My IT Blog

VMware announces vSphere 6.5, the latest version of its industry-leading virtualization platform.  This new release of vSphere features a dramatically simplified experience, comprehensive built-in security, and a universal app platform for running any app. vSphere 6.5 accelerates the customer transition to digital transformation and cloud computing by addressing key challenges: 1.     Environments growing increasingly complex, 2.     Growing IT security threats, and 3.     The need to support both existing and new apps and services. Let’s take a look at some of the key capabilities. Dramatically Simplified Experience vSphere 6.5 elevates the customer experience to an entirely new level. It provides exceptional management simplicity, operational efficiency, and faster time to market vSphere 6.5 makes the  vCenter Server Appliance  the fundamental building block of a vSphere environment. The cor...

I’m often asked the question when looking at vSphere statistics – “What is the difference between PCPU Used and PCPU Utilized and why don’t they match?” Let’s take a look as it can be somewhat complex. First lets start with some definitions: Time Stamp Counter (or TSC) – is a 64 bit register available on all modern processors that counts clock cycles at a consistent rate and is not affected by changes in clock frequency. Unhalted Cycles – another count of ‘all’ clock cycles, but this one is dependent on the clock frequency and therefore the rate can change if the clock frequency changes (due to things like power management or Hyper-Threading). Wall Clock Time – refers to elapsed real world time. Okay now lets define our two counters using the above definitions: PCPU utilized (which is TSC based) = (non-idle state TSC cycles)/wall clock time PCPU used (which is unhalted cycle based) = (unhalted cycles)/wall clock time So assuming a non Hyper-Threaded system, and no pow...

Steps to configure the vCenter Server to generate SNMP traps: A.In the Home page of vSphere Client B.Select vCenter Server Settings  C.Select SNMP configuration D.Enable one of the SNMP receivers E. Provide the details for :  Receiver URL : Provide the host name of the Management Server (target SNMP server / monitoring tool) which will be connected to the VMware vCenter Server. (VMware vCenter Server sends the SNMP traps to this Management Server) Configure port 162 as the SNMP port. Community String: Provide community string (default string is "public")  SNMP versions v1/v2/v3 are supported That is all that is needed for the configuration.  Now you need to configure alarm for generating SNMP traps in the vCenter server. When ever there is a change in the environment ( host state change, VM state change ,etc) the trigger will be generated and send an alert to the monitoring server.  Configure the Alarms After you have setup the external ...

VVols Perhaps the most wanted feature in vSphere 6 is Virtual Volumes, or VVOLs. VVOLs extends the VMware software-defined storage (SDS) story to its storage partners, and completely changes the way its hypervisor consumes storage; it radically changes how storage is presented, consumed and managed by the hypervisor. No longer is virtual machine (VM) storage bound by the attributes of the LUN, as each VM disk (VMDK) can have its own policy-driven SLA. VMware has a passel of storage vendors on board to equip its storage, with the ability to offer VVOLs storage to the VMware hypervisor. I'm sure this feature will get much press and customer attention in the coming days. vMotion vSphere vMotion just got 10 times better, and a lot more interesting. For one thing, it supports live VM migration  across vCenter servers, and over long distances. It used to support round trip times (RTTs) of 10 ms, but now supports RTTs of 100 ms. A ping from Portland, Ore., to Boston, Mass., is 90 ms;...

Here is a list of feature comparison of 5.5 and 6.0

Today we had a (friendly ;-) ) conversation with my colleagues which moved to an argument about the cloud computing. We were discussing (arguing) about the types of cloud services and its pro's / con's which lead me to write this blog post.  The Cloud Computing is now a trend and a hot discussion in every IT group.  The reason behind is that the cloud infrastructure can offer advantages over traditional datacenters in the areas of performance, scalability, and even security. There is a vast differences between private, public and hybrid clouds for enterprise. The type of cloud service is defined based on the types of data they store.  Sometimes these differences narrow, but each type of cloud has different levels of security and varying degrees of management. One may be more flexible or scalable, while another might be more affordable.  Here we’ll talk about private, public and hybrid cloud computing and some of their primary differences. What is a public clo...

# Jagadeesh Devaraj #vVols I believe its a hot and trending topic now in internet. By now you guys might heard a lot about the vVols at VMworld 2014 or through various forums and the reason it is important to manage the end-to-end Infrastructure. The vVols takes cares of end-to-end Infra from compute of storage at the virtual machine (VM) and its VMDK ( vDisk) level. Virtualization meant VMs and vDisks are the unit of management at the compute layer. VMware® Virtual Volumes is meant to bridge the gap by extending the paradigm to storage specifically on VMware vSphere® deployments. What is vVols :  VVOLs is a provisioning feature for vSphere 6 that changes how virtual machines (VMs) are stored and managed. ( Information source : VMware.com) VVOLs is an out-of-band communication protocol between vSphere and storage. It allows VMware to associate VMs and vDisks with storage entities, and allows vSphere to offload some storage management functions, like provisioning of VM's ...

What is the use of defining cloud architecture? Cloud architecture is a software application that uses on demand services and access pool of resources from the cloud. Cloud architecture act as a platform on which the applications are built. It provides the complete computing infrastructure and provides the resources only when it is required. It is used to elastically scale up or down the resources according to the job that is being performed. How does cloud architecture overcome the difficulties faced by traditional architecture? Cloud architecture provide large pool of dynamic resources that can be accessed any time whenever there is a requirement, which is not being given by the traditional architecture. In traditional architecture it is not possible to dynamically associate a machine with the rising demand of infrastructure and the services. Cloud architecture provides scalable properties to meet the high demand of infrastructure and provide on-demand access to the user. ...

What is Hypervisor in Cloud Computing and its types? The hypervisor is a virtual machine monitor (VMM) that manages resources for virtual machines. The name hypervisor is suggested as it is a supervisory tool for the virtual machines. There are mainly two types of hypervisors : • Type-1: the guest Vm runs directly over the host hardware, e.g Xen, Hyper-V, VmWare ESXi • Type-2: the guest Vm runs over hardware through a host OS, e.g Kvm, Oracle virtualbox Are Type-1 Hypervisors better in performance than Type-2 Hypervisors and Why? Yes the Type-1 Hypervisors are better in performance as compared to Type-2 hypervisors because Type-1 hypervisors does not run through a host OS, they utilize all resources directly from Host hardware. In cloud implementation Type-1 hypervisors are used rather than Type-2 because Cloud servers need to run multiple OS images and it should be noted that if OS images are run on host a OS as in case of Type-2, the resources will get wasted. What are ...

Author:     Johan  De  Gelas Page 1 Introduction First dual-core in 2005, then quad-core in 2007: the multi-core snowball is rolling. The desktop market is still trying to find out how to wield all this power; meanwhile, the server market is eagerly awaiting the octal-cores in 2009. The difference is that the server market has a real killer application, hungry for all that CPU power: virtualization. While a lot has been written about the opportunities that virtualization brings (consolidation, hosting legacy applications, resource balancing, faster provisioning...), most publications about virtualization are rather vague about the "nuts and bolts". We talked to several hypervisor architects at VMWorld 2008. In this article, we'll delve a bit deeper as we look to understand the impact of virtualization on performance. Performance? Isn't that a non-issue? Modern virtualization solutions surely do not lose more than a few percent in performance, righ...