Uncategorized – Page 47

Long awaited Fling, Windows vCenter Server to VCSA Converter Appliance is finally here!

03.02.2015 by William Lam //

Back in VMworld 2013, the Office of CTO held its annual Fling Contest where customers can submit their ideas for cool new Flings that they would like to see. If selected, not only would the individual get a free pass to VMworld but VMware Engineers would also build and release the Fling, how cool is that!? There were over 200+ submissions that year and I was very fortunate to have been on the panel to help select the winner. The winning Fling for that year was the Windows vCenter Server (VCS) to VCSA Converter Appliance by Stephen Athanas.

UPDATE 09/15/16 - The officially supported VCSA Migration Tool has has GA'ed with the release of vSphere 6.0 Update 2m. Please see this blog post here for more details.

The idea of a VCS to VCSA Converter really resonated with me as well as with many of our customers. In fact, everyone that I had spoken with who has used the VCSA just love the simplicity, ease of deployment and management it provides compared to its Windows counterpart. However, one of the biggest adoption barrier that I have seen from talking to customers is that is no simple way of migrating from a Windows based vCenter Server to the VCSA. You literally have to start fresh and this is pretty a show stopper for the majority of our customers and I do not disagree with them.

Customers want a migration path to be able to preserve all their vCenter Server configurations such as Folder structures, Permissions, Alarms, Tags, VM Storage Policies, etc. This is the idea behind the VCS to VCSA Converter Appliance which helps migrate a Windows vCenter Server running on an external Microsoft SQL Server Database to an embedded VCSA running a vPostgres Database. Today, I am very proud to announce the release of the VCS to VCSA Converter Appliance Fling.

The Converter Appliance migrates the vCenter database, Roles, Permissions, Privileges, Certificates, Alarms and Inventory Service which contains Tags and VM Storage Policies. At the end of the migration, you will end up with a fully functional VCSA with the original hostname/IP Address fully intact and ready to use. As you can imagine, this was no easy task and we had some of the smartest VMware Engineers working on this project. Todd Valentine from the OCTO managed the overall program with Ravi Soundararajan as the Chief Architect working closely with Mike Stunes, Jignesh Shah, Raju Angani. Being a huge advocate and supporter of the VCSA, I also had the unique opportunity to be involved in this project and working closely with some amazing engineers to help design, test and validate the migration appliance.

We hope you give the VCS to VCSA Converter Appliance a try in your lab (Please carefully read through the documentation along with the requirements and caveats before getting started). Let us know what you think by either leaving a comment here on my blog or on the Flings webpage. This is our first release and we already have some ideas of features and capabilities we would love to add to future releases but if there are things that you feel that are currently missing or enhancements you wold like to see, please let us know!

If you wish to provide private feedback about your environment or engage with us further, feel free to send an email to Todd Valentine at: tvalentine [at] vmware [dot] com

Accessing the vSphere Web Client from a Linux desktop?

02.25.2015 by William Lam // 9 Comments

A common miss-conception about the vSphere Web Client is that it is not accessible from a Linux-based desktop. Contrary to popular belief, this is actually possible at least from a technical standpoint as alluded to in this VMware KB. A recent discussion about this topic had piqued my interest as my own understanding of whether the vSphere Web Client would even work on a Linux desktop is fuzzy at best since it is not a desktop OS I use on a regular basis.

Though this may still comes as a surprise to some folks, Adobe Flash is indeed a requirement to use the vSphere Web Client. There are actually two ways to satisfy this requirement using any modern Linux desktop distribution. In the example below, I am using the latest Ubuntu Desktop 14.04 distribution to demonstrate the two options.

The first option is the most "convenient" by simply using the latest version of Google Chrome browser which actually bundles the Pepper Flash Plugin (more details can be found here from Adobe). Here is the CLI commands to perform the installation of Google Chrome on Ubuntu, you acn easily do a search for the instructions for other Linux distributions.

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google.list'
wget -q -O - https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y install google-chrome-stable

Here is a screenshot using Google Chrome connecting to a vSphere 6.0 environment as well as accessing the VMRC of a VM:

The second option is slightly less "convenient" since you need to install the Pepper Flash Plugin in addition to the browser that supports this plugin which is Chromium. Here is the CLI commands to perform the installation of Chromium on Ubuntu, you can easily do a search online for instructions for other Linux distributions.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y install pepperflashplugin-nonfree
sudo apt-get -y install chromium-browser

Here is a screenshot using Chromium connecting to a vSphere 6.0 environment and you will also be able to access the VMRC of a VM:

This looks pretty good right? I mean you can login to the vSphere Web Client UI to perform basic operations and access the VM Console using the HTML5 based VMRC. Well, almost but there are a couple of caveats to be aware of which may not be obvious at first. In addition to the basic operations and VMRC access, there some other important capabilities the vSphere Web Client offers today:

Deploying OVF/OVA
Windows Session Authentication
Uploading files to a vSphere Datastore
Mounting ISO/Floppy Image
Connecting Local Devices (e.g. USB/CD-ROM)

The above capabilities are made available through what is known as the Client Integration Plug-in (CIP) which is something that is downloaded from the vSphere Web Client Server and installed locally on your desktop. A Linux CIP installer is currently not available today and the above functionality would not be available in the vSphere Web Client. Having said that, not all is lost and there are some workarounds. If you wish to deploy an OVF/OVA, you can still install OVFTool which is available on Linux and instead of using the UI to drive the deployment, it can be done through the CLI. For uploading files like an ISOs, you can use the vSphere API/CLI as shown here or SCP'ing directly to the ESXi host. Once the ISO is uploaded, you can then mount it to your VM from the vSphere Datastore.

Though this is far from a perfect solution for Linux-based desktop users, it does allow you to access the basic management capabilities of the vSphere Web Client. There is definitely room for improvement and this is an area that PM/Engineering is looking to enhance further in the future. There has also been a ton of general performance and usability improvements in the new vSphere 6.0 Web Client which will benefit all platforms and if you are interested to learn more about those, check out the blog post from the vSphere Web Client PM here.

Dynamic memory resizing for vCenter Server 6.0

02.23.2015 by William Lam // 32 Comments

In previous releases of vSphere, scaling up resources such as storage or memory for vCenter Server was a huge pain-point for our customers. Before the various vCenter Server services can consume the new resources, some additional manual steps were required. Though this type of an operation is usually infrequent, there is still an operational overhead which can potentially lead to increased downtime of your vCenter Server.

For example, increasing storage capacity for the VCSA was an offline operation that required adding an additional disk and then copying the existing content to the new disk which can be quite error prone and lead to a significant amount of downtime. In vSphere 6.0, the VCSA now uses LVM which provides the ability for online storage capacity increase without any downtime to vCenter Server. Increasing memory was also challenging because you had to manually adjust several configuration files that manages the JVM heap settings for various vCenter Server services as described in this VMware KB. Having complex workflows to perform basic resource expansion can increase risk of errors, especially when the process is foreign to those performing it for the very first time.

To help solve this problem, in vSphere 6.0 vCenter Server (Windows & VCSA) now includes a built-in dynamic memory reconfiguration process that automatically runs at boot up. This process includes a dynamic algorithm that inspects the current amount of CPU, Memory and Storage that is available to determine the appropriate size to configure the vCenter Server. This means that if you no longer have to tweak individual JVM settings for the various services within vCenter Server, this will happen automatically by analyzing the resources that are available and then calculating the configuration based on the supported maximums for vCenter Server.

Note: In vSphere 6.0, there are additional services going beyond just the core vCenter Server, vSphere Web Client, vCenter SSO and Inventory Services.

The dynamic memory algorithm is configured to understand the minimal amount of resources for running a vCenter Server and is bounded between a "Tiny" configuration which is 2vCPU and 8GB memory and a "Large" configuration which is 16vCPU and 32GB memory. This is important to note because if you try to configure the vCenter Server with less memory than the minimal supported, though the algorithim will dynamically distribute the available memory to the various resources, it could lead to performance degradation as the different services may not be receiving the amount of memory they require to run. YMMV if you decide to reduce the supported amount of memory but the algorithm will distribute what's available.

The process which does all the magic is a utility called cloudvm-ram-size and there are several useful options to be aware of. To view the current memory assignment for the various vCenter Server services including the OS, you can run the following command on the VCSA as an example:

cloudvm-ram-size -l

From the screenshot above, we can see a very simple break down of the current memory assignment for a "Tiny" deployment which has 8GB of memory.

To show that the dynamic memory algorithm is in fact running when more memory is added, the example below is of a VCSA that was initially configured with 8GB of memory. I then capture the running configuration and then shut down the vCenter Server and increased its memory to 10GB. I then power on the VCSA and capture the running state and you can see differences in the screenshot below.

Another useful command to be aware is being able to see the current memory usage for all services. You can do this by running the following command:

cloudvm-ram-size -S

As you can see the dynamic memory algorithm is a very much welcome feature for vCenter Server and will greatly simplify the operational tasks when needing to scale up or down resources such as CPU and Memory. I know this is definitely one of the enhancements I have been waiting for and I am glad to see it here in the new vSphere 6.0 release! As of right now, a system reboot is required but who knows maybe in the future we can increase memory while the VCSA is still running and simply reloading the services ...