Cheng's Random Thoughts on System Management : PRO

VMM 2008 MP is available for download!

Cheng Wei — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 04:19:00 GMT

Greetings,

My colleague, Alan Goodman, has published a blog entry about the release of VMM 2008 MP, which consists of the following exciting reports:

· Virtualization Candidates - Helps identify physical computers that are good candidates for conversion to VM.

· VM utilization - Provides information about your virtual machines.

· Host Utilization - Shows the number of virtual machines running per host.

· Host Utilization Growth - Shows the percentage growth of host resources and number of VMs.

· VM Allocation - Useful data for VM chargeback calculation.

For details, visit here.

Thanks for reading!

Cheng

All about refreshers ...

Cheng Wei — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 02:19:00 GMT

If you have been using VMM for a while, you’ve probably figured out that we use various “refreshers” to pull data from the hosts and VMs that we manage. When deploying VMM in various sized environments, depending on the perf/scale requirements, you might need to tweak the refresher schedule to achieve the best performance.

So, to help you understand what’s happening “under the hood”, here are the refreshers we use in SCVMM 2008 product. Please note, that not all refreshers are customizable.

Host Refresher: Runs every 30mins on every host (with time lags) and updates host properties. It also updates disk/SAN and host network (NIC / virtual switch) information. It does not check any VM related properties or perf counters on hosts. Can be manually triggered on the UI or through cmdlet.

VM Refreshers: Two types

VM Heavy Refresher: Runs every 30mins on every Host and also runs whenever a VM is clicked on (or when you call refresh-vm cmdlet). It updates all VM properties, resource pools, clustering information for this VM and snapshots. But it does not update VM performance counter info.

VM Light Refresher: Runs every 2mins on every Host that is currently in the VMM database. This refresher does the following:

- Checks the host state (to see if the agent is running or the agent is down) and virtualization software status

- Syncs the state of a VM

- Marks VMs as missing

- Imports new VMs created outside of VMM (When VMM detects a new VM created on the virtualization platform, we import it into VMM and kick off the heavy refresher for the new VMs)

Cluster Refresher: Runs every 30mins and refreshes all cluster properties (including bringing in newly added nodes or taking our removed nodes). Can be manually triggered on the UI or through cmdlet.

Library Refresher: Runs on user configurable schedule (increment by 1 hour interval and can be turned off completely) and updates the library shares info and library objects. Can be manually triggered on the UI or through cmdlet.

Perf Refresher: Runs every 9 minutes on a host or whenever there is any state changing operation on the VM (i.e. start/stop/save/etc.). It collects perf counter information of both the host and all the VM’s on a given host.

VirtualCenter Refresher: Runs every 30mins and refreshes VC properties, ESX hosts and resource pools that are managed by this VC. Can be manually triggered on the UI or through cmdlet.

User Role Refresher: Runs every 30mins and updates user role properties.

PRO Tip Refresher: Runs every 30secs. It looks for PRO specific alerts in OpsMgr and reconciles the PRO tips in our DB against the data that is brought back from OpsMgr. This refresher cannot be manually triggered.

Thanks for reading and hope this is useful,

Cheng

Introducing SCVMM 2008 Performance & Resource Optimization (PRO)

Cheng Wei — Thu, 22 May 2008 02:44:00 GMT

What is PRO?

PRO stands for Performance & Resource Optimization (in some of our Beta documentation, you may also see it referred to as "Physical Resource Optimization"), which:

Is a powerful and valuable feature as the result of integration between SCOM (OpsMgr) and SCVMM;
Is a software package that leverages the System Center Operations Manager framework, which enables Microsoft partners (software and hardware vendors) to deliver value-added service and solution to our mutual customers;
Contains a connector piece that accelerates the communications between OpsMgr and SCVMM, and management packs with specific policies that VMM is called to take actions on;
Provides values of minimizing downtime, accelerating time to resolution, and, for advanced users with carefully designed policies, achieving self-healing / auto-recovery / hands-free management experience;

How does it work?

To explain how PRO works, let me use a simulated scenario to describe the system behaviors and the user experience.

From the powerpoint demo below, you can see how VMM PRO reacts to the event that is monitored and reported by OpsMgr:

Assume that we have a three-node cluster with some HA VMs running on each, and the cluster is managed by a VMM server integrated with OpsMgr.
When the resources of a VM peak out on host #1 below on the very left, OpsMgr detects the defined threshold is reached and immediately notifies SCVMM.
A PRO tip pops up on the SCVMM admin console.
Depending on your setting, either manual or auto approval of the action recommended (in this case, Move-VM) would move the VM to the highest rated host (per our intelligent placement), in this case, the host server in the middle with the least load.

Once the migration is completed, all the physical and virtual system states go back to normal, and the alerting state is also cleared for the VM that is now migrated to a new host. Business continues as usual...

How do I set it up?

Well, you might say, this thing looks pretty cool and I want to give it a try. Do I need to go through two hundred manual steps to get it working?

Actually, the installation and configuration is pretty straightforward.

Prerequisites:

Make sure that you have OpsMgr 2007 SP1 installed
Make sure that you have both System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 Management Pack and PRO Management Pack files (including Library, VM, Hyper-V and VMware) installed
Install an OpsMgr console on the VMM server
Add your host clusters to VMM.
Install OpsMgr agent on all hosts and virtual machines.

For a VM to generate PROTips, it's required Integration Services installed on the VM.

Need to enable remotesigning from elevated privileges powershell session in VMM server as well as in OpsMgr server.

Configure PRO tips for each host cluster.

Go to PRO tab in the Host Cluster Properties dialog box
Select "Enable Host PRO on this host cluster" check box
Select the severity level "Critical Only" or "Warning and Critical"
Decide if you want to let VMM automatically take actions based on the recommendation by checking "Automatically implement PRO tips on this host cluster", and you can also further scope the auto-implement method only applies to "Critical Only" or "Warning and Critical" PRO tips.

"Bake time"

It's NOT recommended for users to enable PRO immediately after finishing install of SCVMM. Users are encouraged to get a stable environment first.
For PROtips to successfully migrate a VM, VMM requires some performance data to be collected.
Typically, two days of VM operation "bake time" should be sufficient.

Turn on PRO

On VMM console, go to Administration view, select "System Center" node on the Administration list, double-click on the "Operations Manager Server" line on the middle pane, and specify the OpsMgr 2007 root management server.

Verification of PRO configuration

The way to verify if the configuration was successful, is to go to OpsMgr console, open Discovered Inventory in Monitoring Space, Change Target Type to PRO Enabled Managed VM, PRO Enabled Managed Host and PRO Enabled ESX Server.

In addition to the information above, Michael has posted a nice blog entry on how to enable PRO in VMM here. You might want to check that out for some additional tips.

What else do I get by integrating SCOM and SCVMM?

Now, this is our "Better Together" story for System Center product family. When you integrating SCOM with SCVMM, because Microsoft's virtualization technology does not stop at hypervisor level (unlike other hypervisors on the market today, which only virtualize the hardware layer and hence only understand / monitor hardware or OS layer), and because the virtualization management tool is integrating with our monitoring tool at various levels, the monitoring capabilities are extended from VMM Server to the managed hosts, and to the virtual machines on the host, and to the OS platforms running on the virtual machines, and to the software stack running on top of the OS. All these combined offers you a complete view, from your physical resources to your virtualized business services.

The following picture shows you, as an example, how we are able to monitor both your physical and virtual environment, from the physical host, all the way down to your SQL server DB stores, even with applications running on a VM in VMware ESX host. BTW, this is something VMware is unable to provide to their customers today.

Feeling excited by the power of PRO?

If you have gone this far to this last paragraph, I hope that I've shown you enough gadgets to get you excited with PRO? :-)

If so, what are you still waiting for? Download our Beta today and give it a try!

Thanks for reading,

Cheng

VMM 2008 Architecture

Cheng Wei — Thu, 01 May 2008 02:21:00 GMT

If you are in MMS 2008, you've probably seen this architecture diagram:

For folks who did not get a chance to go, here are some of the key architectual characteristics that I'd like to point out:

On the top-left corner, notice that the UIs (admin console and self-service portal) are all 100% built on top of Powershell. What does this mean? It means that

Everything you do on the UI can be done through powershell. All actions/jobs are 100% scriptable.
In addition, if you are a "script-junkie", :-), you can do more via our powershell interface than what's made available on the UI. Yes, power to Powershell!

Notice the "Connector" sitting between VMM and SCOM, which is part of the new PRO (Performance and Resource Optimization) feature, and that allows a faster message/information sharing between VMM and SCOM.
In the mid of the picture, notice the horizontal single layer of "Management Interfaces". What is so interesting about that?

We have abstracted different virtualization platforms and their APIs, and present a set of consistent and platform-agnostic cmdlets and UI interfaces to perform your heterogeneous host and VM management operations.
It's totally transparent (I mean "no op" here) to you, no matter you are sending an instruction to a Windows Hyper-V host, a VMware ESX host or a Virtual Server host. This is what we call simplified management experience. :-)

On the lower-right corner, it shows how we're managing VMware ESX hosts via VCS (VirtualCenter Server). Most of the host and VM operations are done directly with VCS from VMM server. Note that VMM server may still need to communicate with ESX hosts directly when there is need for file-level enumeration (for example, Save State or Clone VM, etc.).

Thanks for reading,

Cheng