UCS Central Manager – Manage multiple Cisco UCS domains with one tool

UCS Central Manager is serves as the UCS central nervous system and integrates all UCS components across multiple UCS domains, managing server blades, VMs, storage and networking—across multiple chassis—as a single logical domain. UCS Central Manager provides an intuitive GUI with a command-line interface (CLI) and XML API options. It enables real-time configuration and reconfiguration of resources. The built-in XML API provides an open management framework for customers, developers, system integrators and managed service providers to interoperate with Cisco Unified Computing System resources.

his tool is ideal for customers who are using multiple Cisco UCS systems on the same location or across different locations in standalone or distaster recovery scenarios. The tool will be free of charge for a limited number of Cisco UCS systems (probably 5). Above that it’s not free but who cares if you can manage 25 Cisco UCS domains with one single management tool as Cisco is doing in their labs right now.

UCS Central Manager is a tool Cisco is working on to manage multiple Cisco UCS systems/domains. At the moment it is still in beta but they expect to release it Nov/Dec 2012.

Source: Cisco

vCenter Server 5.1 installation fails with a Wrong input and Certificate already expired error

Some customers installing vCenter Server 5.1 have reported seeing the following error messages:

• Error 29113. Wrong input – either a command line argument is wrong, a file cannot be found or the spec file doesn’t contain the required information, or the clocks on the two systems are not synchronized. Check vm_ssoreg.log in system temporary folder for details.
• %TEMP%\vm_ssoreg.log
  java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Invalid solution certificate. Certificate already expired.

The problem is due to expired vCenter certificates. When a client connects to vCenter, vCenter presents its certificate to the client. The client then has the responsibility to validate the certificate. If something is wrong with the certificate (can’t trust signer, expired, mismatch subject/hostname), the client needs to inform the user. The user then has the option to not connect or to continue connecting.

Note: This is not a security issue. The certificate is only used at the time of installation and the expiration of the previous certificate has no security risk associated with it.

For more information on this error, refer to KB article: vCenter Server 5.1 installation fails with a Wrong input and Certificate already expired error (2035413).

Upgrading vCenter Server 5.1 best practices

This presentation provides best practice information on upgrading your install of vCenter Server 5.1. Included in the presentation are highlights of the new vCenter Single Sign On.

http://blogs.vmware.com/kb/2012/09/upgrading-vcenter-server-5-1-best-practices.html

 

 

VMware vSphere 5.1 and vCloud Suite 5.1 available for download

VMware NOW – Get the Latest Info on VMware Product Launches:
http://vmwa.re/vcloudnow

Download links:

• ESXi 5.1.0 Installable
• vCenter Server 5.1.0 and modules
• VMware vCloud Director 5.1.0
• VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5.1.0
• VMware vCenter Infrastructure Navigator 1.2.0
• VMware vCenter Operations Management 5.0.3
• VMware vCenter Configuration Manager 5.5.1
• vSphere Data Protection 5.1.0 
• vSphere Replication 5.1.0
• vSphere Storage Appliance 5.1.0 
• vCloud Networking and Security 5.1.0
• vSphere PowerCLI 5.1
• vSphere CLI 5.1
• vCenter Orchestrator Appliance 5.1.0
• vSphere Management Assistant 5.1

What’s new docs:

• What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1
• What’s new in VMware vCenter 5.1
• What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1 – Networking
• What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1 – Platform
• What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1 – Storage
• What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1 – Performance
• Introduction to VMware vSphere Replication
• Introduction to VMware vSphere Data Protection
• What’s new in VMware vSphere Storage Appliance
• What’s new in vCloud Director 5.1

Source: VMware and yellow-bricks.com

Upgrade of vCenter Server 5.1

vSphere 5.1 introduces the vCenter Single Sign On service as part of the vCenter Server management infrastructure. This change affects vCenter Server installation, upgrading, and operation. As part of this change, vCenter Inventory Service is now installed separately from vCenter Server.

When you install or upgrade vCenter Server 5.1, you must install vCenter Single Sign On and install or upgrade vCenter Inventory Service, in that order, before you install or upgrade vCenter Server.

IMPORTANT VMware does not support command‐line installation and upgrade methods for vCenter Server. However, if the installation or upgrade succeeds, VMware supports the installed or upgraded product.

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/vsp_51_vcserver_cmdline_install.pdf

Coolest VMworld 2012 Videos

Hi Folks,

If you are like me and have interest for the latest virtualization technology take a closer look at what’s happening at VMworld 2012 in San Francisco.

Take a look at vladan website for the latest videos and updates from the VMworld 2012

Source: vladan.fr

VMworld 2012 videos

 

Enhanced Vmotion with Vsphere 5.1

With the new vSphere 5.1 a new vMotion option has been added (only in the new Web Client) that combine vMotion and Storage vMotion in a singe hot migration step to migrate between hosts/clusters without shared storage! This could increase the mobility of the VMs and usage also of local storage (for some cases). Both VM state and VM files are transported across network using the vMotion vmkernel interfaces (so a good network design could be necessary).

The requirements are:

• Hosts must be managed by same vCenter Server
• Hosts must be part of same Datacenter
• Hosts must be on the same layer-2 network (and same switch if VDS is used)
• Hosts must have the same CPU or have the same EVC baseline (like for the vMotion across clusters)

Operational considerations:

• Enhanced vMotion is a manual process
• DRS and SDRS do not leverage enhanced vMotion
• Enhanced vMotions count when considering concurrent limitations for both vMotion (max 8 concurrent vMotions per host) and Storage vMotion (max 2 concurrent Storage vMotions per host)
• Max of 2 concurrent Enhanced vMotions per host (because of the limit of no more than 2 concurrent Storage vMotions per host)
• Enhanced vMotion will leverage multi-NIC when available (in the same way as vMotion from v5.0)

Source: VMware – VMworld 2012

VMware releases version 5.1 of vSphere and vCloud Director

VMware announced a whole list of new major releases of their product portfolio. Some new things:

• No more vRAM limits, vRAM = GONE
• vMotion without shared storage
• the MonsterVM got even stronger, going for 64 vCPU’s, 1 TB of RAM and more than 1.000.000 IOPS per VM

The folks at VMware made very nice ‘What’s New?’ documents! Here’s the list of the documents to download and view:

• What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1
• What’s new in VMware vCenter 5.1
• What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1 – Networking
• What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1 – Platform
• What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1 – Storage
• What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1 – Performance
• Introduction to VMware vSphere Replication
• Introduction to VMware vSphere Data Protection
• What’s new in VMware vSphere Storage Appliance
• What’s new in vCloud Director 5.1

more from VMware

VMware Workstation 9 has been released

The news just went out. The new release of VMware Workstation 9 introduces many new features. One of the good news is better support for nested virtualization and Windows 8 support. VMware Workstation 9 can be installed on Windows 8 and to support the former Metro UI, where toggling between Metro and Desktop can be done by the Windows key and it’s the Unity mode which handles the Metro Interface.

Together with this release, for MAC users, there has been a VMware Fusion 5 release with 70 new features.

VMware Workstation 9 supports multitouch, for driving the Metro interface running in Workstation on Windows 8 tablet.

Nested Virtualization – This is a very good news for nested virtualization fans. The new VMware Workstation 9 should run the nested hypervizors more smoothly since there has been some enhancements and improvements done of   virtual Intel VT-x/EPT or AMD-V/RVI extensions.

Workstation 9 improves the implementation of virtual Intel VT-x/EPT or AMD-V/RVI extensions. This allows users to run ESX as a guest OS and run a 64-bit operating system nested in ESX using less system resources.

The Hyper-V support is only for educational purposes…-:)

Hyper-V has been added to the Workstation 9 guest operating system list. This enables customers to run Windows 8 with Hyper-V enabled, or install Hyper-V Server. This can be used for educational purposes or for building prototype Hybrid Clouds. This feature is NOT SUPPORTED and probably never will be. Microsoft does not support nesting of their hypervisor which makes it extremely difficult – if not impossible for VMware to fix issues that may occur in this configuration. For this reason, this capability has been implemented purely to see if we could do it!

Support of Windows 8 – Another cool feature is an official support for recently RTM Windows 8. VMware Workstation 9. Easy Install has been enhanced to recognize Windows 8. Workstation 9 has been enhanced to support the Windows 8 user interface (formerly known as Metro…. ).

WSX – Workstation’s new web interface allows you to access your virtual machines running in Workstation or vSphere on a tablet, smart phone, PC or any device with a modern browser. VMware Workstation web interface that enables users to access their Shared virtual machines via a web browser on a tablet, smart phone or PC without installing any additional applications or browser plug-ins. This service renders an HTML5 web page that can connect to your Workstation hosts, enumerate the available Shared virtual machines and allow you to power them on and interact with the desktop.

WSX isn’t supported for production environments in this release. The recommended browsers are Google Chrome 17 browser on PCs and the Apple Safari 5 browser on Mac OS hosts and iPads.

Better Graphics – The enhancements include a display-only graphics driver that can render 3D in Windows 8 without hardware acceleration.

You should be able to run those graphics application faster and more precise (like AutoCAD and SolidWorks), with better rendering . Windows XP graphics driver has been improved and big changes were made to improve performance and enable more advanced graphics capabilities in the future.

VMware Player Completely Rewamped – The new Workstation 9 brins also significant improvements for VMware Player. layer user interface has been completely revamped. The user interface conforms with Windows standards, menus have been updated, the toolbar now matches Workstation in regular and full screen mode, we have added device icons, and we have made many more little improvements.

Quick switch II – There is now tabs in full screen mode in order to switch between VMs that runs in full screen mode.

USB 3.0 – Now, VMware Workstation 9 has a USB 3.0 support, which enables the fastest possible transfers through uSB devices needed by flash drives, video devices or other portable storage devices. Windows and linux virtual machines are supported that contains in-box drives USB 3.0

Remoting Improvements – better experience when using VNC client or interacting with the desktop on virtual machine running on vSphere from within VMware Workstation 9.

Disk cleanup – Better management of disk space from within VMware Workstation 9. You can reclaim disk space that has been allocated to the VM but is no longer used by the guest OS. This is something that was always painful, especially if you’re running nested ESXi labs, which consume a lot of diskspace on a SSD drive. SSD drives which are never large enough… -:). Or VMs where you install and uninstall stuff often. Click to enlarge.

Downloading VMs from vSphere – now its possibly to download VMs from vSphere by dragging them from the remote ESXi host to My computer section of the Virtual Machine library.

Note that in Workstation 8 it was possibly to upload the VMs from Workstation to ESX.

VM restriction – Now its possible to enter additional passwords (in addition of encrypted VMs), for changing the VM settings.  This feature enables IT professionals and educational institutions to create virtual machines to be used by their employees and students that prevent these users from enabling shared folders, dragging and dropping files, attaching USB devices, and overcommitting system resources. Restricted virtual machines can be run in VMware Workstation 9, VMware Player 5, and VMware Fusion 5 on Windows, Linux or Mac PCs.

When creating new VM, through the wizard, there is now the possibility to directly choose Hyper-V, or you can see on the screenshot below the possibility to select the type of vSphere hypervizor ( ESXi 4.x or 5.x)

 

Source: VMware

Windows 8 RTM Downloads

Microsoft has released the RTM version of their latest OS for MDSN subscribers the 15th of august. The release for everyone is schedulled for October 26. If you’re not MSDN subscriber or Microsoft partner, you can test the Windows 8 OS by getting a 90 days trial.

No product key is required to install this RTM. The only thing is, that you will need to activate it within 10 days after installing it in your system.

The trial is available following languages: Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), English, English (UK), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), and Spanish.

If you wish to test this system in VMware Workstation, install it as a “Windows 7″ (32 or 64, depending which ISO you’ll get) check the “Accelerate 3D graphics” setting for the graphic card.

You could certainly read about  Why there is no start menu in Windows 8 about everywhere. Start menu which makes the access to power operations or configuraitons much more difficult. You’ll certainly want to get rid of the Windows store page when the system boots up.

The workarounds for booting up directly to W8 desktop are numerous.

Take a look at  Cool Start Menu for Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012. It’s a small freeware application which brings back the start button for Windows 8 and provides many more other cool settings.

If you’re looking for the 2012 Server RTM, there are no trials, but as you might already noticed, the RTM ISO of Windows Server 2012 leaked through the main torrent sites…..

Here are the download links for Windows 8 RTM, x32 and x64 version. (you’ll have to go through the “Live” login stuff….)

Download Windows 8 RTM Free 90-Day Trial Version (32-bit)

Download Windows 8 RTM Free 90-Day Trial Version (64-bit)

If you’re wondering on which machine you’ll be able to test this OS, you can find below the system requirements.

System Requirements:

• Processor: 1 GHz or faster
• RAM: 1GB (32-bit) or 2GB (64-bit)
• Hard disk space: 20GB
• Graphics card: Microsoft DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM driver