VMware vSphere 6 wish list

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UPDATE: VMware announced the public beta for their new vSphere version!! Sign-up here: https://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/vsphere-beta

 

With the release of the latest vSphere 5.5 version (update 1) in March 2014, VMware once again took a major step in the development of it’s hypervisor and the supplementary software and tools. Finally the vCenter appliance took over from the Windows installed version as the primary choice for vCenter deployment. The Windows installed version now officially supports Windows Server 2012 R2.
In the first 5.5 release various improvements were made; SSO  is enhanced, support for 62TB VMDK, 16Gb FC support to name a few. And of course VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN) is now included in the update 1 version!!

VMware-vSphere6

There are some features however still missing. I, for one, would very much like to see these missing features in the next major release of vSphere. Having said that, I don’t expect VMware to announce the release of vSphere 6 this year. I think the coming period will be used by VMware to further engage customers to adopt VSAN and NSX. It will be very interesting to see on what scale these technologies will thrive! !

When thinking of what I would like to see in the vSphere 6 line-up, I came up with the stuff listed below:

  • Multi vCPU FT
  • VUM appliance
  • vSwitch LACP support
  • vCenter built-in autodeploy GUI (like the Fling thing)
  • Linked mode vCSA
  • MSSQL support for external database use with vCSA

Let’s walk through my wish list…

Backing up the vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA)

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vcsa

<update 13 november 2014>

VMware does not support backing up the individual components and restoring them to a newly deployed appliance. Use of image-based backup and restore is the only solution supported for performing a full, secondary appliance restore (KB2034505).

Thank you, Feidhlim O’Leary (VMware), for pointing this out in the comments.

</update 13 november 2014>

 
Last week I was upgrading an old ESX 4.1 environment to ESXi 5.5 and the vCenter server needed to be replaced by the vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA). The new limitations on the 5.5 release should suffice for a lot of environments, the only downsides being no Heartbeat, Linked Mode, VUM and IPv6.

After deploying and configuring the appliance, I soon realized there wasn’t a single article that listed all the necessary post-installation backup tasks. Someone not as smart as you will eventually break your appliance, so make sure to perform all following tasks.

1. Back up vPostgres database
Reference: KB2034505

Building my new vSphere 5.5 homelab

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XH61V

In order to bring you guys more and better blog posts, I need a new homelab. My current nested Workstation setup just isn’t going to cut it any longer. So what better way to spend your Koningsdag hangover than searching the Web for new goodies to buy?

COMPUTE NODE

Requirements

  • 2  NICs
  • reasonable amount of CPU & MEM
  • low power consumption
  • low noise

Intel NUC seems to be the talk of the town nowadays, but adding extra hardware can be a bit of a hassle and is likely to limit you to the board only option. Other popular options are the Shuttle slim/mini PC’s. I decided to compare 3 different setups.

My NetApp Flashpool implementation

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The other day I was designing and implementing an all new NetApp FAS3250 setup running Clustered ONTAP 8.2 supporting a vSphere environment. This setup contains a bunch of SAS 10K disks and a DS2246 shelf filled with 24x 200GB SSD’s.

Because of the requirements stated by the customer, most of the SSD’s are used for a SSD-only aggregate. But to accelerate the SAS disks, we opted to use 6 SSD’s to create a Flashpool. I guess Flashpool doesn’t need any further detailed introduction. It is a mechanism used by NetApp to utilize SSD’s to automatically cache random reads and random overwritten writes in a dedicated Flashpool aggregate. Note the bold ‘overwritten’! This cached data is available during a takeover or giveback.

netapp-flashpool

 

Although the implementation of a Flashpool is pretty straight forward, there are a few things I would like to point out. Things I encountered during the implementation:

Welcome!

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Welcome to Cloudfix, our blog!! We recently decided to start this blog. We are still setting things up and shuffling a bit with the layout. Shouldn't take long now for…