisingly, when “cloudy” types gather over drinks this is a source of vigorous debate. Can opening a ticket really be on-demand? Frankly, I don’t think there will ever be agreement on that, but it does provide a useful middle ground: on-demand self-service for VMs within the boundaries of a virtual data center, which can itself be scaled up or down quicker than you can fill out a PO for a new server. It’s something a geek Goldilocks would love—and understand.

Categories: VMware

Office of the CTO Blogs: Security is a major theme at VMworld 2010.

Planet VMware - Tue, 2010-09-07 20:30

Allwyn Sequeira, VP Security & Network Solutions, VMware

I’m just winding down from a whirlwind trip through VMworld 2010 – days filled with sessions and meetings, and nights filled with celebratory events! Nice to see that the show continues to be very technology focused, with participants from around the world eager to learn and share the advances being made on so many fronts.

Security was a major theme this year, driven by three major forces:

Enterprises are well down the path of virtualization, and as more critical assets get virtualized, security and compliance come to the fore.
With so much interest in the benefits of cloud computing and infrastructure as a service, secure multi-tenancy is a top of mind issue.
The security industry itself has been under siege for a while now, trying to keep up with the ever increasing volume of threats, while trying to avert endpoint and network bottlenecks. Virtualization and the associated scale out, agile architectures hold promise to achieve “better security with virtualization”.

VMware launched 3 products under the vShield umbrella, to secure virtualized environments all the way from the edge to the endpoint:

vShield Endpoint: Enables offloading guest security agents to per-host security VMs.
vShield App: Virtualizes network security, and enables mixed trust zones per host.
vShield Edge: Virtualizes data center edge services i.e. FW, NAT, DHCP, VPN & Load Balancer.

A quick note on the vShield concept – these represent purpose-built, security VMs, that are distributed across the cluster in a scale out fashion, and are proximate to the resources being protected, while taking advantage of virtualization concepts like introspection, programmable insertion and mobile policies. We believe “virtual shields” are a key element of next generation security architectures, and where existing, static, scale-up firewalls and security devices/agents need to head, to take advantage of the VMware stack.

The vShield product line is managed by vShield Manager, which represents VMware’s point of integration for its security and wiring products. vShield Manager exposes all of the vShield product line features through the vShield API set, which is a RESTful set of APIs. vCloud Director, for example, integrates some of the vShield Edge capability, into its provisioning portal.

We announced partnerships around the vShield Manager concept with Cisco, Intel, McAfee, RSA, Symantec and Trend Micro, to further work towards presenting a unified security framework for VMware’s customers. We believe the framework and partnerships will significantly simplify security architectures for our customers, and leave us well poised to move to secure hybrid clouds.

The products were well received, and it was nice to see the vShield products get Best of Show for Security!

A quick note on some of the sessions I was involved with:

In my session SE8389 - Architectural Overview of Virtualization Security for the Private Cloud, we talked through our rationale & strategy for VMware security, with the vShield products representing a significant step in this direction. Whilst there is a lot of talk about public clouds, the bigger story is enterprises taking advantage of the benefits of cloud computing, by embracing secure hybrid clouds. From a security vantage point, we talked about four key areas we’re investing in, to make this happen:

Virtualize security: The first step is virtualizing security hardware, and guest security agents. Much like server, desktop, storage and network virtualization led to disruptive architectures, likewise security virtualization will dramatically accelerate the journey to secure clouds.
Build in security into the 3 layer VMware stack: We need to weave in security into the 3 layers of the virtualization/cloud stack i.e. cloud infrastructure, cloud apps, and end user computing. Different layers demand different areas of focus, all the way from roots of trust, end point security, virtualization infrastructure security, to app/data/id based security and edge security.
Create a unified framework to tie together policies and trust zones: Rather than have tens of solutions hit the customer, it is important to tie these together in a unified fashion. We believe some of the key notions are “Trust Zones”, “Policy-based security” and “RESTful Services”.
Make Secure VDCs (Virtual Data Centers) the next unit of virtualization and cloud computing: Once the above constructs are in place, we can encapsulate VMs, their wiring and their security policies into a higher level “Secure VDC” construct, that can be built, instantly stood up, migrated, federated, etc. Visio diagrams come to life!

SE8520 - Panel Discussion - Private Cloud - Virtualization Security and Compliance, Meeting PCI Standards

This was a nice, relaxed session with lot’s of audience participation, talking through issues of compliance in the virtualization and cloud world, with industry experts Neil MacDonald from Gartner, Bret Hartman from RSA, and Christopher Hoff from Cisco. Hoff did provide some comic relief, when he opened up to show a magic quadrant, carefully drawn up on his shirt. Here he is in pre-game warm-ups…

That’s about it for now. Lot’s to talk about. I’ll continue to provide more color in further posts.

Thanks, and your comments are most welcome!

/Allwyn

Categories: VMware

Release: Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware

Virtualization.info - Tue, 2010-09-07 19:05

During the recently ended VMworld conference (see virtualization.info live coverage), VMware announced a remarkable number of new products. A very interesting one is Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) for VMware.

In mid June VMware and Novell announced an OEM agreement to offer a copy of SLES for each licensed copy of vSphere 4.1.
More than that, the SLES license includes patches and updates. But the two companies didn’t include technical support: that one may be purchased separately from VMware: pricing starts at $600 for 12×5 phone support for one year.

Now the distribution is officially available but, surprisingly, you have to download it from Novell.
The current version is SLES 11 Service Pack 1, available for both 32 and 64bit, which Novell reports to be “tailored to run on VMware vSphere”.
Access to the ISOs requires to register a free account with Novell, so the reason why VMware is not distributing itself the Linux OS may be to give Novell enough visibility on the account database, as part of the OEM agreement.

So far VMware didn’t really clarify the reason to have a branded version of SLES.

The official plan is to adopt the Novell OS as the platform of choice for all its virtual appliances. In the past VMware selected Ubuntu for a similar purpose, but regardless of why the partner has been changed, there’s no real need to have an OEM’ed Linux distribution. The company is big enough to provide its own enterprise support for any OS of choice, and in fact customers have to buy SLES support directly from VMware, and not from Novell.

VMware is moving towards an architecture where ESX doesn’t include the Console Operating System (COS), so this OEM deal is not even for that purpose.

A (way too easy) explanation may be that VMware is testing the enterprise customers reactions to a fully-owned software stack, which, if positive, may lead to the future acquisition of Novell.

Labels: Alliances, Novell, Releases, VMware

Release: VMware ThinApp 4.6

Virtualization.info - Tue, 2010-09-07 18:08

A couple of weeks before VMworld (see virtualization.info live coverage), VMware released a new minor update for its application virtualization platform ThinApp.

Despite the version number, ThinApp 4.6 (build 287958) introduces major new components and capabilities:

Converter (a P2V migration tool that automates creation of ThinApp packages)
ThinReg (allows to execute virtualized services at operating system boot time and expose to non-virtualized applications)
ThinDirect (allows to associate specific web pages to virtualized browsers)
Support for virtualized Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 on Windows 7 operating systems (both 32 and 64bit)
Management COM object (for package inspection and control of package inspection, registration, streaming, and updates)
Integration with View 4.5

In many ways the most important new feature is the introduction of Converter.
The program accpets a .ini configuration file which specifies where a certain installation file is located in the corporate network. Once located, Converter interacts with Workstation 7.x or ESX 4.x to produce a ThinApp virtualized application in a fully automated fashion by executing the following tasks:

Distributing packaging work-load across multiple virtual machines
Connecting to a named VM Workstations, vSphere, or ESX
Taking snapshot of VM initial clean state
Logging into Guest VM
Mounting package source UNC share inside of VM.
Mounting library output UNC share inside VM
Running ThinApp pre-install snapshot process
Running application installer in guest
Waiting for application installer to complete
Running ThinApp post-install snapshot process
Generating application project from two ThinApp snapshots
Building generated project into a package
Saving both project and package in output library
Reverting Virtual Machine to initial state

More importantly, ThinApp 4.6 introduces the integration with the upcoming View 4.5.
ThinApp applications can now be packaged and stored on a network file share. This network repository can be imported into View Manager. Once there, applications can be assigned to selected individual desktops or designated pools of desktops.
Administrators can choose to have them streamed via a shortcut on the guest OS desktop or to directly deploy the virtualized package inside the virtual desktop.

Labels: Platform, Releases, VMware

Release: VMware vShield Endpoint 1.0

Virtualization.info - Tue, 2010-09-07 16:50

At the end of July virtualization.info exposed an upcoming new product, part of the VMware vShield security porftolio called codename Seraph. The company officially unveiled and released it last week at VMworld (see virtualization.info live coverage) under the name of vShield Endpoint.

Endpoint 1.0 (build 287872) is the last piece of the new vShield security family. The other components are Zones 4.1 (the first product, acquired from Blue Lane Technologies in October 2008), App 1.0 (see virtualization.info coverage) and Edge 1.0 (see virtuaization.info coverage).
The four pieces are all centrally managed by vShield Manager 4.1.

Compared to the others, Endpoint is not a real product. It rather is a security framework that leverages the VMware VMsafe APIs and allows third party anti-virus vendors to scan and remediate infected virtual machines in a new way.
The interaction between the anti-virus solution and the target VMs happens at the hypervisor level, in a transparent way, through a process known as introspection.
In this way 3rd party security engines can be deployed only on a single, dedicated VM, offloading the protected guest operating systems from the execution of resource-demanding endpoint agents.

The only agent that virtual machines have at that point is the vShield Endpoint one, informally called thin agent, which exposes the file system activity to 3rd parties through an API and a library for remediation.
The health status of this VMware agent is monitored inside vCenter Server.
Of course the agent has to support the target guest operating system. The VMware offering is still weak here with the lack of 64bit support for Microsoft client operating systems (where the antivirus really needs):

Windows Server 2003 and 2008 (both 32 and 64bit)
Windows XP, Vista and 7 (32bit only)

The side benefit of this solution is that the AV signature database is downloaded only once, rather than being replicated for tens or hundreds of VMs.
As out-of-band anti-virus scanning is particularly important in VDI, vShield Endpoint 1.0 integrates with the upcoming View 4.5.

Like Zones and App, every instance of Endpoint only protects the VMs in a specific host through a Loadable Kernel Module (LKM) called EPSEC.
The primary component, a hardened virtual appliance called Security Virtual Machine (SVM), is not delivered directly by VMware but by its security partners.

To control Endpoint and the other new security products announced at VMworld, VMware is using an additional component called vShield Manager. This is a centralized policy management console that doesn’t require any specific license.
vShield Manager can be accessed through a web interface or the VMware SDK as it offers a specific API.
Such API allows advanced manipulation of all information produced by the other vShield products, like rules and the logs.

vShield Endpoint 1.0 pricing starts at $1,513, which includes protection for 25 virtual machines and 1 year basic support (12×5). Of course this is just the price for the endpoint agent. Customers have to add on top of it the cost for the 3rd party anti-virus solution.

TrendMicro Deep Security 7.5 is the first antivirus product on the market to support vShield Endpoint.

Labels: Releases, Security, VMware

Release: VMware vShield App 1.0

Virtualization.info - Tue, 2010-09-07 15:48

During the recently ended VMworld conference (see virtualization.info live coverage), VMware announced a remarkable number of new products. One of them is vShield App 1.0.

VMware acquired the vShield security technology from Blue Lane Technologies in October 2008. The only product offered so far has been Zones, a virtual firewall that uses stateful inspection and application layer gateway approaches to monitor and filter virtual network traffic between multiple virtual machines deployed on the same virtualization host.
vShield Zones didn’t mature much in almost two years, and VMware is offering it for free as part of vSphere Advanced, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus editions.

vShield App is an enhanced version of Zones. At the moment App doesn’t replace Zones but customers can purchase an upgrade so it’s likely that over time VMware will fade away Zones entirely.
Like Zone, App too must be deployed per virtualization host as a Loadable Kernel Module (LKM). The key difference between the two products is the introduction of Flow Monitoring and Security Groups.

Flow Monitoring is the ability to recognize some protocol sessions between virtual machines in the network traffic. This capability is limited to specific TCP/IP Layer 2-4 protocols: ICMP, ARP, other L2/L3 protocols, UDP and TCP. Like for vShield Edge, there’s no mention about IPv6 support and the App administrator’s guide specifically mentions IPv4 capabilities.
Administrators can use the report generated by Flow Monitoring to generate new firewall rules.

The other key difference, is the availability of Security Groups.
These are logical containers that let users to group together different virtual machines by their vNICs. So rather than specifying every single virtual machine by its IP in the rulebase, firewall administrators can finally create group of objects and use them as source or destinations in the rules.

To control Zones, App, and the other new security products announced at VMworld, VMware is using an additional component called vShield Manager. This is a centralized policy management console that doesn’t require any specific license.
vShield Manager can be accessed through a web interface or the VMware SDK as it offers a specific API.
Such API allows advanced manipulation of all information produced by the other vShield products, like rules and the logs.

Like for the new vShield Edge, vShield App 1.0 pricing starts at $4,538, which includes protection for 25 virtual machines and 1 year basic support (12×5).

Labels: Releases, Security, VMware

Release: VMware vShield Edge 1.0

Virtualization.info - Tue, 2010-09-07 13:46

During the recently ended VMworld conference (see virtualization.info live coverage), VMware announced a remarkable number of new products. One of them is vShield Edge 1.0.

A major limitation of Zones is the inability to filter traffic entering and leaving the virtual network, which is a critical need in multi-tenant cloud computing environments like the ones created by the new vCloud Director.
VMware overcame this limitation by releasing extending the vShield product family with this new solution called Edge.

Zones and Edge share the same firewall engine, but while the former is attached to a specifc virtualization host, the latter is attached to a specific portgroup.
In this role, the engine has been enriched by a few key new capabilities:

Site-to-Site VPN (IPSec only)
NAT and DHCP services
Web load balancing (HTTP/S, with Round-Robin algorithm and sticky sessions)
Logging on local or remote Syslog facilities (Firewall and NAT rules, VPN connections, load balancing sessions, DHCP bindings)
API

Because of its key importance in the VMware vCloud infrastructure, vShield Edge also allows to meter network utilization and account it to specific tenants when it’s integrated with vCloud Director.

The VPN component has some limitations: it only supports pre-shared key mode, AES or 3DES encryption, IP unicast traffic, and no dynamic routing protocol between the vShield Edge and remote VPN routers.
Also, there’s no mention about IPv6. Hopefully the product supports this kind of traffic.

The way it’s deployed implies that vShield Edge can isolate different portgroups in a way that reminds the VLANs on physical network switches.
Anyway, to have this feature, customers need to deploy a specific Loadable Kernel Module (LKM) on each virtualization host they want to control. The enforcement of other features don’t have this requirement.

To control Edge, Zones, and the other new security products announced at VMworld, VMware is using an additional component called vShield Manager. This is a centralized policy management console that doesn’t require any specific license.
vShield Manager can be accessed through a web interface or the VMware SDK as it offers a specific API.
Such API allows advanced manipulation of all information produced by the other vShield products, like rules and the logs.

vShield Edge 1.0 pricing starts at $4,538, which includes protection for 25 virtual machines and 1 year basic support (12×5), which is not exactly an affordable solution for SMBs.

Labels: Releases, Security, VMware

vCO Team: vCO web views not deprecated anymore

Planet VMware - Tue, 2010-09-07 08:49

We have been communicated today that there was a change in the vCO 4.1 release notes since our original vCenter Orchestrator 4.1 release article.

The web-views, while still being supported in vCO 4.1 were listed as deprecated. The release notes have been updated and the web views are not in the deprecated features list anymore. We can now assume this functionality will still be supported in the next major release of vCO.

Categories: VMware

vCO Team: Lifecycle Manager End of Availability

Planet VMware - Tue, 2010-09-07 08:31

VMware has announced a few days ago that LCM is End of Life. Please check the FAQ for more details.

For those of you not familiar with it, VMware Lifecycle Manager is a workflow based application running on top of vCenter Orchestrator. vCenter Orchestrator is not impacted by the LCM EOA.

Categories: VMware

Office of the CTO Blogs: Cloud Computing and Open Government

Planet VMware - Tue, 2010-09-07 07:46

“Advances in computer technology and the Internet have changed the way America works, learns, and communicates. The Internet has become an integral part of America's economic, political, and social life.”
-President Bill Clinton

For more than twelve years now, VMware has helped organizations of all sizes remove cost and complexity from their IT infrastructures. After spending the majority of their IT budgets just maintaining their existing infrastructure, these organizations know that the existing approach cannot survive. With this backdrop, more than 190,000 organizations are moving to virtualized infrastructures and enabling a path towards secure private clouds. This same transition is also underway in the public sector, where it can have an even more direct effect on many of our lives.

The goal of any public sector organization is to provide services and values to its constituents. With this goal in mind, the current United States federal administration is leading the way in the move towards more efficient, flexible and self-service computing. Late last year, the president’s office issued the Open Government Directive with a focus on three basic principles: Transparency, Participation and Collaboration. The initiative’s premise is that by providing the capability for increased citizen participation, government services will become more relevant to the citizens. In a sense, “the more minds working on a problem, the higher the degree of probability an innovative solution will emerge”. Websites such as Data.gov (where agencies can publish data sets) and Apps.gov (a central service offered by the General Service Administration for cloud applications) are fostering new government services devoted to making once-obfuscated information available to the ordinary citizen. These services require new approaches to public sector IT.

In parallel with these public sector initiatives, IT organizations throughout the private sector are shifting towards a more service-orientated model for delivering their own services. Just as in the public sector, the “citizens” of the private sector companies demand access to even more data and applications than ever before. To meet these increasing needs, organizations, both public AND private sector, must move to an agile, flexible, secure and dynamic infrastructure capable of meeting the demands of today’s applications as well as enabling the even richer applications and data sets of the future. However, a particularly challenging problem for the public sector is the fiscal reality of flat or decreasing budgets and reduced tax basis in many states and localities. But all is not lost...

Governments are achieving results today through the move towards secure private clouds. Starting with virtualization, this computing model takes an evolutionary approach to reaching the cloud end-state. Virtualization protects organizations’ existing investments in hardware and software, but it also sets the stage to leverage hardware and applications from other agency or private secure cloud providers. This is how the secure private cloud becomes a “hybrid” cloud. The organizations employing this approach realize several benefits along the way:

they achieve capital expenditure reductions through server consolidation,
they leverage new forms of automation to realize operational expenditure reductions,
by removing the restrictive ties between software and hardware, they can provision new servers more quickly than before,
both security and availability can benefit from pools of interchangeable compute resources, and
they can more elastically “flex” into other datacenters when demand is particularly high.

The path to this new computing model within the public sector has already stated, but there are many additional challenges to be conquered along the way. The driving force is about bringing better value and services to citizens, which will require a greater degree of access to network capabilities at an affordable economic model. This will drive changes and improvements to broadband access. Applications must be available to all as well, so focusing on richer, more intuitive application becomes more important than ever.

In conclusion, governments are under more pressure than ever to provide great services to their constituents, but at a time when financial pressures are as high as they have ever been. Fortunately the arrival of new cloud computing models offers an opportunity to get past these challenges and pave the way for the even more responsive governments of the future.

Categories: VMware

VMware Knowledge Base Weekly Digest: New articles published for week ending 9/4/2010

Planet VMware - Tue, 2010-09-07 02:48

VMware Consolidated Backup
Support for VMware Consolidated Backup (1026945)
Date Published: 8/31/2010

VMware Converter
The Vstor2 UFA Virtual Storage Driver service fails to start (1023795)
Date Published: 9/3/2010

VMware Data Recovery
Unable to access destination store after increasing it in VMware Data Recovery 1.2 (1024210)
Date Published: 9/1/2010

VMware ESXi
Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery, vCloud: How is vNetwork Distributed Switch protected from site loss? (1025125)
Date Published: 9/2/2010
VMware ESXi 3.5, Patch ESXe350-201008401-I-SG: Updates firmware (1026138)
Date Published: 9/1/2010
VMware ESXi 3.5, Patch ESXe350-200912402-T-BG: Updates VMware Tools (1026139)
Date Published: 9/1/2010
Recreating a missing virtual disk (VMDK) descriptor file for delta disks (1026353)
Date Published: 9/3/2010
Preparing a ESXi host in VMware vCloud Director fails with the error: Unknown host boot type 99 (1026884)
Date Published: 9/3/2010
Connecting to the ESXi 3.5 host via VMware Infrastructure Client fails (1027030)
Date Published: 9/2/2010
Recreating a missing virtual disk (VMDK) descriptor file for imported ESX 2.x virtual machines (1026254)
Date Published: 9/1/2010
Committing snapshots on ESX/ESXi host from command line (1026380)
Date Published: 8/30/2010

VMware Fusion
Information concerning antivirus programs in virtual machines (1026504)
Date Published: 9/1/2010
Creating a new Windows 7 virtual machine from an upgrade disc (1026670)
Date Published: 8/30/2010
Nothing happens when printing from a Fusion virtual machine (1027180)
Date Published: 9/3/2010

VMware Service Manager
When performing an Admin Knowledge Search you receive the error: Please select at least one criteria.. (1026621)
Date Published: 8/31/2010
Cannot create virtual directories in VMware Service Manager Server (1026839)
Date Published: 8/30/2010
Changing the System Titles within System Administration does not change titles as seen on the .htm page (1027057)
Date Published: 9/2/2010

VMware ThinApp
Using Virtualized Internet Explorer 6 with a Legacy Web Application That Requires It (1026562)
Date Published: 8/30/2010
The ThinDirect.msi File in ThinApp Program Files for Implementing ThinDirect Redirection to a Virtual Browser (1026675)
Date Published: 8/30/2010
Unregistering a Virtual Browser That Has ThinApp ThinDirect Implemented for Redirection (1026678)
Date Published: 8/30/2010
Running ThinApp Thinreg /a on a Virtual Browser Gives Error Message: File Does Not Exist (1026885)
Date Published: 8/30/2010
Desktop Shortcut Is Missing after Registration of Virtual Internet Explorer 6 (Virt IE6) with ThinApp ThinDirect Implemented (1026893)
Date Published: 8/30/2010

VMware vCenter Chargeback
Purging samples before upgrading to VMware vCenter Chargeback 1.5 (1026068)
Date Published: 8/31/2010
Minimum system requirements for installing VMware vCenter Chargeback 1.5 (1026347)
Date Published: 8/31/2010
Back up vCenter Chargeback database and configuration files (1026796)
Date Published: 8/31/2010
vCenter Chargeback uninstaller failed to remove the relevant services, registry entries, and files and folders (1026838)
Date Published: 8/31/2010

VMware vCenter Converter
Installing VMware Converter 4.2 fails with the error: Error 29454 Setup failed to register VMware vCenter Converter extension (1025351)
Date Published: 9/1/2010
Redhat 4 conversion fails or the virtual machine does not boot after successful conversion (1026348)
Date Published: 9/3/2010
When converting a Linux source to an ESX 4.1 host, VMware Converter 4.0.1 Standalone fails at 1% with the error: methodFault.Summary (1025992)
Date Published: 9/2/2010

VMware vCenter Lab Manager
Lab Manager 4.0.2 MKS plugin cannot connect to Lab Manager 4.0.1 or earlier virtual machines (1026569)
Date Published: 8/30/2010
Lab Manager virtual machine fails to power on with the error: File unspecified file name was not found (1026976)
Date Published: 9/2/2010

VMware vCenter Orchestrator
Configure SQL Server Express for Experimental Use with Orchestrator (1026478)
Date Published: 9/1/2010

VMware vCenter Server
VMware VirtualCenter Server service fails to start after vCenter 2.5 upgrade to vCenter 4.0. (1015239)
Date Published: 8/30/2010
How to change language of vSphere email alerts (1015646)
Date Published: 9/1/2010
The Performance Overview tab within vCenter Server reports the HTTP Status 404 error (1016160)
Date Published: 9/1/2010
vCenter Server loses connectivity to the Oracle database with the error: could not resolve the connect identifier (1023987)
Date Published: 9/3/2010
Integration Vmware products: What are the considerations for vCenter Server Heartbeat? (1025018)
Date Published: 9/2/2010
Search function does not work after upgrading to vCenter Server 4.1 (1026092)
Date Published: 9/3/2010
Cannot access instances of vCenter Server in Linked Mode configuration after upgrading to vCenter Server 4.1 (1026346)
Date Published: 9/3/2010
Unable to remove a datastore from the vCenter Server database (1026661)
Date Published: 9/1/2010
Attaching a vCenter Server to VMware vCloud Director (1026866)
Date Published: 8/31/2010
Webservices features such as Hardware Status show errors when using interactive or manual authentication (1015957)
Date Published: 9/3/2010
Virtual Machine Guest reboot alarm trigger does not function if virtual machine is rebooted from within Guest OS (1026818)
Date Published: 9/1/2010

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager
Error: Connection to local Site Recovery Manager https:/x.x.x.x:8095 lost (1015194)
Date Published: 8/30/2010

VMware VirtualCenter
Rollup jobs for vCenter database running on Oracle fail with error message PLS-00201 identifier stats_rollup3_proc must be declared. (1015776)
Date Published: 9/2/2010

VMware vShield Edge
Assigning a vShield for VMware vCloud Director license key in vCenter Server (1026479)
Date Published: 8/31/2010

VMware vShield Endpoint
Disabling Windows Security Center anti-virus notifications for vShield Endpoint (1026746)
Date Published: 8/31/2010

VMware vSphere Client Plug-ins
Upgrading vSphere Client fails with the error: Error applying transforms. Verify that the specified transform paths are valid (1023938)
Date Published: 9/3/2010

VMware Workstation
Installing VMware Workstation in openSUSE 11 (1026369)
Date Published: 9/2/2010

Categories: VMware

Release: VMware vCloud Director 1.0 – UPDATED

Virtualization.info - Mon, 2010-09-06 23:38

During the recently ended VMworld conference (see virtualization.info live coverage), VMware announced a remarkable number of new products. One of them is the long, long awaited vCloud Director 1.0 (formerly vCloud Service Director, and before that Project Redwood).

vCloud Director 1.0 (build 285979) is a management platform for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds powered by VMware vSphere 4.1. It should not be confused with the vCloud Express platform that just four hosting providers worldwide adopted and offered in the last few months as part of large beta program.

This first release of the product introduce a number of basic capabilities expected in this class of solutions, like:

Self-service provisioning portal
Content catalog (virtual machines and templates library) with customization on provisioning
Resource pooling
Resource monitoring, reporting and billing
Role-based user access (RBAC)
Multi-tenancy
Service Level Agreements enforcement
API

CONTINUE READING ON CLOUDCOMPUTING.INFO…

Labels: IaaS, Platform Management, Releases, VMware

Release: Proxmox Server Solutions Proxmox VE 1.6

Virtualization.info - Mon, 2010-09-06 19:07

Last week Proxmox Server Solutions released version 1.6 of its open source management solution for hardware and OS virtualization platforms (KVM and OpenVZ): Proxmox VE.

Proxmox has been in development for a few years now. virtualization.info covered the product for the first time in May 2008, when it was still a pre 1.0 solution.
Version 1.0 was released in October 2008 and so far the company updated it quite regularly, adding key functionalities like the live migration for KVM, a wide support for storage protocols, and the inclusion of DRBD, which allows storage replication with active/active mode.

Version 1.6 introduces the OpenVZ patch for Linux kernel 2.6.32 and KVM 0.12.5, plus the update for a number of other components.

The roadmap for version 2.0, which doesn’t have a planned release date yet, is rich:

Complete new web interface (new javascript framework, RIA)
Based on Debian Squeeze
New cluster communication based on corosync
HA for KVM guests
User management (advanced)
RESTful web API
Extend pre-built Virtual Appliances downloads
Resource monitoring
Firewall

Proxmox Server Solutions offers annual support subscription: 399 Euros / year per CPU sockets with unlimited cores.
Support is only through the online help desk system, through email and if needed through remote access. Apparently there’s no phone support available.

Labels: Platform Management, Proxmox Server Solutions, Releases

Release: Xen 4.0.1

Virtualization.info - Mon, 2010-09-06 18:11

A couple of weeks ago Xen.org released Xen maintenance release 4.0.1.
It’s primarily for bug fixing but it also introduces a few new capabilities.

First of all the default pvops kernel is now 2.6.32 (Xen 4.0 used kernel 2.6.31). Secondarily, they pygrub boot loader now support loading para-virtualized guests using GRUB2 configuration files. But more importantly, Xen 4.0.1 introduces Remus support, the Xen fault-tolerance package, for pvops dom0 kernels.

Xen 4.0.1 is expected to be included in the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) as the project further matures. It still uses Xen 3.4.2

Labels: Platform, Xen

Eucalyptus Systems releases the open source edition of Eucalyptus 2.0

Virtualization.info - Mon, 2010-09-06 17:58

In June Eucalyptus Systems announced the second version of its flagship product: Eucalyptus, a management platform for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds powered by Xen and KVM.
At that time the only edition available was the Enterprise one, but a couple of weeks ago the company also released the open source counterpart.

The open edition of Eucalyptus 2.0 introduces:

Support for virtio implementation in KVM (users can choose between emulated device drivers or direct kernel supported I/O devices)
Support for iSCSI protocol for Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volumes
Support for Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) versioning
Support for Fedora guest operating systems

CONTINUE READING ON CLOUDCOMPUTING.INFO…

Labels: Eucalyptus Systems, IaaS, Platform Management, Releases

News aggregator

ESXi Chronicles: VMworld 2010 Wrap-up

Office of the CTO Blogs: Beyond Infrastructure

VROOM!: HPC Application Performance on ESX 4.1: Stream

VMware Support Insider: vCloud Director KB articles

VMware Support Insider: Ask Support Anything video series

Rethink IT: Virtual Data Centers -- The Goldilocks of Enterprise Cloud Computing

Office of the CTO Blogs: Security is a major theme at VMworld 2010.

Release: Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware

Release: VMware ThinApp 4.6

Release: VMware vShield Endpoint 1.0

Release: VMware vShield App 1.0

Release: VMware vShield Edge 1.0

vCO Team: vCO web views not deprecated anymore

vCO Team: Lifecycle Manager End of Availability

Office of the CTO Blogs: Cloud Computing and Open Government

VMware Knowledge Base Weekly Digest: New articles published for week ending 9/4/2010

Release: VMware vCloud Director 1.0 – UPDATED

Release: Proxmox Server Solutions Proxmox VE 1.6

Release: Xen 4.0.1

Eucalyptus Systems releases the open source edition of Eucalyptus 2.0

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