vCloud Connector 2.5

VMware vCloud Connector received an update today with it's 2.5 release.  This update comes shortly after the introduction of VMware's Hybird Cloud Service (vHCS).

vCloud Connector Core is available to all current vSphere and vCloud Director customers as a free download. To get support for the Core edition of vCloud Connector, you must have an active support contract for vSphere or vCloud Director.

vCloud Connector Advanced includes the Data center Extension and Content Sync features, is available as a part of the vCloud Suites and the VMware vCloud Hybrid Service.

One of the new features in vCloud Connector 2.5 includes the ability to perform bulk offline workload migration to VMware vHCS.  Offline Data Transfer (ODT) can be requested as a service from MyVMware with VMware provided NAS  with up to 12TB of space per device.

There has also been improvements with in transfer performance using path optimization and the UDT protocol. The previous version the transfer from the vCC Nodes used a sequential method that  exported the VM to source node as VMDK & OVF, then transferred the VMDK & OVF to destination node and finally imported the VMDK & OVF from destination node into the destination Cloud.  Using Path Optimization  the export / transfer / import process all run in parallel to fully utilize the full bandwidth of the connection.

vCloud Connector Advanced Edition includes the ability to extend your data-center in to a public cloud by creating a Layer 2 extension over a SSL VPN tunnel. Data Center Extension (DCE)  give you the ability to move workloads from the data center to the secondary data-center or public cloud while retaining its network settings, including MAC & IP addresses.  Avoiding these networking changes for applications and servers within your infrastructure speeds up the ability to migrate workloads in (and out) of a publicly provided service or secondary data-center.  Keep in mind that this is transfer that requires the workload(s) to be powered off during the migration.

The content synching ability allows you to publish a vCloud catalog or vSphere folder and then subscribe to it from one or multiple vSphere folders or vCloud catalogs.  When changes are made to the folder or catalog on either end, the changes are synchronized to it's partner.  This functionality enables the you to provision new workloads to either data-center depending on your preference or the requirements of the application without worrying about if a template or catalog item is up to date or the latest version.

The vCloud Connector FAQ provides answers to many common questions around this release.

vCenter Operations Manager Suite - What's New in 5.7.1

VMware has released an update to it's widely adopted management stack. vCenter Operations Manager Suite 5.7.1 includes some long awaiting updates and a new product into the family that ties in another layer of integrated management for the entire landscape of existing infrastructure.  Here are some of the highlights of new features and functionality of the complete solution.

VMware vCenter Log Insight:

Releasing in to an open beta as of today, vCenter Log Insight opens up the door for quicker troubleshooting with integration into vCenter Operations Manager as a core product.  From the vCenter Operations dashboards, there is In-context application launch capabilities which are pluggable for suite & third-party products.  This give an administrator the ability to view log analytics events notifications with relevant resource context.  In turn this significantly reduces the time to resolve issues and get back to work.

For more about vCenter Log Insight, see my featured post here.

vCenter Operations Manager as a core product has also introduced some new features in addition to the new member of the family above.  There new dashboards targeted at troubleshooting, specific virtual machines, hosts & clusters as well as newer heatmaps & alerts views.  

One of the new dashboards include pre-built dashboards for vSphere utilization and performance indicators based on VMware best practices including the 10 most requested dashboards from customers and field that shows KPIs for a vSphere environment.

Troubleshooting dashboard example:

There are also new canned dashboards from a VM perspective showing key metrics including a Top 25 lists to identify the top VM resource consumers at-a-glanc.

Virtual Machine specific / Host and Cluster example:

Updated heatmaps display metrics for CPU, Disk, Memory & Network for easy comparison.

Heatmap example: 

Fresher looking alerts dashboard provides additional troubleshooting information at a glance including operation centric alert views - Datacenter workload, Relationshi based view and Filtering capability.

Alert example: 

Another key update to the vCenter Operations Manager core functionality is added reporting abilities.  These reports give administrators and operations groups the ability to provide easy to understand reporting to the application owners and lines of business within the organization.  You can easily assess performance impact to clusters/datastores from increased VMs/demand over last week as well as identify which clusters, datastores, VMs had performance problems last week.

Balance profiles are also something of specific interest to me and a welcomed new feature that enable the delivery of scalable functionality and metrics without compromise to vCenter Operations functionality.  The Balanced profile will be default profile for fresh vCenter Operations install.  For upgrades, the previously selected profile will be not be change.

For more information about the updated vCenter Operations Suite head to the product page on vmware's website.  

http://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/vcenter-operations-management/overview.html 

VMware vCenter Log Insight

VMware has released it latest application included in the latest update to the vCenter Operations Suite; VMware vCenter Log Insight.  Below is the breakdown and high level points that you should know about this new product and how it rolls into the Management Suite of products.

Approach to Log Management: Leverage existing suite:

Extending on the patented analytics engine from vCenter Operations and using it to get dynamic thresholds and analysis from any log files within your infrastructure.  Log Insight extends analytics to logs, giving real-time actionable operational intelligence

Ensure that it is easy to use and accessible:

Today, existing solutions are either highly specialized, or too expensive.  Log Insight has an intuitive, easy-to-use interface; and a predictable pricing model with unlimited amount of log data, making it accessible to all.

Integration into the vSphere Infrastructure:

Log Insight comes with built-in knowledge and native support for vSphere. Integration with vCenter Operations maximizes ROI and value, providing a complete cloud operations management solution

When would Log Insight come in handy for Operations or Administrators in a Virtual Infrastructure Environment?

Troubleshooting and Root Cause Analysis:

• I observed a problem (e.g. slowness), try to troubleshoot the problem and identify the part of the stack that is responsible (e.g. network delay vs storage)
• Follow the trail from vCenter Operations to logs to get to root cause to an observed problem
  

Monitoring Using Logs:

• Monitor metrics and events (performance & change) that are visible only in logs
• Collect all the data in one place without the need for custom parsing, transformation of data.

One of the greatest things I found about the Log Insight is the direct integration in vSphere Web Client and vCenter Operation Manager to keep in tune with the tight integration in the Cloud Management Suite of tools. 

With the vSphere Content Pack you can collect and visualize all of the data from your vSphere vCenter and ESXi hosts: 

The vSphere content pack has been created based on PSO and GSS knowledgebase to provide the most authoritative knowledge about vSphere log management, troubleshooting and monitoring.  You get pre-configured dashboards on best practices the VMware experts and the community.

Included in the Advance and Enterprise version of vCenter Operations Manager you can now natively open Log Insight from the Operation Manager Dashboard: 

If you want to try it out, as of today (June 11th) there is an open beta.  Head on over, check it out and see how it stacks up to competitors like Splunk, Solarwinds and SumoLogic.

More information on vCenter Log Insight 

Introduction to vCloud Automation Center

vCloud Automation Center was acquired by VMware in 2012 when it was known as DynamicOps as part of it’s strategy to complete the Software Defined-Datacenter Vision. VMware recognizes that customers will have heterogeneous pools of infrastructure. vCloud Automation Center helps deliver on our commitment to customer choice by enabling customers to manage across all platforms. vCloud Automation Center enables you to rapidly deploy and provision business-relevant cloud services across private and public clouds, physical infrastructure, hypervisors, and public cloud providers.

Let's break down some of the key benefits derived from vCloud Auto Center:

Private Cloud:
•    Complete lifecycle management of cloud service
•    Quickly build cloud services
•    Map existing business processes to cloud service
•    Leverage existing investment in infrastructure tools

Software Defined-Datacenter Strategy:
•    Moving from Templates to Blueprints
•    Leading the evolution of IAAS
•    Virtualization -> Self-Service -> Intelligent & self-aware
•    Wrap the data center in a secure API

Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Initiatives:
•    Unify and simplify the user experience Govern & Control access to public cloud resources
•    Integrating public resources into the enterprise ecosystem
•    Support legitimate use cases for public cloud

How does vCloud Automation Center enable these key initiatives within the enterprise? Let’s highlight some of the most valuable capabilities of the product:

Self Service Experience: Intuitive, consumerized and customizable Cloud management portal.  vCloud Automation Center provide an intuitive and personalized self-service experience for cloud consumers. The appearance and behavior of the front end can be branded and configured to match your organizations needs. Additionally, vCloud Automation Center  provides a dynamic cloud interface for the administrator and the consumer.  This interface provides a secure, Web enabled API for programmatic access to cloud data and services. Furthermore, we can dynamically generate this secure RESTful API for third party tools and homegrown systems to create a unified and secure interface across the datacenter.

Complete Lifecycle Management: More than just self-service provisioning, self service management.  We provide self service for the full lifecycle, which included request, provisioning, ongoing management (reprovision, snapshot, reconfig, archive, reclamation, and archive) through decommissioning.

User/Organizational Governance: Provides specific and unique business context for each user’s request. vCloud Automation Center  delivers services that meet the unique needs of each user within and organization.

Multi-vendor Orchestration: Coordinates multiple vendor’s technologies enabling best of breed solution leveraging existing tools.  We can automate a variety of provisioning mechanisms across multiple hardware and platform types. vCAC also supports native integration to third party tools such as SCCM, BladeLogic and HP Opsware.

Automated Service Delivery: Built-in automation provisions virtual, physical and cloud.  Now the next level of Extensibility is aimed at our most advanced customers who want to leverage our platform – but allow their in-house developers who have .NET or Windows Workflow experience to quickly deliver completely new use cases outside of Cloud life cycle management.  They are able to deliver these new services on top of our unique architecture. Application Director integration is an interesting add into this mix.

Cloud Service Costing: Cost allocation and charge/show-back across infrastructure, storage, business unit.  vCAC allows your organization to chargeback/show back for its cloud services by measuring each business unit or consumer's infrastructure, software, and storage costs. vCAC provides a variety of out of the box reports as well as an accessible data model for 3rd party reporting or billing systems.

Intelligent Resource Management: Discovers and manages existing environment and provides resource efficiency across entire resource lifecycle.  The features here enable you to discover and organize your infrastructure fabric into tiers and allocate resources to multiple consumers. This enables intelligent policy-driven placement and full visibly into fabric consumption.

Visual Workflow Designer: Admin level ability to graphically adapt processes to environment.  So along with the OOB capabilities our suite ships with a visual workflow design utility called vCloud Automation Center Designer.  This provides a non-developer the ability to easily extend our functionality to adapt to your specific processes and tools. 

All of these capabilities work across your internal physical & virtual infrastructures – as well as public cloud resources…today we have Amazon out of the box, however we have done integrations with Saavis and others and will continue to productize these as customer demand dictates.

vSphere vCenter 5.1 Update 1 - Appliance Upgrade

vSphere vCenter 5.1 Update 1 was released on April 25th with a new features, resolved issues as well a list of known issues.  I am using the vCenter Server Appliance in my lab at home and decided to upgrade this morning to see what the experience was like incase some of my customers asked about it.  I was pleasantly surprised on how simple it was.  Here is a break down on how it went.

First I logged into the vCenter appliance with https://<fqdn or IP Address>:5480/ and selected the Update tab, then selected the Check Updates button to get the following resulting screen:

To start the Select Install Updates button to initiate the upgrade and confirm the prompt.

After the process begins the progress begins to download the bits in the backend while showing the following message:

Time for a coffee, check and reply to some emails....took about 20 minutes.

When the upgrade completed, I was presented with a message for a 'reboot to complete the upgrade' message.

I was rather impressed with the simplicity and speed of the upgrade.  Next up, vSphere ESXi 5.1 Update 1.