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Ken Werneburg

About Ken Werneburg

Senior Technical Marketing Manager at VMware for Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery solutions. Twitter @vmKen

SRM 5.1.1 and vSphere Replication 5.1.1 released

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As of this evening, both Site Recovery Manager and vSphere Replication have been updated and the 5.1.1 release is now available.  I strongly recommend this build as even though there is little in the way of new functionality, it is almost completely filled with things that make SRM and VR work better.

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5.1.1 | Build 1082082  
VMware vSphere Replication 5.1.1 | Build 1079383

Some of the fixed issues, for example, are things like:

  • All sorts of timeout problems ranging from multiple operation timeouts to reprotect timeouts to HBA rescan timeouts
  • Custom vCenter https ports now work better with vSphere Replication
  • Pairing SRM servers using custom certificates and VCVA now works
  • Re-protect using vSphere Replication is more resilient

Two things in particular that I want to highlight though are really nice to see are listed below.

Continue reading →

Tech Marketing at Partner Exchange 2013

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Still have some empty spots in your PEX calendar?

Let me recommend a few sessions being brought to you by some of our Tech Marketing team in the Cloud Infrastructure team!

Arranged by presenter’s name, not priority (because CI1130 would be at the top of the list then…)

Cormac Hogan

  • TEX1138 – vSphere 5.1 New Storage Features

Harry Smith

  • CI1502 – Selling IAAS with VMware vCloud Director

Jeff Hunter

  • CI1127 – vSphere Data Protection – Technical Deep Dive
  • CI1130 – High Availability, Data Protection, and Disaster Recovery in a VMware Virtualized Environment Workshop

Justin King

  • CI1545 - vSphere – Deployment Best Practices
  • CI1544 - vSphere Web Client - Technical Walkthrough

Ken Werneburg

  • CI1130 – High Availability, Data Protection, and Disaster Recovery in a VMware Virtualized Environment Workshop
  • CI1435 – Site Recovery Manager – Technical Walkthrough

Kyle Gleed

  • CI1144 – vSphere – Upgrade Best Practices
  • CI1545 – vSphere – Deployment Best Practices

Mark Achtemichuk

  • CI1149 – Virtualizing Business Critical Applications for Maximum Performance
  • CI1119 – Performance Deep Dive of the VMware Hands on Lab Cloud

Ranga Maddipudi and Vyenkatesh Deshpande

  • CI1440 – VMware vCloud Networking and Security Workshop

Vyenkatesh Deshpande

  • CI1225 – vSphere Distributed Switch – What’s New

 

**EDIT  - Oops, how could I have forgotten this session?

Rawlinson Rivera

  • CI1244 –  vSphere Storage Appliance – What’s New

Linked mode with SSO for SRM

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With the introduction of Single Sign On in vCenter 5.1, it poses a change in behaviour for those of you using linked mode.   This post will outline some of the considerations for why or why not to use linked mode with SSO and SRM in 5.1, and how to install SSO in multi-site mode in order to take advantage of linked mode.

Mostly linked mode is used by customers with Site Recovery Manager for purposes of visibility of both your protected and recovery sites including protection status and looking at the placeholders so you can see what is protected for recovery.  Linked mode also gives easier license sharing between sites, so you can install the same SRM key at both sites and have automated transfer of per-VM usage between sites when migrating or failing-over between sites.

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Site Recovery Manager Awards

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Today I’m pleased to have a guest author for the uptime blog: Gil Haberman.  Gil is the Product Marketing Manager for business continuity products at VMware, and he wants to highlight a couple of very exciting accomplishments for SRM.  Here’s Gil:

Happy New Year folks!

It’s been a remarkable year for vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) and we open 2013 with plenty of exciting news: First, SRM has passed the 10,000 customers mark and we are excited to see accelerated adoption around the world and across all customer segments. In addition, SRM has just won The 2013 Virtualization Review Reader’s Choice Award for Business Continuity. We learned about this award a few weeks after SRM won the 2012 Windows IT Pro Community Choice Award for Best High Availability Product.

Continue reading →

SRM Updates – 5.1.0.1 and 5.0.2 Released

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Along with the vCenter 5.1.0B release, we now also have a few interesting updates in the Site Recovery Manager world that were just released.

First, for those of you not yet ready to upgrade to 5.1, we have an SRM 5.0.2 release with a few minor but important fixes and improvements.

  • A handful of new operating systems are now supported for customization (including Windows 8, W2K12, RHEL 6.2/6.3, and Ubuntu 12.04).
  • vSphere Replication accepts MD5 certificates
  • The OpenSSL implementation has been upgraded to 0.9.8t
  • Autogenerated certificates are now 2048 bit
  • And the are a raft of resolve issues.

Go check out the full list of features at the Site Recovery Manager 5.0.2 Release Notes page!

For those of you, however, who are running the latest release, SRM 5.1.0.1 was also released.  This one is mostly dealing with resolving two outstanding issues in SRM 5.1.  Those issues that are fixed are:

  • Installing SRM 5.1 or upgrading to SRM 5.1 using an imported certificate fails
    If you attempt to install SRM 5.1 or upgrade to SRM 5.1 using an imported PKCS12 certificate rather than an auto-generated certificate, the installer runs to completion but then fails with the error Failed to install certificate. See KB 2036909. This issue has been fixed in SRM 5.1.0.1.
  • SRM Server on the recovery site fails during cleanup of recovery plans
    SRM Server on the recovery site fails repeatedly during cleanup if there is nothing to clean up, for example if there are no LUNs to detach, or no datastores to unmount. This problem occurs when the command to start the test recovery from SRM Server to the SRA reports success with at least one LUN, but finds no LUNs when the ESXi hosts on the recovery site run a rescan. This issue has been fixed in SRM 5.1.0.1.

So this too is a pretty small release, but better to get patched and up to date under controlled circumstances, rather than trying to fix problems during an emergency!

Keep in mind as well – if you’re upgrading SRM and using vSphere Replication: You will need to upgrade vSphere Replication at the same time to match the SRM version.  In this case you may actually already be running VR at the latest version, but please make sure you check the revisions of VC, SRM, and VR to make sure they work correctly together!

Check out the SRM 5.1 Release Notes Page for further information about SRM 5.1 in general.

-Ken

*** Postscript ***

Since writing this blog, I’ve been asked a few times about upgrades.  Please note that the 5.0.2 patch is a “later” release than the 5.1 release, and that they are completely separate code branches. This means there is NO direct upgrade path from 5.0.2 to 5.1.0.x.

In essence, if you’re running 5.0.x make sure you upgrade to the latest version of 5.0.x but when it comes time to move to 5.1 you’re going to do a forklift upgrade for all intents and purposes.  5.0 and 5.1 are separate products, and patches are only valid within their own major branch.

Technical Marketing Update 2012 – Week 47 – #tmupdate

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#TMUPDATE

This week marks some milestones.  For me personally, this week I started my 7th year here at VMware, and I’m personally excited that we still have cool stuff and I’m still thrilled to be working on it and writing about it.  Duncan, who’s been posting the updates, is moving over to a new role at VMware, and I’ll be taking over the weekly updates on material that Tech Marketing has been producing.  Here’s what the Cloud Infrastructure Tech Marketing group turned out for this week:

BLOGS

vSphere Blog:

  •  VMware vSphere Data Protection (VDP) Error and Time Synchronization – Jeff Hunter - http://bit.ly/TwHYjF
  •  Updated VMFS Whitepaper now available – Cormac Hogan - http://bit.ly/Tre14w
  •  Is vSphere Replication storage agnostic even when using SRM? – Ken Werneburg - http://bit.ly/WXQU7b
  •  Configuring SNMP v1/v2c/v3 Using ESXCLI 5.1 – William Lam - http://bit.ly/WXAfAO
  •  Load Balancing using vCloud Networking and Security 5.1 Edge – Ranga Maddipudi - http://bit.ly/WWiuBV
  •  Automating CA Self-Signed Certificates for ESXi 5.1 for use with resxtop – William Lam - http://bit.ly/TmHA7n
  •  Manage the vCloud Suite vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) 5.1 from the vSphere Web Client – Rawlinson Rivera - http://bit.ly/WS8oBW

Cormachogan.com:

Frankdenneman.nl:

Virtu-Al.net:

virtuallyGhetto:

Yellow-bricks.com:

WHITEPAPERS

  •  VMware Virtual Machine File System: Technical Overview and Best Practices – Cormac Hogan - http://bit.ly/11hZT2y
  •  VMware vSphere Storage APIs – Array Integration (VAAI) – Cormac Hogan - http://bit.ly/Qw80WY

 

Is vSphere Replication storage agnostic even when using SRM?

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In short: Yes, it sure is!

In this post I’ll show 6 VMs being protected with vSphere Replication.  2 VMs each will reside on fibre channel data stores (EMC CX4), iSCSI data stores (Falconstor NSS Gateway), and an NFS datastore (EMC VNX5500).  I’ll replicate them onto different datastores, fail them over, reprotect, and fallback.

Continue reading →

vSphere Replication Videos

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Some of you may not yet have seen vSphere Replication in action.  VR was introduced about a year ago as part of Site Recovery Manager, but was spun out as a standalone feature of vSphere 5.1 in September 2012.

We did a couple of short videos of VR in action without SRM, that are now available on Youtube.  The first clip shows how to protect a VM through the web client using vSphere Replication.

As you can see, setting up a VM to be protected is a pretty easy process.  As for recovering a VM, we’ve got that covered as well with the second video.

Let me know what you think of the videos, and if there are other things you’d like to see shown in video format – I’m always looking for feedback on what you’d like to see on the Uptime blog!

-Ken

vSphere Replication 5.1.0.1 patch released

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Some of you may have noticed that vSphere Replication 5.1 has been unavailable to install or upgrade through either VAMI upgrades or the VUM repositories.  We’ve just released 5.1.0.1 which is now available through either mechanism!

There are a few means of upgrading you can choose: Either using the built-in VR Appliance web console upgrade method, or through VUM.

Whichever method you choose, and I’ll show you both in a second, I very strongly recommend you upgrade immediately as this patch fixes some important problems!

To upgrade through the VAMI, you log onto the web console of your VR Appliance,  navigate to the “Update” tab, and click “Check Updates”.

If an update is available, you simply click “Install Updates”.  This will take a few moments to download and install the patch that is needed, and then you reboot your VR Appliance.  That’s it!

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To use Update Manager, go to your VUM icon in the vSphere Client.  I usually go to the “Configuration” tab, and click to “Download Now” to force an updated list of patches.  Click on the “VA Upgrades”.  This will show you all VMware Virtual Appliance updates that are available, including, hopefully, the 5.1.0.1 VR Management Server update.

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Once you see that it is present, you can simply return home to your “VMs and Templates” section, and make sure that you’ve applied the “VA Upgrade to Latest” baseline to your VR Appliances.

Scan and remediate… and you’re done, fully upgraded!

Again, this fixes a very important problem that led to difficulty recovering a VM if the host that held it at the protected site crashed, or its storage path to the primary vmdk went away.  This fixes that problem, documented in kb 2035929 so please upgrade ASAP!

 

Stop vs Pause with vSphere Replication

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Something to be aware of with regards to vSphere Replication is how we handle stopping vs pausing replication.  With a pause we temporarily stop shipping differential data to the recovery site, but with a stop we completely stop the replication, remove it from the UI *and delete the recovery data*.

Let’s take a look at this.

Say we have a VM that’s replicated, in this example “TestSRV1″.

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We can see the replication in the “Outgoing Replications” tab, everything is looking good.  We can go take a look at the recovery site datastore to see what files are there.

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Continue reading →