Containers and VMware

I´ve heard a lot of times in the last months about the containers will replace the virtual machines but nothing could be more untrue.

This kind of conversations come from the lack of knowledge about the different technologies and a bit of misunderstanding about what we can do with VMs or containers.

A container is an isolation unit of the kernel from the kernel subsystem but linked or bound to the same kernel where it was created or run. Nowadays, there are a lot of companies that develop container technologies: Docker, Rocket, Garden, etc.

Now, let´s review about what Docker is explained by VMware as it is the most famous container runtime: "Docker is not a container technology. It uses Libcontainer directly or in conjunction with LXC, libvert, OpenVZ, and others. Docker introduced the idea of creating images out of containers.  These images reside on a layered filesystem.  Each layer consists of a change made to a container.  This allows for quick image updates and downloading of new images.  You can build an image from a container that you created or you can download an existing image, update it and then commit the changes into a new image.  These images can reside locally in a private registry like VMware Harbor or in a publicly available registry, like DockerHub"

So, what's about VMware? how VMware can help in this new container technology wave? One of the best approach is join the best of both worlds: VMs and Containers.

In the next image you can see the stack for VMware: storage VSAN, network NSX, hypervisor vSphere, containers VCH and mgmt with vRealize... at the end operations an developer world fits into the same datacenter.  

To accomplish that, VMware had developed different open-source projects. You can find all of them in Github: Admiral, Harbor and vSphere Integrated Containers:

vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC) is the add of three components: Engine, Harbor and Admiral.

Admiral is the container management portal.

Harbor is the container registry for containers.

https://github.com/vmware/admiral

https://github.com/vmware/harbor

 https://github.com/vmware/vic

An important piece of VIC is Photon: "an OSS based linux container host runtime optimized for VMware vSphere"  https://vmware.github.io/photon/ 

How all this projects fits together? check this schema to understand how: VIC Engine + Admiral + Harbor

At the end of the day, what you will get is that with VIC containers will be created in vSphere as  virtual machines so you will be able to apply most of the features in vSphere to them (functions, monitoring, automation, security, networking, etc) in a transparent fashion for the developers as they will continue to use API to create containers, apps, and so on.  You win visibility of the container environment as VMs, which is critical to manage a infrastructure.

Last but least, just to clarify, "vSphere Integrated Containers is available to all vSphere 6.0 and above Enterprise Plus customers. There is no additional license subscription required to use vSphere Integrated Containers. You can download it from myvmware.com"

vSphere 6 upgrade: repoint replicated embedded SSO or PSC to external PSC

One of the keys of the new vSphere 6 topology is decided which scenario will fits better following the best practices. The main best practice is deploy external PSC as it will help us to get high availability SLA and an easier upgrade path for the future. keep in mind that VCSA is the recommended option to deploy vCenter right now.

First of all, review on this image the upgrade path from the two different platforms: Windows Server and VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance):

Go ahead with a specific and common scenario: SSO embedded replicated between at least 2 vCenters.

First step is to deploy an external SSO replicating with the embedded SSO, second step is repoint vCenters to the external SSO and third uninstall the embedded SSO:

The quid here is the process to "repoint" the SSO, follow this KB and you´ll see it´s a piece of cake:

How to repoint and re-register vCenter Server 5.1 / 5.5 and components (2033620)

If you have PSC embedded instead the SSO embedded just follow this kb:

How to repoint vCenter Server 6.0 between External PSC within a site (2113917)

Once you have the new external SSO working, just upgrade it to PSC:

And last but not least, upgrade the vCenter 5.x to vCenter 6.x

You can use the same steps to upgrade a single vCenter install with embedded (or not) SSO or PSC.

Finally, remember that VMware recomeends:

• Deploy VCSA
• Deploy external(s) PSC
• Select a VMware "recommended" topology

Rightsize, Rightsize, Rightsize...

     ¿Rightsize? Si, cada dia es mas frecuente encontrarse con problemas de performance y de gestion de las conocidas como Monster VMs por una asignacion indebida de recursos a una maquina virtual, como si de un entorno fisico se tratase, aun sabiendo que posiblemente todos esos recursos no están correctamente aprovechados, ni siquiera la aplicacion esta diseñada para ello.

"No por asignar mas recursos a una VM se conseguirá mas performance, incluso puede producirse el efecto contrario"

     Es muy importante dedicar tiempo a realizar un dimesionamiento de las aplicaciones correcto, no solo para un uso mejor de los recursos del entorno de virtualizacion si no de la propio rendimiento de la VM y de las aplicaciones que en corran sobre ella.

     El ejemplo mas sencillo lo tenemos con el crecimiento scale-in (vertical, tambien conocido como scale-up) y el crecimeinto scale-out (horizontal)

     En un crecimiento scale-in debemos tener claro que las aplicaciones y el SO seran capaces de aprovechar la asignacion de mas memoria y CPU lo que posiblemente nos obligue a realizar modificaciones, por ejmeplo, en JAVA, si agregamos mas memoria RAM a la VM, deberiamos tocar los parametros de asignacion de la JVM, de lo contrario, la JVM seguiria disponiendo de la misma RAM que antes de su aumento.

     En un crecimiento scale-out, si conseguimos definir un building-block en la cual una VM con uan configuracion determinada de RAM y CPU, soporte por ejemplo un carga especifica de usuarios, ante eventos de crecimiento de demanda, sera mas sencillo desplegar desde la plantilla del building block tantas VMs como sean necesarias para soportan la nueva demanda, ahorrando ademas en tiempos de reconfiguracion y despliegue.

     Que se conseguimos con VMs mas pequeñas: al tener menos vCPU en estado iddle, el rendimeinto de una VMs en mas eficiente, reduciendose los valores de CPU Ready, CPU Wait y Co-Stop en la mayoria de las ocasiones (tendieno en cuenta que se realize un overcommit de los recursos del host ESXi de forma adecuada)

     A todo esto podemos añadirle las facilidades de getion de una VM mas pequeña e incluso poder protegerla con Fault Tolerace de VMware con tiempo de caida cero (downtime=0) que desde la version ESXi6 soporta ya 4 vCPU y hasta 64GB de RAM por VM protegida, unicamente hay un maximo de 8 vCPU protegidas por host ESXi lo que nos permite varias combinaciones.

    Como detalle a configurar para nota,  recordad cambiar en las BIOS de los host ESXi el performance en nivel HIGH, los valores balanced o low impactan negativamente en el rendimiento de las VM (en la mayoria de los servidores viene en modo balanced configurado de fabrica)

Rightsize, Rightsize and Rightsize

VMworld San Francisco 2015: resumen

En este post podréis leer un resumen de las novedades y tendencias presentadas en el pasado VMworld 2015 SF (USA) cortesía de Jose M. Maldonado (Global Solutions Consultant en VMware.) @maldonjo

DevOps y contenedores

VMware Integrated Containers - Permite la ejecución de aplicaciones en contenedores directamente sobre la infraestructura vSphere o en vCloud Air, haciendo uso de las mismas capacidades y procesos actualmente existentes. Actualmente en fase beta podrá comenzar a probarse a finales de año de cara a usar el propio vSphere como un host para Docker. Permite que los desarrolladores utilicen sus herramientas Docker preferidas e IT soporte los servicios con la misma disponibilidad y flexibilidad como hasta ahora, pudiendo gestionarlos directamente desde vCenter.

• Niveles de servicio garantizados, permite que los contenedores se comporten como máquinas virtuales: DRS, vMotion, HA/DR … minimizando el tiempo de indisponibilidad planificado.
• Utiliza las capacidades de Instant Clone para levantar nuevas VMs para ejecutar contenedores en base a las necesidades o el orquestado del servicio
• Integrable con el ecosistema de soluciones: Cloud Foundry, CoreOS, Tectonic, Docker, Kuebernetes, Mesosphere DC Operating System, …
• Garantiza la seguridad, aislamiento y autenticidad de los contenedores arrancando cada uno en una VM de forma eficiente gracias al vSphere Instant Clone
• Si se requiere almacenamiento y persistencia de datos, se podrán desplegar volúmenes de datos asociados a contenedores sobre plataforma vSphere.
• Comunicación granular gracias a NSX, pudiendo aplicar configuraciones en base a políticas a cada uno de los contenedores por separado

VMware Photon Platform - Es una plataforma optimizada para la ejecución de contenedores con gestión basada en APIs, compuesta por dos elementos:

• Máquinas Photon: Son los hosts de computación, sencillos, horizontalmente escalables y fácilmente reemplazables, con un "microvisor" basado en ESXi y un sistema operativo Linux optimizado para la ejecución de contenedores
• Controlador Photon: Controlador de hosts y orquestador de cargas de trabajo con un plano de gestión distribuido y multi-tenant

CONTINUAR... 

vRealize Operations Manager 6: How to create Projects

VMware vSphere: how to create tags - Part II with PowerCLI

On the Part I post we learn how to add a Tag and a Category trough the GUI interface with vSphere Web Client, now, let´s take a look about how to do it with PowerCLI.

Remember that Tags are a new feature available from vSphere 5.1 and the cmdlets are available from PowerCLI 5.5, so, we need at least a vCenter on vSphere 5.1 and the PowerCLI 5.5 installed but much better use las version PowerCLI 6 (not all cmdlets are present in PowerCLI 5.5 initial release)

Use this to verify the version you have installed: 

PowerCLI C:\> Get-VIToolkitVersion

Now with the New-Tag we can review the Tags configured, and with "New-TagCategory" create a Category and after with "New-Tag" the Tag

Now, we are ready to assign Tags to objects, in this case to Virtual Machine:

It´s time to verify it trough Web Client:

Something i didn´t mention jet, is that you can assign multiple Tags to an objet in vSphere , in our case to a Virtual Machine. It means that you can for example tag a VM with the "DDBB_tag" because it´s a SQL DDBB, and Tag it with "Cluster_tag" because it´s a Microsoft Cluster, or with another tag like "Test_tag" because it´s a DDBB SQL Cluster from the Lab Environment.

Why multiple Tags? For vROps it will be useful to create custom groups using different Tags criteria and fix different policies if its a VM from DDBB servers, or if its a VM from Lan Environment..... one VM could be placed in different Custom Groups at the same time :-)

First Part of this post: VMware vSphere: how to create tags - Part I

http://virtualshocks.blogspot.com.es/2015/04/vmware-vsphere-how-to-create-tags-part-i.html

VMware vSphere: how to create tags - Part I

What is a tag?

A tag is a label that you can apply to objects in the vSphere inventory. Tags allow you to attach metadata to objects to make them more sortable and searchable.

Tags are grouped into categories, which define how the tags can be applied to inventory objects.

What is a category?

A category groups together related tags in the vCenter Server inventory.

When you create a category, you specify whether multiple tags in that category can be assigned to a given object at one time, or whether only one tag can be assigned to an object at a time. For example, a category called Priority might contain the tags High, Medium, and Low, and be configured to allow only one tag in the category to be applied to an object at a time.

You also specify whether tags in a category can be applied to all objects, or only to specific object types, such as hosts or datastores.

...yes, this is just a Copy&Paste from the original explanation from tags and categories on the VMware documentation....but i´m sure that no one read it...or at least...just a few docu-addicts :-)

Once we have a crystal clear the idea about what Tags and Category are....let´s show how to create them:

continue reading....

Ediciones de VMware vCloud Suite

VMware en su version vCloud Suite dispone de tres ediciones: Standard, Advanced y Enterprise.

En cada una de ellas se incluyen diferentes soluciones: vSphere Enterprise Plus, vRealize Operations (vROps), vRealize Automation (vRA), vRealize Business y vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM): 

vRealize Operations es el antiguo vCenter Operations
vRealize Automation es el antiguo vCenter Automation
vRealize Business es en antiguo IT Business Management

Mas info en:  http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vCloud-Suite-Pricing-Packaging-Whitepaper.pdf

What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.5

La nueva version de vSphere 5.5 y de ESXi 5.5 duplica algunos de los
maximos de la version 5.1.
De especial interes los maximos del appliance de vCenter que ahora permite 500 host ESXi y 5000 virtual machines; mayor compatibilidad para los MSCS, discos VMDK y RDM de hasta 62 TB woooow!

El resumen de las mejoras:

• Hot-pluggable SSDPCIe devices
• Supportfor Reliable Memory Technology
• Enhancements to CPUC-states
• Virtual machine compatibility withVMware ESXi 5.5
• Expanded supportfor hardware-accelerated graphics vendor
• Graphic acceleration supportfor Linux guest operating systems
• vCenter Single Sign-On Server security enhancements
• vSphere Web Client platform support andUI improvements
• vCenter ServerAppliance configuration maximum increases
• Simplified vSphereAppHAapplication monitoring
• vSphereDRS virtual machine–virtual machine affinity rule enhancements
• vSphere BigData Extensions, a new feature that deploys and managesHadoop clusters on vSphere    
from within vCenter vSphere 5.5 also includes the following storage-related enhancements:
• Supportfor 62TBVMDK
• MSCS updates
• vSphere 5.1 enhancements
• 16GB E2E support
• PDLAutoRemove
• vSphere Replication interoperability and multi-point-in-time snapshotretention
vSphere 5.5 also introduces the following networking-related enhancements:
• Improved LACP capabilities
• Traffic filtering
• Quality of Service tagging

Mas info en el doc oficial:
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere/VMware-vSphere-Platform-Whats-New.pdf

No actualizar a vSphere 5 con Veeam 5

Gostev nos recomienda desde Veeam no utilizar Veeam 5.x con vSphere 5 aun cuando parezca que funciona. Todavia tiene que realizar sus pruebas con la nueva version Veeam Backup & Replication 6 con vSphere 5, por lo que no os recomendamos que actualiceis todavia a vSphere 5.