Today I've got a guest poster from my team - Alan Goodman. Alan is the program manager responsible for SCVMM 2008's Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO) feature. PRO functionality has been described at length on this and other blogs but this post provides you with exact step by step details on how to configure and set up PRO. In future posts, Alan will be providing some best practices around using and calibrating PRO as well as authoring information for building your own PRO-enabled management packs so this post is the first of a multi-part series.
NOTE: The instructions described here pertain to the final version of SCVMM 2008 (i.e. not the beta). For those customers enrolled in our early adopter TAP program, you can use the latest release candidate to run through these steps.
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Hi my name is Alan Goodman and I am a Senior Program Manager on the Virtual Machine Manager team. My main area of focus is VMM's integration with Operations Manager and in particular PRO. As we get closer to the RTM of VMM 2008 I wanted to take some time to help you better understand how to use the various aspects of this feature area. In this post we will start with looking at configuring the integration between VMM and Operations Manager. The following is a step by step set of instructions for walking you through this configuration.
Step by step instructions for configuring VMM 2008's integration with Operations Manager 2008.
The following steps discuss the best way to get through the configuration and ensure a successful configuration. First I want to be clear on two assumptions that are made by the following instructions:
- These instructions will not work with VMM beta, they are written assuming that you are using a post beta build of VMM 2008
- These instructions assume that you have already installed OpsMgr 2007 sp1. In order to try and keep these instructions clear, let's call the root management server opsmgr-01
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1. Install Virtual Machine Manager 2008 Server (Let's assume this machine is names VMM-01)
Note: If the VMM server and the OpsMgr Server are installed on the same machine then skip step 2 and continue with step 3.
2. Install the VMM 2008 console on VMM-01
3. Install the OpsMgr 2007 sp1 console on VMM-01
4. Log into your root management server (opsmgr-01 ) with an account which has been granted Operations Manager Administrators access.
5. Uninstall any version of the VMM 2008 console that may have been previously installed. If the OpsMgr Server is the VMM server then uninstall the VMM console (don't worry it will be reinstalled as part of step 8).
6. Open the Operations Manager console and import the following MPs if they are not already imported:
- a. SQL Server MP (Download here)
- Microsoft.SQLServer.Library
- Microsoft.SQLServer.2005.Monitoring
- Microsoft.SQLServer.2005.Discovery
- b. IIS 2003 MP (Download here)
- Microsoft.Windows.InternetInformationServices.CommonLibrary
- Microsoft.Windows.InternetInformationServices.2003
7. If you have older versions of the VMM MPs imported then remove all of them.
8. On your root management server, run the setup from the VMM 2008 CD and select Configure Operations Manager and on each of your management servers just run the VMM Administrator Console installer.
Note: You must run one of the two setup wizards on each of the OpsMgr servers in your management group.
Note: This setup wizard will do the following:
- Import the VMM management packs, including all MPs required for PRO.
- Grant the run as account of your VMM server the necessary access to your OpsMgr Server.
- Install the VMM console.
9. Log into the VMM console and connect to your VMM server (in this case VMM-01)
10. Open the Administration tab and select User Roles.
11. Open the properties of the Administrators user role and add the Default Action Account for each of the management servers in the management group.
12. Open the Administration tab and select System Center from the tree view in the upper left of the console.
13. Open the Operations Manager Server item and enter the name of your OpsMgr root management server (in this case opsmgr-01)
At this point VMM and OpsMgr are integrated, and you can see all of the data from your VMM installation discovered into your OpsMgr installation by opening your OpsMgr Console and navigating to the Monitoring tab. From there you will find a newly created folder called Virtual Machine Manager 2008 Views. Inside that folder there should be a new view with the name of your VMM server. If that view does not exist, then you should check the Operations Manager event log on the OpsMgr Server (opsmgr-01). If there were any errors during discovery they will show up here.
Hopefully you have found this post helpful and insightful. I am looking forward to further discussion about VMM and OpsMgr and looking at other aspects of this feature area such as enabling PRO and authoring your own PRO enabled MPs.
Aside from overall performance, stability and reliability (things you might expect to improve from any beta), I thought I'd give folks a heads up on some of the things that we've added/changed for the final release next month which weren't in the beta. While the beta was advertised as "feature complete", we did take a bunch of the feedback that you sent our way and hopefully the end result is an even better final product.
Here's a list outlining some of the key improvements:
· Support for managing hosts in a Disjoint Namespace
· PRO
o Support for enabling PRO on non-clustered hosts
o Automated loading of OpsMgr MPs via Configure Operations Manager option in Setup
o View Script Option – now you can preview the script that PRO will run to implement the PRO Tip
· Admin Console
o Network Diagram View graphically shows how your hosts and VMs are connected to networks in your environment (some screen shots to follow)
o New, more polished UI
· Self-Service
o Allow users to mount ISOs
o Completely overhauled UI
· VMware management
o Support for VMware HA along with HA VM creation on VMware clusters
o Enhanced security for VMware management
o Management of ESX 3i
· Global Static MAC Address range – configure the range of MAC addresses VMM uses when creating new virtual network devices
· P2V improvements
o Support for offline conversion using static IP
o Storage and network driver detection for offline conversion
o P2V of domain controller
· VM Creation
o Creation of VMs without customization required (templates now have the option of “skipping” customization) so you can use non-Windows templates
o Product Key encryption by default in Guest OS profile
o VHD expansion
· Setup and Installation
o SQL 2008 Support
o VMM 2007 to VMM 2008 Migration
o Ability to install as a domain user in addition to local system
In case you missed it, we recently announced a more precise date for the final release of SCVMM 2008 - September 2008. Previously we had said that it would be the second half of 2008 but Hyper-V shipped early and we're coming down the home stretch as well. At this stage of the game, shipping software is as much art as it is science so it's hard to pin down an exact date. Our single focus for the past four months has been quality and that will continue to be our focus until we ship. We have been testing SCVMM in as many configurations and use cases as is humanly possible in addition to cranking up the performance and scale limits. We're working with a small group of aggressive early adopters in parallel with our efforts here in Redmond to ensure we're battle tested before the general release.
Stay tuned......
Rakesh
A popular question that seems to be floating on various blogs and message boards is related to why SCVMM integrates with Virtual Infrastructure by proxying requests through Virtual Center Web Service APIs as opposed to talking directly to ESX. There are several reasons for this and I'll go through them roughly in priority order to hopefully clarify some confusion.
1) ESX doesn't support all of the same APIs that Virtual Center does. Most notably, you can't use VMotion without going through Virtual Center and this was a key requirement from customers in doing SCVMM/VMware integration. There are other management constructs and features also exposed only through Virtual Center and in order to do a complete job of integration, we used that API route. There seems to be some debate across various blogs as to whether the APIs on ESX/Virtual Center are equivalent or not and it's a pretty cut and dry issue. This is from VMware's programming guide:
The full API doc is here, the snippet is from page 28.
2) Most VMware customers already use Virtual Center (in part due to licensing and packaging of Virtual Infrastructure features) and don't want to re-implement everything that they have configured in Virtual Center in SCVMM. With the current architecture and design, we simply synchronize and import the information from Virtual Center so you don't need to re-run lots of configuration steps. You can literally start managing your entire VMware environment in 5 mins and we demo this for customers with their actual live environments all the time.
3) For environments that already use Virtual Center, SCVMM effectively becomes a "manager of managers" which is an appealing and low-risk way of introducing SCVMM in the eyes of many customers. You don't need to rip out and replace your existing Virtual Center instances to begin using SCVMM (but of course, you will only be able to manage the VMware environment with Virtual Center whereas SCVMM manages ESX, Hyper-V, Virtual Server and eventually Xen). SCVMM can even let you manage multiple Virtual Center instances through our console, something VMware currently does not offer. Since we synchronize with Virtual Center instances bi-directionally, this means that any action you take on the VMware environment through SCVMM is automatically reflected in the Virtual Center UI and vice versa. Plus, we do all of this without installing additional software/agents on the VMware boxes. Our goal of course is to show you that you'll want to live in our console since it provides a more complete picture for mixed environments in addition to the value-add management capabilities.
4) Technically speaking, we have a dependency on the Virtual Center web service, not the console but you'll still need to use the Virtual Center console to on-board new ESX servers and a handful of other tasks. Again, our goal from a management perspective is to allow you to live in one console day to day and automate using one PowerShell interface across hypervisors. With that said, just as you occasionally need to access Windows features directly on the Hyper-V box (MMC snap-ins, storage configuration, bare metal configuration etc.), the same holds true of ESX.
Hopefully this helps clarify things.
Rakesh
While SCVMM 2007 had good integration with Ops Manager, SCVMM 2008 has gone to the next level with our Performance and Resource Optimization feature (PRO). In a nutshell, PRO allows you to tie specific Ops Manager alerts to actionable remediation actions. For example, you might want to load balance VMs between physical hosts when specific thresholds are exceeded (transactions per second, CPU utilization, email message delivery SLA etc.). Alternatively, you might want to migrate VMs when a hardware failure is detected, like a fan failure for example. PRO is fully extensible since PRO itself is simply an extension of the existing Operations Manager management pack infrastructure. Once PRO finds an opportunity for optimization, it generates a PRO tip which comes complete with the remediation script baked in. Admins can manually approve the PRO tip for implementation or set PRO up to automatically implement tips on all or a subset of your environment.
Furthermore, we wanted to ensure that the person in front of the SCVMM console didn't have to go to the Ops Manager console every time a PRO tip is generated to provide a more seamless user experience. We wanted admins to get access to this information directly through the SCVMM UI which is what you see when you click on "PRO Tips" in SCVMM 2008 - Ops Manager generates the PRO tip and publishes it back to SCVMM. Of course, the Ops Manager UI will show the corresponding alerts as well so the information remains consistent.
In the beta release of SCVMM 2008, the initial configuration of PRO was a little bit more cumbersome than we liked so in the final release, we've simplified this by incorporating a "Configure Operations Manager" option to our setup splash screen. When you run our setup on your Ops Manager machine and select this option, SCVMM installs the our admin client and Powershell infrastructure locally, configures security and also imports the required management packs required to run PRO. You then run the Ops Manager client installation on the VMM box and voilà, you can now share information securely between the two systems and take full advantage of PRO.
You'll see tighter integration between the System Center family as a common theme in future System Center releases, this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Rakesh
Big day for us today as Hyper-V hits the (virtual) shelves! Just a quick note about Hyper-V RTM and SCVMM beta - to date, we haven't found any major issues with compatibility between the two releases provided you're using the SCVMM patch that we put out for Hyper-V RC1 compatibility. If you do find issues, please let us know through our beta site at connect.microsoft.com or send me a note directly.
Thanks!
Rakesh
Last week we held the "super bowl" (or "world cup" depending upon which flavor of football you prefer) of IT Pro conferences at Tech Ed held in Orlando. If you were there, you know that virtualization and our investments across the board were a central theme. I had the privilege of demonstrating SCVMM 2008 with Hyper-V during Bob's opening keynote. You can watch the keynote video here - the SCVMM demo is at the 42:30 mark of the session.
We're coming down the home stretch of getting this puppy out the door. We've received plenty of positive feedback from the beta and have incorporated some of the feature requests and many of the bug fix requests. While the beta version was technically "feature complete", we did put some time in our schedule to add some customer feature requests and as we get closer to the final release, I'll start sharing some of them with you. (One that we heard more than a few times was support for disjoint DNS name spaces which we'll support in the final release)
Rakesh
Many of you probably are already aware of this but in case you missed it, you can get the SCVMM patch that enables RC1 Hyper-V compat. The bits are available through our connect site. Key thing to keep in mind before applying the patch is that you must upgrade *all* of your Hyper-V hosts to RC1. The patch is not backward compatible with RC0.
Rakesh
It's been a couple of weeks since my last post but just wanted folks to know that we're almost ready with a patch that makes SCVMM beta compatible with Hyper-V RC1. We're "dogfooding" it (we're using it ourselves) internally for the next couple of days and barring any showstoppers, we should have a public patch available by Monday. Thanks for hanging in there. I know this is somewhat painful but the change to hyper-V was necessary and ultimately the final release of both products will be better.
Rakesh
The Hyper-V team has released RC1 of our virtualization platform (you can ready more about it here). Due to some necessary and important interface changes made by the Hyper-V team, the recently released beta of SCVMM 2008 doesn't work correctly with Hyper-V RC1. Needless to say, we're working on a patch and plan to fully support RC1 and I'll update everyone on time lines once we have them nailed. Our goal is to make an update available within a couple of weeks once we get a chance to fix some of the breaking bugs and re-test a bunch of our functionality. Rest assured that our test team is on top of this.
We could have "held" the Hyper-V RC1 release until these SCVMM issues were addressed but in the interest of ensuring our partners (who are also dependent upon the interfaces) get equal and sufficient time to address the changes, we pulled the trigger. It also allows you to begin testing the latest RC and as you get ready to roll it out more broadly, SCVMM will be ready to support you.
Thanks!
Rakesh
In case you missed the announcement last week at the Microsoft Management Summit in Las Vegas, the beta for VMM VNext (now called VMM 2008) is publicly available - you can download the software here: http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/scvmm/default.mspx
The beta is nearly feature complete meaning that in one form or another, we have implemented all of the new functionality including Hyper-V support and VMware support. Of course, good ol' Virtual Server is still fully supported as well. It is of course a beta so it's still a little rough around the edges so you can expect the final version to have better overall performance, reliability and scale but the beta should get you pretty good mileage in the mean time. I was able to demo VMM 2008 in front of 4000 IT Professionals last week and was interrupted several times for spontaneous applause. Assuming that wasn't just our team, people liked what they saw :-)
While the beta has nearly all of the features baked in, there are a few things that we're still working on for the final release later this year so stay tuned and I'll run some of them by you in future posts. Until then, download the beta and don't be shy, give us honest and direct feedback.
Rakesh
Not necessarily a glamorous topic I know, but absolutely essential as part of any deployment.
Contrary to popular belief (or what other vendors might have you believe) you don't need to re-engineer your backup infrastructure or license new technology if you're using virtualization. One of the benefits of virtualization with Windows as the host OS is that we have 20+ years of partners who have worked with us to ensure you get a well integrated backup and recovery solution. That's not to say that virtualization doesn't provide new opportunities for efficiencies, it most certainly does, but our philosophy is that you should be able to back up physical and virtual machines with a single tool (one you probably already have) while still taking advantage of the new benefits.
One of the things that virtualization makes easier is what is commonly called "bare metal recovery". This is the recovery situation you'd find yourself in if you wanted to completely rebuild a server after hardware failure or a disaster. With physical servers this can be tricky since the server that you backed up might not be identical to the server that you're restoring to. In addition, unless you're using an imaging tool, recovery typically involves laying down a fresh copy of the OS before you can even begin to get your application and data back which can kill your SLA. With VMs, you have the opportunity to back up the entire virtual machine (at the VHD level) so that bare metal recovery simply involves copying your VHDs to any host server. There's a not so subtle catch here though - how do you ensure that your VHDs are in a "consistent" state so that recovery will actually work? You could shut down the VMs before backup or save state but that's not particularly appealing for obvious reasons. You could just grab the VHDs while the VM is running and hope that the recovery works....which is equally unappealing. What you really need is a way to back up the VMs at the host (VHD) level but ensure that that the data within the VHDs is consistent and recoverable without downtime.
The Windows platform provides just such a mechanism and it's called the Volume Shadow Copy Service or VSS. VSS allows for application-coordinated backups using snapshot technology. Every one of our server applications and subsystems (SQL, Exchange, Sharepoint, registry, DNS etc.) comes with a VSS plug-in known as a "VSS Writer". When a backup system asks for a snapshot of a server, the VSS infrastructure goes through all of the VSS writers on a system and asked them to get their on-disk data into a consistent state (flush buffers, finish or rollback mid-flight transactions etc.) so that backup applications can grab the files. There's a much more orchestration than that involved but for the purposes of this discussion, the simplification I've made is sufficient. We actually use the same infrastructure on our desktop OS versions starting with XP....if you're really bored, open a command prompt and type "vssadmin list writers" and you'll get back a list of VSS writers installed on that system. The reason we have application vendors build the writers is because only the application knows how to get itself into a consistent state and every application is different.
Starting with Virtual Server R2 SP1 and also available in Hyper-V, we've included a VSS writer for virtual machine backup. This has allowed products like System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) and products from our partners to install a single agent on the virtual machine host and ensure that you get consistent, recoverable copies of your VMs. Using the VSS framework and the application-specific writers, when the backup agent initiates a backup request, the host OS automatically communicates with all of the applications running inside of the VMs to ensure that they get themselves into a consistent state so that the data contained within the VHD is application consistent. That way, the recovery is not only guaranteed to work but you won't have to sit through a 2 hour chkdsk or consistency check session.
DPM has a pretty slick UI to make backup and recovery easy and includes the ability to backup to disk and tape in an integrated way. If you've got SCVMM, you're already licensed for DPM so give it a try. If you're not using DPM, check with your backup vendor to see if they include support for virtual machine backup on Virtual Server and Hyper-V, most of them already do.
Bottom line - if you're virtualizing on Windows, backup and recovery will snap into place seamlessly with your existing infrastructure.
Rakesh
Sorry for the large gap between posts here folks but as you might imagine, we've been pretty heads down working on the next release of SCVMM. Our immediate goal is to get the beta out so that you all can start managing your Hyper-V deployments and also start consolidating your management.
A few weeks ago we had a customer event here in Redmond for our Windows Server early adopters to give them the first glimpse of VNext and some of the functionality that we're going to support. The number one piece of feedback was "I need this yesterday". Point taken.
Aside from the VMware and Hyper-V support, there are a bunch of other things we're adding to the product so I thought I'd run through a few.
Resource Optimization - With VNext we've taken integration with Operations Manager to the next level. You'll be able to take a subset of application specific alerts that Operations Manager has generated while monitoring your environment and surface them directly into the SCVMM console (no more "alt-tabbing") in a feature we call "Physical Resource Optimization" or "PRO" for short. As Ops Manager finds opportunities for optimization within your data center, the alert is forwarded to SCVMM where you can view these "PRO tips". You can even have SCVMM automatically implement PRO tips based on rules that you can defined. The really cool part about PRO is that it is extensible and we're working with our industry partners (hardware and software) so that you get the best data available to make a fully informed decision when you go to optimize your data center. Even on VMware's hypervisor, PRO will help you make better decisions resulting in fewer mistakes and less reconfiguration.
Host Clusters - I know that lots of you will cluster your Hyper-V hosts and we wanted to simplify the management experience around clustering. Server 2008 has plenty of improvements with respect to clustering that make it easier to configure. Once you have configured a host cluster, SCVMM recognizes this and lets you manage this group of servers as a unit within your host group. You can then specify how many node failures you want the cluster to be able to withstand while keeping the VMs running and SCVMM's intelligent placement system will ensure that you don't over commit the resources on your cluster so that this SLA is maintained. In addition, when you deploy a new VM and want it to be highly available, you simply specify this requirement by checking a check box and we configure the appropriate cluster settings and resource groups for you. We wanted to keep things simple while ensuring that we maintain your SLA.
Delegated Administration - In SCVMM V1, we basically had two types of users - self-service users and administrators. Customers have been telling us that their virtualization deployments are getting very large and they need the ability to sub-delegate chunks of their environment to regional or departmental administrators. With SCVMM VNext, we've included this capability so now you'll be able to use a single SCVMM server to manage very large enterprise environments in a flexible way. You'll also find that our published scale numbers for SCVMM V1 are roughly double that of our competition. We've heard you loud and clear - fewer management servers and consoles is better. As a guy who builds management consoles and servers, that took a second to digest ;-)
There are plenty of additional features as well and I'll be blogging about them over the coming weeks. In addition, we'll have lots of sessions and discussion about the product at the upcoming Microsoft Management Summit (more info about that here) which I encourage you to attend.
Rakesh
Since we announced a few months back that our next release of VMM (VNext) would manage VMware, I've received lots of questions with respect to why we made this decision and what "manage VMware" really means. Let me walk you through some of the reasoning and thinking.
1) Customers - The primary reason that we decided to manage VMware was, quite frankly, because customers were asking for it. Personally I take this as a compliment to our management suite given that most if not all VMware customers are already using VMware's management tools. The fact that they want our tools to work on top of VMware's OS platform tells me that there's a definite opportunity to innovate and do a better job and we're fully committed to doing this....which leads to my next point.
2) We think we can do a better job - At the end of the day, it's not about managing virtual machines. It's about managing applications and services and today, many if not most of those run on Windows. Understanding the application in detail is absolutely critical to making intelligent management decisions. For example, migrating a VM when the CPU spikes to 80% for 10 minutes is not a particularly smart way to make that decision but if the VM is a 'black box' to you, it's the only choice that you have. With our management tools, you'll be able to set policies and rules based on application specific criteria. For example, if the average amount of time it takes for your order entry system to process an order exceeds 10 seconds and CPU is the reason, add more CPU capacity to the VM. Our customers are telling us that this is much more powerful and relevant. We feel strongly that with Hyper-V, our platform and our management tools provide an excellent end to end solution. With that said, we know that you have investments in VMware but even in that case, our management 'engine' can make better decisions on the VMware platform. In addition, the System Center family of products gives you the ability to manage physical servers right alongside your virtual machines with a single set of integrated tools rather than creating a new silo or island within your organization.
3) Flexibility in Hypervisors with a single management solution - As I said above, we feel very confident that our hypervisor provides the best platform in the vast majority of customer use cases (that's for you to decide of course) but regardless, customers want to use a single management tool in mixed environments. You'll also be able to automate across hypervisors using a single Powershell interface that we provide. VMM will abstract the difference in hypervisor APIs for you. You simply run the "Stop-VM" cmdlet and we make sure that regardless of the hypervisor platform, the VM is stopped. No more code blocks that read "If (VMware)....elseif (VirtualServer)......elseif (Hyper-V)......"
Finally, I want to emphasize that when we say "manage VMware", we mean that day to day, you'll be able to use our console and command line interface to fully manage your Virtual Infrastructure environment (including live migration), Virtual Server and Hyper-V environments seamlessly. In addition, we'll be able to extend the management capabilities that VMware offers today so you'll get an enhanced solution even on a non-Windows OS.
We'll share more details, screenshots and demos very soon....
Rakesh
