What’s new in vSphere 5?

Dan BrinkmannSolutions Architect at Lewan & Associates

http://blog.lewan.com / Twitter: @dbrinkmann

ABOUT LEWAN

• Customer-focused

• Superb engineering talent

• Cross technology offerings and options

• Local talent and solutions, global strength

• Process driven

• Satisfaction guaranteed

TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS Innovative and reliable IT solutions are in our DNA.

Data Centerblade systems, stand-alone servers, server virtualization, range of operating systems, information lifecycle management, SAN/NAS, storage management, data de-duplication, backup/recovery, archival, tape libraries

Networkvoice over IP, call center, routing/switching, telepresence/collaboration, wan acceleration, circuits, wireless, firewalls, VPN, access control, IDS/IPS

Application Delivery & Applicationsbusiness productivity applications, email, directory services, file/print, desktops, laptops, desktop virtualization, thin clients, mobility, anti-virus, anti-spam

•ESXi only

•ESXi CLI

•New virtual machine format

•Auto deploy

•Storage DRS

•Profile-driven storage

•VMFS 5

•SIOC for NFS

Some of vSphere 5 changes

• New VAAI primitives

• vDS (span, LLDP, netflow)

• NIOC enhancements

• Rewrite of HA

• vMotion / DRS enhancements

• ESXi firewall

• vSphere web client

• vCenter linux appliance

• Convergence of the platform on ESXi

• No more service console

• Thin architecture

• Smaller security footprint

• Streamlined deployment and configuration

• Simplified patching and updating model

ESXi Only

• ESXi Shell

• Rebranded Tech Support Mode

• Local and remote (SSH)

• vCLI

• ‘esxcli’ Command Set

• Local and remote CLI

• New and improved in 5.0

• ‘vicfg’ Command Set

• Remote CLI Only

• Other Commands:

• vmware-cmd, vmkfstools, etc.

• vCLI available for Linux and Windows

ESXi CLI Components

• vMA• vCLI Appliance

• PowerCLI• Windows CLI Tool

vSphere 5.0 CLI Compatibility

1. ‘esxcfg’ commands deprecated in 5.0 (replaced with esxcli)

2. ‘esxcli’ in 4.x is *not* backward compatible with 5.0

3. ‘vicfg’ used for remote CLI only

Commands Run Local Run Remote ESX/ESXi 4.x ESXi 5.x

esxcfg1 Yes No Yes No

esxcli2 Yes Yes No Yes

vicfg3 No Yes Yes Yes

vmware-cmd Yes Yes Yes Yes

vmkfstools Yes Yes Yes Yes

PowerCLI No Yes Yes Yes

• 3-D graphics for Windows Aero

• USB 3.0 devices

• Support for 32 vCPU and 1TB RAM

• Multi-core vCPU support (licensing)

• If using vCD check this link: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2005932

• Upgrade VM tools then upgrade virtual hardware

New VM format (version 8)

• Works with Image Builder, vCenter Server, and Host Profiles

• How it works:

• PXE boot the server

• ESXi image profile loaded into host memory via Auto Deploy Server

• Configuration applied using Answer File / Host Profile

• Host placed/connected in vCenter

• Benefits

• No boot disk

• Quickly and easily deploy large numbers of ESXi hosts

• Share a standard ESXi image across many hosts

• Host image decoupled from the physical server

• Recover host w/out recovering hardware or having to restore from backup

Auto Deploy

• Storage DRS provides the following:

• Initial Placement of VMs and VMDKS based on available space and I/O capacity.

• Load balancing between datastores in a datastore cluster via Storage vMotion based on storage space utilization.

• Load balancing via Storage vMotion based on I/O metrics, i.e. latency.

• Storage DRS also includes Affinity/Anti-Affinity Rules for VMs & VMDKs

Storage DRS

VMFS 5

Feature VMFS-3 VMFS-5

2TB+ VMFS Volumes Yes (using extents)

Yes

Support for 2TB+ Physical RDMs No Yes

Unified Block size (1MB) No Yes

Atomic Test & Set Enhancements(part of VAAI, locking mechanism)

No Yes

Sub-blocks for space efficiency 64KB (max ~3k) 8KB (max ~30k)

Small file support No 1KB

• Adds support for NFS when using Storage I/O Control

• Delivers same benefits now for NFS as existed in 4.1 for iSCISI and FC

SOIC for NFS

• New primitives for VAAI NAS (Full File Clone and Reserve Space/thick VMDK) – note not shipped with ESXi 5.0

• Write Same, ATS, and Full Copy now fully T10 compliant in ESXi 5.0

• New VAAI UnMap – dead space reclamation, monitoring of space – Currently recommended to disable http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2007427

New VAAI primitives

• LLDP – standard based vendor neutral discovery protocol

• Netflow – collects IP traffic information, inter & intra VM

• Port Mirror – (SPAN) overcomes limitation of promiscuous mode

• NOIC at VM level – create VM resource groups

Virtual Distributed Switch

• Network I/O control is a traffic management feature of vSphere Distributed Switch (vDS)

• In a consolidated IO (10 gig) deployments this feature allows customer to

• Allocate Shares and Limits to different traffic types.

• Provide Isolation

• One traffic type should not dominate others

• Guarantee Service Levels when different traffic types compete

• Enhanced Network I/O Control — vSphere 5.0 builds on previous versions of Network I/O Control feature by providing

• User-defined network resource pools

• New Host Based Replication Traffic Type

• QoS tagging

NOIC

NOIC

VMRG2

VMRG1

VMRG3

Network IO Control

VM

FT vMotion NFS

VMWare vNetwork Distributed Switch

TCP/IP

iSCSI

10 GigE

Total BW

VMOT ION

NFS

FT

iSCS I

HBR

• Complete re-write of vSphere HA

• Provides a foundation for increased scale and functionality

• Eliminates common issues (DNS resolution)

• Multiple Communication Paths

• Can leverage storage as well as the mgmt network for communications

A fun read http://www.yellow-bricks.com/vmware-high-availability-deepdiv/

High Availability

• Every host runs a agent

• Referred to as ‘FDM’ or Fault Domain Manger

• One of the agents within the cluster is chosen to assume the role of the Master

• There is only one Master per cluster during normal operations

• All other agents assume the role of Slaves

• There is no more Primary/Secondary concept with vSphere HA

High Availability

• Multi-NIC support – up to four 10Gbps or sixteen 1Gbps

• Support for higher latency networks – up to ~10ms

• DRS support Agent VMs and special handling of them

vMotion & DRS

• Service oriented stateless firewall, restrict access to services based on IP/subnet

• GUI for configuring firewall on ESXi 5.0 similar to classic ESX firewall

• Host profile support for the ESXi 5.0 firewall

• Upgrades from Classic ESX to ESXi 5.0 will have firewall settings preserved

ESXi Firewall

vSphere Web Client

vCenter in either single or Linked mode operation

The Query Service obtains live data from

the core vCenter Server process

Application Server that provides a scalable back end

Flex ClientBack End

vCenter

Query Service

The vSphere Web Client runs within a browser

• Pre-packaged 64 bit app running on SLES 11

• Optional support for remote Oracle DB

• Embedded DB – 5 hosts/50VMs

• External DC - <300 hosts/<3000VMs

• No support for: Linked mode (requires ADAM), IPv6, vCenter Heartbeat, View Composer

vCenter Linux Appliance

• Dump Collector

• Syslog server

Not to be missed

• ESXi 3.5-4.1 http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&docTypeID=DT_KB_1_1&externalId=1021801

• ESXi 5.0 http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&docTypeID=DT_KB_1_1&externalId=2004201

• Syslog is what “I” would use

• Enabling syslog on ESXi 3.5 and 4.x http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1016621

• Enabling syslog on ESXi 5.0 http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2003322

vSphere logging

This was not a comprehensive list, check out

http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2011/08/vsphere-50-features.html

http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2011/08/duncans-50-out-of-140-vsphere-5.html

http://blog.lewan.com