vCenter Server Appliance

• Enhanced vCenter Install, Upgrade, Patch: Streamlined user experience while deploying, upgrading and patching for vCenter Server. Support for CLI template-based vCenter Server lifecycle management.
• vCenter Server Appliance Migration Tool: Single-step migration process for existing Windows vCenter Server to latest release of vCenter Server Appliance. Assumes the identity of the source Windows vCenter (UUID, IP, OS Name). Support for both CLI and UI methods. Migrations for both embedded and external topologies. VMware Update manager is now included in the migration process.
• Sphere Update Manager for vCenter Server Appliance: Fully embedded and integrated vSphere Update Manager experience for vCenter Server Appliance – with no Windows dependencies!
• Enhanced Auto Deploy: New capabilities such as UI support, improved performance and scale, backup and restore of rules for Auto Deploy.
• Improvements in Host Profiles: Streamlined user experience and host profile management with several new capabilities including DRS integration, parallel host remediation, and improved audit quality compliance results.
• VMware Tools Lifecycle Management: Simplified and scalable approach for install and upgrade of VMware Tools, reboot less upgrade for Linux Tools, OSP upgrades, enhanced version and status reporting via API and UI.
• vSphere Automation API: A new REST based API, SDKs and Multi-Platform CLI (DCLI) is now available to provide simplified VM management and automation of the VCSA based configuration and services.
• Platform Service Controller High Availability: The PSC HA feature include zero configuration high availability with automatic vCenter failover to another PSC within a site. New PSC Site Management client side tools for viewing your topology and viewing PSC HA status. Available for both Windows and Appliance PSCs.
• vCenter High Availability: Protect mission critical vCenter deployments with a native high availability solution that will not only protect against host and hardware failures, but also against vCenter application failures. The vCenter HA solution provides automated failover from active to passive vCenter with expected RTO < 5 mins. Uses synchronous replication so there is no data loss and operates in an Active-Passive configuration with a Witness. Requires 2 network adapters, one for the “public” network and one for the “private” network. And is only be available to the vCenter Appliance.
• vCenter Server Appliance and Database Management: The new 6.5 Appliance Management Interface includes usage monitoring of the embedded vCenter Postgres database by data type and utilization trends, and sends database usage alerts directly into the vSphere web client. Monitor appliance CPU, Memory, and networking utilization trends for more targeted troubleshooting. Send syslog data to remote hosts.
• Native vCenter Server backup and restore: Back up the vCenter Server Appliance and Platform Services Controller in three simple steps in the Appliance Management Interface using industry-standard protocols like HTTP(S), SCP or FTP(S). The file-based backup (encryption optional) will include the embedded Postgres database, vCenter inventory, and all configuration files required to recover vCenter. Restore the appliance from the new vCenter Server 6.5 installer.

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Sander Daems is founder and author of this blog and working as a Sr. Infrastructure Consultant by IT-Value. Sander has over 10 years experience in IT, primary focus: virtualization, storage and SBC

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XenServer 7 was released in May of 2016.  It was available in pre-release form under the project name of Dundee.  All new XenServer installations should be made using XenServer 7.

Microsoft Technology integration

Citrix has a long history of integrating with, and supporting Microsoft operating systems and infrastructure products, and XenServer 7 is no exception.

• Automated Microsoft Windows VM driver management
  Do you administer a larger XenServer environment? We currently support up to 1000 VMs per host, and have customers running thousands of hosts, so when time comes to updating the Windows VMs’ XenTools, it can be quite a challenge. Even with smaller infrastructures, the process of updating many Windows VMs can be a headache, something we’ve heard loud and clear from our customers. Our solution? Automation.
  In XenServer 7, it is now possible to let Microsoft Update Services automatically install and/or update the Windows VM I/O drivers contained within those VMs, moving this once cumbersome process into the standard organizational framework for how their Windows machines are updated.
• Microsoft Server Message Block (SMB) support
  Adding to the wide variety of host storage connectivity, XenServer 7 now includes SMB to enable IT admins to use Windows storage devices running SMB for their XenServer VM’s disks.
• Docker containers in Windows Server 2016
  In May 2015, XenServer introduced Docker container management for Linux VMs, opening up visibility and management to IT admins, of the containers being used within their XenServer infrastructures. This year for XenServer 7, we are really excited to be supporting Docker containers on Microsoft Windows Server 2016 OS, rounding off our of Docker support across both Linux and Windows, the first and only commercial hypervisor to do so.
• A new Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) management pack is now integrated and licensed in XenServer 7. For customers wanting greater Microsoft SCOM management visibility, this ties in well across the Citrix stack.
• The Microsoft Active Directory integration within XenServer has been improved, changing the underlying connectivity components, which increases the scalability to support large AD forests, whilst also increasing performance.
• XenServer 7 includes templates for Microsoft Windows 10 and preview of Windows Server 2016.

Revolutionary Security

Infrastructure security is always a challenge, and whether it’s protection from viruses, malware or hackers, there are a variety of tools and methods used by security vendors to help businesses protect their IT infrastructures from the variety of tools and methods used by the people with malicious intent. A big challenge is how malware and hackers get around, disable, or hide themselves from existing security solutions.

If someone can leverage a software vulnerability to gain access to a system, they tend to work their way up the security chain, seeking to get the highest level of system privileges from where they can disable security software and do the most damage or gain access to the most sensitive data.

XenServer 7 is different.

Working closely with Bitdefender, Citrix is proud to announce XenServer Direct Inspect APIs, which allow integration from third party security software companies to leverage hypervisor memory introspection (HVMI). This uses a privileged security appliance (SVA), one per-host to inspect the memory of VMs running on the host. As introspection is happening from outside the guest VM, there are no agents required within the VMs, and as such, nothing for a virus, piece of malware or hacker to disable within the VM. Should anyone also hack into a VM OS, they would also only be able to see within the boundaries of that VM container, and be completely unaware that a host-based SVA could be monitoring and blocking their activity; we call this “better than physical” protection.

Security products based on virus or malware signatures protect you from known risks, however what about day-zero attacks? How do you protect yourself against something for which there is no known signature? Bitdefender’s integration goes beyond the standard signature checking, by examining the techniques used by viruses or malware rather than their signatures, enabling protection of systems against day-zero attacks.

This solution isn’t targeted at replacing all disk based scanning protection, as the Direct Inspect APIs feature is a memory based solution, yet it extends protection through either a kernel-mode or user-mode (for specific applications), providing protection against a variety of security threats, including existing security products from being disabled. As such it complements existing disk based protection solutions. Find out more from Bitdefender on this blog and data sheet.

Some papers:

• Citrix XenServer 7.0 Release NotesCitrix XenServer 7.0 Installation Guide
• Citrix XenServer 7.0 Quick Start Guide
• Citrix XenServer 7.0 Virtual Machine User’s Guide
• Citrix XenServer 7.0 Administrator’s Guide
• Configuring Citrix XenServer 7.0 for Graphics
• Citrix XenServer 7.0 Configuration Limits
• Citrix XenServer 7.0 Licensing FAQ
• Citrix XenServer 7.0 Technical FAQ
• Citrix XenServer 7.0 Management API Guide
• Citrix XenServer 7.0 Software Development Kit
• Citrix XenServer 7.0 Supplemental Packs & the DDK Guide
• Citrix XenServer 7.0 Measured Boot Supplemental Pack
• Citrix XenServer Workload Balancing 7.0 Quick Start Guide
• Citrix XenServer Workload Balancing 7.0 Administrator’s Guide
• Citrix XenServer 7.0 Conversion Manager Guide
• Citrix XenServer 7.0 vSwitch Controller User Guide
• Citrix SCOM Management Pack for XenServer Release Notes
• Citrix SCOM Management Pack for XenServer User Guide
• Citrix SCOM Management Pack for XenServer Compatibility Matrix
• Citrix SCOM Management Pack for XenServer Reference Guide

More information: Citrix

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Sander Daems is founder and author of this blog and working as a Sr. Infrastructure Consultant by IT-Value. Sander has over 10 years experience in IT, primary focus: virtualization, storage and SBC

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Install & Upgrade

• Enhanced Install and Upgrade Capabilities – Windows vCenter installation experience has been enhanced with additional capabilities including custom ports, custom paths, uninstall and error messaging improvements. Furthermore, all upgrade paths from Windows vCenter 5.0 and up are now supported. vCenter Server Appliance now has a guided installer. Separate ISOs and scripted installation for both vCenter Server for Windows and vCSA reduce the overall download time and improve automation capabilities respectively.

Compute

• Expanded Support for New Hardware, Architectures, and Guest Operating Systems – Expanded support for the latest x86 chip sets, devices and drivers. Added support for FreeBSD 10.0 and Asianux 4 SP3 guest operating systems.
• Increased Scalability – Increased configuration maximums in vSphere 6: Cluster maximums have increased to support up to 64 nodes and 6,000 VMs. Virtual Machines will support up to 128 vCPUs and 4TB vRAM and Hosts will support up to 480 physical CPUs, 12 TB RAM, 64 TB datastores, 1000 VMs and 32 Serial Ports. Increased support for virtual graphics including Nvidia GPU.
• Instant Clone – Technology built in vSphere 6 that lays that foundation to rapidly clone and deploy virtual machines, as much as 10x faster than what is currently possible today.

 

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Sander Daems is founder and author of this blog and working as a Sr. Infrastructure Consultant by IT-Value. Sander has over 10 years experience in IT, primary focus: virtualization, storage and SBC

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sanderdaems

Sander Daems is founder and author of this blog and working as a Sr. Infrastructure Consultant by IT-Value. Sander has over 10 years experience in IT, primary focus: virtualization, storage and SBC

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Sander Daems is founder and author of this blog and working as a Sr. Infrastructure Consultant by IT-Value. Sander has over 10 years experience in IT, primary focus: virtualization, storage and SBC

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Hyper-Convergence Meets Data Protection and High Availability

In 2014, there were 28 million IT professionals worldwide. IDC expects this number to grow to 36 million by 2020. The trouble here is that the amount of data for which these professionals are held responsible is growing at a much higher rate. Today, each IT professional on average is responsible for 230GB; by 2020, that number will explode to 1,231GB. This massive spike is made even more challenging by the increasing richness of data sources and formats, driven by everything from new applications to the Internet of Things.

This is the reason that productivity — doing more with less — has never been more important for the engineers creating and building next generation data centers. This is one reason that hyper-converged storage has been increasingly popular. Hyper-converged infrastructure systems offer a software-defined scale-out architecture that integrates compute, networking, and storage via virtualization. At the end of the day, what these systems offer to the overburdened IT professional is a more productive way of creating and managing IT infrastructure.

The future of backup lies in hyper-convergence as well. The basic architecture of a backup appliance — a server, networking, storage, operating system, and backup software — will need to take advantage of more and faster processors and cores, memory, backplane and I/O performance. Flash-enabled architectures will increasingly become mandatory — not just to enable faster backup and recovery, but also because of the increased functionality that the backup appliance must support in terms of more capability and high availability. Techniques such as on-appliance virtualized instant recovery of virtual and physical environments, as well as off-appliance support of virtual environments, will present very different I/O loads that can only be reconciled with tiered flash and rotational storage.

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Sander Daems is founder and author of this blog and working as a Sr. Infrastructure Consultant by IT-Value. Sander has over 10 years experience in IT, primary focus: virtualization, storage and SBC

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This release resolves the following issues related to vCloud Automation Center:

Attempts to perform vCloud Automation Center tenant administration operation fail with an error
When you attempt to perform any vCloud Automation Center tenant administration operations such as removing an administrator from the default tenant (vsphere.local), the operation fails with a System Exception error.

Attempts to log in to vCloud Automation Center fail if the SAMAccountName contains extra trailing spaces
When you attempt to log in to vCloud Automation Center, the login attempt fails if the SAMAccountName attribute contains extra spaces trailing at the end of the name.

Attempts to log in to vCloud Automation Center fail if the password contains the colon (:) character
While attempting to log in to vCloud Automation Center, if you use a password that contains the colon (:) character, the login attempt fails.

Attempts to use the Windows Session Authentication feature might fail
When you log in to vCloud Automation Center by using Windows Session Authentication on browsers such as Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, and Mozilla Firefox might fail due to an error in the VMware Client Integration Plug-in. An error message similar to the following is displayed:
Windows Session Authentication login has failed as a result of an error caused by the VMware Client Integration Plugin 

Attempts to log in to vCloud Automation Center fail if a custom UPN suffix is configured in the alias field for AD over LDAP
When you attempt to log in to the vCloud Automation Center where the custom UPN suffix is configured in the alias field for Active Directory (AD) over Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), the login attempt fails.
This issue is resolved in this release.

Attempts to log in to vCloud Automation Center using vSphere Single Sign-On 5.5.0b might fail with an error
If you specify the Global Catalog (GC) port in the AD over LDAP Identity Provider’s (IDP) connection string, attempts to log in to vCloud Automation Center using vSphere Single Sign-On 5.5.0b might fail with an error message similar to the following:
Error received by LDAP client: com.vmware.identity.interop.ldap.WinLdapClientLibrary, error code: 10
You can also see log messages similar to the following in the vmware-sts-idmd.log file:
2014-04-09 14:18:16,564 ERROR [ServerUtils] Exception
'com.vmware.identity.interop.ldap.ReferralLdapException: Referral
LDAP error '
com.vmware.identity.interop.ldap.ReferralLdapException: Referral
LDAP error
at
com.vmware.identity.interop.ldap.LdapErrorChecker$11.RaiseLdapError(LdapErrorChecker.java:172)
at
com.vmware.identity.interop.ldap.LdapErrorChecker.CheckError(LdapErrorChecker.java:826)
at
com.vmware.identity.interop.ldap.WinLdapClientLibrary.CheckError(WinLdapClientLibrary.java:758)
at
com.vmware.identity.interop.ldap.WinLdapClientLibrary.ldap_search_s(WinLdapClientLibrary.java:433) 
 

The vCenter Server 5.5 Update 1c can be downloaded here and the release notes can be found here.

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Sander Daems is founder and author of this blog and working as a Sr. Infrastructure Consultant by IT-Value. Sander has over 10 years experience in IT, primary focus: virtualization, storage and SBC

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The release of VMware vSphere vCenter 5.5 Update 1 contains the following enhancements: 

vCloud® Hybrid Service™ vSphere® Client Plug-in, is now available in vSphere Web Client.
The plug-in installer icon appears in the Home page, under Inventories. Click the installer icon to install the plug-in. The vCloud Hybrid Service plug-in lets you view and manage your vCloud Hybrid Service resources in the vSphere Web Client. After you install the plug-in and register your vCloud Hybrid Service account with it, you can view all your Dedicated Cloud and Virtual Private Cloud instances in the vSphere Web Client. You can browse each cloud instance and manage its inventory of virtual data centers, gateways, networks, and virtual machines. See the vCloud Hybrid Service vSphere Client Plug-in documentation at https://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/vchs_plugin_pubs.html for more information.

vCenter Server is now supported on Windows Server 2012 R2.

Resolved Issues – This release delivers a number of bug fixes that have been documented in the Resolved Issues section.

The release of VMware vSphere ESXi 5.5 Update 1 contains the following enhancements:

VMware Virtual SAN – Virtual SAN 5.5 is a new hypervisor-converged storage tier that extends the vSphere Hypervisor to pool server-side magnetic disks (HDDs) and solid-state drives (SSDs). By clustering server-side HDDs and SSDs, Virtual SAN creates a distributed shared datastore designed and optimized for virtual environments. Virtual SAN is a standalone product that is sold separate from vSphere and requires its own license key 

Resolved Issues – This release delivers a number of bug fixes that have been documented in the Resolved Issues section.

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Sander Daems is founder and author of this blog and working as a Sr. Infrastructure Consultant by IT-Value. Sander has over 10 years experience in IT, primary focus: virtualization, storage and SBC

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Summary of new features and capabilities available in vSphere 5.5

• Doubled Host-Level Configuration Maximums – vSphere 5.5 is capable of hosting any size workload; a fact that is punctuated by the doubling of several host-level configuration maximums.  The maximum number of logical CPUs has doubled from 160 to 320, the number of NUMA nodes doubled from 8 to 16, the number of virtual CPUs has doubled from 2048 to 4096, and the amount of RAM has also doubled from 2TB to 4TB. There is virtually no workload that is too big for vSphere 5.5!
• Hot-pluggable PCIe SSD Devices – vSphere 5.5 provides the ability to perform hot-add and remove of SSD devices to/from a vSphere 5.5 host.  With the increased adoption of SSD, having the ability to perform both orderly as well as unplanned SSD hot-add/remove operations is essential to protecting against downtime and improving host resiliency.
• Improved Power Management – ESXi 5.5 provides additional power savings by leveraging CPU deep process power states (C-states).   By leveraging the deeper CPU sleep states ESXi can minimizes the amount of power consumed by idle CPUs during periods of inactivity.  Along with the improved power savings comes additional performance boost on Intel chipsets as turbo mode frequencies can be reached more quickly when CPU cores are in a deep C-State.
• Virtual Machine Compatibility ESXi 5.5 (aka Virtual Hardware 10) – ESXi 5.5 provides a new Virtual Machine Compatibility level that includes support for a new virtual-SATA Advance Host Controller Interface (AHCI) with support for up to 120 virtual disk and CD-ROM devices per virtual machine.   This new controller is of particular benefit when virtualizing Mac OS X as it allows you to present a SCSI based CD-ROM device to the guest.
• VM Latency Sensitivity – included with the new virtual machine compatibility level comes a new “Latency Sensitivity” setting that can be tuned to help reduce virtual machine latency.  When the Latency sensitivity is set to high the hypervisor will try to reduce latency in the virtual machine by reserving memory, dedicating CPU cores and disabling network features that are prone to high latency.
• Expanded vGPU Support – vSphere 5.5 extends VMware’s hardware-accelerated virtual 3D graphics support (vSGA) to include GPUs from AMD.  The multi-vendor approach provides customers with more flexibility in the data center for Horizon View virtual desktop workloads.  In addition 5.5 enhances the “Automatic” rendering by enabling the migration of virtual machines with 3D graphics enabled between hosts running GPUs from different hardware vendors as well as between hosts that are limited to software backed graphics rendering.
• Graphics Acceleration for Linux Guests – vShere 5.5 also provides out of the box graphics acceleration for modern GNU/Linux distributions that include VMware’s guest driver stack, which was developed by VMware and made available to all Linux vendors at no additional cost.
• vCenter Single Sign-On (SSO) – in vSphere 5.5 SSO comes with many improvements.   There is no longer an external database required for the SSO server, which together with the vastly improved installation experience helps to simplify the deployment of SSO for both new installations as well as upgrades from earlier versions.   This latest release of SSO provides enhanced active directory integration to include support for multiple forest as well as one-way and two-way trusts.  In addition, a new multi-master architecture provides built in availability that helps not only improve resiliency for the authentication service, but also helps to simplify the overall SSO architecture.
• vSphere Web Client – the web client in vSphere 5.5 also comes with several notable enhancements.  The web client is now supported on Mac OS X, to include the ability to access virtual machine consoles, attach client devices and deploy OVF templates.  In addition there have been several usability improvements to include support for drag and drop operations, improved filters to help refine search criteria and make it easy to find objects, and the introduction of a new “Recent Items” icon that makes it easier to navigate between commonly used views.
• vCenter Server Appliance – with vSphere 5.5 the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) now uses a reengineered, embedded vPostgres database that offers improved scalability.  I wasn’t able to officially confirm the max number of hosts and VMs that will be supported with the embedded DB.  They are targeting 100 hosts and 3,000 VMs but we’ll need to wait until 5.5 releases to confirm these numbers.  However, regardless what the final numbers are, with this improved scalability the VCSA is a very attractive alternative for folks who may be looking to move a way from a Windows based vCenter.
• vSphere App HA – App HA brings application awareness to vSphere HA helping to further improve application uptime.  vSphere App HA works together with VMware vFabric Hyperic Server to monitor application services running inside the virtual machine, and when issues are detected perform restart actions as defined by the administrator in the vSphere App HA Policy.
• vSphere HA Compatibility with DRS Anti-Affinity Rules –vSphere HA will now honor DRS anti-affinity rules when restarting virtual machines.  If you have anti-affinity rules defined in DRS that keep selected virtual machines on separate hosts, VMware HA will now honor those rules when restarting virtual machines following a host failure.
• vSphere Big Data Extensions(BDE) – Big Data Extensions is a new addition to the VMware vSphere Enterprise and Enterprise Plus editions.  BDE is a vSphere plug-in that enables administrators to deploy and manage Hadoop clusters on vSphere using the vSphere web client.
• Support for 62TB VMDK – vSphere 5.5 increases the maximum size of a virtual machine disk file (VMDK) to 62TB (note the maximum VMFS volume size is 64TB where the max VMDK file size is 62TB).  The maximum size for a Raw Device Mapping (RDM) has also been increased to 62TB.
• Microsoft Cluster Server (MCSC) Updates – MSCS clusters running on vSphere 5.5 now support Microsoft Windows 2012, round-robin path policy for shared storage, and iSCSI and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) for shared storage.
• 16Gb End-to-End Support – In vsphere 5.5 16Gb end-to-end FC support is now available.  Both the HBAs and array controllers can run at 16Gb as long as the FC switch between the initiator and target supports it.
• Auto Remove of Devices on PDL – This feature automatically removes a device from a host when it enters a Permanent Device Loss (PDL) state.  Each vSphere host is limited to 255 disk devices, removing devices that are in a PDL state prevents failed devices from occupying a device slot.
• VAAI UNMAP Improvements – vSphere 5.5 provides  and new “esxcli storage vmfs unmap” command with the ability to specify the reclaim size in blocks, opposed to just a percentage, along with the ability to reclaim space in increments rather than all at once.
• VMFS Heap Improvements – vSphere 5.5 introduces a much improved heap eviction process, which eliminates the need for large heap sizes.  With vSphere 5.5 a maximum of 256MB of heap is needed to enable vSphere hosts to access the entire address space of a 64TB VMFS.
• vSphere Flash Read Cache – a new flash-based storage solution that enables the pooling of multiple flash-based devices into a single consumable vSphere construct called a vSphere Flash Resource, which can be used to enhance virtual machine performance by accelerating read-intensive workloads.
• Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) Enhancements – with the vSphere Distributed Switch in vSphere 5.5 LACP now supports 22 new hashing algorithms, support for up to 64 Link Aggregation Groups (LAGs), and new workflows to help configure LACP across large numbers of hosts.
• Traffic Filtering Enhancements – the vSphere Distributed Switch now supports packet classification and filtering based on MAC SA and DA qualifiers, traffic type qualifiers (i.e. vMotion, Management, FT), and IP qualifiers (i.e. protocol, IP SA, IP DA, and port number).
• Quality of Service Tagging – vSphere 5.5 adds support for Differentiated Service Code Point (DCSP) marking.  DSCP marking support enables users to insert tags in the IP header which helps in layer 3 environments where physical routers function better with an IP header tag than with an Ethernet header tag.
• Single-Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) Enhancements – vSphere 5.5 provides improved workflows for configuring SR-IOV as well as the ability to propagate port group properties to up to the virtual functions.
• Enhanced Host-Level Packet Capture – vSphere 5.5 provides an enhanced host-level packet capture tool that is equivalent to the command-line tcpdump tool available on the Linux platform.
• 40GB NIC Support – vSphere 5.5 provides support for 40GB NICs.  In 5.5 the functionality is limited to the Mellanox ConnectX-3 VPI adapters configured in Ethernet mode.
• vSphere Data Protection (VDP) – VDP has also been updated in 5.5 with several great improvements to include the ability to replicate  backup data to EMC Avamar,  direct-to-host emergency restore, the ability to backup and restore of individual .vmdk files, more granular scheduling for backup and replication jobs, and the ability to mount existing VDP backup data partitions when deploying a new VDP appliance.  For more information about these new features as well as more information about VDP vs. VDP advanced check outJeff Hunter’s recent blog post.

Source: VMware

sanderdaems

Sander Daems is founder and author of this blog and working as a Sr. Infrastructure Consultant by IT-Value. Sander has over 10 years experience in IT, primary focus: virtualization, storage and SBC

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