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vCloud Director 5.1 Introduces "Open in vSphere Web Client" & Task Correlation ... Awesomeness!

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Have you ever had to troubleshoot something in vCloud Director such as looking into a particular vApp and then realizing you needed to jump over to the vSphere environment to continue troubleshooting? This meant you had to perform a separate login to your vSphere environment and most likely using a different set of credentials and then find the set of Virtual Machines that made up that vCloud Director vApp ... painful and annoying right? Wish you could just right click and jump straight to that vApp construct in vSphere?

Well, now you can with the latest release of vCloud Director 5.1 which introduces a new option called "Open in vSphere Web Client".

In the screenshot above, I have a vCloud Director vApp which contains 3 Virtual Machines and I want to jump straight to that object in the vSphere Web Client. To do so, simply right click on the object and select "Open in vSphere Web Client".

This will open up a new browser to the vSphere Web Client and locate the object in the appropriate vCenter Server and automatically log you in using the new vCenter SSO. Pretty cool huh!? This new option is not just limited to vCloud Director vApps and VMs, but applies to any vSphere object found within vCloud Director.

Note: You will need to be a System Administrator in vCloud Director to perform this operation as you will need access to the vSphere infrastructure.

Another challenge that you might have faced while troubleshooting in vCloud Director is to be able to correlate the tasks generated from vCloud Director and map those back to vSphere tasks in vCenter Server. This is not a trivial thing to do and required you to jump between vCloud Director and vCenter Server manually correlating the tasks. In vCloud Director 5.1, this has been enhanced by providing users with a single view for a given vCloud Director task and all the associated vSphere tasks that were created.

When you open a given vCloud Director task, you will be defaulted to the vCloud Director task details as you would expect. In the same view, there is also a new tab called vSphere Tasks which contains all the vCenter Server tasks generated from that given vCloud Director task.
As you can see from these two enhancements, you will be able to quickly and easily view all tasks that have taken place between vCloud Director and vCenter Server, all from a single location. If you need to drill down further into the vSphere layer, it is simply a right click and you will be taken directly to the vSphere object in the vSphere Web Client without having to provide additional credentials.

ESXi 5.1 Officially Certified on Apple Mac Pro

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If you are still trying to catch up with all the awesomeness that has been shared, blogged, tweeted, etc. about in the last 24hrs with the announcement of the new vCloud Suite 5.1 release, here is one additional tidbit to add to that list which you might not have heard about it. With the release of ESXi 5.1, the Apple Mac Pro is now officially supported!

I came across this little tidbit from some folks internally who have been working hard to get the Mac Pro platform certified and supported on ESXi. After the vCloud Suite went live, I did a quick search on the VMware HCL and sure enough, the Apple Mac Pro was listed with support for ESXi 5.1.

If you recall back when vSphere 5.0 was released, VMware introduced support for ESXi to run on Apple's XServe ... unfortunately, Apple had decided to announce it's EOL (End of Life) several months prior which made it difficult to purchase and rely on the XServe as a platform. The only way you could get your hands on an XServe is if you were one of the few who purchased them before the EOL date (I personally went through this) or you were willing to look on Ebay. Luckily, now with the latest release of ESXi 5.1, if you need to virtualize Mac OSX Server Virtual Machines and other guestOSes, you can do so using the Apple Mac Pro.

Nested ESXi 5.1 Supports VMXNET3 Network Adapter Type

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I noticed something interesting while extracting the contents of ESXi 5.1 ISO for some kickstart configurations ....

Do you see it? It's a VMXNET3 driver for the VMkernel! I also confirmed by running the following ESXCLI command querying for the VMkernel module "vmxnet3":

# esxcli system module get -m vmxnet3
Module: vmxnet3
Module File: /usr/lib/vmware/vmkmod/vmxnet3
License: GPL
Version: Version 1.1.32.0, Build: 799733, Interface: 9.2 Built on: Aug  1 2012
Signed Status:
Signature Issuer:
Signature Digest:
Signature FingerPrint:
Provided Namespaces:
Required Namespaces: [email protected], com.vmware.vmkapi@v2_1_0_0

***Disclaimer***: This is for educational purposes only, this is not officially supported by VMware. Use at your own risk. There is also a mention of this in the vSphere 5.1 release notes that VMs running on nested ESXi hosts using VMXNET3 driver could potentially crash. Again, not supported user at your own risk.

Next I decided to create a Nested ESXi 5.1 VM, but instead of selecting the e1000 driver which was the only network adapter type that would function for running a nested ESXi host, I choose the VMXNET3 adapter and to my surprise ESXi's networking stack was fully functional.

You can see from the above screenshot, I have a two VMXNET3 network adapters for my nested ESXi 5.1 VM. Here are two additional screenshot of the physical adapters as seen by nested ESXi 5.1 host and you can see that it shows up as VMware Inc. VMXNET3

I have not tried any performance tests, so not sure if there are going to be any significant benefits but pretty cool nonetheless!