In just a few days, Dell Storage Forum 2012 kicks off at the Grange St Paul’s Hotel in London. I will be in attendance and I hope that you will have the chance to join myself and the rest of the Dell staff and of course an array of storage customers, channel partners, enthusiasts, and analysts. At DSF your appetite will be satisfied with Executive lead Keynote sessions, Breakout sessions delivered by Technical Experts, Instructor lead training, and Hands-on/Self-Paced labs covering Compellent Storage Center, Dell EqualLogic, and PowerVault storage.
This venue won’t be an exact carbon copy of past DSF events. Dell Storage will be showcasing an updated product roadmap and we’ll also see new product announcements. One of the announcements you’ll hear about is the availability of Compellent Storage Center 6.0. As a Technical Marketing Product Specialist who spends all time working on the VMware integration points, this is a release I’ve been looking forward to since starting my career at Dell Compellent in May of last year. This is a significant launch for Dell Compellent from an architectural perspective. SC 6.0 now leverages the FreeBSD 64-bit platform. The 64-bit architecture is the springboard for new features launched this week (such as multithreading opportunities and 12GB memory per Series 40 controller) and will serve as a key enabler for future scalability, integration, and feature enhancements.
If you’re a current Dell Compellent customer with vSphere 4.1 or newer in your datacenter, you know that through SC 5.5.x we supported one VAAI primitive: Zero Blocks or Write Same. Storage Center 6.0 supports additional VMware vSphere VAAI primitives:
Copy Offload
Hardware Assisted Locking
Of course we still support Block Zeroing
On a side note, VMware also released a 4th VAAI primitive in vSphere 5 focusing on Thin Provisioning for block storage arrays. However, shortly after the release, VMware pulled support on this primitive (applies to all storage vendors) to work out some kinks. I wrote about that here.
VAAI excites me because of the performance and scalability gains it brings to the vSphere virtual datacenter in addition to vSphere bolt ons such as VMware View and vCloud Director.
Compellent SC 6.0 VAAI support:
41% faster block cloning operations on Eager Zeroed Thick and Lazy Zeroed Thick virtual disks
98% faster Eager Zeroed Thick disk creation
Up to 100% reduction in Block Zeroing data traffic from host to storage
Offloaded operations result in significantly reduced copy traffic between host and storage
Offloaded operations result in reduction of ESX(i) host resource and storage fabric utilization
This should be a really great week. Personally, it will be my first Dell Compellent focused conference. I do hope to see you there and look forward to some good discussions. If you’re not able to attend in person, you can use these links to follow the action remotely:
Details: StarWind iSCSI SAN V5.8 introduces a new powerful backup technology designed specifically for Hyper-V-based environments to provide fast backup and restore for virtual machines.
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– Global Deduplication
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Register now to learn more!
Here is the link for registration:
With 2011 wrapped up and the holiday festivities over with, I decided to kick off 2012 by sitting a few new VMware certification exams. Before I get into the details of the exam experience, I must extend my sincere appreciation to the new testing center I tried out – New Horizons Computer Learning Center in Eagan, MN. It’s a new facility, friendly staff, state of the art equipment, AND THEY ALLOW COFFEE IN THE EXAM ROOM! I’m locked on to this facility for all future exams.
Ok, VMware Certified Associate 4 – Desktop, otherwise known as VCA4-DT. Thursday morning, 70 questions, multiple choice, 90 minutes if I remember right. Time isn’t much of a factor on this exam as it has been in past exams I’ve sat. Unfortunately I failed by a narrow margin. 289/500 (300 is the passing mark). Not passing was a bummer since I’ve only failed one other exam and that was 14 years ago. The reality was that I hadn’t had enough View Administrator seat time to recall what was being tested. I can’t go into specifics but I will say that having a photographic memory of the View Admin console will go a long way to get by this exam. I’ve managed a tiny View 4.6 and now 5.0 environment in my lab but I haven’t spent countless hours in the console on a day to day basis which is what I think is really required. That makes sense – after all it is an Administrator role based exam. My hope was that brushing up on the blueprint objectives and reading Mike Laverick’s Administrating VMware View 4.5 book cover to cover the night before the exam would have been enough to get by. It wasn’t. No fault to Mike of course, his was a fine book. I planned short on the preparation, rolled the dice, and.. well you know by now what happened. It was a humbling experience but at the same time it’s an effective method to learn more. After I get back from Dell Storage Forum London I’ll plan on hitting the lab and ultimately finishing the exam the proper way. After that, I’ve got my sights set on VMware Certified Professional 4 – Desktop (VCP4-DT) which I may already be better prepared for.
On to the VMware Certified Professional 5 or VPC5. Friday morning, 85 questions, multiple choice, 90 minutes. I reached the end of the exam with 14 minutes left to review marked questions – I had quite a few. I don’t know why – I rarely change my answer when reviewing questions. I mark the questions with the intent that there may be a better answer which comes to me later on in the exam but it rarely happens and I believe statistics prove that on average, first instinct is going to be the better or correct answer. I’ll be honest, dwelling on yesterday’s fail did a number to my confidence level but I had no choice but to push forward studying the blueprint for a solid 8 hours last night into the wee hours of the morning. Granted, the VCP5 exam should be higher on the difficulty level, but the infrastructure content maps quite a bit better to my expertise that VMware View administration does. I had seen some comments from others that the VCP5 exam didn’t contain much along the lines of Configuration Maximums type questions. Based on that, I didn’t spend much time in the vSphere 5 Configuration Maximums document. I brushed up on HA, DRS, and although I have little hands on working experience with the appliance based bolt ons like the vCenter appliance, vDR, VSA, or Auto Deploy, I tried to pick up as much as I could on those areas. On exam difficulty, the content came easier to me based on familiarity. For most of the exam I was pretty well within my comfort zone. As a Technical Marketing Product Specialist at Dell Compellent, the storage related questions aren’t quite the level of difficulty they once were. There was a pretty good blend of easy/medium/difficult questions, and also a few which I felt were worded poorly enough such that I knew the correct answer either way, but interpretation of the question is going to determine a right or wrong answer. Results on this exam were better – 406/500 (300 passing). There were plenty of questions on the other vSphere products I talked about earlier such as the vCenter appliance, vDR, VSA, and Auto Deploy. While I feel I did answer a few of those questions correctly, the remainder is likely what accounts for the majority of the points I missed on the exam. By the way, if you’re not using vSphere Update Manager on a regular basis to assist in upgrading your environment, you should be, and you’ll want to know that product for this exam as well.
Have a great weekend and for those attending Dell Storage Forum London next week, I hope to meet up with you.
Veeam is once again blessing the community with their generous holiday spirit, which of course includes gifts! Veeam recently launched version 6 of their flagship Backup and Replication product which now includes support for Microsoft Hyper-V. Those who are heavily active in the Microsoft and/or VMware community and formally recognized as such, are eligible to register for their free gift from Veeam – NFR licensing for Backup and Replication v6.
I will attest that I’ve been using Veeam Backup & Replication to protect valuable data in my home lab for a few years and I’ve had to rely on it for recovery more than once. I also included it as a backup and disaster recovery replication solution in my VCDX design submission which I successfully defended in February 2010.
Below you’ll find two promotions for redeeming the NFR licenses. First is the Hyper-V promotion for MVPs, MCPs, and MCTSs, followed by the VMware promotion for vEXPERTs, VCPs, VCIs, and registered VMUG members (remember, anyone can be a registered VMUG member, it’s free to sign up, so why not do it today?)
Free NFR license for
Veeam Backup & Replication v6 for Hyper-V
Get this holiday gift from Veeam!
If you are a Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP), Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) or a Most Valuable Professional (MVP), you can get a FREE 2-socket NFR* license for Veeam Backup & Replication v6 for your home or work lab.
*An NFR (Not for Resale) license can only be used for evaluation or demonstration purposes. Read EULA for more details.
Free NFR license for
Veeam Backup & Replication v6 for vSphere
Get this holiday gift from Veeam!
If you are a VMware vExpert, VMware Certified Professional (VCP), VMware Certified Instructor (VCI) or VMware User Group (VMUG) member, you can get a FREE 2-socket NFR* license for Veeam Backup & Replication v6 for your home or work lab.
In this round, the vCD cell stopped working properly (single cell server environment). I could log into the vCD provider and organization portals but the deployment of vApps would run for an abnormally long time and then fail after 20 minutes with one of the resulting failure messages being Failed to receive status for task.
Doing some digging in the environment I found a few problems.
Problem #1: None of the cells have a vCenter proxy service running on the cell server.
Problem #2: Performing a Reconnect on the vCenter Server object resulted in Error performing operation and Unable to find the cell running this listener.
I search the Community Forums, talked with Chris Colotti (read his blog) for a bit, and then opened an SR with VMware support. VMware sent me a procedure along with a script to run on the Microsoft SQL Server:
BACKUP the entire SQL Database.
Stop all cells. (service vmware-vcd stop)
Run the attached reset_qrtz_tables_sql_database.sql
— shutdown all cells before executing
delete from qrtz_scheduler_state
delete from qrtz_fired_triggers
delete from qrtz_paused_trigger_grps
delete from qrtz_calendars
delete from qrtz_trigger_listeners
delete from qrtz_blob_triggers
delete from qrtz_cron_triggers
delete from qrtz_simple_triggers
delete from qrtz_triggers
delete from qrtz_job_listeners
delete from qrtz_job_details
go
Start one cell and verify if issue is resolved. (service vmware-vcd start)
Start the remaining cells.
Before running the script I knew I had to make a few modifications to select the vCloud database first.
When running the script, it failed due to case sensitivity with respect to the table names. Upon installation, vCD creates all tables with upper case names. When the MS SQL Server database was first created by yours truly, case sensitivity, along with accent sensitivity, were enabled with COLLATE Latin1_General_CS_AS which comes straight from page 17 of the vCloud Director Installation and Configuration Guide.
After fixing the script, it looked like this:
USE [vcloud]
GO
— shutdown all cells before executing
delete from QRTZ_SCHEDULER_STATE
delete from QRTZ_FIRED_TRIGGERS
delete from QRTZ_PAUSED_TRIGGER_GRPS
delete from QRTZ_CALENDARS
delete from QRTZ_TRIGGER_LISTENERS
delete from QRTZ_BLOB_TRIGGERS
delete from QRTZ_CRON_TRIGGERS
delete from QRTZ_SIMPLE_TRIGGERS
delete from QRTZ_TRIGGERS
delete from QRTZ_JOB_LISTENERS
delete from QRTZ_JOB_DETAILS
go
The script ran successfully wiping out all rows in each of the named tables. A little sidebar discussion here.. I talked with @sqlchicken (Jorge Segarra, read his blog here) about the delete from statements in the script. It is sometimes a best practice to use the truncate table statement instead so that the transaction logs are bypassed instead of using the delete from statement which is more resource intensive due to the row by row deletion method and the rows being recorded in the transaction logs. Thank you for that insight Jorge! More on MS SQL Delete vs Truncate here. Jorge was also kind enough to provide a link on the subject matter but credentials will be required to view the content.
I was now able to restart the vCD cell and my problems were gone. Everything was working again. All errors have vanished. I thanked the VMware support staff and then tried to gain a little bit more information about how the problem was resolved by deleting table rows and what exactly are the qrtz tables? I had looked at the table rows myself before they were deleted and the information in there didn’t make a lot of sense to me (but that doesn’t necessarily classify it as transient data). This is what he had to say:
These [vCenter Proxy Service] issues are usually caused by a disconnect from the database, causing the tables to become stale. vCD constantly needs the ability to write to the database and when it cannot, the cell ends up in a state that is similar to the one that you have seen.
The qrtz tables contain information that controls the coordinator service, and lets it know when the coordinator to be dropped and restarted, for cell to cell fail over to another cell in multi cell enviroment.
When the tables are purged it forces the cell on start up to recheck its status and start the coordinator service. In your situation the cell, due to corrupt records in the table was not allowing this to happen.
So by clearing them forced the cell to recheck and to restart the coordinator.
Good information to know going forward. I’m going to keep this in my back pocket. Or on my blog as it were. Have a great weekend!
If you were at VMworld 2011 US and/or Europe, you may have seen or heard of the posters being given away at the Hands On Labs. Supplies were limited at the US conference and if you attended in Copenhagen maybe you didn’t get a chance to get into the labs to grab some posters.
Although VMworld is over, you still have access to the posters.
One way would be to request a Dell Compellent Executive Briefing with me. I brought a few pounds of posters back from Copenhagen and what’s mine is yours if you’re willing to listen to me talk about the great integration points Dell Compellent Storage Center has with VMware’s growing portfolio.
The other option would be to go online and grab a copy of the posters which you can view electronically or have printed at your local copier shop. This blog post was inspired by Xtravirt email bulletin 94 – thanks for pulling together the links guys.
I don’t publish the majority of the press releases which make their way to my inbox but I took a quick look at HotLink SuperVISOR for VMware and what it does is interesting. Watch the video below (feel free to expand to full screen to see the detail) and see how this product is able to pull in various Type 1 hypervisors in a heterogeneous datacenter under the vCenter management umbrella. By now you know VMware isn’t the only player in the hypervisor business. VMware’s competitors have been making their presence known. They remain persistent partly because of their gradual market penetration. And I’ll be the first to admit that the other hypervisors out there are the right fit for some business use cases and requirements. Also, multi vendor policies are not uncommon in large organizations. Whatever the reason, deploying different makes and models of hypervisors in an environment is your business. Managing them with ease is HotLink’s business. Read on.
Press Release:
HotLink Launches Latest Version of HotLink SuperVISOR™ for VMware
Leading enterprises including McAfee and BMC Software adopt HotLink SuperVISOR to seamlessly manage mixed hypervisors inside VMware vCenter console
SUNNYVALE, Calif. – December 15, 2011 – HotLink® Corporation, the market leader in transformation solutions for heterogeneous virtualization management, today announced the newest release of its flagship product, HotLink SuperVISOR™ for VMware. HotLink SuperVISOR is the first and only solution to enable VMware vCenter users to natively manage cross-platform virtual infrastructure spanning Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (KVM). The latest release, HotLink SuperVISOR for VMware 1.2, adds new capabilities focused on enterprise robustness, scalability, configuration and management of multi-hypervisors and workloads.
With its latest release, HotLink customers benefit from an enhanced virtual integration platform that provides total control and performance visibility across all enterprise hypervisors, using the VMware vCenter management console they already have. The new features of HotLink SuperVISOR for VMware 1.2 include:
Enhanced Networking Configuration – Users can now provision and modify virtual switches and network adapters from VMware vCenter and associate these to any enterprise hypervisor —enabling users to manage heterogeneous virtual networking from a single interface.
Expanded Performance Monitoring – The latest release expands the heterogeneous performance statistics and alerts that are gathered and displayed inside the native VMware vCenter performance tab —allowing administrators to quickly identify issues across the mixed hypervisor environment.
Robust Configuration of Virtual Machine Settings – Only HotLink provides the ability to modify the configuration of virtual machine settings such as virtual CPUs and memory assignments natively inside vCenter and apply across all virtual platforms —ensuring the optimum VM configuration regardless of the hypervisor.
“Enterprise IT needs are rapidly evolving as an increasing number of VMware shops are deploying heterogeneous hypervisor environments. Administrators need a single management console that provides a comprehensive view and complete control of all enterprise workloads,” said Lynn LeBlanc, CEO and founder of HotLink. “The latest enhancements to HotLink SuperVISOR extend the VMware vCenter management infrastructure to provide sophisticated and robust management capabilities to Hyper-V, XenServer and KVM – unifying the management of all virtual workloads inside VMware vCenter.”
As virtual infrastructure deployments expand and mature, heterogeneity is being fueled by a combination of economics and maturing of hypervisor alternatives. The most recent Gartner Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure report included, for the first time, both Citrix and Microsoft alongside VMware in the leaders quadrant. Moreover, Hyper-V grew 62 percent last year compared to ESX’s 21 percent growth and Citrix’s 25 percent, according to IDC. While the proliferation of multiple virtual platforms is accelerating, streamlined infrastructure is needed to unify management. That’s exactly what the latest release of HotLink SuperVISOR for VMware addresses.
“McAfee historically was an all VMware shop, but our business needs have changed so that we now have a mix of vSphere, Hyper-V and XenServer. Utilizing HotLink SuperVISOR for VMware across our virtual environment enables us to increase our usage of other hypervisor platforms while unifying management. By deploying multiple hypervisors and standardizing on VMware vCenter as our primary management interface, we expect to reduce our virtualization cost by over 50 percent and admin costs by 65 percent over the next 3 years,” said Mark Tonnesen, CIO of McAfee. “The foundation of our multi-hypervisor environment is built on the HotLink SuperVISOR platform.”
With the new HotLink SuperVISOR technology, enterprises can tier their virtual infrastructure with cost-effective hypervisors and still unify the management, significantly reducing their licensing and operating costs. With HotLink SuperVISOR, customers can realize the benefits of mixed hypervisors while avoiding overly complicated management systems.
“Like many other IT shops, we are investigating the use of multiple hypervisors to cost effectively support development and test activities for our Tier 2 and Tier 3 business applications. We have been very impressed by HotLink’s SuperVISOR technology and the hypervisor interoperability that it enables. We believe that HotLink will enable us to optimize the use of specific hypervisors for individual workloads without compromising our ability to manage our overall virtual environment,” said Mark Settle, CIO of BMC Software.
Pricing and Availability
HotLink SuperVISOR for VMware 1.2 is available now with pricing starting at $25,000. For more information, contact sales@hotlink.com or visit www.hotlink.com.
Founded in early 2010 by data center software veterans and the founders of FastScale Technology, Inc. (acquired by VMware), HotLink Corporation is on a mission to transform real-world IT with the first true heterogeneous data center system management platform for virtual, cloud and physical computing infrastructure. Early customers include enterprise IT organizations spanning technology, financial services, telecommunications and Internet search. HotLink’s advisory board includes visionary leaders from Informatica, Facebook, E*TRADE, Clorox, Citrix, BMC and Flextronics. HotLink is a privately held, venture capital backed company based in Sunnyvale, California. For more information, visit www.hotlink.com.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my personal opinions. Content published here does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of my employer.
