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Previous entry: Preview – Extreme Performance Series: Monster Virtual Machines
Next in our Extreme Performance Series mini-track, I’d like to highlight the following vCenter performance breakout. Remember, you’ll want to attend the whole series to learn about performance across the stack.
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This year at VMworld (both San Francisco and Barcelona) performance will be front and center. I’ve been working internally to create a “mini-track” of technically advanced performance breakouts with many of our actual performance engineers as speakers. Customers always want to know about best practices, troubleshooting and just how far vSphere can push the performance envelope and that’s very hard to do in a 60 minute session. So this year I’ve got approval to try something different. Continue reading
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A few weeks ago I saw on an internal email thread an ask from a customer via their VMware sale engineer. The customer was using AutoDeploy and Host Profiles. As part of this process, they were creating a local user on their ESXi hosts and when they connected to the host via the vSphere Client application on Windows, they were worried to see that the user was created with Shell Access already granted! As you can imagine, that’s probably not something you want done by default. Even more so when you’re in an environment that has compliance concerns. And especially when you have the Security Guy looking over your shoulder!
Well, like our friends from Down Under would say, “No Worries Mate”. What you are seeing here is a UI bug in the vSphere Windows Client. As you know, the vSphere Windows Client has been superseded by the new vSphere Web Client. But at the moment, it’s the main tool for configuration by those who connect to ESXi servers. With the vSphere Web Client being the current and future client user interface for vCenter Server managed objects and resources, the “old” vSphere Client may, at times, not be as current as we’d like.
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When architects think about putting big data and Apache Hadoop on virtualized commodity servers they usually see virtualization as a performance deterrent. Virtualization software is just that—software. Additional software layers are overhead and they must make it run slower.
Not true.
In a recent performance study by VMware, they demonstrated that performance between bare-metal deployments and virtualized deployments can even exceed bare-metal performance in certain cases when using multiple virtual machines allowing for parallelism.
Just like the data industry proved that distributed querying is faster and more scalable than a single monolithic source, VMware believes that performance can improve with virtualization and is working on a variety of projects including Hadoop Virtualization Extensions (HVE) and Serengeti, as well as working with vendors like Cloudera to certify their Hadoop distributions on vSphere. Continue reading
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vSphere 5.1 Update 1 was just released last week and one of the things that caught my eye while reading through the release notes for ESXi 5.1 Update 1 was a new enhancement to hostd logging:
Though this enhancement is targeted for troubleshooting purposes and will most likely be used when working with GSS. I thought I would walk you through on how this feature works as there were not much detail in the release notes.
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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:
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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:
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VMware has just released the much anticipated Update 1 patch for vSphere 5.1 which includes several updates and bug fixes for both ESXi and vCenter Server 5.1. I highly encourage everyone to review the release notes for the complete list of resolved issues. While going through the ESXi 5.1 Update 1 release notes myself, I noticed a few resolved bugs that I had been following and thought I would highlight a few of them:
One interesting thing that caught my eye while going through the release note is the following:
It looks like you now have the ability to configure granular log levels for various components within hostd which can better assist during troubleshooting and log collection. I will discuss how this works in more detail in another blog article.
There are many more resolved issues and you can check out the rest of the fixes in the ESXi 5.1 release notes.
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Patch management for ESXi is very different compared to traditional operating system patches, where incremental updates are made to the base operating system and thus increasing the disk footprint for each patch update. For the ESXi hypervisor, when a patch is applied, the entire ESXi image also known as an Image Profile is replaced. This means that each time you patch or upgrade your ESXi host, you are not adding on top of the original installation size.
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Similar to my previous article Which Guest OSes Are Supported In vSphere? Using the vSphere API and the Environmental Browser, you can also query for the list of supported Virtual Machine’s virtual hardware versions also known as Virtual Machine Compatibility. This also comes in handy when building a provisioning system or script and you will be able to ask the vSphere platform what virtual hardware version is supported prior to creating your Virtual Machine shell. To do so, you will need to use the QueryConfigOptionDescriptor() method which returns back an array of VirtualMachineConfigOptionDescriptor that contains information about the virtual hardware version and whether the host can support a particular version and whether a version can be upgraded or not.
Disclaimer: These script are provided for informational/educational purposes only. It should be thoroughly tested before attempting to use in a production environment.
To demonstrate the QueryConfigOptionDescriptor method, I have created a simple vSphere SDK for Perl script called getSupportedVirtualHardwareVersion.pl which lists all the supported virtual hardware versions given a vSphere Cluster as input.
Here is the syntax for the script:
./getSupportedVirtualHardwareVersion.pl --server [VCENTER] --username [USERNAME] --cluster [CLUSTER-NAME]
Here is a screenshot of the output from the script:
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This was a recent question that was asked internally about the minimum privileges required to query VIBs on an ESXi host. The request was for a custom script that was developed for compliance check and the customer was looking to create a custom vSphere role to minimize the privileges needed to perform the task. Since I did not know the answer, it was off to the lab for some testing. Through the process of elimination, it turns out the only privilege that is required for querying VIBs on an ESXi host is Global.Settings.
In the example above, I created a custom vCenter Server Role called VIBQuery and enabled the Global.Settings privilege and assigned the role to a user. The custom role can be created on both a vCenter Server as well as directly on an ESXi host. By using vCenter Server, one can benefit from centralize management of user access to all ESXi hosts in the environment.
To confirm that our user assigned to the new role can query VIBs on an ESXi host, we will run the following ESXCLI command:
esxcli --server [VC-SERVER] --vihost [ESXi-SERVER] --username [USER] software vib list
We can also confirm that we can do the same directly on the ESXi host by running the following ESXCLI command:
esxcli --server [ESXi-SERVER] --username [USER] software vib list
When granting access to your vSphere infrastructure, you should always use good security practices by leveraging RBAC model (Role-Base Access Control) and restrict the amount permission a user has access to.
UPDATE: In addition to using ESXCLI, there are two additional options to query installed VIBs on an ESXi host as noted by the comment below by Mike.
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