Virtual Machine Management : VMware

Working with VMware VI4 (aka vSphere)

mlmich — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 02:38:00 GMT

Even though VMM 2008 R2 (beta or RC) does not officially support VMware vSphere/VI4, we have a few customers that have gotten some of the functionality to work. However, one of the issues that can arise is a failure to find paths in ESX storage. Typically,...(read more)

How Virtual Machine Manager Administrator Console uses VirtualMachineViewer.exe

mlmich — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 21:46:00 GMT

The VMM Administrator Console's VirtualMachineViewer.exe and the VMM Self-Service Portal (SSP) both use a same codebase for connecting to Hyper-V virtual machines. With the enhancements made to Win2k8 and VistaSP1, we are able to leverage MSTSCAX to connect to virtual machines through the host. What this means is that instead of directly connecting to the Virtual Machine using RDP, we instead RDP to the host and specify the VM to connect to. This allows VMM to connect to virtual machines with no network connectivity and to be able to view the virtual machine while booting (both of these features would not have been possible with regular RDP). One caveat of this implementation is that if you don't have the Integration Services installed inside of the guest operating system, then mouse support is not enabled when you launch either VirtualMachineViewer or the SSP within a terminal services connection. Basically, trying to RDP inside an RDP connection makes the mouse not behave correctly, so we disabled mouse support for this scenario. VMConnect.exe from Hyper-V has the same limitation.

Because this is only possible with Vista SP1 and Win2k8, if neither of these operating systems are installed on the client machine (and in this case, a client machine is the machine either running the internet explorer in the SSP case, or the machine running the Administrator Console), then VMM tries to connect to the Virtual Machine using standard RDP. Connecting via regular RDP has a few requirements of its own as well.

-The Integration Services need to be installed in the virtual machine. When the integration services are installed, VMM is able to get the fully qualified computer/domain name of the operating system installed in the guest operating system. We use this computer name to connect to the VM via RDP.

-There has to be a network connection from the client machine to the Virtual Machine (meaning we need network connectivity as well as the RDP port being open in any firewalls)

For connecting to VMware virtual machines, we use their QuickMKS ActiveX control that is available from their web service. As always, for Virtual Server we use the VMRC protocol for connecting to the virtual machines.

How to enable PRO with VMM

mlmich — Thu, 22 May 2008 21:19:00 GMT

Last week I mentioned I was going to talk about how to enable PRO with VMM. PRO stands for Physical Resource Optimization.

If you followed my steps from last week, your Operations Manager and VMM servers are configured to work together to provide monitoring and alerting within your virtualized environment. This also means that your environment is ready for you to enable PRO. PRO can be enabled at the cluster level for both VMware and Hyper-V. Customers can set two main PRO settings—the Monitoring Level and the Automation Level— for each host cluster in their virtualization environment. These settings tell VMM which monitors to enable for hosts and virtual machines within the host clusters and which monitors to configure to auto-implement their respective remediations

Through VMM, you can enable the monitoring of clusters based on the severity of alerts and PRO will only monitor for either Critical only or both Critical and Warning alerts. The following procedure tells how to enable PRO on a cluster for both Warning and Critical alerts.

1. From either Hosts or Virtual Machines view of the VMM Administrator Console, find your host cluster and open the properties.

2. On the PRO tab, select the Enable PRO on this host cluster check box.

3. By default, the monitoring level is set to Warning and Critical, which means that PRO will enable all monitors and display all PRO Tips. To restrict the PRO Tips to Critical alerts only, select the Critical Only option.

4. Click OK to save your settings.

Through VMM, you can enable the automatic implementation of Tips based on the severity of alerts. PRO allows you to specify this setting for each cluster within your environment, and when enabled PRO will only automatically implement either Critical or both Critical and Warning alerts. The following steps would be used to enable PRO to automatically implement tips on a cluster:

1. In either Hosts or Virtual Machines view of the VMM Administrators Console, find your cluster and open the properties.

2. On the PRO tab, select Enable PRO on this host cluster.

3. By default, the monitoring level is set to Warning and Critical, which means that PRO will enable all monitors and display all tips. If you would like for PRO to monitor for and display only Tips with a severity level of Critical, select Critical Only.

4. Select the Automatically implement PRO tips on this host cluster check box.

5. By default, the automation level is set to Critical Only, which means that only PRO Tips with a Critical severity level are automatically implemented. If you would like for all tips to be implemented automatically, select the Warning and Critical option.

6. Click OK to save your settings.

The toolbar of the VMM Administrator Console contains a PRO Tips button, which opens the PRO Tips window, shown below. The window shows all active PRO Tips that the user has access to. (For more information about user roles and delegated administration in VMM, see VMM 2008 Help).

If you click on this button, a new dialog pops up. The top half of the screen lists the Tips, and the bottom half shows details for the Tip that is currently selected. The fields on the left side of the details pane are automatically generated based on the context of the Tip. The content on the right side is product knowledge for the alert, which is developed by the management pack author. The product knowledge for each alert can contain four sections: Description, Recommended Action, Causes, and Summary.

If a selected Tip has an associated action and is still Active, users can click the Implement button to initiate the associated recovery task. Alternatively, if the administrator chooses to not implement a tip, she can simply click the Ignore button, and the Tip will be dismissed.

Thanks to a few of my team members that generated this content and allowed me to share this with you.

This is one of the most important features of the VMM 2008 release and I hope that it provides/adds a lot of flexiblity to your monitoring environment.

What are the different ways virtual machines can be migrated using VMM 2008

mlmich — Tue, 06 May 2008 04:03:00 GMT

A post on the VMM newsgroup today prompted me to explain the different ways that VMs can be migrated when using VMM 2008.

From a VMM perspective, we have a few ways that we allow you to move a VM from one host to another. I listed them below in no particular order:

-Using Hyper-V and Windows Clustering, we offer what we call "quick migration". This method takes very little time to move a VM from one host to another. This time is proportional to the amount of time required to save the VM state and restore it. Clustering and the Hyper-V cluster resources take care of the rest.

-Using our network migration, we perform a network copy of the data as we move the VM from one host to another. The bulk of the time here is spend on the network copy operation. This is the slowest method of virtual machine migration that VMM offers.

-Using our SAN migration, we allow you to move a VM from one host to another via SAN. For this method, we employ a variety of techniques depending on your storage infrastructure. We can utilitze NPIV (In this case, we migrate a VM from host to host via delete and create vport), iSCSI (in this case, we migrate a VM from host to host via login and logout) or FC (In this case, we migrate a VM from host to host via Storage Array based LUN Masking, utilizing VDS).

-For VMware VMs, we can also utilitize VMotion.

Because of the fact that we move LUNs from one machine to another, we require that for any of the above methods (except VMotion) you need to allocate one VM per LUN. Otherwise we can only migrate a VM via the network migration method.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 beta is out!

mlmich — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 20:04:00 GMT

This is the release a lot of people have been waiting for. A beta of VMM that supports Hyper-V. The team has worked extremely hard over the last few months to get this ready for MMS (the Microsoft Management Summit that is happening right now in Vegas).

Some of the key features that went into this release (you can also find more detailed descriptions on the connect site):

-Clustering support. You can now add host clusters into VMM and perform quick-migratons of your virtual machines

-PRO (performance resource optimization). This provides you with a way to integrate with OpsMgr to surface into VMM a set of application specific alerts from your virtual machines. These PRO Tips (as we call them), can have remedial actions (i.e. you can implement an action to solve this alert)

-Delegated administration. We have listened to our customer feedback from VMM 2007 and this is one of the key ones. With the virtualization environments getting larger and larger, the need for delegated or scoped administration was become essential.

-Support for managing Hyper-V and VMware VCenter

I will be blogging about more VMM features as the beta rolls out and customers start using it.

You can download the beta from: http://connect.microsoft.com/ (or if you are attending MMS, you can go get a physical CD with the bits on it). The download should be available within the next 48 hours.

RTM is estimated to come out in early H2 CY2008.