VI Team Blog

Last week, VMware released an update to its VMware Infrastructure suite of products and there a few changes worth noting:

-          Enhanced hardware monitoring for VMware ESXi

-          Support for VMware High Availability (HA) for VMware ESXi

-          Support for Microsoft Cluster Services (MSCS) for both VMware ESX and VMware ESXi, including support for Cluster Continuous Replication (CCR) with Exchange 2007

The enhanced monitoring and alerting for VMware ESXi includes new Common Information Model (CIM) providers for CPU, system memory, fan, power supply, and other sensors.  This hardware health information can be consumed by VMware VirtualCenter and by third-party management products.

This further addresses a common question about VMware ESXi: “How can I manage ESXi without a Service Console?”  The answer: standards-based protocols and open interfaces.  Migrating to these remote management tools enables us to completely free the hypervisor from the operating system, leaving behind a small, 32 MB kernel.  This eliminates common security vulnerabilities found in general purpose operating systems while making the hypervisor extremely easy to deploy.

These remote management tools include:

·         VMware VirtualCenter for centralized management of VMware ESXi and its virtual machines.

·         CIM for key hardware health status information.

·         The Remote Command Line Interface (RCLI) for developing custom management scripts and GUI-free administration.

·         The VMware Infrastructure API for third party management integration, replacing the function of Service Console agents.  These tools use the same interfaces as VirtualCenter to monitor and interact with VMware ESXi.

·         VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) for integrating with third party backup agents to provide LAN-free backup from a centralized proxy server.

While some of these tools, like VirtualCenter and VCB, are optional purchases, we do find that most customers do deploy them when managing multiple hosts in their environment.

Separately, with support for both VMware HA and Microsoft Cluster Services (MSCS), customers can deploy complementary tools for providing resilience in the face of hardware and application failures.  VMware HA provides a simple, application-independent solution for recovering quickly from server failures.  MSCS complements VMware HA with an application specific solution that provides continuous availability in the case of application or server failure.  The latest ESX update provides support for MSCS, including both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows guests, boot from SAN for VMs using MSCS, and Exchange 2007 Cluster Continuous Replication (CCR).  According to Microsoft, CCR “is a high availability feature of Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 that combines the asynchronous log shipping and replay technology built into Exchange 2007 with the failover and management features provided by the Cluster service.”  CCR support provides customers another availability tool for virtualizing their Exchange 2007 deployments.

While this is just a minor update to VMware Infrastructure, these small improvements provide further support for building a robust and resilient virtual infrastructure.