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Justin King

About Justin King

Justin King has been involved with the IT industry for over 15 years where he has held various roles and responsibilities from administration to architecting solutions. Since joining VMware in 2009, Justin has supported sales teams as a sales engineer, evangelized BCDR technologies and currently installs confidence by removing the doubt with VMware's Cloud Infrastructure Suite line of products being part of the Technical Marketing team. Follow vCenterGuy on Twitter for news and information on anything vCenter Server related

Did you know vCenter Server can manage multiple hypervisors?

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VMware vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager is a component that enables support for heterogeneous hypervisors in a VMware vCenter Server environment. It provides the following benefits to your virtual environment:

 
  • An integrated platform for managing VMware and third-party hypervisors from a single interface.
  • A hypervisor choice for the different business units in your organization to accommodate their specific needs.
  • No single hypervisor vendor lock-in.

When you add a third-party host to vCenter Server, all virtual machines that exist on the host are discovered automatically, and are added to the third-party hosts inventory.

The ability of vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager to migrate virtual machines from third-party hosts to ESX or ESXi hosts is implemented by exposing the capabilities of vCenter Converter Standalone in the vSphere Client. See VMware KB article 2048927 for information about dependency between vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager and vCenter Converter Standalone.

Key Capabilities

vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager 1.1 introduces the following set of basic management capabilities over third-party hosts:

  • Third-party host management including add, remove, connect, disconnect, and view the host configuration.
  • Ability to migrate virtual machines from third-party hosts to ESX or ESXi hosts.
  • Ability to provision virtual machines on third-party hosts.
  • Ability to edit virtual machine settings.
  • Integrated vCenter Server authorization mechanism across ESX/ESXi and third-party hosts inventories for privileges, roles, and users.
  • Automatic discovery of pre-existing third-party virtual machines
  • Ability to perform power operations with hosts and virtual machines.
  • Ability to connect and disconnect DVD, CD-ROM, and floppy drives and images to install operating systems.

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VMware vCenter Server 5.1 Update 1 Released

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There have been some rumors but I can now officially share the update release 1 for vSphere vCenter Server 5.1.

vCenter Server 5.1 Update 1 | Build 1064983
vCenter Server Appliance 5.1 Update 1 | Build 1065184

Download from VMware.com

What’s New

This release of VMware vCenter Server 5.1 Update 1 offers the following improvements:

  • vCenter Server is now supported on Windows Server 2012
  • Additional vCenter Server Database Support: vCenter Server now supports the following databases.
    • Microsoft SQL Server 2012
    • Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 SP2
  • Additional Guest Operating System Customization Support -vCenter Server now supports customization of the following guest operating systems:
    • Windows 8
    • Windows Server 2012
    • Ubuntu12.04
    • RHEL 5.9
  • vCenter Essentials no longer enforces vRAM usage limit of 192 GB
    With vSphere 5.1 Update 1, the Essentials and Essentials Plus licenses no longer restrict virtual machine power-on operations when the vRAM usage limit of 192 GB is met.
  • Resolved Issues – This release delivers a number of bug fixes that have been documented in the Resolved Issues section.

Click to review the complete VMware vSphere 5.1 Update 1 release notes

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vCenter Certificate Automation Tool – Now Available

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With the release of vCenter 5.1 adding additional certificates into the environment to make communication between components more secure, the process of updating these certificates with customers’ own signed certificates has been a challenge.

We are pleased to announce the general availability of vCenter Certificate Automation Tool 1.0. This tool provides an automated mechanism to replace certificates in the following components of the vCenter Server 5.1 management platform:

 

The tool is available now and can be downloaded for free from the VMware download website

For more information on how to install, and use the tool, refer to KB article: Deploying and Using the SSL Certificate Automation Tool (2041600).

This tool is fully supported by VMware.

 

Note: The new certificate tool does NOT handle replacement of certificates in ESXi hosts.

vCenter Single Sign-On – Part 4: Pre Install Requirements

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The installation of vSphere vCenter Sign-On is a relatively a straight forward process when planned correctly and as there are many factors of the environment that the installation process will touch, it is important to review the vCenter Single Sign-On Server prerequisites prior to deployment, preferably during the initial design phase. It is important to note that the vCenter Single Sign-On server is the first component to be installed prior to vCenter Server install or upgrade.

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vCenter Single Sign-On – Part 3: Availability

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Before we continue with the pre-requisites and installation of SSO we need to complete the planning of our vSphere install/upgrade design and this includes the desired level of availability required, if any.

When speaking to partners and customers I am often stumbled by the amount of attention and time that is placed on individual SSO availability. My response is bluntly why? followed by the question on what do you use today to protect vCenter server? to which the response is typically nothing or vSphere HA, sometimes vCenter Heartbeat. Don’t get me wrong my background is in business continuity and the way I look at it, SSO is an authentication component of the vCenter server, nothing more, nothing less and so when looking to protect SSO, the solution you choose for protecting vCenter server will provide the best protection of all vCenter components. If you choose not to protect the vCenter server then no protection of SSO is required, if SSO goes down, you bring down the vCenter server management, if only vCenter server goes down, you’re in the same situation, without vCenter server your not going to have much use for an SSO server unless shared with multiple vCenter servers (see below). There are solutions that enable themselves with SSO but these all have a dependency on the vCenter server to be operational. I understand that when reading up on SSO at the excellent vSphere 5.1 Documentation Center, there is a configuration called SSO HA (not to be confused with vSphere HA) and as this is an installable configuration, some believe this is the only option for SSO availability which is not correct. While this solution works, it can be very complex to setup, requires the use of third party technologies but does it give me anymore protection than say vSphere HA? I hope to answer this for you.

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Heading to the VMware Partner Exchange this year?

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If your going to be in Las Vegas for the annual 2013 VMware Partner Exchange, why don’t you come and check out my sessions on vSphere 5.1 covering the vSphere web client and vCenter components like Single Sign-On

Thursday, Feb 28, 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM
CI1544 - vSphere Web Client - Technical Walkthrough
With the release of vSphere 5.1 was a new primary client for the management of vSphere Solutions. With this session we will build competency in the adoption of the vSphere Web Client by highlighting the differences, easing the initial reaction to a Web Client and show you how to wow your customers with real world use cases

Thursday, Feb 28, 10:15 AM – 12:15 PM
CI1545 - vSphere – Deployment Best Practices
With the new technologies introduced with vSphere 5.1 many unanswered questions exist with designing and deploying the vSphere 5.1 environment. This session will share best practices learned from the field and provide common scenarios with recommended configurations of vCenter, Single Sign-On, Inventory Service and the web client that will future proof your customers environment. This session has now been extended to include Kyle Gleed (@VMwareESXi) discussing best practices on deploying and working with vSphere hosts (ESXi)

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vCenter Single Sign-On – Part 2: Deployment Options

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Now you understand what vCenter Single Sign-On (SSO) provides, as you start to design or upgrade to your vSphere 5.1 environment, particular attention needs to be given in the planning stages around the placement and configuration of the SSO server. This will always be the first component to be installed; regardless of fresh install or upgrading from a previous version. The SSO server can be deployed in a number of configurations and I will explain these options and too why you may use each option.

During the installation process you will be presented with the below screen which is a key decision on which deployment method of SSO you would like to deploy. It is very important that you have planned your SSO deployment as changing this configuration later is possible but not an easy achievement. Continue reading →

An update to vCenter Server 5.1 released, version 5.1.0B available now

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An update for the vSphere vCenter Server 5.1 has been released to address a couple of issues that didn’t make it into the GA version. If you have experienced issues with timeout errors occurring when logging in to the vSphere Client or logging in to a vSphere Web Client as a user of an Active Directory domain that has a non-standard UPN or have changed the Single Sign-On master password you probably should look at updating to the new release.

You can get the updated files from vmware.com and I would highly recommend reading the release notes for a full list of known issues that have been resolved in this release as well as a readme that has been included to add additional assisting information.

If you haven’t been sold on the vCenter Appliance yet you should checkout the update process when using the vCenter Appliance; just navigate to the upgrade tab and apply the update from there (internet or cdrom), the process for updating the vCenter appliance is very slick and another reason why you should be looking into it. For those using the installable version of vCenter Server (Windows) we provide an ISO image.

With vSphere 5.1 comes a new vSphere Web Client

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With the release of vSphere 5.1 there is a brand new client to manage and administer your vSphere environment. Although a web client has been been part of vCenter server since it’s introduction, it has been some what limiting in features but helpful for those times of need. In vSphere 5.1 the web client has been completely rewritten from the ground up with the focus on providing a cross platform client that delivers comparable features and functionality to that of the desktop client. In fact all new technologies delivered with vSphere 5.1 are only manageable within the vSphere web client making it the primary go to client in vSphere 5.1.

With this new client comes some changes to the familiar way of using the desktop client, primarily in navigation however once you get the hang of it you will wonder how you worked without it and this does highlight a small learning curve required. I have recorded a video that highlights the changes around relational navigation as well as show off the new features and technologies found in the new web client that help you as an administrator to simplify and save time.

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vSphere Inventory Searching and Tagging

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With the release of vSphere 5.1, many new features were added and I really like some of the new search capabilities which can be great timesavers when administering a vSphere environment.

You have always been able to search the inventory but now we have the ability to see our results categorized with inventory lists found in the vSphere Web Client which help quickly locate what your are seeking. You can run really specific searches across multiple object types and conditions and then save them for future use so you don’t have to repeat the selection process, all of this can be accessed from anywhere in the vSphere Web Client.

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