vSphere 5 – latoga labs

vSphere 5 Now Live

August 24, 2011 Leave a Comment

(The following is taken from a newsletter I produce for my clients that I’m pre-posting here on the blog.)

Back on July 12th, VMware unveiled the Cloud Infrastructure Suite which included vSphere 5.

As of a few minutes ago, vSphere 5.0 is available for download on the VMware website! (ESX 5.0 is build 469512 and vCenter Server 5.0 is build 456005)

The vSphere Support Center, Documentation Portal, and Community Portal have all been updated. I have also updated my VMW Launchpad.

vSphere 5 New Features

The blogosphere has been super active since the VSphere 5 announcement. Here is a sampling of some of the great work done by VMware community to highlight some of the great new feature available in vSphere 5:

ESXi only form factor
Monster Sized VMs (up to 32 vCPUs and 1 TB of RAM)
VMFS-5: Which includes Unified 1MB File Block Size, Large Single Extend Volumes up to 64TB, Smaller Sub-Block, and Small File Support (Note VMFS volumes needs to be ugraded to v5 to obtain all these benefits and that can be done online and non-disruptively.)
vSphere APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA) – Which is implemented by Storage Vendors and is a 1.0 API which always has room to grow.
Profile Driven Storage
Storage DRS (SDRS)
New HA architecture for expanded scalability
vCenter Server Linux appliance
vSphere Web Client (the future)
Stateless ESXi Auto-Deploy

And many more. With over 200 new enhancements it’s hard to list all of the new features.

Cloud Infrastructure Suite

While vSphere is the core of the Cloud Infrastructure Suite, it is just one piece of the puzzle (and VMware added a new piece…). The Cloud Infrastructure Suite also consists of:

vCloud Director 1.5 – Now with fast provisioning via Linked Clones and more.
vShield 5 – new flow monitoring, L2 firewall, REST APIs, enhanced groupings
vShield App with Data Security – Adds policy based management to protect sensitive data is not being shared inappropriately.
Site Recovery Manager 5.0 – works with vCenter 5.0, vSphere (host) based replication, Automated Failback, and more.
vCenter Heartbeat 6.4 – works with vCenter 5.0
vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) 1.0 – New Product – allowing you to take local storage from up to 3 servers and turn that into a Virtual NAS. VSA is designed for the SMB users but can be useful for point deployments with the enterprise.

vSphere 5 License Advisor Available

August 11, 2011 Leave a Comment

Following on the vSphere 5 License adjustment, VMware recently released the vSphere 5 License Advisor. This is a tool that you can use to run against your vSphere 4.1, vSphere 4.0, or Virtual Infrastructure 3.5 deployments to understand how the vSphere 5 vRAM licensing entitlement will affect your installation.

Note: I’ve heard some comments that the tool may have some reporting issues in the GUI with deployments in excess of 1000 VMs, but that the exported report is correct. I would appreciate anyone who can validate these reports…

VMware Listened: vSphere 5 Licensing Changes

August 3, 2011 2 Comments

So VMware announced a change in licensing with vSphere 5…the customers reacted…and VMware listened and adjusted the licensing in about 3 weeks. Quite a rarity in the enterprise software industry…

When I talked to my clients about the licensing changes that were coming with vSphere 5, the reaction wasn’t really one of shock to a change (they had realized that VMware would eventually need to change licensing somehow as the server industry moved to larger sized servers) but rather a raising of concerns over Enterprise Plus only having a 48GB vRAM entitlement and concern that the new vRAM entitlement in general would limit the desire to virtualize more Tier 1 applications. Non-production groups also had concerns over the transient nature of their dev/test environments which could have short spikes in vRAM usage when lots of VMs get deployed. Apparently, my clients were not unique in their concerns…

Today VMware announced a change to the new vSphere 5 licensing:

Raising the vRAM entitlements per vSphere editions

Essentials / Essentials Plus / Standard are now 32GB of vRAM per license
Enterprise is now 64 GB of vRAM per license
Enterprise Plus is now 96 GB of vRAM per license

vRAM consumption per running VM is now capped at 96GB

a VM configured with 96GB up to 1 TB of vRAM will only reduce the vRAM entitlement pool by 96GB.

vCenter will calculate & report on a 12 month trailing average of vRAM usage rather than a high watermark

This will reduce the risk of transient VM environments requiring additional vRAM licenses.
Note: This change will not be reflecterd in the vSphere 5 reporting capabilities at GA time; it will appear in an vSphere 5 future update release but be trackable via a free utility from VMware until then.

Remember that vRAM is a pooled entitlement across an entire vSphere cluster (all hosts managed by one vCenter Server). And if you have multiple vCenter Servers linked together, their vRAM entitlements are pooled together as well. This pooling is often overlooked or mis-understood by users. The Pooling helps to even out your vRAM consumption across your enterprise.

Make sure you take the time to run the calcualations for your environment. I did that this afternoon with one client group and their vRAM entitlement was more than 3x their current environment and still more than 50% more than their planned upgrade environment.

The following chart is a good summary of the vSphere 5 licensing and features per edition:

VMware also announced a new vSphere Desktop license package for those environments that use vSphere to host Virtual Desktops. This new license only counts the total number of powered on virtual desktops and is available in packs of 100 desktop licenses. Most View users usually purchase a View bundle which includes the vSphere licenses. For those users who run non-View manage desktops on vSphere, they would purchase those licenses via this new vSphere 5.0 Desktop license pack.