Book: VMware Infrastructure 3: Advanced Technical Design Guide and Advanced Operations Guide

Three years ago two well-known influencers in the virtualization industry, Ron Oglesby (Director of Virtualization and Architecture Services at GlassHouse) and Scott Herold (Lead Architect of Virtualiztion at Quest), published a unique book for all the VMware professionals out there: VMware ESX Server: Advanced Technical Design Guide.

Instead of replicating most of the contents available through (already very good) VMware documentation, these guys collected years of experience on real-world infrastructures, offering a precious collection of best practices and advices to design every aspect of a virtual data center with ESX 2.x and VirtualCenter 1.x.

Doing the same for the relatively new VMware Infrastructure 3.x requires some time, to master the products, learn the new rules, build a solid blueprint in designing with the new features and limitations in mind.

So, even if VMware Infrastructure 3 was released 2 years ago, Ron and Scott are back only now, with a new co-author, Mike Laverick (Independent Trainer and Consultant at RTFM Education), and a new book:

Well, its offical - ESX3i is Free

VirtualCenter Passthrough Authentication

A very useful, yet very undocumented feature of the Virtual Infrastructure Client is that it can be configured to automatically pass your Active Directory credentials without you typing them in. To use: create a shortcut to the Virtual Infrastructure Client, then right-click on it and edit the shortcut properties. You'll need to pass the program two arguments when calling it like so:

"C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher\VpxClient.exe" -passthroughAuth -s vc.yourdomain.com

Where "vc.yourdomain.com" is replaced with the DNS name for your VirtualCenter server. It's extremely simple and just might hold of carpel tunnel syndrome for an extra few days.

Release: VMware Infrastructure 3.5 Update 2

As expected VMware has released the Update 2 for ESX (build 103908) and VirtualCenter (104215).

This new version brings a number of important features including:

• Cross-processors VMotion (auto-configuration of AMD-V Extended Migration and Intel FlexMigration)
• Virtual machines live snapshot through Microsoft Volume Shadow Service (VSS) (only Windows 2003 and 2008 guest OSes)
• Virtual machines live cloning
• Virtual disks hot-extension (only for flat disks without snapshots in persistent mode)
• VMware HA support for individual virtual machines
• VirtualCenter alarms for physical servers health (single components supported)
• Manual computers addition in Guided Consolidation (by hostname or IP)
• Single Sign-On (SSO) on VirtualCenter client (capability to pass-through Windows authentication credentials, with support for smartcards and digital certificates)
• Support for Microsoft Windows Server 2008, Sun Solaris 10 U5, Novell SLES 10 SP2 and Ubuntu 8.04 guest OSes
• Support for 8GB Fibre Channel HBAs
• Support for NFS and iSCSI over 10Gbit Ethernet
• Support for Remote Command Line Interface (CLI) (no more experimental)

It’s worth to note that the Remote CLI has been greatly revamped and now finally includes a wide range of commands.

Download a trial of VI 3.5 Update 2 here.

Release: Veeam Backup 2.0

The startup Veeam continues to release software at an impressive pace.
Less than five months after the first release, Veeam Backup already hits version 2.0.

The new edition includes some interesting features like:

Additionally, Veeam improved the product engine so that the product now completes backups and restores up to 5 times faster than version 1.0.

A demo of the product in Flash is available here (12MB).
The trial is available  here.

 PowerGUI inside VI Client

PowerGUI now plugs into VMware Infrastructure Client. To be precise, starting with version 1.5.1 the setup has VMware Client Integration component which registers both PowerGUI and PowerGUI Script Editor as VI Client plugins.

PowerGUI admin console and script editor can be started right within VI Client

The cool thing is that when you start them from VI client they automatically inherit your current connection to VMware infrastructure, so all your VMware management scripts or PowerGUI nodes/actions just work without asking you to connect first - no more additional prompts, having to type the password, etc. - you are already in and everything just works!

VI Toolkit (for Windows)

Well, once Carter spilled the beans, everybody is now waiting with bated breath for VMware to release the beta of our new curiously-named VI Toolkit (for Windows). The toolkit is powered by Windows PowerShell, a shell/scripting technology that Microsoft appears to have gotten very right indeed. The VI SDK, while extremely powerful, is not for the faint of heart. This toolkit takes that power and wraps it up in a very simple syntax which creates a compelling tool for VI admins.

I'm a Perl guy from way back, and I have to say seeing PowerShell scripts, er, cmdlets do all sorts of tricks with my VMs without breaking a sweat makes me grin like a maniac. This is going to be a real boon to VI admins.

Here's an example from the VMworld hands-on lab manual Automating VMware with PowerShell Lab Manual. How can you not like this? You don't even need a manual to understand what it does.

get-vm | get-snapshot | where { `
  $_.Created -lt (get-date).addmonths(-1) `
}

Here's a round-up of the blog reactions so far.

Dave Marshall played with it at VMworld. Link: VMware administrators find value in Microsoft PowerShell

VMware ESX 3rd Party Add-on Tools

Now let's get to the meat of this article and cover all of the third-party products for VMware ESX I could locate. Here is the list:

Vizioncore - Vizioncore offers vRanger, vMigrator, vCharter, and vReplicator. vRanger (formerly ESX Ranger) is a popular backup application for VMware ESX Server. vMigrator is a P2V conversion application, vCharter is a performance monitoring application, and vReplicator is used replicate virtual machines or SAN LUNs to other servers or SANs, either on the LAN or across the WAN.

Dunes VS-O and VD-O - VS-O offers a management layer on top of VMware Virtual Center or Microsoft Virtual Server which helps in virtual automation. VS-O is a type of virtual infrastructure management package. VD-O is used for VDI.

EsXpress - a scaleable and fault tolerant backup, restoration, and disaster recovery solution for VMware ESX. They offer the Virtual Backup Appliance (VBA)

Platespin - offers Power Convert and Power Recon. Power Convert is a P2V, V2V, and complete server workload management system (depending on the package you buy). Platespin also offers PowerRecon which collects and reports on all physical and virtual servers. PowerRecon will report the most efficient use of your hardware & software, as well as tell you how much you could save by virtualizing your systems (both in hardware and in cooling/electricity usage)

Veeam - offers Veeam Configurator, Reporter, FastSCP. Veeam configurator is used to extend the Virtual Center console and give you access to more options and flexibility than what Virtual Center provides. Veeam Reporter is used to document, discover, and create a visual diagram of your ESX server farm. Veeam FastSCP is used to transfer ISO files to your ESX server. They claim that FastSCP is 6 times faster than traditional SCP clients. Veeam also offers a couple of free utilites - Rootaccess Wizard for ESX and Veeam Monitor for VMware Server.

VMTS - offering a variety of FREE tools and scripts for VMware ESX Tools such as VMTS Patch Manager, SSH client for ESX, and more.

Of course, there are a number of companies making Virtual Desktop brokers used with Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI).

If there are products that you use or that you have heard of and would recommend, I encourage you to post them in our VMware virtualization forum so that they can be added to this list for the benefit of all Petri forum members.

Friend of mine Ron Bertino has done excellent Video presentation on Exchange 2007