We are expanding in our Middle east and North Africa region (MENA) and hiring for multiple positions. At the time of writing these lines there are five openings:

• Senior Consultant – Professional Services – Saudi Arabia
• Enterprise Account Manager – Sales – Saudi Arabia
• Engagement Manager – Professional Services – Dubai
• Partner Business Manager – Sales – Dubai
• Senior Systems Engineer – Sales – Dubai

You can click on each link to get more information, and you can also apply from there. If you are looking for technical positions and you think you are good enough, don’t hesitate to contact me directly and I’d be happy to forward your CV along. Please note that I have no influence in the recruitment process, but I can put a good word for you if I felt that you are qualified and passionate about the position.

My email: hany [AT] vmware [DOT] com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/hanymichael

My second newsletter in a row. Can’t believe it’s been 2 weeks already. Time seems to fly these days!

The VM Crowd in the wild

I was really happy with the feedback I received regarding this crazy idea. I didn’t expect that much of attention especially that the first episode is simply a bunch of inside jokes. You literally have to be on twitter day and night to get these jokes and know what on earth I’m talking about. As just an example, the “underwear saga” (as Massimo like to call it) actually happened to me and the latter in London. We were literally stranded in the UK due to this ash cloud, and we did go out together to shop for underwear. I can’t believe I’ve mentioned that twice on my blog! Okay, before I jump to the next point I’d like to thank you for the positive feedback. Stay tuned for more.

Two cool new courses from VMware Education

VMware Education Services lunched two new cool courses:
1 – Transitioning to ESXi: I really like this course, and from what i’ve seen in the course material it has a quite valuable content. I highly recommend this to any one starting fresh on ESXi or planning for the transition. Even if you are quite happy with your classic ESX and its service console, this course will make you change your mind.

2 – vSphere 4.1: Install, Configure and Manage: The course title is self explanatory. We all know about the cool new features of vSphere 4.1 and it’s all in there.

“Virtual Roads. Actual Clouds.”

Yes, VMworld 2010 is approaching and this is the official motto of the event. The sessions and labs catalog are now available online also for your to start exploring the great subjects covered in this event. Some vendors started to talk about their activity in the event, don’t miss the EMC and the IBM ones.

The first end-to-end FCoE solution certified by VMware

This is the industry’s first end-to-end solution by Cisco (datacenter switches) and NetApp (storage) that is certified and supported by VMware. Pretty exciting stuff to the all the FCoE enthusiasts out there. Vaughn Stewart has nice blog post talking about this with a big screenshots from the VMware HCL.

Free Book from NetApp

Still with NetApp and Vaughn, they are giving away free copies from the “vSphere on NetApp Best Practices”. Last word from twitter: the books are flying and only 150 copies are left. You have to have a shipping address in the US to get your copy. Thanks to Aramex.com, i will get my copy

TrainSignal’s vSphere Pro Series Volume 2!

Landed in Doha yesterday after a week of travel to see a very nice surprise in my mail. It’s the TrainSignal second volume of the vSphere Pro Series and It’s featuring some very cool products like SRM, Veeam (Monitor, Reporter and Backup) as well as VDR! I can’t wait to start watching these videos especially the SRM ones!

Cisco UCS Visio Stencils Hidden Secret

I’m working these days on a vSphere design on UCS and of course I had to use Visio in the architecture. I was surprised to see a very few stencils in the official Visio pack from Cisco, and that all of these shapes were just showing the front view of the devices. After “tweeting” out to the community and knowing that it’s not just me who’s frustrated about that, I received the simple answer from Cisco Dubai! you need to right click on the shapes (after placing them in your work area and then you will get the option whether to use the font view or rear one! Doh!

New VMware Releases:

A lot of new releases from VMware in the past few weeks among which: vCenter SRM 4.1, vCenter Orchestrator 4.1, vCenter Server Heartbeat 6.3

It’s an idea that I had for a quite long time, and yet I managed to get it out in the busiest time of my life. Love it or hate it – it’s just for fun, guys!

Yes, I’m still alive. It’s been over three months now without blogging, and yes it’s crazy!

Apart from being a Sr.Consultant and a TAM at VMware with 100% utilization in this huge and active region, I’ve been also doing lots of reading and studying lately to prepare for the VCAP exams. Not to mention my growing obsession with the Redwood project whether through testing and evaluating it, or following its daily discussions on our developers & PMs mailing lists. Add all that to the frequent traveling and you won’t find a time to scratch your head!

I won’t take much time in this introduction, so straight to the point: I decided to start a newsletter (or whatever they call it these days). I have to admit though that this is not my most original idea. Firstly I was inspired by one of my colleagues in VMware (Michael White – who’s also one of the SRM legends out there). He has an internal weekly newsletter with lots of invaluable information and I really enjoy reading it! I thought of doing the same on my blog, but I wasn’t sure about this idea until I started receiving another mind-blowing weekly newsletter written by our CTO, Steve Herrod. At that point I realized that I’m a newsletter person and I do like the idea of having everything consolidated in one place at a time. I won’t do this letter however on weekly basis, at least at the beginning. Let’s make it casual every two weeks or so until I see my readers feedback.

At least I get to blog, and that’s all what it matters. Here we go.

News flash: vSphere 4.1 is released!

Yes the debate around the numbering (4.1 Vs. 4.5) is finally over. Most of this debate was driven mainly by the fact that it’s a quite powerful release with major enhancements and rich features normally found only in major releases. There is no point of copying and pasting the release notes here if you can read it directly on VMware’s website. Here you go:

• For ESX Classic : http://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere4/doc/vsp_esx41_vc41_rel_notes.html
• For ESXi : http://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere4/doc/vsp_esxi41_vc41_rel_notes.html

The password issue with ESX/i 4.1

You’ve probably heard about the 8-char password issue with ESX/i 4.1, but in case you haven’t heard yet about its solution, you can find the details here in this KB article:
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1024500

VCB Support in vSphere 4.1

I had a couple of customers asking me about the VCB support and whether it has been removed, and the answer is no. VMware extended the support in 4.1, but I personally recommend moving to the vStorage API for Data Protection (VADP) in case you are upgrading or starting a new vSphere environment.

From our internal mailing list I also quote this: “Several backup vendors have released VADP based backup solutions. These include VMware Data Recovery 1.x, Symantec NetBackup 7.0, Symantec Backup Exec 2010, CA ArcServe 12.5, EMC Avamar 5.0, IBM TSM 6.2, Veeam 4.0 and VizionCore 4.5”

vSphere on IBM BladeCenter H Part II

I’ve been getting many questions about the second part of the BCH, and when I will release it. I actually finished nearly all the Visio diagramming, but the problem is simpler than this. The HX5 and Virtual Fabric expansion card from IBM are not been certified yet by VMware! I was really hoping that both will be on our HCL by the release of vSphere 4.1, but nothing so far. I see no point to publish my article if you won’t be able to use it. Besides, it can cause lots of unnecessary confusions to the partners and customers. I won’t leave you disappointed however, and I’ll direct you to an awesome new redpaper written by IBM on the Virtual Fabric.

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpapers/pdfs/redp4673.pdf

Mobile Noter for iPad!

Every day I find more value for the iPad! I’m not really into games or apps in general, and my main reason for buying an iPad was PDF reading and web surfing while traveling, but I have to admit that it has a lot more value than that. A couple of weeks ago I came to know about this cool App called “Mobile Noter” and it was like a dream came true! I used to take notes and document things on OneNote since it was released back in 2003, and till this moment I still do. The MN simply allows you to synchronize your iPad with either you desktop over a WiFi network, or to the cloud over 3G or WiFi. I can now have all my notes on the go with me either on the iPhone or iPad, and also keep them all synchronized.

New books:

Interesting 2 books talking about the forensic investigations in our virtualization and cloud computing worlds.

• A Digital Forensic Investigator’s Guide to Virtual Environments
  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1597495573
  
• Digital Forensics for Network, Internet, and Cloud Computing
  http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Forensics-Network-Internet-Computing/dp/1597495379/
  

To the partners

I know there are a quite big number of VMware partners subscribed to my blog (as I see from the email domains), so I’ll try to keep you updated with any important news whenever applicable.

A new version of the HealthAnalayzer appliance has been released with strong support for the vSphere best practices. Make sure to download, test and patch this appliance to the latest updates before going to the customers. Great tool as it has always been!

Important: In case you haven’t done that already, please take a moment to read the first post of this series.

Due to the insane number of expansion modules/options available in the IBM BladeCenter H, I had to split this post into two parts. In fact, I was initially planning to have around 12 different designs for vSphere on BladeCenter H (yes twelve) but I then I started to shrink and skip some designs to fit as many scenarios as possible in a reasonable two-part article. With that said, the following is by no mean a list of all the possible design scenarios you can achieve with this hardware platform. If you started the “mix and match” game, you may literally end-up with uncountable possibilities!

The Diagram

Here is some important notes before using the diagram:

• You will see different configurations in this post and the relevant architecture of each configuration in the diagram. This is done through the PDF layers, which basically means than you should *not* activate more that more layer in the same time.
• By default, “Configuration 1″ is the first active layer when you open the PDF file. You can show/hide the other layers by simply clicking on them. Again, you should only show one layer/configuration at a time.
• You will always see two boxes on the right side of the diagram, the upper one will show you the current vSphere configuration, and the lower one will show you the relevant hardware configuration. You should typically start looking at those two boxes before scanning through the diagram to understand the “ingredients” of the design.
• At the time of writing this post, you will see four configurations only in this diagram, however, when I publish the second part, there will be additional configurations that I will add to the existing ones. In other words, the diagram will be updated later on to have those additional configurations so keep that also in mind.

The common design and configurations

You will find in most of the configurations a common design, unless I explicitly state otherwise. I will list them here in details:

The Clusters:

You will see two type of clusters:

• Management Cluster: it is typically a two node cluster running the management and infrastructure services. For example, if you want to virtualize the vCenter Server, the VM should be running on this cluster rather than the actual production clusters. Same thing holds true for other vCenter products like: AppSpeed, CapacityIQ, SRM and so forth. There are two reasons for doing that: the first, we don’t want to run into the problem where vCenter Server is not accessible (there are some examples published in the community but my favorites are Jason Boche’s Catch22s!). The second reason, we don’t want to either affect our workloads’ performance with our management virtual appliances or vice versa.
• Production Clusters: You can see here two production clusters (Cluster A and Cluster B). The take away from that is the following:
  • You don’t have to stick with that number of hosts per cluster, it depends on what you want to achieve, and also on some configuration maximums that may or may not limit you.
  • The nodes have to be spanned across the two chassis as numbered and illustrated in (Config 1). There are two reasons for that: Firstly, you don’t want your whole cluster to fail in an unluckily event when a whole chassis fails. Secondly, you have to keep in mind that VMware HA selects the first 5 hosts in the cluster and promote them as a “Primary” nodes, if they fail, your HA cluster fails.

The Blades:

You will see two consistent blades throughout the first four configurations, the HS22 and the HS22V. Both blade servers share the same IO expansion capabilities, however, there are a some differences between them. For example, the HS22V has no hot swappable HDD but it is superior in the memory capacity (144GB compared to 96GB in the HS22). In part-two of this article, I’ll talk in details about the new HX5 and what it can bring to the table in terms of scalability.

The Expansion cards:

Every HSxx blade comes with two onboard 1Gbps Ethernet ports for basic networking. They will always show in vSphere as vmnic0, and vmnic1. These ports are in turn mapped to Bay 1 and Bay 2 in the chassis. Of course no one recommends implementing vSphere using 2 x 1GbE ports in an enterprise environment (although it will technically work), so we will use here what we call: expansion cards. There are two slots for expansion cards in any HS22/V blade, the first one is called CIOv (for vertical expansion modules) and CFFh (for the horizontal fast IO modules). The CIOv is usually used with the FC HBAs (although we will see later how we will utilize it for iSCSI connectivity), and they are mapped to Bay 3 and Bay 4 in the chassis. The CFFh on the other hand is mapped to four fast expansion modules (7, 8, 9 and 10). I say fast because this is the only card that can leverage the 10GbE connectivity (or Infinibad but it’s not relevant to our series). Depending on the configuration, you will see how we will use different cards to support our designs, however, the onboard 2 x 1GbE port will be always common, and always there.

Now that we’ve talked about the common stuff, let’s start talking about the unique configurations. Oh yes, we were just warming up!

CONFIGURATION (1):

We have in this configuration 6 x 1GbE pNICs per blade to support our MGMT, VMkernel and Virtual Machine networks. We teamed three pNICs here in a vNetwork Standard Switch (vSS) to serve the SC, vMotion and FT. The other three pNICs are teamed in a vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS) to serve the VM networks. Let’s dig litter deeper on how this is done.

As mentioned earlier, we have three type of IO ports on the blades: the onboard ports, the CIOv, and the CFFh. In order to achieve the maximum availability, we teamed one onboard port with a couple of ports from the CFFh card. In this case, if we had a failure in any IO port (on board or expansion card) we will be able to tolerate that failure.

The second consideration here is to distribute the load and bandwidth for our networks. For example, the SC network will be active on vmnic0 and standby on vmnic1. The vMotion will be active on vmnic1 and standby on vmnic0 and so forth.

You may have noticed also that we grouped the SC + VMkernel network on a vSS, while we grouped the VM networks on a vDS. The reason behind that is to ensure that you would still be able to control your SC network even if your vCenter fails. For the VM networks, you would still leverage the great enhancements and features of the vDS. This is *not* a best practice from VMware, and as far as I know there is no documentation recommending that. It is up to you whether you would go with that setup or simply have everything on a single vDS.

CONFIGURATION (2):

This is nearly identical configuration except for the IP SAN. In Config1 we were running on a FibreChannel SAN, while in this configuration we have an iSCSI. The thing to note here is that you will need to install your Ethernet expansion modules in Bay 3 & 4. We will swap also the CIOv card from being a FC HBAs to a traditional 2 x 1GbE card. Of course you will use in this case the vSphere iSCSI initiator for doing your storage networking. This is fine in nearly most cases, except the one where you will actually need to boot your ESX server from SAN.

Please also note there that you can use NFS with the same layout. Your 2 x 1GbE blade ports + the 2 x expansion modules (bay 3 & 4) will all serve your NFS requirement in a high availability design.

CONFIGURATION (3):

What you will see in this configuration is something a bit different. We are using here a 2 x 10GbE ports through the CFFh expansion card to serve “all” our networks. This card is mapped to two 10GbE expansion modules sitting in Bay 7 and Bay 9.

The trick here is this: how can you have a proper network segmentation if you are using two pNICs only? The answer, of course, is VLANS. As you see in the diagram, we have two production networks and one lab network. All these networks are tagged with a VLAN ID to flow the traffic through the vmnics to pNICS all the way to your enterprise/core switches. The ports on your core switches need to be of course in trunk mode.

Now, the second question here would be this: how can you ensure that no network will saturate the whole link and affect the performance of the others. The solution for that is to use the vSphere traffic shipping. You can simply dedicate the bandwidth to each “port group” per your requirement. Example, for SC you normally don’t need more than 1Gbps. For vMotion and FT you would definitely require more bandwidth. To keep things simple, I illustrated in the diagram how the segmentation and bandwidth allocation can be distributed across the two links in an Active/Standby approach.

You will notice here also that we are utilizing the two on board Ethernet ports to have an additional iSCSI SAN (for the Lab environment for example) along with the FC SAN for your production workloads.

CONFIGURATION (4):

In the previous configuration we saw how we leveraged the VLANs to do our network segmentation and how that was quite easy and flexible. But what if the customer has a policy not to use VLANs to consolidate the networks (for a security reason as an example)? Easy, we would still be able to comply with that. Basically we will need to swap here the 2 x 10GbE CFFh card with a 4 x 10GbE card and of course add additional two 10GbE expansion modules to Bay 8 and Bay 10.

Now, what did we achieve by doing that? Two things:

1 – We are compliant with the customer requirement to have a physical segmentation between the Management/FT/vMotion networks and the production networks.
2 – We are using the vSS for our management network while leveraging the vDS for our Virtual Machine networks.

You have also here another two options that were not included in the diagram. You can make use of the two onboard ports to have an additional iSCSI SAN as we did in the previous configuration, or, you can use them as a standby ports for your Management/VM networks in case of a CFFh card failure. Do you see now what I meant above by the “mix and match game”?

Coming Soon – Part 2:

I’ll talk about the new HX5 and how you can have a lot more memory or extended IOs to support special workloads or strict design requirements. I will talk about FCoE and CNAs. I will also talk about the new & promising Virtual Fabric from IBM, and how you can basically slice your pNics into almost any protocol or speed you want.

Stay tuned!