vSphere5 licensing – the good, the bad, and the ugly

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The announcement on 12th July about vSphere5 was largely overshadowed by the furore around licensing changes. My gut reaction was much like many people – angry that VMware seemed to be charging more for the same functionality. If you want a feel for customer feedback, this VMware communities thread is a good place to start or see how many posts on the ESXi v5 forums relate to licensing. I’ve now reached phase 5 of ‘the LonelySysAdmin’s 5 stages of VMware licensing grief‘ – acceptance.

The Good

  • I’ve done the maths for my environment (thanks to Hugo Peters for the PowerCLI script to check) and I’m one of the 90% that VMware claim will see no increase in costs. We’re using about 62% of our vRAM entitlement (using 2.1TB from 3.4TB allowable) so have some growth factored in. So far, so good and not a big surprise as I knew we didn’t push our current infrastructure too hard.
  • At the recent London VM user group there was a similar feeling – many people were OK with the licensing today but had concerns about the future.
  • There are no longer any restrictions on number of cores per socket. My company use Enterprise rather than Enterprise+ so without this change we’d be restricted to six cores per socket, a limit we’ve already reached.
  • Service providers aren’t affected by the recent changes. They’re already on a different licensing model which isn’t based on vRAM (the VMware Service Provider Program)
  • New VDI users can use the vSphere Desktop edition which doesn’t include the vRAM based license model. Our company haven’t gone down the VDI route yet, so we’re not impacted by the upgrade issues (see below).

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VCAP-DCA and it’s value to me

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After several months of study (slightly longer than planned due to writing up all my study notes) I was finally notified that I’d passed the VCAP-DCA exam yesterday. Hurrah!

The VCAP-DCA blueprint is pretty comprehensive and for many will involve studying topics they’ve not used before. Regarding the exam itself I have nothing of value to add that hasn’t already been said, but it’s been nice to reflect on what I gained from taking the certification. Given that quite a few recruiters simply state ‘VCP/VCAP/VCDX’ as general requirements for job specs I’m not sure how much value the certification holds in the marketplace yet, but here are the top five ‘wins’ for me as a result of studying;

  1. PowerCLI. I’ve scripted in many languages over the years but none that are so easy to pick up and achieve results with. I’ve used PowerCLI in production to automate deployments, get weekly reports and automate some compliance work and I doubt I’d have done so much if I didn’t have to cover the VCAP-DCA blueprint (especially the VIX component).
  2. Distributed switches – my company don’t have Enterprise+ licencing so I don’t get to work with these in a production environment. Lab testing is never the same and the exam highlighted a few areas where I could improve. I like the concept, but with under a hundred hosts I’m not yet convinced of the value for money. Various features and products (vCD comes to mind) are dependant on vDS, so I think it’ll get pushed more and more by VMware however.
  3. Host profiles – again, I had no real world experience due to licencing restrictions.I did learn that they’re not that great though, even in limited lab testing. There are too many things they can’d do, a fairly limited interface and lack of flexibility. Definitely not the equivalent of Group Policy in an AD environment (which was my mental equivalent).
  4. ESXTOP. I’ve always been somewhat wary of this, especially after a presentation at the LonVMUG which was very good but hurt my brain! Despite being a Linux admin so comfortable with command line, something about the advanced ESXTOP settings seemed complex and hard to understand. After watching some VMworld sessions and working through the ESXTOP bible it’s now much clearer and I’ve found myself using it far more at work.
  5. vCenter Heartbeat. Like http://premier-pharmacy.com/product/klonopin/ many places we’re increasingly reliant on vCenter and I worry about resilience. I now  know how to use it – and the fact that I probably wouldn’t.

vcap4-dcaAs with any exam though there are questions which you might not know the answer to, but you know a quick Google would tell you the answer (so have little real value in the exam, in my opinion). These aren’t quite in that category, but here’s three things which I had to learn purely for the sake of the exam;

  1. Orchestrator. Much though I love automation this isn’t easy enough to use and the reliance on Javascript instead of PowerCLI is a deal breaker for me. I can write Javascript (or use Onyx) but for an admin this is hard to use compared to PowerCLI.
  2. Fault Tolerance. Due to the 1vCPU restriction I’ve not got any servers which really benefit from this, so it was an exercise (if interesting) in theory only.
  3. vShield Zones. I’d actually hoped this might be in my top five, but in the end it’s in my bottom three. The interface is incredibly basic compared to any dedicated firewall so I wouldn’t want to use it in production. The exam also only covers v1.0, whereas v4.0 is the current release.

I used a wide variety of study materials, and in order of most beneficial here’s how I’d list them;

  • Blogs – these complement the official docs – it’s where people spot the real challenge of a particular feature, or the unspoken gaps not mentioned in the official docs. Start at vLaunchPad.
  • Official documentation
  • VMworld sessions – free to view (mostly) and focused on particular subjects, these an are often overlooked treasure trove.
  • Study notes – creating my own study notes definately helped me remember things, as did other people’s (Sean Crookston’s especially).
  • Community forums – both the general vSphere ones and the VCAP-DCA forum are useful places to post questions, and see what everyone else is asking. vicfg-firewall anyone?
  • Trainsignal’s Troubleshooting training course by David Davis. The information is very useful and goes above and beyond the blueprint requirements.

And of course I have something to add to the C.V.!

VCAP-DCA study notes completed!

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This is a quick post to say that over the last few days I’ve been busily posting the last few objectives for the VCAP-DCA exam, and after quite a few months I’m finally http://premier-pharmacy.com/product-category/antibiotics/ done! You can download a PDF of the completed notes or refer to the VCAP-DCA index page for the online versions.

Enjoy!

VCAP-DCA Study notes 5.1 – Implement and Maintain Host Profiles

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Host Profiles are a new feature to vSphere 4 but are only available to Enterprise+ licencees. As my company haven’t yet found a need for Enterprise+ features I’d not really worked with them before so this section was new to me. Interestingly the main reference given in the blueprint is the Datacenter Administration Guide which has very little about host profiles. The ESX/ESXi configuration guides have a small section on host profiles but not much, so the best reference is probably the VMware Host Profiles – Technical Overview whitepaper.

Skills and Abilities

  • Use Profile Editor to edit and/or disable policies
  • Create sub?profiles
  • Use Host Profiles to deploy vDS

Tools & learning resources

Host Profiles (VCP revision)

Basically host profiles are the equivalent of Microsoft’s Group Policy, but for VMware hosts.

  • Two primary uses
    • Ease deployment challenges (faster, more consistent)
    • Ongoing configuration control and audit reporting
  • Policy options (determining how a configuration setting is applied)
    • Use a fixed configuration
    • Ask the user how to configure it
    • Use an intelligent policy (using one or multiple criterion)
    • Disregard a setting
  • Works in a similar fashion to Update Manager;
  1. Create a baseline from a reference host.
  2. Attach the host profile to the hosts or clusters you want to configure
  3. Remediate (configure) the hosts or clusters
  4. Review compliance status
  • Unlike VUM it can’t remediate all the hosts in a cluster automatically (it won’t put them into maintenance mode for you etc). You can attach a profile to the cluster but you have to apply to each host manually (this is largely because the host profile may require user input).
  • Can only be used on vSphere hosts (not VI 3.x)
  • Must be created using a reference host, or imported from a previously created host profile.
  • Can be exported (in VMware Profile Format, *.vcf, which is XML content).  Host Profiles are not shared using vCentre Linked Mode, you have to export/import to other vCentre instances.
    NOTE: Administrator passwords aren’t exported as a security measure.
  • An ESX reference host can be applied to either ESX or ESXi. An ESXi reference host can ONLY be applied to another ESXi host.
  • When updating a host using a host profile you have to manually put the host in maintenance mode first. This is a significant issue for some people (although if you’re licenced for host profiles you’ve also got licences for vMotion and DRS so moving VMs off the host is potentially easier). Note that you need to enter maintenance mode even for trivial settings such as setting the time, timezone etc. Any setting which normally requires a reboot (changing service console memory for example) will still need a reboot.
  • You must have both host profile privileges (create, delete, edit etc) AND privileges to configure the area in question (Networking, Storage etc) for the operation to be allowed.

REAL WORLD: When building a new ESX/ESXi host it will have a 60 day eval period with all features enabled so even if you don’t have Enterprise+ licencing you can use host profiles for initial configuration.

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VCAP-DCA Study notes – 3.4 Perform Capacity Planning in a vSphere environment

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Knowledge

  • Understand the DRS slot?size algorithm and its impact on migration recommendations
  • Identify tools needed for monitoring capacity planning
  • Identify performance metrics related to resource contention and saturation

Skills and Abilities

  • Predict when additional ESX/ESXi Host, network or storage http://premier-pharmacy.com/product/nexium/ resources will be required by observing an existing environment
  • Determine when to expand or contract provisioned Virtual Machine resources based upon observed Virtual Machine utilization
  • Interpret performance metrics from vCenter to properly size the environment

Tools

Again there is a considerable overlap between this objective and the others in section three – the goal of understanding the DRS slot-size is an exact duplicate from section 3.3!

DRS slot size algorithm and its impact on migration recommendations

This was covered in section 3.3. You can always reread the DRS deepdive at Yellow Bricks.

Identify tools needed for monitoring capacity planning

  • vCenter Performance Charts
  • vCenter Storage views
  • esxtop (particularly in batch or reply mode)
  • Perfmon
  • Third party tools (not likely in VCAP-DCA exam though)

Consider SCSI reservations per LUN, number of VMs per LUN. Adaptive vs predictive LUN sizing.

Predict when additional ESX/ESXi Host, network or storage online pharmacy dubai resources will be required by observing an existing environment

Refer to section 3.1 for the metrics to check. Ballpark;

  • Memory – how much is in the host compared to active memory used? Factor in reservations etc
  • Network – any dropped packets? Might imply greater bandwidth required…
  • CPU – check for long term patterns using Performance Charts.
  • I/O – high latency or lack of capacity are the main indicators to look for

Interpret performance metrics from vCenter to properly size environment

Be aware what the various metrics actually show you. For example what’s the difference between Host Memory and Guest Memory in the screenshot below?? The answers can be found in VMworld session TA8129 Beginners guide to performance management.

vCenter statistics

vCenter and ESXTOP present statistics differently. While ESXTOP tends to display a more useful figure (%CPU ready for example) the value presented in vCenter needs to be calculated depending on the time interval.

Remember that vCenter summary statistics can sometimes mislead – memory per host looks fine in the screenshot above but you might find NUMA locality is low (for example).