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Posts Tagged ‘VmWare’

Azure ASR’s SLA-backed enhanced VMware to Azure solution is now ready to replicate your on-premises workloads to Azure

January 14, 2016 2 comments

You heard right. Microsoft has launched an enhanced version of its Azure Site Recovery (ASR) targeted especially for VMware customers.

asr-new

The concept of ASR is very simple: organisations will be able to replicate their VMware virtual machines (VMs) to Azure, update and then run them in Azure as a disaster recovery option. They will be charged a small amount by VM but won’t have to pay for compute or storage until the VM is up and running in Azure.

To note, Azure Site Recovery, as part of Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS), enables your organisation to gain control and manage your workloads no matter the source: Azure, AWS, Windows Server, Linux, VMware or OpenStack.

 

Some of the key ASR characteristics:

  • With non-disruptive recovery testing, you can easily test the failover of your VMware virtual machines to Azure within minutes, and validate your workload’s performance in Azure, without impacting on-going replication or the production workload.
  • With ASR-integrated failback, start replicating your Azure virtual machines back to your on-premises ESXi environment, and failback to the original or an alternate location when your on-premises site is once again available for use.
  • Heterogeneous workload support, automated VMware vCenter Server discovery
  • Continuous data protection (CDP), one-click failovers with ASR Recovery Plan
  • Rich health monitoring and e-mail notifications.

I’ve been working with ASR for a while and I definitely recommend it.

Ready to start using ASR? Check out additional product information, to start replicating your workloads to Microsoft Azure using Azure Site Recovery today. You can use the powerful replication capabilities of Site Recovery for 31 days at no charge for every new physical server or virtual machine that you replicate.

You can read the announcement at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/ga-enhanced-migration-and-disaster-recovery-for-vmware-virtual-machines-and-physical-servers-to-azure-using-asr/

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Categories: Cloud, Microsoft, System Center, Virtualization Tags: , , , , , ,

Monitoring Hyper-V and VMware workloads. Integrating SCVMM with SCOM. Veeam MP

February 28, 2014 Leave a comment

The System Center 2012 VMM cookbook has a Chapter 10 (as a plus for the readers), which is not on the paperback/Kindle version. It is mentioned in the “What This Book Covers” section of the book and if you brought the book you will be able to download the chapter for free.

Chapter 10, Integration with System Center Operations Manager 2012 SP1, provides tips and techniques to allow administrators to integrate SCOM 2012 with SCVMM when monitoring the private cloud infrastructure.

In a hybrid hypervisor environment (for example, Hyper-V, VMware), using Operations Manager management packs (MPs) (for example, Veeam MP), you can monitor the Hyper-V hosts and the VMware hosts, which allow you to use only the System Center Console to manage and monitor the hybrid hypervisor environment

What we cover in chapter 10 :

  • In this chapter, we will cover:
  • Installing System Center Operations Manager 2012 SP1
  • Installing management packs
  • Managing Discovery and Agents
  • Configuring the integration between Operations Manager 2012 and VMM 2012
  • Enabling reporting in VMM
  • Monitoring VMware vSphere infrastructure from the Operations Manager using management packs

With management packs, you can extend Operations Manager (OpsMgr) and its possibilities. On a hybrid hypervisor environment, where there is a mix of Hyper-V and VMware ESXi servers, the Veeam MP extends the OpsMgr for monitoring, alerting, and for undertaking remedial actions on VMware vSphere. Veeam MP uses vSphere API to gather information to allow monitoring and reporting against all layers of the VMware stack, which include layers from the underlying hardware though network, storage, hosts, clusters, datacenters, up to vCenter. Examples of the key metrics for the VMware admins include latency, CPU ready, disk and memory pressure against a host.

For the Chapter 10, Veeam Management Pack for VMware (SCOM) s required. There is a new version 6.5 which can download from here: http://www.veeam.com/vmware-microsoft-esx-monitoring-resources.html

Enjoy reading !

To buy the book

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_1?_encoding=UTF8&field-author=Edvaldo%20Alessandro%20Cardoso&search-alias=books&sort=relevancerank

http://www.packtpub.com/microsoft-system-center-virtual-machine-manager-2012-cookbook/book

Categories: Microsoft, System Center, Virtualization Tags: , , , , , ,

Hyper-V , XenServer, vSphere Comparison : Scalability,Performance;Density

November 12, 2012 6 comments

Some folks are asking me about Citrix and Hyper and VMware comparison :

Scalability,Performance;Density

1.XenServer 6.0 active VMs per host varies based on Server/VDI workload, with PVS/IntelliCache & HA on/off

2.Maximum VMs on a Cluster (Resource Pool) on XenServer 6.0 based on a maximum of 50-60 concurrent protected VMs per host with HA enabled.
3.Host physical memory is capped at 32GB thus maximum VM memory is also restricted to 32GB usage.
4.For clustering/high availability, customers must purchase vSphere
5.vSphere 5.0 Enterprise Plus is the only edition that supports 32 vCPUs.  All others support 8 vCPUs within a virtual machine.
6.Maximum number of Virtual CPUs per Host is not documented in the Citrix XenServer 6.0 Configuration Limits documentation.

High Availability & Resiliency

1.XenServer 6 provides Automated VM Protection & Recovery in the Advanced edition and higher
2.XenServer 6 provides a Site Replication capability in the Platinum edition, however replication is provided by a storage vendor, not inbox from XenServer hosts.
3.XenServer 6 provides HA in the Advanced edition or higher.
4.The vSphere Hypervisor has no high availability features built in – vSphere 5.0 is required.
5.VMware Data Recovery is available in Essentials Plus and higher vSphere 5.0 editions
6.vSphere Replication is a feature of VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM), which is available in 2 editions and is a chargeable addition to vSphere 5.0
7.VMware HA is built in to Essentials Plus and higher vSphere 5.0 editions
8.VMware have made APIs publicly available, but actual application monitoring is not included
9.Features available in all editions that have High Availability enabled.

 

1.Maximum VMs on a Cluster (Resource Pool) on XenServer 6.0 based on a maximum of 50-60 concurrent protected VMs per host with HA enabled.
2.High Availability/vMotion/Clustering is unavailable in the standalone vSphere Hypervisor
3.VMware does not support VM Guest Clustering using iSCSI storage.
4.VMware does not support VM Guest Clustering using File Based Storage i.e. NFS
5.VMware does not support the vMotion of a VM that is part of a Guest Cluster
6.VMware does not support the use of Memory Overcommit with a VM that is part of a Guest Cluster
7.No XenServer documentation can be found that details the number of simultaneous live migrations over either 1GB or 10GB Ethernet.

Also, comparing Hyper-V Windows 2008R2 with Hyper-V Windows 2012

 

 

Categories: Microsoft, Virtualization Tags: , ,

Hyper-V Windows 20012 improvments and comparison

June 27, 2012 1 comment

Significant improvements have been made across the board, with Hyper-V now supporting increased cluster sizes, a significantly higher number of active virtual machines per host, and additionally, more advanced performance features such as in-guest Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA).

The tables below shows the improvement Microsoft has done with  Windows 20012 Hyper-V :

 

 

The table also shows that both Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and vSphere 5.0 Enterprise Plus deliver up to 1TB of memory to an individual virtual machine, however, one aspect to bear in mind when creating virtual machines of this size, is the vRAM (Virtual Machine Memory) entitlement with vSphere 5.0.

  • Each vSphere 5.0 Enterprise Plus CPU license comes with a vRAM entitlement of 96GB vRAM, and on a 2 CPU physical host, this would equate to 192GB vRAM added to a ‘vRAM Pool’
  • The 1TB virtual machine would consume 96GB of the vRAM allocation (this is an upper limit established for an individual VM, and was one of the results of customer feedback around the original vRAM licensing announcements)
  • This would leave only 96GB of vRAM for use by other virtual machines, restricting scale. The only option to overcome this would be for the customer to purchase additional vSphere 5.0 licenses at considerable expense. This is on top of the extra administrative overhead of monitoring and managing vRAM entitlements.

 

Notes:

1.XenServer 6.0 active VMs per host varies based on Server/VDI workload, with PVS/IntelliCache & HA on/off
2.Maximum VMs on a Cluster (Resource Pool) on XenServer 6.0 based on a maximum of 50-60 concurrent protected VMs per host with HA enabled.
3.Host physical memory is capped at 32GB thus maximum VM memory is also restricted to 32GB usage.
4.For clustering/high availability, customers must purchase vSphere
5.vSphere 5.0 Enterprise Plus is the only edition that supports 32 vCPUs.  All others support 8 vCPUs within a virtual machine.
6.Maximum number of Virtual CPUs per Host is not documented in the Citrix XenServer 6.0 Configuration Limits documentation
Categories: Microsoft, Virtualization Tags: , , ,

High Availabilty. Why Hyper-V delivers better

May 29, 2012 Leave a comment

That’s kind of interesting subject to talk about

Taking as a sample 3 cluster node, where every node has  1(one) connection to a shared storage.

By using VmWare,  if one of the VmWare hosts ever lose the IP storage connectivity ( an fault on the ISCSI nic for example ), your Virtual Machines are on the dark, you will probably receive an Blue Screen. The VmWare monitoring will try to start (vmotion) the Virtual machine on the same host or on any other host that has storage connectivity.

Now, the clever solution from the Hyper-V
if the one of the Hyper-V hosts lose IP storage connectivity ( an fault on the ISCSI nic for example ), the Hyper-V will redirect the Storage traffic to the CSV and the VM  still working : no blue screen, no restart.

In a Hyper-V Failover Cluster with CSV, all storage I/O is Direct I/O meaning each node hosting a virtual machine(s) is writing directly (via Fibre Channel, iSCSI, or SAS connectivity) to the CSV volume.  But in case of lost of Storage connectivity in one of the hosts the traffic will be redirected over the CSV network to another node Host in the cluster which still has direct access to the storage supporting the CSV volume.  This functionality prevents the loss of all connectivity to storage.  Instead, all storage related I/O is redirected over the CSV network. This is very powerful technology as it prevents a total loss of connectivity thereby allowing virtual machine workloads to continue functioning.

Of course there are other fault scenarios to consider and yes, I know that the recommedation is to have redundant storage connection, but that’s kind of expensive solution and does not take the fact that the Hyper-V solution is more clever.

If you ever experienced this situation I would like to hear your input.

Categories: Microsoft, Virtualization Tags: , , , ,

Microsoft Virtualization for VMware Professionals : Free Online Classes taught by two of the most respected authorities on virtualization technologies

March 8, 2011 Leave a comment

Microsoft Virtualization for VMware Professionals  –  Free Online
Classes  –  March 29 – 31

Just one week after Microsoft Management Summit 2011 (MMS), Microsoft Learning will be hosting an exclusive three-day Jump Start class specially tailored for VMware and Microsoft virtualization technology pros.  Registration for “Microsoft Virtualization for VMware Professionals” is open now and will be delivered as a FREE online class on March 29-31, 2010 from 10:00am-4:00pm PDT.

What’s the high-level overview?

This cutting edge course will feature expert instruction and real-world
demonstrations of Hyper-V and brand new releases from System Center Virtual
Machine Manager 2012 Beta (many of which will be announced just one
week earlier at MMS).  Register Now!

  • Day 1
    will focus on “Platform” (Hyper-V, virtualization architecture, high
    availability & clustering)

    • 10:00am– 10:30pm PDT:  Virtualization 360 Overview
    • 10:30am– 12:00pm:  Microsoft Hyper-V Deployment Options & Architecture
    • 1:00pm–   2:00pm:  Differentiating Microsoft and VMware (terminology,etc.)
    • 2:00pm–   4:00pm:  High Availability & Clustering
  • Day 2
    will focus on “Management” (System Center Suite, SCVMM 2012 Beta, Opalis, Private Cloud solutions)

    • 10:00am – 11:00pm PDT:  System Center
      Suite Overview w/ focus on DPM
    • 11:00am – 12:00pm:  Virtual Machine
      Manager 2012 | Part 1
    • 1:00pm –   1:30pm:  Virtual
      Machine Manager 2012 | Part 2
    • 1:30pm –   2:30pm:
      Automation with System Center Opalis & PowerShell
    • 2:30pm–   4:00pm:  Private Cloud Solutions, Architecture & VMM SSP 2.0
  • Day 3
    will focus on “VDI” (VDI Infrastructure/architecture, v-Alliance, application
    delivery via VDI)

    • 10:00am – 11:00pm PDT:  Virtual
      Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Architecture | Part 1
    • 11:00am – 12:00pm:  Virtual Desktop
      Infrastructure (VDI) Architecture | Part 2
    • 1:00pm –   2:30pm:
      v-Alliance Solution Overview
    • 2:30pm–   4:00pm:  Application Delivery for VDI
  • Every section will be team-taught by two of the most respected authorities on virtualization technologies: Microsoft Technical Evangelist Symon Perriman and leading Hyper-V, VMware, and XEN infrastructure consultant, Corey Hynes

Who is the target audience for this training?

Suggested prerequisite skills include real-world experience with Windows Server 2008 R2,virtualization and datacenter management. The course is tailored to these types of roles:

 

  • IT Professional
  • IT Decision Maker
  • Network Administrators & Architects
  • Storage/Infrastructure
    Administrators & Architects

How do I to register and learn more about this great training opportunity?
Register: Visit the Registration
Page and sign up for all three sessions

  • Blog: Learn more from the Microsoft
    Learning Blog
  • Twitter: Here are a few posts you can retweet:
    • Mar. 29-31
      “Microsoft #Virtualization for VMware Pros” @SymonPerriman Corey
      Hynes http://bit.ly/JS-Hyper-V
      @MSLearning #Hyper-V
    • @SysCtrOpalis Mar.
      29-31 “Microsoft #Virtualization for VMware Pros” @SymonPerriman
      Corey Hynes http://bit.ly/JS-Hyper-V
      #Hyper-V
    • Learn all the cool new
      features in Hyper-V & System Center 2012! SCVMM, Self-Service Portal 2.0, http://bit.ly/JS-Hyper-V
      #Hyper-V #Opalis

What is a “Jump Start” course?

A “Jump Start” course is “team-taught” by two expert instructors in an engaging radio talk show style format.  The idea is to deliver readiness training on strategic and emerging technologies that drive awareness at scale before Microsoft Learning develops mainstream Microsoft Official Courses (MOC) that map to certifications.  All sessions are professionally recorded and distributed through MS Showcase, Channel 9, Zune Marketplace and iTunes for broader reach.

 

Categories: Microsoft, Virtualization Tags: , , , , , , ,