rakeshm's VM Management Blog

Configuration Control

2009-10-15T23:07:00Z

One of the challenges of virtualization management is the sheer number of new configuration settings that get exposed to the IT administrator. IT orgs have always had problems with configuration drift but virtualization can make the situation worse if not carefully controlled. Point solutions that help ensure your virtual machine hosts are consistently configured but that's the least of your problems - even if your hyper-V or ESX hosts are uniformly configured, what you really care about is the applications running on the server.

Fundamentally, our strategy puts the application aka "service" at the center of what we do. This is a big difference between our strategy and that of our competitors. The virtualization software and physical infrastructure is just there to help the application do its job but at the end of the day, its all about the app. As we move to a "model based" world of management, developers will be able to use tools like Visual Studio to describe how applications work, how they fail, how they respond to resource allocation etc. Basically you'll be creating a definition and recipe for how an app should be deployed, configured, serviced and how it should behave. This is extremely powerful.

This definition will feed directly into System Center so that operations and IT folks can effectively manage the application without having to know exactly how it works. While the original application definition describes what the developer expects to happen, we all know that apps in the real world exhibit characteristics that were never designed or intended. System Center will also enrich the model and add information as it learns more about it's actual behavior and capture this knowledge in the application definition. If somebody uses remote desktop to change a bunch of application settings (usually for a good reason), the management infrastructure can compare what's running on your servers to the definition to see if it is in violation of the application definition. In some cases you'll want the system to update the application definition with the newly changed settings so that the change is captured in the recipe and can be repeated for future application deployments. In other cases the application change should not have happened and the application needs to be reverted back to what's in the definition.

While the user scenario I describe is powerful, one of the challenges is that it's hard to write definitions and keep them up to date. The burden is on us as a management vendor to provide you with the right tools to enable this scenario in a practical way and we're hard at work across multiple product divisions including Visual Studio, Windows Server, System Center along with our stable of flagship server products like SQL, Exchange, Sharepoint etc. making this a reality.

With that said, you can actually get started on many of these scenarios now. System Center Configuration Manager has a feature called "Desired Configuration Management" or DCM. DCM lets you create baselines for how things should be configured (patches, applications, settings - anything you can think of) and measure your infrastructure against the baseline. This applies not only to your virtual machine hosts but ANY type of server workload. You can find out more about DCM in SCCM 2007 here.

Come and get it....SCVMM 2008 R2 is now available

2009-08-24T19:27:00Z

Told you it was coming soon :-) You can get the eval bits here.

Additional information:

System Center Blog detailing the release information

Our team blog highlighting the key new features

SCVMM 2008 R2 Release Date

2009-07-13T21:40:00Z

I just wanted to clarify (incorrect) rumors/speculation about the release date for SCVMM 2008 R2. There is a lot of built up excitement for this release and we've added many features, none more anticipated than live migration. While it is true that our competition has had this feature for some time (and has made customers pay dearly for the privilege if using it), adding it to Hyper-V opens up a brand new set of exciting and cost effective management/optimization scenarios for Windows Server nation!

We've always maintained that we will ship SCVMM 2008 R2 as soon as possible after Windows Server 2008 R2 is released and this remains the case. As you can read from the Windows Server Blog we're coming down the home stretch. Once the Windows Server release is locked, (which is now only a couple of weeks away) our test team will run through a full test pass with SCVMM 2008 R2 to ensure that we've caught any late breaking issues. We have obviously worked very closely with the Hyper-V team and already have plenty of customers in full production on Windows Server 2008 R2 + SCVMM 2008 R2 so we don't expect this to happen but as Reagan once said "trust but verify".

I don't have an exact date to communicate at this point but late summer/early fall is our target.....as always, stay tuned for more details.

Rakesh

Clouds and Coffee - two things we know well in Seattle

2009-06-30T00:56:00Z

Over the course of the next few months, I’m going to “repurpose” this blog a little bit. We’re going to start using our team blog to focus on product announcements, features etc. It’s just easier to keep all of that information centralized and I will continue to link to that blog when major news is announced. With this blog, I’ll focus more on strategy/direction/opinion with our feature investments in SCVMM and also share some of what we’re hearing from our customers.

Recently at our annual Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) we demo’d some early work we’ve been doing to allow SCVMM customers to augment their on-premise/private cloud resources with hosted/public cloud resources. Cloud computing isn’t new but the appeal of what it offers is really starting to resonate with customers. Last year we conducted focus groups for SCVMM feature planning and not a single person brought up cloud computing as being near the top of their radar. This year we had lots of dialog on cloud computing with customers, most of it unprompted. What we found is that more and more, customers are looking to build a “private cloud” within their enterprise datacenters. Lots of customers told me that many of their internal business units are starting to leverage external public cloud providers and the reasoning typically went something like this:

“All they need is a credit card number and they get a server in a few hours or even minutes. If they call me (internal IT) we have this bureaucracy that takes weeks and that’s assuming I can even automate the provisioning process from networking, storage, physical servers, OS etc. If it’s for dev/test, it will take even longer since that’s less critical.”

Ultimately, as an IT shop, they want to provide their business users with the same level of responsiveness and all of the attributes of public cloud computing so that the decision of whether to go on premise or off premise is a business decision, not a technical one.

The definition of “cloud computing” has also been evolving but most definitions include the concepts of scalability, shared resources and abstraction of physical implementation. Virtualization is a key enabler for many of these scenarios but ultimately we feel it comes down to management as the differentiator (I know, I’m biased but that doesn’t make me wrong!).

Many vendors are advising customers to wait for better industry alignment before proceeding (Tom Bittman at Gartner has an alternative interpretation of this tactic) but waiting isn’t really an option for most customers who are already under heavy pressure in this particularly difficult economy. Over the next few blog posts I’ll be going into more detail but System Center and Windows Server will form the foundation of our technology stack so you can get started now knowing that we have your back on ensuring that your investments today line up with our strategy longer term. Customers are telling us that they want to manage both private and public resources using a consistent approach and using a single set of tools so that’s what we’re committed to bringing them. We showed an early glimpse of this at MMS but we are very ambitious and that’s just the tip of the iceberg – stay tuned!

Come and get it - SCVMM 2008 R2 Release Candidate now available

2009-06-09T01:43:00Z

We just pushed out the RC for SCVMM 2008 R2 and you can get the bits at https://connect.microsoft.com/

We've managed to add many significant new features to our RC since the beta release based on customer feedback and you can read about the details here on our team blog. Several of our early adopter customers are already running this release in large scale environments so we're feeling pretty good about stability but it's still "not quite" final. Please send us your comments/suggestions/bugs through MS connect website.

Rakesh

SCVMM 2008 R2 RC Feature Set Announced

2009-05-11T20:43:00Z

Since the R2 beta was released, we've been at work incorporating some feedback from beta customers and our early adopters. As a result, we've added some pretty significant enhancements to SCVMM 2008 R2. Check out our team blog for the detailed feature breakdown.

New SCVMM 2008 QFE Released

2009-04-16T00:42:00Z

This QFE includes several fixes including one with VMware resource pools discussed in a previous blog post of mine. You can get the QFE details here and download it via Microsoft Update using SCVMM 2008.

SCVMM 2008 R2 Beta is available NOW

2009-03-16T17:29:00Z

Here we go again!

Since shipping VMM 2008 in October, we’ve been busy working on an update that supports Windows 2008 R2 and take advantage of the new features in the platform. Today, we’re announcing the Beta of VMM 2008 R2 (it was actually released to our beta community on Friday March 13).

There’s a lot in the beta so I want to take a moment to talk about the new features and also about fixes to some issues that customers have reported since we shipped VMM 2008. (If the suspense is killing you - you can download the beta from our MS Connect beta site and click on "server" under "categories" to quickly locate it)

New features in R2 include:

· Support for Live Migration: With Windows 2008 R2 adding support for Live migration, it’s now added as a new migration option in VMM R2. Live migration requires the source and destination host to be part of a failover cluster and that the VM is on a shared storage. Live migration means that there is no user perceived downtime; since the VM’s memory pages are being transferred, the hosts’ processors need to be the same (manufacturer and processor architecture). Our competition claims that Vmotion doesn’t require clustering but this only works for planned downtime and not for unplanned downtime. By combining Live migration and clustering, Hyper-V addresses both planned and unplanned downtime.

· Multiple VMs per LUN: VMM 2008 didn’t allow placing multiple VMs per LUN even though Hyper-V allowed it and the reason was that the LUN ownership was on a per host basis. This meant that migrating any VM on that shared LUN would result in all other VMs being migrated as well which can result in a confusing user experience (I’ve blogged about this at length). With CSV (Clustered Shared Volumes) in Windows 2008 R2, a single LUN is accessible by all hosts within a cluster. This enables a VM that’s on a shared LUN to be migrated without affecting other VMs on that LUN. As a result, with VMM R2, we’ll allow multiple VMs to be placed on the same LUN if CSV is enabled on the cluster.

· SAN related enhancements: We’ve done a number of SAN related enhancements in VMM R2.

o SAN migration in and out of clusters: With VMM R2, you can migrate a VM from one cluster to another or from a standalone host into a cluster or vice versa. Especially useful when you are deploying a VM from a test cluster to a production one.

o Multiple LUNs per single iSCSI target: VMM 2008 supported only initiator-based iSCSI target connection, which allows only one LUN per iSCSI target. VMM 2008 R2 adds support for masking-based target connections, which allows multiple LUNs per iSCSI target and expands VMM support for iSCSI SAN providers. This implies that we have better support for iSCSI products from Network Appliance and EMC for example.

· Network related enhancements:

o Network Optimization

§ Win2k8 R2 supports 2 types of network optimizations: VMQ & Chimney

§ During VM creation you can enable/disable network optimization

§ If enabled, VMM will configure the VM to use VMQ or Chimney, if available on the host

§ During placement, VMM R2 detects and shows availability of Network optimization on the host

o Some workloads such as Network load balancers need to be able to spoof MACs: There’s a new setting that allows admin to enable/Disable MAC spoofing on a per VM basis

o Ability to reuse port groups defined in VMWare VirtualCenter

§ In VMM 2008, port groups were always created even if the admin had already created them on the host.

§ In VMM R2, the admin is allowed to pick an available port group that’s already defined.

· Maintenance mode

o For servicing a host, VMM R2 allows host to be put in maintenance mode: When you do this, all VMs on that host that are running are live migrated off the host to avoid downtime.

§ Admin can choose to save state VMs if host is not part of a cluster

o During placement, a Host that’s in maintenance mode gets zero star ratings. This also p-prevents PRO from picking this host when migrating VMs.

o Maintenance mode is supported for Hyper-V, VS and VMWare ESX hosts

· Support for Disjoint domains: When a host has different FQDN in AD and DNS, it’s said to be in a disjoint domain. For example: server name is foo and FQDN in AD is foo.domain.contoso.com and FQDN in DNS is foo.contoso.com. For Kerberos authentication to work, SPN needs to be created for DNS Name

o VMM 2008 required custom SPN to be manually configured in AD

o VMM 2008 R2 automatically creates custom SPN for DNS name. (AD needs to be configured to give permissions to VMM for SPN read/write permissions)

As you can see, there are a number of enhancements we’ve introduced in R2 along with fixing some important issues reported by customers and partners. We are not done yet! In addition to responding to more feedback from beta testers, there are a few more features in the pipeline for post Beta so stay tuned.

Download the beta here and keep the feedback rolling in!

Rakesh

SCVMM 2008 and VMware management - we must be doing something right...

2009-03-10T04:14:00Z

It has come to my attention that some of our competitors are making various claims about SCVMM 2008 and VMware ESX management capabilities. I guess we have officially crashed the party but I thought I’d put together a blog post to address some of these claims.

Let me start by saying that no software is perfect and we are constantly trying to improve and respond to customer feedback. In fact, the whole VMware ESX management feature was a result of customer feedback. Put simply, people want to use a single primary console for day to day management of virtual machines across multiple hypervisors so we went after this problem. As a result, multi-hypervisor management via SCVMM 2008 has proven to be enormously popular with customers and partners alike. Rather than offering customers an alternative or competitive cross-hypervisor solution, it’s unfortunate that rhetoric and FUD are being used, neither of which actually solve real customer problems. This is a pretty common tactic and as a result, I seldom respond directly to competitive claims (believe me, it’s tempting!) unless they come directly from customers because that’s ultimately our focus. In this case however it’s important to set the record straight on a few key issues because I don’t want customers to be confused or surprised so let’s get right into it…..

Why Does SCVMM remove templates from my ESX server when I import them?–SCVMM has the concept of a “library” which it uses to manage all of the building blocks of your VMs including ISOs, scripts, VHDs, VMDKs etc. - VMware doesn’t have this concept. When you choose to import ESX templates, SCVMM removes the template from the ESX host and puts it into our library. Keeping templates in both places results in multiple copies of the same template that you will need to maintain. For obvious reasons, customers typically don’t want to do this. Of course, importing the templates is an option and is not something that you are forced to do. You are free to create separate SCVMM templates for VMware directly though our UI if you feel like that’s a better approach and want to keep different versions for the different environments. Creating a template in SCVMM takes only a few minutes.

When I create a VM with SCVMM 2008, how come the default settings through the wizard don’t work with ESX or Virtual Server? – When you first begin to provision a VM with SCVMM, we don’t know which hypervisor you’ll eventually select – Hyper-V, ESX or Virtual Server – so we can’t default things automatically. If you as an administrator know which hypervisor you want to target ahead of time and don’t want to reconfigure VMs in the wizard each time through, there’s a simple way to solve this – create a reusable template. SCVMM’s template creation process is simple and straight forward and is meant for the very purpose of avoiding the need to re-type parameters repeatedly.

VMware doesn’t have intelligent placement and they only support ESX so this is an issue that they can ignore even if you cannot – they always assume ESX and ask you to select the host yourself. Incidentally, if you select a VM that is configured in such a way that it cannot be run on a specific hypervisor, SCVMM’s intelligent placement gives you this information and tells you how to modify the VM configuration to make it compatible which you can use as part of your template.

Does SCVMM 2008 give me visibility into resource pools? - Yes. You can view resource pool properties by right-clicking on an SCVMM 2008 host group. SCVMM 2008 customers use host groups as their effective resource pools (or they consider a cluster to be a resource pool because it’s the radius within which live migrations or quick migrations can occur). SCVMM ensures that when VMs are auto-migrated via policy that they can remain attached to their native host group or cluster so in almost every practical scenario, you won’t have issues. With that said, we’ve received customer feedback that SCVMM should also retain mappings to underlying VMware resource pools and we have a patch that we’re preparing to release in the coming month (April 2009) to address this issue.

Does SCVMM prevent migrations that Virtual Center would allow? Sometimes it discourages them and that’s a good thing. As I’ve stated earlier, VMware doesn’t have intelligent placement so you select the host manually and this means that it’s much “looser” in what it allows. You can do the same in SCVMM and bypass intelligent placement and the associated analysis by using our Powershell interface but that’s not necessarily a good idea. In a recently cited example, SCVMM gives an ESX host that is out of physical memory zero stars in intelligent placement when in reality a customer could use ESX memory overcommit to actually run the VM on that host. Practically speaking (in the real world), this is a contrived scenario since the only way you’d have this problem is if *every* host that you’re considering for placement is out of memory and resources. If you’re not in that predicament, intelligent placement will find a more suitable location for you automatically (I suppose if I had to shell out all that cash for ESX/VI licenses I’d be trying to use every last MB before adding a new host as well but I digress). While the effectiveness and wisdom of memory overcommit is in a production environment is debatable, preferring a host that doesn’t require overcommit to one that does is undeniably the right thing to do. With that said, you can always bypass our intelligent placement via Powershell to move VMs to overcommitted hosts so you shouldn’t be blocked as some have claimed. In addition, we’ll look to integrate this with intelligent placement UI in our upcoming release for the rare case where you end up in this situation.

Can I reuse port groups that I created in ESX? We’ve added this feature to the upcoming release. This is more about nuisance/clutter and if you ask me, the whole concept of port groups is awkward and leads to confusion. We didn’t invent it but we’ve made some changes to accommodate the ESX model for better compatibility.

It looks like Virtual Center gives me more monitoring information than System Center, is that true? Of course not. If your job depends on keeping applications and services running and not on checking IP addresses and watching CPU charts, System Center does this for you with Operations Manager. Once again, like cross hypervisor management, VMware does not provide any solution. Try checking the health of your SQL Server or accounting application with Virtual Center….

Rather than throwing very rudimentary monitoring and health information into the SCVMM console (okay, so we did some of that anyways), we have a full featured extensible monitoring solution that provides in-depth knowledge about applications running within a VM with System Center Operations Manager and the over 100 vendor created management packs. The fact is that if you want to monitor applications, you need a management solution that monitors applications – it’s that simple. Treating a VM like a black box and monitoring hardware as VMware does is not particularly useful for making decisions and does not eliminate the need for health monitoring. Saying that SCVMM requires different software for monitoring is like saying Word requires different software for Spreadsheet work. For our part, Operations Manager and SCVMM are built on the same UI framework and SCVMM 2008 adds a new feature called Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO) which forwards alerts between the consoles. In the future, you can expect even tighter integration between these products.

With that said, you are of course free to use your existing monitoring system as well. Unlike ESX, all Hyper-V functionality is publicly available and exposed to any and all of our partners directly at the hypervisor level. In addition, anything you do in SCVMM through the GUI you can also do through our fully documented command line interface via Powershell. System Center can also patch and configure your VMs via Configuration Manager and back up your VMs with Data Protection Manager. While we (along with thousands of customers) think that they all provide great value and functionality as a group, you of course have the freedom to choose and decide for yourself.

If you are thinking of using SCVMM 2008 to manage VMware because you have a mixed environment (and we have many many customers who are doing just that), keep in mind that SCVMM does not require you to uninstall or remove VMware Virtual Center from your environment. In fact, you have to keep Virtual Center around because VMware does not expose some APIs (like Vmotion) through ESX. We’re a manager of managers so it is nearly risk free to try it out and make up your own mind about how effective we are.

We’re extremely proud to be the only deep cross-hypervisor management tool in market solving this important problem for customers.

Thanks,
Rakesh

Updated management pack for SCVMM 2008 now available

2009-01-28T21:42:00Z

We have just released an updated management pack for SCVMM 2008.

This release includes updated reports for all platforms that we manage:

· Virtualization Candidates

· VM utilization

· Host Utilization

· Host Utilization Growth

· VM Allocation

You can download the management pack here

Rakesh