Real Time Performance Monitoring - VMTurbo Virtual Health Monitor

 

Just tested this product on my our lab. It’s provide FREE and unlimited real time performance monitoring solution which regardless of hypervisor in your environment. This product is an appliance and support the following hypervisor:-

• Citrix XenServer
• Microsoft Hyper-V
• VMware ESXi/vSphere
• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization

What’s the system requirement? Well, please refer to below table

If you are using Hyper-V hypervisor to store the appliance, then you are require to has at least 16GB of memory, 2 vcpu and 16GB of storage space in order to make it run

This appliance allow users to support up to 10000 virtual machines. The appliance is running OpenSuse OS and the appliance size is around 400 MB (zip). After unzip, the size is 1.45 GB. Use Hyper-V Manager to import the appliance.

Configuration steps:-

1. Configure IP address of the appliance by using the following authentication:- ipsetup/ipsetup

2. Then, use browser and key in the http://ipaddress of the appliance. Make sure your machine is installed with Adobe Flash Player.

3. Use the wizard to apply “free edition” license.

4. Enter the target Hyper-V Host and authentication into the system. If you enter a cluster host, the system will automatically added the entire host into the VMTurbo. Just wait till the system collect the inventory data.

5. Once complete, it enables you to

• gain visibility into your entire infrastructure. You can view your infrastructure from Hyper-V, Local Disk, Shared Storage and Virtual Machine Workload from a single pane of glass

One of the Hyper-V Host performance:-

Storage:-

Able to identify the IOPS and Latency of the storage.

Ubuntu VM workload. No agent is require to get the performance data.

• See and identify problem in real time

Host issue:-

Example:- Detected that one my cluster having an issue. Click on the icon to drill down of the issue. The server has reached to 85% of memory utilization. In this o free action, you cannot perform an action. To perform an action, you’re require to upgrade this version to Enterprise /Cloud Edition

VM Issue:-

Several virtual machine having high memory utilization.

Drill down, you view the utilization according to time. Drag the slider to view the utilization on specific time.

• Generate performance and efficient reports

From the system, you also able to generate performance and efficient reports. Here is a sample of Hyper-V Server performance report: (Click on the thumbnail to view the report)

If you are looking for performance monitoring tool, download this product and give it a try to understand your infrastructure

Sponsor Announcement–16 May 2013

 

Starwind Software

Recently Starwind has signed a new partnership agreement with German distributor. For more detail, please refer to “StarWind Expands German Distribution with Addition of Azlan”  here.

Veeam Software

Modern Data Protection – Built for Virtualization™
In March, Veeam^® introduced a new company message to help organizations make the move to Modern Data Protection™. It explains how Veeam provides powerful, easy-to-use and affordable solutions that are Built for Virtualization™.

Veeam Backup & Replication Cloud Edition
In February, Veeam released Veeam Backup & Replication™ Cloud Edition, turning every leading public storage cloud into an easy-to-use data repository for backups, and providing a powerful and affordable alternative to tape and traditional offsite backup storage.

Veeam Backup Free Edition and Veeam FastSCP
Veeam Backup™ Free Edition and Veeam FastSCP™ have surpassed more than 200,000 users. These free tools enable IT administrators to backup, archive or copy a VM, all without pausing or powering it off. Users can also restore data from inside a VM, restore from backups or SAN snapshots, and migrate and manage VMs and files. For more details, visit the Veeam Backup Free Edition and Veeam FastSCP product pages.

Veeam Continues to Take Home Industry Awards
Veeam is starting 2013 the way 2012 ended—by winning awards. Notable wins include:
Virtualization Review 2013 Readers Choice Awards and three Redmond Third-Party Reader’s Choice Awards. Veeam Backup & Replication received an InfoWorld Technology of the Year Award while SearchStorage.com 2012 Products of the Year awarded silver to Veeam Backup & Disaster Recovery.

COUNTDOWN TO V7
What’s next for Veeam? Our next major release: Veeam Backup and Replication v7! This new version will have many new features, including:

• Archive to tape
• Virtual Lab for Hyper-V
• Veeam Explorer™ for Microsoft SharePoint
• vSphere Web Client
• Enhanced Backup and Recovery for vCloud Director
• Virtual Lab for Replicas

For further details, visit the Countdown page.

And finally, it’s been just over 5 years that Veeam Backup & Replication has been available! This great infographic shows the past 5 years. Happy Birthday Veeam Backup & Replication!

VMware Hypervisor Support Windows Server 2012

Recently one of my customer would like to know about compatibility running Windows Server 2012 on Vmware Hypervisor.

Well , here is the Q and A based on my findings:-

Q1. Which version of VMware hypervisor is fully supported to run Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8?

A:  Windows Server 2012 fully supported only on

• ESXi 5.1 and ESXi 5.0 U1 and ESXi 5.0 U2. You must install patch ESXi500-201209001(Patch 04) on ESXi 5.0 U1.
• vSphere 5.1

Supported documents:-

• VMware ESXi 5.0, Patch Release ESXi500-201209001 (2032584)

• Windows Server 2012 Operating System does not boot or install on ESXi or ESX 2006859)
• Guest OS Install Guide : Windows Server 2012

Q2. Can I use an older version of Vmware vSphere or ESX to run Windows Server 2012?

A:- No.

Q3. What is my option to run Windows Server 2012 guest VM?

A: Upgrade Vmware version to supported version which listed in Q1.

Q4. I would like to perform Active Directory snapshot. Windows Server 2012 has feature called “VM-Generation ID” which allow hypervisor vendor to expose a virtual machine identifier that Windows Server 2012 domain controllers can use to detect the state of a virtual machine and trigger new Active Directory safeguards. These safeguards protect the Active Directory from the dreaded USN roll-back if a virtual machine is reverted to a snapshot or rolled back by other mechanisms. Can I have this feature on Vmware hypervisor?

A: Yes. Your hypervisor need to be at least:

• VMware vSphere 5.0 Update 2 (vCenter Server and ESXi must both be at 5.0 Update 2)
• VMware vSphere 5.1 (ESXi must be at least 5.0 Update 2)

Supported documents:-

• Windows Server 2012 VM-Generation ID Support in vSphere

Q5. Is Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Failover Clustering supported in Vmware vSphere 5.1?

A. No. The document below pointed that

Well, in short, despite VMware claiming that vSphere 5.1 is compatible with Windows Server 2012, it is NOT. Fundamental functionality does not work within vSphere and VMware is misleading customers trying to provide guest high availability for critical workloads.

Fundamental functionality does not work within vSphere and VMware is misleading customers trying to provide guest high availability for critical workloads.

For other Vmware version and different types of application support on clustering, please refer to here.

Supported document:-

• Microsoft Clustering on VMware vSphere: Guidelines for Supported  Configurations (1037959) –based on updated April 22 , 2013

• VMware vSphere 5.1 Release Notes

Q6. What is my option due to Q5 issue and I would like to setup Windows Server 2012 Clustering?

A: Deploy Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V. Microsoft Hyper-V is systematically created, developed, tested and runs Microsoft production workloads at global scale for both internal and external IT resources.

“Hyper-V is the preferred virtualization platform for Microsoft products”.

Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas) Product Line Architecture

 

Microsoft has just released two documents which talked about the IaaS architecture.

a) Virtualization part – Click here to download “IaaS Product Line Architecture Fabric Architecture Guide” . This document provides guidance for developing fabric (compute,network, storage and virtualization layer) in three architecture pattern: Non-Converged, Converged Network and Continuous Availability over SMB Storage

b) Management part – Click here to download “IaaS Product Line Architecture Management Architecture Guide” . This document provides guidance to develop Microsoft Private Cloud infrastructure using Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1