Shortly after the release of vCenter 5.1, VMware released “vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager 1.0″. With this product you as an administrator are able to manage third party hypervisors like Microsoft’s Hyper-V from within your vCenter installment.

This will give companies more flexibility over what hypervisors they are able to use and thus use the hypervisor they need for each specific situation.

Multi-Hypervisor manager can be installed on the server which also contains the vCenter installation or can be on a separate server. The installation process is pretty straightforward (depending on your installation and security profile, you may have to open up some extra ports). After the installation on the server you will only need to download and install the plugin for the vSphere client (installing the plugin). After the plugin is installed you can open a separate inventory from the vSphere client homepage that will show you all 3th party hosts and their virtual machines.

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VMware is rapidly expanding the possibilities of their new management suite VMware vCenter Operations Manager (vCops) with their recent release of VMware vCenter Operations Manager for View. This new addition provides end-to-end visibility into the health, performance and efficiency of a VMware View virtual desktop infrastructure. With this new tool desktop administrators can proactively ensure the best end-user experience, avert incidents and eliminate bottlenecks.

VMware vCenter Operations Manager for View really simplifies the deployment and management of a VMware View infrastructure. Admins can do end-to-end performance monitoring of entire virtual infrastructure, perform user-specific infrastructure analysis and track the  health of various components in a view deployment.

The cool thing is, VMware vCenter Operations Manager for View automatically learns normal operating parameters for View infrastructure and user workloads. This means the thresholds are not based on some default parameter from a configuration or best practices guide. Instead it knows when your infrastructure is acting normal or is in trouble by constantly monitoring and evaluating the behavior of your environment.

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Last Friday VMware released the Orchestrator plugin for Active Directory v1.0. With the plugin it is possible to manage Active Directory objects straight from within Orchestrator.

For those of you that don’t know what VMware Orchestrator is:

VMware vCenter Orchestrator provides out of the box workflows that can help administrators automate existing manual tasks. Administrators can utilize sample workflows from VMware vCenter Orchestrator’s workflow library and provide a blueprint for creating additional workflows.

VMware vCenter Orchestrator exposes the building blocks to enable more detailed workflows to be created for VMware vSphere.

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I have just updated the list after receiving word the new version is out and the build numbers are known for vSphere 4 and vCenter Server. So I compiled a list of build numbers and updates from the patch notes for VMware ESX and VMware vCenter Server.

vCenter Server 4.0 Update 1 | 19 Nov 2009 | Build 208156

vCenter Server 4.0 | 05 May 2009 | Build 162902

VirtualCenter 2.5 Server Update 5 | 10 Jul 2009 | Build 174791 (English version)

VirtualCenter 2.5 Server Update 4 | 23 Feb 2009 | Build 147633 (English version)

VirtualCenter 2.5 Server Update 3 | 03 Oct 2008 | Build 119598 (English version)

VirtualCenter 2.5 Server Update 2 | 25 July 2008 | Build 104217 (English version)

VirtualCenter 2.5 Server Update 1 | 10 Apr 2008 | Build 84767 (English version)

VirtualCenter 2.5 Server | 10 Dec 2007 | Build 64201

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It sounds a bit strange, ‘vCenter vs VDI‘, as both are VMware products but it’s true. As usual a twitter contact pointed me to a VMware KB article which states the following.

‘VirtualCenter tasks that conflict with VMware Virtual Desktop functionality‘

My first thought was ‘Ah finally, an explanation why vSphere 4 has no support for VMware View 3‘. But when I looked at the affected product versions it appeared that this was not the case.

The VMware KB article provides a list of VirtualCenter 2.5.x actions that conflict with VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure functionality (Virtual Desktop Manager 2.x and View 3.x) and cause VDI Desktops to become inaccessible. These action are:

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For the project I’m doing now I had to add VMFS volumes to eight servers. Not that I’m lazy, but with a couple of ESX hosts and still adding volumes it kinda gets nasty to do a rescan on all systems. Thankfully I remembered a post by Eric Sloof about a plugin from Icomasoft to do a SCSI scan.

This really saved me a lot of work and irritation

http://www.icomasoft.com/downloads/rescan.html

Update April 22th 2009: Today the rumor mentioned below was confirmed during the vSphere 4 launch.

Rumor in the VMware community has it that the next version of VMware ESX, vSphere, has very limited support for the VMware management and automation suite. vSphere will of course be available with vCenter for basic management and automation tasks but the rest of VMware’s great product suite is not supported in the initial release of vSphere.

So there won’t be support for:

• VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager
• VMware vCenter Lab Manager
• VMware vCenter Lifecycle Manager
• VMware vCenter Stage Manager
• VMware View

In my opinion this is a mistake. I understand the pressure is on and VMware should  release a new version fast to challenge the competition. But releasing a product which does not support the majority of your former product suite is not a clever move.

From what I understand this is also a discussion within VMware so let’s hope VMware gets wiser and postpones the release or add support for the VMware Management & Automation suite soon.

As every morning I was browsing on the internet and read an amazing article about controlling your virtual infrastructure by logging into vCenter mobile access from your mobile device. I think almost everyone knows the situation in which you are occupied in a personal situation and all of a sudden you receive a call from work. Something is going wrong with your IT infrastructure and they need you to fix it. During the years a lot of remote access programs where made for IT administrators which can help you in a similar situation.

For these situations VMware is working on a program for remote access. The “VMware vCenter Mobile Access” or “vCMA” software makes it possible for an IT administrator to access your ESX infrastructure for remote management.

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You probably noticed the last couple of weeks that everybody is talking about the next generation of virtualisation software from VMware.

In about an hour VMware is going to do a live webcast about vCenter Server.
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Erik pointed me to an article from Eric Grey (must be the name that makes it good ) on VCritical about using System Center Virtual Machine Manager for the management of your VMware virtual infrastructure.

Although Microsoft is advertising this as one of the good things of the product Eric thinks otherwise. I must admit, I was already biased, but after reading the articles I totally agree with him. I mean, You don’t wanna use a hammer to open bolts or using a screwdriver to change channels on your TV.

Link to the article: http://www.vcritical.com/2009/03/managing-vi3-with-scvmm-considered-harmful

With the release of ESX 3 and VirtualCenter 2 we got a lot of new features but we lost ‘vmkusage’, a graphical interface which was a great help in solving problems. But today I read the release notes of vCenter 2.5 update 4 and now ‘vmkusage’ is back again! It is not available in the normal installation procedure but it is well worth the hassle.

Check this VMware article to see how to install ‘vmkusage/performance overview’ and mind the three notes at the end of the article.

After the installation you will see a Performance Overview tab, on host, resource pool or VM, which displays a single view of key performance metrics for CPU, memory, disk, and network without navigating through multiple charts. Just like the old days

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Today at VMWorld Europe 2009 in Cannes VMware introduced their strategy for the coming years.  Chargeback, CapacityIQ, Orchestrator, ConfigControl and self service are a couple of the building blocks that create the foundation for the next level in the virtualization game.

vCenter Chargeback as part of the management vServices. vCenter Chargeback enables automated tracking of costs and chargeback to the business enabling IT to function as a utility with true visibility into operating costs.

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February 10th I participated in a VMware WebEx on their new vCenter addon, vCenter Server Heartbeat and today the news will be released in Cannes at VMWorld Europe 2009.

vCenter Server Heartbeat is an important addon which creates high availability for vCenter Server. vCenter Server Heartbeat monitors and protects VMware’s management platform against network, hardware, OS or application issues. This fully protects the infrastructure which helps VMware users to deploy critical applications on VMware.

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While building the virtual enviroment for a client we are getting a lot of questions about how they should handle certain aspects in their new enviroment.

One of those questions is how they should handle upgrades, best practices etc.

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Yesterday VMware announced a new vCenter Server add-on, VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat.

As customers expand their use of VMware, maintaining a highly available management infrastructure is quickly becoming a key requirement. So VMware created a high availability solution for vCenter Server.

Today I participated in a VMware WebEx ‘Introducing VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat‘ where more details were uncovered. This information is under strict embargo and I was asked not to publish any detailed information on this subject, which I respect (and others do not ). So check out the news from VMWorld Europe 2009, I think we can tell you more as there is a session called ‘Chosing a Solution for vCenter Server Availability (DC10)‘ 

Matthijs Haverink from VirtualFuture.info posted a great article on the ever returning vCenter physical/virtual discussion as Anne Jan has posted on recently.

In his article he describes 4 critical decisions which have to be made:
1. vCenter: physical or virtual
2. SQL database: locally or detached
3. Redundancy options: make it redundant and if so; how?
4. License server: locally or detached

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One of our clients wanted to start using the deployment of virtual machines with the customization wizard in VirtualCenter. For a strange reason this didn’t work. Probably the time of day wasn’t right for me, because I totally forgot the article about the customization problem.

If you change the path for the TEMP and TMP variables to store tempfiles on another location the customization fails. It looks like the process can’t copy the files to the desired location.

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1005943

I know, it’s an old kb article, but perhaps it can save you time (and stupid looks from your collegues )

Jason Boche posted a very good article on security of vCenter.I could try and explain it to you, but I think you’d be better of visiting the original article from Jason.

He explains it by comparing it to NTFS security for Windows administrators. Link to his article

Chapeau!