VMware vSphere Reviews

Originally posted at vcdx133.com.

The amazing VMware vSphere 6.0 has just been announced and will be released in March 2015! Michael Webster wrote a great article about the significance of vSphere 6.0 that is worth reading. This a “brain-dump” of the impressive new features and improvements:

• Enhancement of vCenter Server architecture – SSO has evolved to the multi-service Platform Services Controller (SSO, Licencing, Certificate Authority, Certificate Store, Service Registration).
• vCenter Server Appliance – supports large (1000 hosts, 10,000 VMs) environments and Linked Mode
• Enhanced Linked Mode for vCenter – Microsoft ADAM has been replaced with a VMware “native Replication Technology” where vCSA is supported and Policies and Tags are also replicated.
• IP version 6 – Static IPv6, DHCPv6 with FQDN for 100% management of hosts and iSCSI, NFS, VMFS IPv6 support.
• Availability – Improvements to the Watchdog Remediation features of vCenter (SSO, vCenter, vCenter DB).
• Content Library – an Administrator’s multi-vCenter central repository for all VM Templates, ISO images, scripts and vApps.
• vSphere Client – is only used for direct connection to the ESXi host and for connecting to vSphere Update Manager, all other tasks must be performed with the vSphere Web Client.
• Enhanced vMotion – Cross vCenter vMotion supported and Long-Distance vMotion of up to 100ms RTT.
• vSphere Fault Tolerance supports 4 vCPUs and 64 GB RAM – with VADP support and any vDisk provisioning on different datastores.
• Increased Scalability – 64 Nodes per Cluster (incl. VSAN), 8,000 VMs per Cluster, 480 Logical CPUs per Host, 1,024 VMs per Host, 12TB RAM per Host.
• Virtual Data Center and Policy Based Management – Automates VM provisioning based on capacity and capability. Intelligently place VMs based upon policy. Monitor VM policy adherence with automated remediation. Automate initial VM placement without writing complex policies. Ongoing operational efficiencies via policy-based remediation throughout VM lifecycle.
• NFS Client version 4.1 with Kerberos – NFS benefits from Session Trunking and Multipathing, improved Security and improved Locking, Error Recovery and NFS Protocol efficiencies.
• Virtual SAN – All Flash datastore with SSD persistence. 2x more IOPS with VSAN Hybrid (up to 40K IOPS/host). 4x more IOPS with VSAN All-Flash (up to 100K IOPS/host). 64 Nodes per Cluster. 150 VMs/host (Hybrid), 200 VMs/host (All-Flash). VSAN Snapshots and Clones. H/W-based checksum and encryption support. Blade architectures supported (DAS JBOD). Rack awareness (tolerate rack failures). Flashing LEDs to detect failed disks.
• Virtual Volumes (VVols) with Storage Policy-Based Management (SPBM) – removes the need for management of LUNs and NFS volumes via enhanced VASA APIs. A single VVol is the equivalent of a VMDK file. Extends SDS control plane to monolithic storage.
• Storage I/O Control – Per VM reservations.
• Network I/O Control – Per VM and Distributed Switch bandwidth reservations.
• Support for FreeBSD 10.0, Asianux 4 SP3.
• Security Enhancements – Increased Flexibility of Lockdown mode, Added Smart Card Authentication to DCUI, Improved password and account management, Enhanced Auditability of ESXi admin actions, Added full certificate lifecycle management, Added certificate based guest authentication.

NOTE: This is based upon the information and features provided in the RC version of the vSphere 6.0 (Beta 2). There may be some differences between the features of the RC and GA versions.

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Summary: The vSphere Webclient has been around since vSphere 5.0 but it’s fighting an uphill battle to gain user acceptance. I’ve recently tried using it as my primary administration tool with mixed success.

Recently I’ve been rebuilding my home lab to test out new features in vSphere6 among others. As VMware have been very vocal about moving to the webclient I thought it was about time I took the plunge and started using it in anger – after all it’s been out for several years and like many others until now I’ve stuck with the C# client. Unfortunately I can’t say it’s been an overly positive experience, largely because of browser compatibility issues rather the the design of the webclient itself. To be fair it does seem faster than in earlier releases. VMware KB2005083 lists the prerequisites for the WebClient (both server and client components) but it doesn’t detail the browser specific configuration you need to get it working successfully. This post will cover a bunch of settings you need to make but it’s largely for my own reference as I couldn’t find a single source of information elsewhere.

Browser and server tweaks to make it work

Surely one of the perks of a web based client is no client side setup right? Sadly no. I’m using a Windows 2012 server as my management station for my home lab, which isn’t representative of a real production environment as I’m less concerned with compliance, security etc. While mine is a niche use case some of the same settings apply to desktop Windows editions, especially Windows 8. There are a few configuration changes you need to make on Windows to allow you to work with vSphere via the web client;

• Enable desktop experience (instructions in VMware KB2054049) to allow Flash which is required by the web client (this is only required on Windows Server editions).
• Install the client integration plugin as Administrator, run IE as Administrator. Discussed in this forum post (and this one) though I’ve had mixed success getting it to work at all. Based on the fact that those two forums posts between them have over 50,000 views I’d say this is a very common issue and one that seems to vary with each browser.
• Disable Protected mode (internet and intranet zone) as per VMware’s advice. Obviously this reduces the security but if you’re choosing to use client applications on a server you’ve already made that choice!
• Install the root CA certificate (instructions here) to remove those annoying ‘this site is untrusted’ errors. Alternatively deploy certificates to replace the self-signed one’s that ship with vSphere, although that’s considerably more work!
• Disable pop-up blockers for the following sites;

I’m not sure if VMware publish a compatibility matrix across all their products but I’d suggest you have two different browsers installed so you can switch between them as required. For example IE is supposedly the fastest when using the webclient, but doesn’t work at all when trying to login to the Orchestrator configuration web service.

Tuning performance

Here are a few tips;

• Java heap tweaks are no longer required (unless you’re using NSX apparently – I’ve not tried it myself).
• Tweak Flash settings to allow more local storage
• Modify the web.properties file (just as I was finishing this post I found this Wikibooks entry which covers many of the configuration tweaks covered here. Who knew! Anyway I’m going to publish as I’ve written it now).
• If you’re working remotely be aware that the WebClient can be pretty bandwidth intensive. Use RDP if possible!

Let VMware know what you think

VMware are apparently listening to user feedback, according to this forum post, although in reality it’s largely an outlet for frustrated users!

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Initial Setup:

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Cost and Licensing Advice:

Other Solutions Considered:

One of the major new features of vSphere 6 is the ability to vMotion over very long distances. With previous releases of vSphere the maximum network Round Trip Time (RTT) was 10 ms which equates to a distance of almost 400 miles. With Long-Distance vMotion the RTT has been increased to a whopping 100 ms which increases the distance to 4,000 miles – far enough to move a VM from London to New York.

Of course you do still require a L2 stretched network (L2 adjacency) which is where technologies like vSphere NSX come in, but what about the storage?

vSphere 5.1 introduced Enhanced vMotion which combined vMotion and Storage vMotion into a single operation so that shared storage was no longer required – essentially Long-Distance vMotion moves all of the storage for a given VM along with its memory.

This does not sound ideal as you would need to move an awful lot of data between London and New York – it is one thing to move a few GBs of RAM, but 100s of GBs of disk per VM is another matter. The answer to the problem is to combine Long-Distance vMotion with asynchronous storage array or vSphere replication.

For vSphere Replication this should be relatively straight forward as it is integrated into the hypervisor and it works at the VM level, storage array replication will be much more of a challenge as typically it replicates an entire datastore containing many VMs.

This is where Virtual Volumes comes in to play as they should allow replication to be controlled at the VM level. Long-Distance vMotion would need to synchronise the replication and switch the active site – sounds like a complex task, but it would bring tremendous advantages and make Disaster Avoidance available over almost any distance.

I am quite sure that this is something that VMware is currently working on with the likes of EMC and NetApp – so watch this space as hopefully Long-Distance vMotion is only going to get better.

What is most valuable?

How has it helped my organization?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and technical support?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

How was the initial setup?

What about the implementation team?

What was our ROI?

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

What other advice do I have?

What is most valuable?

How has it helped my organization?

For how long have I used the solution?

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

How was the initial setup?

What about the implementation team?

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

What other advice do I have?

Valuable Features

Improvements to My Organization

Room for Improvement

Use of Solution

Deployment Issues

Stability Issues

Scalability Issues

Customer Service and Technical Support

Initial Setup

Implementation Team

Pricing, Setup Cost and Licensing

Other Solutions Considered

Other Advice