VMware vCenter chargeback is a product I use today. I use it for show back for internal IT costs. I am working to get it tuned to the point I can show where the money I spend in CapEx and OpEx is actually going. I think the holy grail of configuration for it would be balancing the spends vs usage seen, showing that each dollar we spend is either available or consumed resources. I also wish to use vCenter Chargeback to show that I provide a value back to the business. Cost transparency in how I am running the infrastructure is something i have tried to show, and that needs to exist going forward. Chargeback helps greatly with that.

From the session we can gather a few points.
1. A data collector is good for up to 15,000 VM’s or 5 vSphere instances.
2. Charge back managers scale out for performance and high availability.
3. Max config is around 35,000 VM’s and 10 vCenter servers.
4. I have heard via various conversations that people want API’s into chargeback. It looks like that is occurring. Also a SDK is to be released in Q4 2011

I encourage you to visit the chargeback community on VMware.com. I frequently browse them and there is some good info available there.

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For the past 2 years I have been trying to get more value out of vCO. It has seemed like vCO was a dead product. Today the room if nearly full with hundreds of people in this session. I am very happy to see this. I hope there is more content like plugins and workflow libraries available in them communities for vCO.

One of the first slides eludes to vCO being used to connect VMware Service Manager to vCloud. I hope this happens quickly, I really want this type of capability and agility. VCO isn’t about replacing the existing management systems. VCO is to be used to automate the manual tasks you perform in those management systems. Having VSM kick off workflows and automatically input the variables needed for the workflow to being is one of my goals at my company, happy it was mentioned here. I am very interested in VMware’s management strategy, I think we can expect good things.

One of the slides in this presentation shows VMware’s current it infrastructure from a high level. The next slide shows their end to end business application provisioning. I need to make sure to check these 2 slides out further.

Looks like there is a beta plugin for vCO to control F5 BigIP application delivery controllers. Application blueprints is a term we will be hearing more it seems. Finally it seems we are becoming aware that there is more to delivering an application that just a web server and a database.

VMware has seen 90%+ reduction in time for provisioning VM’s, applications, and scaling applications up with moving to cloud and using vCenter Orchestrator. Days and weeks to hours.

Plugins for vCO are being developed and seem to have some focus. Available on the VMware solutions portal. Hopefully a community can be created around these plugins and hopefully workflows that can help customers get a good jumpstart on using these tools. A plugin sdk and certification program is being created. Single stop market place for plugins is currently in beta.

There is a new instructor course for developing workflows. There will be self paced online training coming late 2011. There is also a book “Automating vCenter 5.0 with vCO” to be released in 2011. There is a blog for vCO with examples and best practices. This is actually where i saw the UCS plugin in action.

Hopefully VMware develops a virtual appliance for all of their software. A vCO appliance is in the works.

Well, let’s get started reducing our OpEx by using vCenter Orchestrator.

TEX2923 and TEX1442 are two additional sessions to look at for vCO.

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Lab Manager does a great job of providing environments on the fly via self service. vCloud Director appears to be positioned to provide the same service in a better way.

One of the first slides in this session shows the terminology map between vCloud director and lab manager. I myself need to remember to go and look at this session online and get a copy of that slide.

Lab manager only supports 1 vCenter, but vCloud director supports 25 vCenters today. VCloud director 1.5 supports SQL now which is a nice change.

This session was mostly about SAP’s massive lab manager deployment and PoC of vCloud director to be the successor of this. They have their work cut out for them for migrating all of their VM’s in lab manager to vCloud.

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I recently acquired vCenter Operations enterprise. I have had a PoC done by VMware to ensure it met my requirements of a consolidated view of what is really going on in my converged infrastructure. Although I have some extensive knowledge into vCOps I am very interested in getting an under the covers look at how some of the data is calculated. I am also interested on how best to monitor my operation and what KPI’s I should really be looking at. Then I want to learn how best to interpret some of them. Let’s see what this session has to offer….

1. Lol first slide says it’s not just black magic! I like this session already.
2. With virtualization capacity is now fluid, I agree.
3. Invisible walls, with vm CPU and memory issues may not be resolved by adding more, contention can play a significant role. Proper troubleshooting is required.
4. With vmview you have to monitor end users not VM’s. I agree here as well as a user may move between virtual desktops. End user experience is important.
5. The key thing for VC OPs to do for me is to take the tons of metrics I have and to present the end calculation to me. Am I green or red?
6. Dynamic threshold analysis uses competing algorithms, meaning the system actually uses multiple methods to calculate the trend, then checks to see who is right more often and then uses that method. Genius. These are calculated every night.
7. A version change can cause the normal operation of a system to change. Thresholds may not catch this but trends have a better chance. I liked this idea.
8. Trending noise to determine abnormalities, this is really going to help my environment since we use a number of tools that are all sending emails for every little thing. We use our brains today to get a feel for the data center health. I declared this a broken model earlier in the year.
9. Alerts should be an indication of a real problem, yes yes yes! Do not alert on every threshold that is reached. Yes please. May I subscribe to your newsletter!
10. Root cause determination in this product is really root metric determination. It isn’t telling you what the problem was just what metric that was being monitored was the starting metric of the issue. I.e. We saw disk latency go to 100ms before the app crashed.
11. Workload is demand divided by entitlement.
12. Right-sizing is a concept I always support, but VM admins and I seem to be on the front line of this alone on this.

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I like vCenter Configuration Manager more and more as I use it. The reporting and control it gives me is much better than my previous product. I am pointing at my Altiris server with the dust on it. Who am i kidding, I virtualized that product when we installed it. The thought of a physical server not running esx on it is laughable to me. I am going to sit here and eat my pretzel while we wait for the session to start. I assure you that your wait will be shorter than mine.

See? Let’s begin.

1. This session was a little weird because the presenters would interrupt each other and start talking. Odd.
2. VCM integration with vCloud Director looks cool. Auto discovery and understanding of machines with the same name and ip but in different zones.
3. The change detection is tricky for me. I want to monitor everything that could possibly change because of paranoia.
4. Although I do not use it, VCM can provision OS, via pxe boot.
5. Someone agrees that the cloud should include moving the workload back and forth between the public and private cloud.
6. One thing I had not really considered before but I am now, is giving read only access and reports to the server app owners in my org. We keep this info to the server guys right now.

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1. The iterative memory copy that vMotion does was interesting to hear more about in detail. I think too many people may not quite understand what a vMotion is really doing. I often just explain it as black magic.
2. VSphere 5 interests me, the idea of multiple nics being used for vMotion. I wonder how best to configure this in UCS. Is vMotion traffic more than client traffic?
3. VMotion ID once found can give details about vMotion in the vmkernel log.
Tests appear to show that vMotion on vSphere 5 is faster, 37% drop in time on vSphere 5.
4. vMotion obviously gains tremendous performance on 10GbE.
5. Multiple vMotion NICs and vMotion performance gain in vSphere 5.
6. Configure vMotion NIC’s on the same vSwitch.
7. For best vMotion performance place vm swap on SAN.
8. If you use CPU reservations, leave some CPU for the host for vMotion ~30%.
9. Metro vMotion supported in vSphere 5. Doesn’t help us VPlex Geo guys.
10. Conclusion? Upgrade to vSphere 5 ASAP if you want faster vmotions.
11. I’m headed to ask about vMotion over asynchronous distances. If not NDA I will share

Good session for vMotion people.

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Automation and IT Service Management are big interest points for me this year. VMAXe and VPlex integrations and best practices also are in scope for me this year. To top it all off I plan to spend as much time in the hands on labs as possible.

If you see me out there feel free to chat me up on topics of interest. I still need to find out if there is a bloggers lounge and take care of some last minute scheduling.

See you there!

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I have seen what appears to be the VMware person who schedules sessions a few times now. This leads me to believe VMware is aware of the overflow of interested people. I have tried to sell my spot in line for $20-$100 with no luck. People seem to think they have paid their due to sit down in a session, I agree.

VMware we love you. We just really want to hear what you have to say!

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VMworld 2010 so far has been informative. It’s obvious in my first few sessions that VMware is serious about cloud computing. Most of my sessions have either shown or eluded to upcoming cloud oriented products and tools from VMware. They appear to even be providing the software we will need to really run our own private clouds. This appears to heavily depend on orchestrator. Keep an eye our for vCloud Director and the vCloud api.

I would be happier if they would allow us to schedule sessions as the lines are quite long to get into sessions. Only one session so far today has been full before I got there.

Breakfast was light, I was hungry. Lunch was a little on the light side, and no water? Coffee was good but seems to have disappeared now. Recycling is big this year and that is welcomed.

The conference bag is a nice backpack. My pocket guide took me to the wrong room; I will have to check my conference bag for the bigger book because I didn’t see it last night. I’m a winner for CSC’s little flyer game. We’ll see what I really have won later. I think they have won some contact info .

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Last night I spent two hours talking to a couple of developers from the Site Recovery Manager group. They turned out to be excellent people who listened to my experiences with SRM. I felt empowered as a small voice for the SRM user base. They were already well aware of some of the issues I addressed, others seemed to spark their interest.

IP customization obviously needs work. An enterprise class user interface is needed and it should not look like a spreadsheet. We talked about policy and rule based ip customization. This would work well in my environment since I change the 2nd and 3rd octet. For example in site A you may have the ip address 10.20.30.40. In site B this machine would have its ip changed to 10.40.130.40. The 10.40.30.0/24 network is already in use as a server vlan (vlan 30) there. Policy or rule based, in the inventory mappings possibly, would let me say that I want the destination ip to always have 100 added to the 3rd octet and use 40 for the 2nd octet if the 2nd octet is 20. Then I would never have to do anything else for ip’s. Of course exceptions and additional expressions would be awesome.

Failback is another key point. Currently SRM is a one way product. You set it all up, test your plan to prove success, and you wait for an event that justifies hitting that red run button. Now you are up and running in a new and strange place, but with no easy way back. You have to create your ip customizations and build your protection group and recovery plans. The ability to do all of this ahead of time needs to be there. Your protection group should have a failover and a failback plan section of the recovery plan. Your configurations should be stored in both sites. It would be nice to be able to test the failback as well, however this could get complicated I would think.

Deep recovery plan testing is something you can do now, but it requires considerable development on the customer end. Of course I am talking about proving your recovery plan beyond simply having the virtual machine power up. A virtual machine is useless! It’s what we have running in them that matters most. Exchange, Citrix, DNS, Active Directory, Oracle, or SQL insert any number of applications and services you may use, these are what you are really after. You can write your own scripts to check that these function. Then have exit codes from the scripts that let SRM say if a VM had an error and thus the DR plan. It would be excellent if VMWare provided these scripts for the default installations of major applications like Exchange or SQL. In addition a place for the VMWare user community to post their own scripts. I would really like to see more than just checking for a process to be running, but will take anything. This would also lead us into scheduling DR tests in the middle of the night or weekend. We can sleep while the systems make sure the DR plan is good once a week. Notify of results with an email you check on Monday. I think this is the future of DR tests. If VMWare doesn’t do it someone else will.

Test bubbles are also something I would like to see improved. Currently the test bubble is there just to allow testing to work on a single ESX host. You can create an isolated vlan (OSI layer 2) to allow VM’s to communicate across ESX hosts. However there is no built in solution to allow for routing. We have tackled this at my shop with a linux machine running in the recovery site as a VM. It has 4 virtual nics and I have created 3 isolated vlans for testing my servers. The fourth virtual nic is available if needed to allow internet connectivity to the machines for testing. This allows me to have a 3 subnet test bubble with routing inside of it. VMWare could package up a quick appliance with a web interface that you could configure all of the subnets and it would create virtual nics for you. There are obvious issues that could come up if you allow your test machines to communicate with production or the internet. An example would be an email server brought up in test allowed to connect to internet and delivering email even the it’s production twin already did.

I would like to give a big THANK YOU to the developers standing at the SRM station in the VMWare booth. It was a pleasure speaking to you. I really do appreciate your work on SRM. The product is wonderful and appears to have an excellent future.

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