If you were at VMworld 2011 US and/or Europe, you may have seen or heard of the posters being given away at the Hands On Labs. Supplies were limited at the US conference and if you attended in Copenhagen maybe you didn’t get a chance to get into the labs to grab some posters.
Although VMworld is over, you still have access to the posters.
One way would be to request a Dell Compellent Executive Briefing with me. I brought a few pounds of posters back from Copenhagen and what’s mine is yours if you’re willing to listen to me talk about the great integration points Dell Compellent Storage Center has with VMware’s growing portfolio.
The other option would be to go online and grab a copy of the posters which you can view electronically or have printed at your local copier shop. This blog post was inspired by Xtravirt email bulletin 94 – thanks for pulling together the links guys.
I don’t publish the majority of the press releases which make their way to my inbox but I took a quick look at HotLink SuperVISOR for VMware and what it does is interesting. Watch the video below (feel free to expand to full screen to see the detail) and see how this product is able to pull in various Type 1 hypervisors in a heterogeneous datacenter under the vCenter management umbrella. By now you know VMware isn’t the only player in the hypervisor business. VMware’s competitors have been making their presence known. They remain persistent partly because of their gradual market penetration. And I’ll be the first to admit that the other hypervisors out there are the right fit for some business use cases and requirements. Also, multi vendor policies are not uncommon in large organizations. Whatever the reason, deploying different makes and models of hypervisors in an environment is your business. Managing them with ease is HotLink’s business. Read on.
Press Release:
HotLink Launches Latest Version of HotLink SuperVISOR™ for VMware
Leading enterprises including McAfee and BMC Software adopt HotLink SuperVISOR to seamlessly manage mixed hypervisors inside VMware vCenter console
SUNNYVALE, Calif. – December 15, 2011 – HotLink® Corporation, the market leader in transformation solutions for heterogeneous virtualization management, today announced the newest release of its flagship product, HotLink SuperVISOR™ for VMware. HotLink SuperVISOR is the first and only solution to enable VMware vCenter users to natively manage cross-platform virtual infrastructure spanning Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (KVM). The latest release, HotLink SuperVISOR for VMware 1.2, adds new capabilities focused on enterprise robustness, scalability, configuration and management of multi-hypervisors and workloads.
With its latest release, HotLink customers benefit from an enhanced virtual integration platform that provides total control and performance visibility across all enterprise hypervisors, using the VMware vCenter management console they already have. The new features of HotLink SuperVISOR for VMware 1.2 include:
Enhanced Networking Configuration – Users can now provision and modify virtual switches and network adapters from VMware vCenter and associate these to any enterprise hypervisor —enabling users to manage heterogeneous virtual networking from a single interface.
Expanded Performance Monitoring – The latest release expands the heterogeneous performance statistics and alerts that are gathered and displayed inside the native VMware vCenter performance tab —allowing administrators to quickly identify issues across the mixed hypervisor environment.
Robust Configuration of Virtual Machine Settings – Only HotLink provides the ability to modify the configuration of virtual machine settings such as virtual CPUs and memory assignments natively inside vCenter and apply across all virtual platforms —ensuring the optimum VM configuration regardless of the hypervisor.
“Enterprise IT needs are rapidly evolving as an increasing number of VMware shops are deploying heterogeneous hypervisor environments. Administrators need a single management console that provides a comprehensive view and complete control of all enterprise workloads,” said Lynn LeBlanc, CEO and founder of HotLink. “The latest enhancements to HotLink SuperVISOR extend the VMware vCenter management infrastructure to provide sophisticated and robust management capabilities to Hyper-V, XenServer and KVM – unifying the management of all virtual workloads inside VMware vCenter.”
As virtual infrastructure deployments expand and mature, heterogeneity is being fueled by a combination of economics and maturing of hypervisor alternatives. The most recent Gartner Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure report included, for the first time, both Citrix and Microsoft alongside VMware in the leaders quadrant. Moreover, Hyper-V grew 62 percent last year compared to ESX’s 21 percent growth and Citrix’s 25 percent, according to IDC. While the proliferation of multiple virtual platforms is accelerating, streamlined infrastructure is needed to unify management. That’s exactly what the latest release of HotLink SuperVISOR for VMware addresses.
“McAfee historically was an all VMware shop, but our business needs have changed so that we now have a mix of vSphere, Hyper-V and XenServer. Utilizing HotLink SuperVISOR for VMware across our virtual environment enables us to increase our usage of other hypervisor platforms while unifying management. By deploying multiple hypervisors and standardizing on VMware vCenter as our primary management interface, we expect to reduce our virtualization cost by over 50 percent and admin costs by 65 percent over the next 3 years,” said Mark Tonnesen, CIO of McAfee. “The foundation of our multi-hypervisor environment is built on the HotLink SuperVISOR platform.”
With the new HotLink SuperVISOR technology, enterprises can tier their virtual infrastructure with cost-effective hypervisors and still unify the management, significantly reducing their licensing and operating costs. With HotLink SuperVISOR, customers can realize the benefits of mixed hypervisors while avoiding overly complicated management systems.
“Like many other IT shops, we are investigating the use of multiple hypervisors to cost effectively support development and test activities for our Tier 2 and Tier 3 business applications. We have been very impressed by HotLink’s SuperVISOR technology and the hypervisor interoperability that it enables. We believe that HotLink will enable us to optimize the use of specific hypervisors for individual workloads without compromising our ability to manage our overall virtual environment,” said Mark Settle, CIO of BMC Software.
Pricing and Availability
HotLink SuperVISOR for VMware 1.2 is available now with pricing starting at $25,000. For more information, contact sales@hotlink.com or visit www.hotlink.com.
Founded in early 2010 by data center software veterans and the founders of FastScale Technology, Inc. (acquired by VMware), HotLink Corporation is on a mission to transform real-world IT with the first true heterogeneous data center system management platform for virtual, cloud and physical computing infrastructure. Early customers include enterprise IT organizations spanning technology, financial services, telecommunications and Internet search. HotLink’s advisory board includes visionary leaders from Informatica, Facebook, E*TRADE, Clorox, Citrix, BMC and Flextronics. HotLink is a privately held, venture capital backed company based in Sunnyvale, California. For more information, visit www.hotlink.com.
I’ve gone a few rounds with VMware vCloud Director in as many weeks recently. I’ve got an upcoming blog post on a vCenter Proxy Service issue I’ve been dealing with but until I collect the remaining details on that, I thought I’d point out VMware KB 1026312 Collecting diagnostic information for VMware vCloud Director. This knowledge base article details the steps required to collect the necessary support logs for both vCD versions 1.0 and 1.5.
The vmware-vcd-support script collects host log information as well as these vCloud Director logs. The script is located in the following folders:
For vCloud Director 1.0, run /opt/vmware/cloud-director/bin/vmware-vcd-support
For vCloud Director 1.5, run /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin/vmware-vcd-support
Once executed, the script will bundle the following log files from /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/logs/ into a .tgz tarball saving it in the directory from which the script was run (providing there is enough storage available):
cell.log – Console output from the vCloud Director cell.
diagnostics.log – Cell diagnostics log. This file is empty unless diagnostics logging is enabled in the local logging configuration.
vcloud-container-info.log – Informational log messages from the cell. This log also shows warnings or errors encountered by the cell.
vcloud-container-debug.log – Debug-level log messages from the cell.
vcloud-vmware-watchdog.log – Informational log messages from the cell watchdog. It records when the cell crashes, is restarted, etc.
On the subject of vCD log files, also mentioned in the KB article is VMware KB 1026815 Configuring logging for VMware vCloud Director. The information in this article is useful for specifying the quantity and size of vCD log files to be maintained on the cell server.
Once the log files have been collected, you may analyze them offline or upload them to VMware’s FTP site in association with an SR by following VMware KB 1008525 Uploading diagnostic information to VMware.
Cody Bunch over at ProfessionalVMware has pulled together a whole bunch of fantastic lab resources which he plans to give away to one lucky contest winner at the BrownBag Blow Out – vSphere Lab Give Away. This is a great opportunity to walk away with books, videos, 1×1 VCAP training, storage, laptop PC, VMware Workstation, VMware exam vouchers, a brand new v3 vCalendar from you-know-who, and maybe more (I hear Cody has a book coming…)
Contest Rules:
1) Create and send a 1 – 3 minute video, explaining who you are and how you think the lab would help you.
2) Shipping to US addresses only.
3) Employees of prize vendors and Cody’s tight friends are ineligible.
4) Entries must be received by midnight 12/13.
5) Winner will be announced between 12/14 and 12/16.
6) The very best of luck to all contestants and may the luckiest and most deserving person win. If you sue Cody or cause trouble for him you will be the biggest loser.
For the Twitter folks… (The Real) Mostafa Khalil (@MostafaVMW, VCDX #2) is now on Twitter. I’d recommend following him as there are some amazing changes brewing on the vSphere storage horizon. Hopefully he’ll privilege us on a semi regular basis with bits from his great storage mind.
For the non Twitter folks… Seven days ago, Mostafa posted the picture shown below. It’s the Getting Started Guide for VMware Workstation 1.0 for Linux. It comes to us from the year 1999.
Seeing this is enough to make a vEvangelist tear up. I’d love to get my hands on this product at some point and take it for a spin. Perhaps I’ll have a chance if the VMTN Subscription makes its return. My VMware journey didn’t start until a year later with Workstation 2.0.2 for Windows. Look at the file size – 5MB.
Installing vCloud Director 1.5 can be like installing a VCR. For the most part, you can get through it without reading the instructions. However, there may be some advanced or obscure features (such as programming the clock or automatically recording a channel) which require knowledge you’ll only pick up by referring to the documentation. Such is the case with vCD Transfer Server Storage. Page 13 of the vCloud Director Installation and Configuration Guide discusses Transfer Server Storage as follows:
To provide temporary storage for uploads and downloads, an NFS or other shared storage volume must be accessible to all servers in a vCloud Director cluster. This volume must have write permission for root. Each host must mount this volume at $VCLOUD_HOME/data/transfer, typically /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/data/transfer. Uploads and downloads occupy this storage for a few hours to a day. Transferred images can be large, so allocate at least several hundred gigabytes to this volume.
This is the only VMware documentation I could find covering Transfer Server Storage. There is a bit of extra information revealed about Transfer Server Storage upon the initial installation of the vCD cell which basically states that at that point in time you should configure Transfer Server Storage to point to shared NFS storage for all vCD cells to use, or if there is just a single cell, local cell storage may be used:
If you will be deploying a vCloud Director cluster you must mount the shared transfer server storage prior to running the configuration script. If this is a single server deployment no shared storage is necessary.
Transfer Server Storage is used for uploading and downloading (exporting) vApps. A vApp is one or more virtual machines with associated virtual disks. Small vApps in .OVF format will consume maybe 1GB (or potentially less depending on its contents). Larger vApps could be several hundred GBs or beyond. By default, Transfer Server Storage will draw capacity from /. Lack of adequate Transfer Server Storage capacity will result in the inability to upload or download vApps (it could also imply you’re out of space on /). Long story short, if you skipped the brief instructions on Transfer Server Storage during your build of a RHEL 5 vCD cell, at some point you may run short on Transfer Server Storage and even worse you’d run / out of available capacity.
I ran into just such a scenario in the lab and thought I’d just add a new virtual disk with adequate capacity, create a new mount point, and then adjust the contents of /etc/profile.d/vcloud.sh (export VCLOUD_HOME=/opt/vmware/vcloud-director) to point vCD to the added capacity. I quickly found out this procedure does not work. The vCD portal dies and won’t start again. I did some searching and wound up at David Hill’s vCloud Director FAQ which confirms the transfer folder cannot be moved (Chris Colotti has also done some writing on Transfer Server Storage here in addition to related content I found on the vSpecialist blog). However, we can add capacity to that folder by creating a new mount at that folder’s location.
I was running into difficulties trying to extend / so I collaborated with Bob Plankers (a Linux and Virtualization guru who authors the blog The Lone Sysadmin) to identify the right steps, in order, to get the job done properly for vCloud Director. Bob spent his weekend time helping me out with great detail and for that I am thankful. You rule Bob!
Again, consider the scenario: There is not enough Transfer Server Storage capacity or Transfer Server Storage has consumed all available capacity on /. The following steps will grow an existing vCloud Director Cell virtual disk by 200GB and then extend the Transfer Server Storage by that amount. The majority of the steps will be run via SSH, local console or terminal:
Verify rsync is installed. To verify, type rsync followed by enter. All vCD supported versions of RHEL 5 (Updates 4, 5, and 6) should already have rsync installed. If a minimalist version of RHEL 5 was deployed without rsync, execute yum install rsync to install it (RHN registration required).
Gracefully shut down the vCD Cell.
Now would be a good time to capture a backup of the vCD cell as well as the vCD database if there is just a single cell deployed in the environment.
Grow the vCD virtual disk by 200 GB.
Power the vCD cell back on and at boot time go into single user mode by interrupting GRUB (press an arrow key to move the kernel selection). Use ‘a‘ to append boot parameters. Append the word single to the end (use a space separator) and hit enter.
Use # sudo fdisk /dev/sda to partition the new empty space:
Enter ‘n’ (for new partition)
Enter ‘p’ (for primary)
Enter a partition number. For a default installation of RHEL 5 Update 6, 1 and 2 will be in use so this new partition will likely be 3.
First cylinder… it’ll offer a number, probably the first free cylinder on the disk. Hit enter, accept the default.
Last cylinder… hit enter. It’ll offer you the last cylinder available. Use it all!
Enter ‘x’ for expert mode.
Enter ‘b’ to adjust the beginning sector of the partition.
Enter the partition number (3 in this case).
In this step align the partition to a multiple of 128. It’ll ask for “new beginning of data” and have a default number. Take that default number and round it up to the nearest number that is evenly divisible by 128. So if the number is 401660, I take my calculator and divide it by 128 to get the result 3137.968. I round that up to 3138 then multiply by 128 again = 401664. That’s where I want my partition to start for good I/O performance, and I enter that.
Now enter ‘w’ to write the changes to disk. It’ll likely complain that it cannot reread the partition table but this is safe to ignore.
Reboot the vCD cell using shutdown -r now
When the cell comes back up, we need to add that new space to the volume group.
pvcreate /dev/sda3 to initialize it as a LVM volume. (If you used partition #4 then it would be /dev/sda4).
vgextend VolGroup00 /dev/sda3 to grow the volume.
Now create a filesystem:
lvcreate –size 199G –name transfer_lv VolGroup00 to create a logical volume 199 GB in size named transfer_lv. Adjust the numbers as needed. Notice we cannot use the entire space available due to slight overhead.
mke2fs -j -m 0 /dev/VolGroup00/transfer_lv to create an ext3 filesystem on that logical volume. The -j parameter indicates journaled, which is ext3. The -m 0 parameter tells the OS to reserve 0% of the space for the superuser for emergencies. Normally it reserves 5%, which is a complete waste of 5% of your virtual disk.
Now we need to mount the filesystem somewhere where we can copy the contents of /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/data/transfer first. mount /dev/VolGroup00/transfer_lv /mnt will mount it on /mnt which is a good temporary spot.
Stop the vCloud Director cell service to close any open files or transactions in flight with service vmware-vcd stop.
rsync -av /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/data/transfer/ /mnt to make an exact copy of what’s there. Mind the slashes, they’re important.
Examine the contents of /mnt to be sure everything from /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/data/transfer was copied over properly.
rm -rf /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/data/transfer/* to delete the file and directory contents in the old default location. If you mount over it, the data will still be there sucking up disk space but you won’t be able to see it (instead you’ll see lost+found). Make sure you have a good copy in /mnt!
umount /mnt to unmount the temporary location.
mount /dev/VolGroup00/transfer_lv /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/data/transfer (all one line) to mount it in the right spot.
df -h to confirm the mount point is there and vCD data (potentially along with transient transfer storage files) is consuming some portion of it.
To auto mount correctly on reboot:
nano -w /etc/fstab to edit the filesystem mount file.
At the very bottom add a new line (but no blank lines between) that looks like the rest, but with our new mount point. Use tab separation between the fields. It should look like this: /dev/VolGroup00/transfer_lv /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/data/transfer/ ext3 defaults 1 2
Ctrl-X to quit, ‘y’ to save modified buffer, enter to accept the filename.
At this time we can either start the vCD cell with service vmware-vcd start or reboot to ensure the new storage automatically mounts and the cell survives reboots. If after a reboot the vCD portal is unavailable, it’s probably due to a typo in fstab.
This procedure, albeit a bit lengthy and detailed, worked well and was the easiest solution for my particular scenario. There are some other approaches which would work to solve this problem. One of them would be almost identical to the above but instead of extending the virtual disk of the vCD cell, we could add a new virtual disk with the required capacity and then mount it up. Another option would be to build a new vCloud Director server with adequate space and then decommission the first vCD server. This wasn’t an option for me because the certificate key files for the first vCD server no longer existed.
I assume you follow Duncan and Frank and read their blogs, but in case you don’t, check out this Crazy Black Friday / Cyber Monday deal!Between now and Monday 11:59pm PST, prices are slashed on Frank and Duncan’s ebook vSphere 5 Clustering Technical Deepdive.
If you’re serious about vSphere 5, you need this book in your technical library. Even if you’re already a seasoned vSphere expert, there are some major changes in the features which Duncan and Frank deepdive on. Tis the season for giving so if you already have a copy for yourself, take advantage of these prices to pick up another copy for your favorite co-worker, employee, manager, spouse, or child. Now is as good a time as any to get the young ones started on VMware virtualization.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my personal opinions. Content published here does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of my employer.
