Saturday, June 15, 2013

VMware vCloud Connector 2.5 GA and available to download


VMware vCloud Connector 2.5 GA and available to download

What's vCloud Connector?
  • vCloud Connector (vCC) is a key differentiator in vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS) as well as a core component of the vCloud Suite.
  • vCC helps customers realize the hybrid cloud vision by providing them with a single pane of glass to view, operate and copy VMs/vApps/templates across vSphere/vCD, vCHS & vCloud Service Providers.
What's new in vCC 2.5?
  • Offline Data Transfer (ODT) for vCHS
Allows customers to ship large number of VMs/vApps/templates (>TBs) from on-prem vSphere / vCD to vCHS via an external storage device. Customer uses vCC to export VMs/vApps/templates to the device and ships the device to vCHS. vCHS Ops team then uploads the VMs/vApps/templates from the device into the customer vCHS account. Customer can start using these in their vCHS environment.
Note: This feature only support vCHS as a destination.
  • UDP Data Transfer (UDT)
For customers who could leverage the UDP protocol instead of HTTP, this feature will significantly improve the transfer performance of vCC and reduce the amount of time it takes to move VMs/vApps/templates between vSphere/vCD, vCHS & vCloud SPs.
  • Path Optimization
Uses streaming between the vCC Nodes to dramatically improve the transfer performance of vCC. 
Support
vSphere 5.1, 5.0, 4.x
vCloud Director 5.1, 1.5
vCHS

    • Available to all vSphere, vSphere with Operations Management & vCloud Director customers as a free download.
    • Includes all the new features such as ODT, UDT & Path Optimization.
    • Datacenter Extension & Content Sync NOT INCLUDED.
    • Available via vSphere download in the "Drivers & Tools" tab, Click here
    • Available to all vCloud Suite & vCHS customers. 
    • Includes all vCC Core features plus Datacenter Extension & Content Sync.
    • Activated with a valid vCloud Suite license key or a vCC Key provided with the vCloud Hybrid Service Click here

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Want to go VMworld Europe in Barcelona



Join cloudcredibility and complete the tasks assigned to you and your team, these points can be redeemed to nice goodies. To see the entire list of goodies click HERE

The grand prize is a trip to VMworld Europe in Barcelona.





Different Hypervisor designs in Type 1 hypervisor's






Different Hypervisor designs in Type 1 hypervisor's

In the type 1 VMM/hypervisor a.k.a bare metal hypervisor there are two categories of Hypervisor designs.


a. Microkernelized Hypervisor Design
Ex: Microsoft Hyper V
b. Monolithic Hypervisor Design
Ex: VMware vSphere

Microkernelized hypervisor:

Device drivers does not need to be hypervisor aware and they are on the controlling layer. So a wide range of Hardware can run this kind of a Hypervisor and there is less overhead on the hypervisor itself.
At the same time this needs an Operating System to be installed to initialize the hypervisor layer, and any attack or a fault of that controlling layer operating system can affect the whole hypervisor and bring down all the virtual machines.

Monolithic Hypervisor Design:

In this design the device drivers run at the same layer as the VMM/Hypervisor, hence the hardware and I/O devices should be Hypervisor aware in other words device drivers to be developed for the hypervisor so this results only a certain set of certified hardware can only run this kind of a hypervisor.
No operating system is required to fork lift this hypervisor this makes the hypervisor stable, No security patches are needed for components running in the "Controlling Layer."

Now that we have understood about type 1 hypervisor's what is type 2.

A type  2 hypervisor runs as a software on top of an existing Operating system.

Ex: VMware Workstation, VMware Fusion etc.



Wednesday, May 8, 2013

Limits and Throughput's  of vCloud Network and Security components:

Details of Edge instances used in performance metrics comparison


Edge (Compact) Edge (Large) Edge (X-Large)
vCPU 1 2 2
Memory 256 MB 1 GB 8 GB
Disk 320 MB 320 MB 4.4 GB

 Tested Limits

The following table provides information on the tested soft limits per vCloud Networking and Security Manager:
Note: These soft limits can be exceeded on a per feature basis depending on the resources and the set of features in use.
Limit vCloud Networking and Security Manager
Number of Edge HA appliances 2,000 Compact / Large Edges or 1,000 X-Large Edges
Number of clusters 8
Number of hosts with Edge in use 256 (8 clusters * 32 hosts)
Number of hosts in inventory 400
Number of virtual machines 15000 total virtual machines, 5000 powered on
Number of networks 5000 VXLANs
Number of firewall rules 100,000
Number of firewall object groups 130,000
Number of DHCP static bindings 25,000
Number of DHCP pools 10,000
Number of static routes 100,000
Number of load balancer pools 3,000
Number of load balancer virtual servers 3,000
Number of members in load balancer pools 30,000
The following table provides information on the tested soft limits per vCloud Networking and Security Edge:
Limit vCloud Networking and Security Edge
Number of interfaces 10
Number of firewall rules 2,000
Number of NAT rules 2,000
Number of DHCP static bindings 25
Number of DHCP pools 10
Number of static routes 100
Number of load balancer pools 3 (Hard limit: 64)
Number of load balancer virtual servers 3 (Hard limit: 64)
Number of members per load balancer pool 10 (Hard limit: 32)
Concurrent IPSec VPN Tunnels 64
Concurrent SSL VPN Tunnels 25 (Compact), 100 (Large)

 Firewall and VPN Performance Comparison


Edge (Compact) Edge (Large)
Firewall Performance (Gbps) 3 9.7
Concurrent Sessions 64,000 1,000,000
New sessions/second 8,000 50,000
IPSec VPN throughput (Gbps) - H/W acceleration via AESNI 0.9 2

 Load Balancer Performance Comparison


Edge (Large) Edge (X-Large)
Load balancer throughput – L7 Proxy Mode (Gbps) 2.2 3
Load balancer connections / sec – L7 Proxy Mode 46,000 50,000
Load balancer concurrent connections – L7 Proxy Mode 8,000 60,000
Load balancer throughput – L4 Mode (Gbps) 6 6
Load balancer connections / sec – L4 Mode 50,000 50,000
Load balancer concurrent connections – L4 Mode 600,000 1,000,000

Thursday, December 13, 2012

General Availability of vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) 5.1




VMware announced the General Availability of vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) 5.1. 

This is the first release as part of the VMware family since DynamicOps joined the company in July, 2012.  This release comes only five months after the acquisition and five months since the last release (4.5 in July) with five major features. In addition, this release is part of the vCloud Suite Enterprise edition.
 Notable features and integrations in this release include:
 ·         vCloud Director integration
   Provision vApps to virtual datacenters
   Support for vCloud Director private or public clouds
 ·         Invocation of vCenter Orchestrator workflows
   Facilitates Facilitates integration with third party technologies and systems
   Expands the vCAC automation library
 ·         Multi-machine services
   Streamlines the provisioning and ongoing management of multiple machines
   Deliver multiple machines with one operation
   Manage multiple machines as a single entity
 ·         Ability to reconfigure virtual machines
   Policy-driven reconfigure approvals
   Policy-driven threshold enforcement (min, max thresholds)
   Self-service management of existing machines
   Add or remove CPU, memory, and storage from an existing virtual machine
 ·         Simplified storage management
   Define one or more volumes on different storage paths
Congratulations to the Engineering, QE, Documentation, and PMM teams who succeeded in delivering this release in the short period of time after the acquisition.  Thanks for all the help from the program, release, legal, and support/enablement teams.  This was truly a team effort!
 Links to binaries, docs, new product features, pricing and licensing: 


Friday, October 5, 2012

Keyboard Shortcuts for Windows 8


This is very helpful for windows 8 users. lot of shortcuts easy to navigate ...


Thursday, October 4, 2012

ALL About VMware SSO


There was a nice blog post by vmware support for SSO deployment, configuration and troubleshooting. below are are few of them.

Let’s start with two particularly important KB articles. These are classified as ‘Resolution Paths’. They walk you through an ordered set of steps in resolving a problem. You can read more about resolution path articles here.
If those two don’t address your problem, here are a few more resources to help you along your way on the upgrade path. Enjoy!
Installation and Deployment
How vCenter SSO Deployment Scenarios Affect Log In Behavior
Setting up Apache load balancing software with vCenter Single Sign On (2034157)
Configuring SSO for HA (2033588)
Manually Replicate Data in a Multisite vCenter Single Sign On Deployment
Installing vCenter Single Sign On in a multisite deployment (2034074)
Deploying SSO at each site in multi site mode
SSO server Deployment Modes
Configuration
Replacing Default SSL Certificates for vCenter components (pdf)
When you log into the vSphere Client, linked vCenter Server systems do not appear (2033213)
vCenter Single Sign On and dependent services fail to start after you reboot the system (2032749)
After updating SSL certificate for SSO, a newly installed instance of VC fails to start (2033215)
Unable to connect to vCenter Inventory Service (2032356)
Repointing and reregistering vCenter Server and components (2033620)
Configuring SSO for HA (2033588)
Troubleshooting SSO on Windows (2033208)
  • autodiscovery fails
  • Single Sign On Installation fails completely
  • error occurs that references the vCenter Inventory or Web Client
vCenter Single Sign On fails to start at startup or initialization (2033164)
Troubleshooting Single Sign On with the vCenter Server Appliance configuration on an external database (2033624)
Troubleshooting vCenter Server Appliance configuration with an external vCenter Single Sign On server (2033737)
Troubleshooting Single Sign On and Active Directory domain authentication with the vCenter Server Appliance (2033742)
Change the vCenter Single Sign On Mode in VCVA
Update vCenter Single Sign On settings after you change the hostname or port of the database server (2033516)
Admin and Login
Troubleshooting SSL certificates updates and SSO (2033240)
Troubleshooting vSphere Web Client login errors (2033253)
  • provided credentials are invalid
  • user account is locked
  • Single Sign On server fails to respond
  • vCenter Server administrator permissions are not valid by default on Single Sign On
Troubleshooting SSO on VCVA (2033338)
Updating SSL certificates for vCenter Single Sign On servers behind a load balancer (2034181)
Unable to log in to vCenter Server with the vSphere Client (2034798)