vCloud Suite 5.1 Licensing Explained

VMware has announced the release of the new vSphere 5.1 solution. Together with this new release, VMware has also announce it’s new VMware vCloud Suite 5.1 licensing model. This model combines multiple components (vSphere Enterprise Plus, vCloud Director, vCloud Networking and Security, etc.) into a single product with a single license. All virtual machines running on a properly licensed vCloud Suite processor can use all components included in that vCloud Suite edition.

Licensing per processor

As mentioned above the licensing unit takes place per-processor. VMware no longer limits it’s customers physical resources and on the number of virtual machines!!! VMware has listened to the VMware Community and no longer applies the vRAM principle. Or like other call it, the vTax. The VMware vCloud Suite 5.1 is licensed per physical processor. With all physical processors licensed in a server a customer can run all VMware products on top of this server that are licensed within the bundle.

vCloud Suites Editions

There are 3 editions available for the vCloud Suites :

1. VMware vCloud Suite Standard; vSphere Enterprise Plus, vCloud Director, vCloud Connector & VMware vCloud Network and Security Suite Standard.

2. VMware vCloud Suite Advanced; vSphere Enterprise Plus, vCloud Director, vCloud Connector & VMware vCloud Network and Security Suite Advanced and vCOPs Advanced.

3. VMware vCloud Suite Enterprise; vSphere Enterprise Plus, vCloud Director, vCloud Connector & VMware vCloud Network and Security Suite Enterprise, vCOPS Enterprise, vFabric Application Director and SRM.

So what’s the deal?

In my opinion VMware tried to simplify the whole licensing part of building a vCloud solution. Most customers that build a private cloud in general want to build such a vCloud solution in an easy manner, but it also needs to be easy to manage, must be monitored and should work in case of a disaster.

All of these components are in the bundle that is licensed with vCloud Suite Enterprise edition. An easy licensing path on the road to your own private vCloud. Most companies already have VMware vSphere licenses and VMware also provide an upgrade path toward the new VMware vCloud Suite licenses. For upgrading VMware has introduced the Fair Value Conversion Program that can be found at http://www.vmware.com/go/ vcloud-suite-licensing.

For more information on the VMware vCloud Suite licensing see the vCloud Suite 5.1 Pricing and Packaging Whitepaper or talk to your own VMware sales representative.

Auto Deploy in vSphere 5.1

Auto Deploy has been added to the vSphere portfolio with the release of 5.0. Now with vSphere 5.1 the functionality and resiliency has been improved and makes Auto Deploy the tool for deploying ESXi onto baremetal servers.

Auto Deploy works in combination with PXE booting. During network boot the PXE server will re-direct the baremetal server to the Auto Deploy server. With 5.0 there was only one option Stateless Install. Now with 5.1 two more options have been added: Stateless Caching & Stafull Install.

Each option has different method of installing the ESXi operation system to the baremetal server:

Stateless Install; The baremetal server will need to boot to PXE each time the server is restarted. A connection to the Auto Deploy server will be made and ESXi is streamed to the server in memory. If the Auto Deploy server can’t be reached, the server won’t boot ESXi.
Stateless Caching; Stateless caching will try boot ESXi into memory just like Stateless Install. However the last known installation will also be cached to a local disk. In the event that the Autodeploy server can’t be reached the baremetal server will boot the last know configuration.
Statefull Install; The first time the baremetal server boots it needs to connect via PXE boot to the Autodeploy server. The Autodeploy server will then install ESXi onto local disks. After that the baremetal server will boot ESXi from local disk.

Auto Deploy in vSphere 5.1 adds more resiliency by providing the option to install or cache to local disk. This has matured Auto Deploy for usage in an enterprise environment. For more information see the whitepaper “vSphere 5.1 – What’s New Platform”

vCenter Single Sign-On Server in vSphere 5.1

VMware introduces vCenter Single Sign-On with vSphere 5.1. This solution creates a new layer between the vSphere solutions and the customers identity sources. The figure below gives a graphical representation where to position vCenter Single Sign-On.

The vCenter Single Sign-On server is the vSphere platform service that will be in between the vSphere solution, such as vSphere Web Client, vCenter, vCloud Director,etc., and the identity sources that are available within the customer infrastructure.

vCenter Single Sign-On has been introduced within the vSphere environment for the following reasons:

· Provide one single sign-on solution for authentication across all management applications;

· Support for multiple user identity repository solutions;

· One central point for authorization and auditing within the vSphere environement;

· Trust between components using token exchange, in stead of each solution having it’s own identity creation and authorization process;

· Support for open standard authentication protocols: SAML 2.0 and WS-TRUST.

Besides the improvements mentioned above, vCenter Single Sign-On can now also be setup with a in a more resilient setup. This will result in a high availability level for authentication in the vSphere environment.

For more information about the vCenter Single Sign-On Server look at the “vSphere 5.1 – What’s New vCenter Server”

VMware 5.1 release party!

Word is out, vSphere 5.1 and vCloud 5.1 have been released. So what’s new in this release? A lot I can tell you that!

And that’s what the Technical Marketing has been working on the last couple of months.

Here is the list with papers that cover all the new features :

Thanks to Duncan Epping for providing this list on his blog.

Thanks to everybody at Tech Marketing for making this information available to us!!!

New storage books for designing cloud infra

When creating a design for your cloud environment you always have to take the physical components, such as compute, network & storage into account. These components are the foundation that your cloud environment will be build on. A good design of these components is crucial for your overall design, the performance and resilience of your solution. Fact remains that you can’t know it all, but when you do want to know it, then the best way is to learn it from the experts.

Now we have the chance to do so. Three experts in the field of storage released two books about storage in relation to virtual cloud environments.

Mostafa Khalil from VMware, released the book “Storage Implementation in vSphere 5.0”

“The more important VMware virtualized infrastructure becomes, the more important virtualization storage becomes. Virtualization storage planning and management is complex, and it’s been almost impossible to find authoritative guidance – until now. In Storage Implementation in vSphere 5.0, one of VMware’s leading experts completely demystifies the “black box” of vSphere storage, and provides illustrated, step-by-step procedures for performing virtually every task associated with it. Mostafa Khalil brings together detailed techniques and guidelines, insights for better architectural design, planning and management best practices, common configuration details, and deep dives into both vSphere and external storage-related technologies. He gives technical professionals the deep understanding they need to make better choices, solve problems, and keep problems from occurring in the first place. This book answers crucial, ground-level questions such as: How do you configure storage array from “Vendor X” to support vSphere “Feature Y”? How do you know you’ve configured it correctly? What happens if you misconfigure it? How can you tell from logs and other tools that you have a problem – and how do you fix it? Most of the author’s troubleshooting techniques are based on his own personal experience as a senior VMware support engineer helping customerstroubleshoot their own vSphere production environments – experience that nobody else has.”

At the same time Vaughn Stewart and Mike Slisinger from NetApp released the book “Virtualization Changes Everything: Storage Strategies for VMware vSphere & Cloud Computing”:

“Storage is a foundational component in the support of virtualization and cloud computing – and it is dynamically evolving. It is an aspect of the datacenter that is all-too-often overlooked, but without storage, there is no data, and without data, there is no cloud. Virtualization Changes Everything, by Vaughn Stewart and Mike Slisinger, examines the evolutionary influence of host virtualization and cloud computing in breaking storage deployment out of outdated silo models and into a dynamic, flexible hosting environment. Virtualization Changes Everything reviews common goals and challenges associated with providing storage service with cloud computing, and addresses each through the application of advanced storage technologies designed to scale in order to support the ever-expanding storage needs of the future. The examples within the book are pulled from real-world experience, and often involve the integration of multiple innovative technologies. If you are looking for measured guidance on high availability, efficiency, integration and performance for the storage in your cloud, then this book is for you!”

Both execellent books on the topic of storage and the impact it has on your virtual cloud environment. A must read for everybody that wants to gain more knowledge on this topic and the impact storage has on virtual cloud environments.

Resource management in a vSphere vApp

What is a vApp?

A vApp is a container in vSphere. It works the same way as a resource pool, but has extra options that help define a more structured approach to hosting virtual machines. With vApps you can build application stacks of virtual machines that have a relations with one another.

The most common example is always the three tiered app; a webserver, application server and a database server. With a vApp these virtual machines can be grouped together and besides grouping them together you can also control the startup order of the VMs in the vApp and allocate a specific amount of resources to the vApp.

Note : vSphere vApps are not the same as vCloud vApps! Both group workloads together, but they are not the same thing.

Resource allocation

The allocation of resources for a vApp works with the same construct as that of a resource pool. The vApp can be allocated a specific amount of CPU and RAM resources. By default the vApp is set to unlimited and resources are expandable if needed, just like a resource pool. These settings can be changed in the same way as with normal resource pools. Reservations, limits and shares can be defined on a vApp level and can help to allocates resources depending on the requirments of the application stack.

VMs in a vApp share the resources that have been allocated to the vApp only with the other VMs in the vApp. In this way VMs are isolated from other VMs, vApps and resource pools outside of its own vApp. When resource contention takes place all VMs in a vApp will have to compete over the amount om resource that are available to the vApp.

If expendable reservations are configured, the vApp can allocate more resources if the parent resource pool has those available. However if there are no resources available the VMs in the vApp will need to compete over the resource available to the vApp. This is where normal resource mechanisms apply such as shares, limits and reservations.

Lets take the vApp with the three tier vApp (web-app-db) as an example. By default all VMs are equal in a vApp. However the database is the most important VM in this three tiered vApp and needs to be given enough resources when resource contention takes place. To define this one can set the shares for the database VM on High. By default this is set to Normal. This will give the database VM twice as much resource shares as the other two VMs in the vApp. This will elevate its priority within the vApp and provide it with half of the resources when resource contention takes places. In this way one can set a specific priority to VMs within a vApp.

More information about the allocation of resources within vSphere can be found in the book VMware vSphere 5 Clustering Technical Deepdive by Frank Denneman & Duncan Epping.