Today I have the pleasure of talking at the London VMware User Group.

My presentation is called Help, My VDI Project is Hell!

There are many complexities with VDI projects causing many to fail at the planning stage, at the POC or testing stage or even worse during the implementation phase.

I go through some of the Magic Fixes that VDI is meant to solve and what the reality often turns out to be with all this new technology you need to consider.

Looking at some research stats, many companies are doing VDI for the wrong reasons with many thinking they should do VDI to save costs and then realising this often isn’t the case.

VDI is great for many use cases, remote connectivity, security, quicker provisioning, containing your VM info, maybe availability, maybe easier management but can be also terrible in many circumstances with performance, user experience, cost, peripherals, licensing, flexibility, support and general complexity issues.

I then go through the 3 things you need to work out, your strategy, your apps and your users.

Your strategy is what you are trying to achieve from a business perspective. If your business strategy is to use VDI you are already heading down the wrong path. VDI is a technology you can use to realise some of your business strategy but it should not be your business strategy in itself. Your tech strategy is not just about VDI or desktops or streaming or server based computing or laptops or tablets. It’s all of them. Stop thinking about it from just an infrastructure layer, don’t get fixated on the I in VDI. What you are actually trying to do is develop an application delivery strategy. Desktops are useless without the applications so move your focus away from the desktop element and rather towards applications. Have a holistic view of everything that makes up your desktop / application technology environment and factor that into your planning.

You then need to map out your applications and find out how they can be delivered and what constraints there are.

You then need to map out your users and group them based on locations and applications and get an understanding of who needs what.

Once you have this information you can start to bring it together. Your strategy, your users and your apps provide the Why, Who and What of your plan.

You can then start  to decide which application delivery mechanism is suitable for different groups, locally installed applications may be fine or stream some of them or use XenApp or VDI. Don’t keep thinking in silos. There’s no prize for having to have 100% of your company on VDI. Businesses who use the right technology where it makes sense are the successful ones. Make sure you have a valid reason for using VDI, when you use it in the right place  it will be awesome. Yes, it will cost more but that’s quite OK if you are going to be able to do more and now achieve your business goals.

VDI is also not server virtualisation. Virtualising servers saved money and was awesome so surely it must be great for VDI is just plain wrong, VDI is much more complex and needs far more to get it right.

I then look at some things you need to get right in your build if you decide to use VDI and go on to talk about being realistic and honest with your cost models and offer some tips on things to watch out for and how to make it work.

Then some information on VMware’s future with its End User Computing.

Here’s a link to the presentation:

Well, today, now we have Powershell Toolkit, DataONTAP version 2.0

The major features include:

• Data ONTAP 8.1 (Cluster-Mode) support – Cluster Mode Powershell architecture is now said to be stable and complete, 86 new cmdlets
• Dynamic VHD to fixed VHD conversion – Use rapid copy-offload with ConvertTo-NaVhd to convert a dynamic VHD to a thin, fixed VHD to fix alignment issues without using more space for both LUNs and CIFS shares
• LUN to VHD file conversion – ConvertTo-NaVhd can convert an entire LUN to a VHD file in another LUN, great for P2Vs.
• VHD file to LUN conversion – new cmdlet ConvertTo-NaLun to convert a VHD file to a LUN for a V2P if you need to
• NDMP copy client – 4 new cmdlets to monitor NDMP copy operations.
• More CIFS shares support – building in support for Windows Server 2012 supporting Hyper-V over SMB.

New cmdlets, not including the Cluster-Mode set:

• Invoke-NaEmsAutosupportLog
• Rename-NaFile
• Get-NaLunAttribute
• Set-NaLunAttribute
• ConvertTo-NaLun
• Disable-NaNdmp
• Enable-NaNdmp
• Invoke-NaNdmpCopy
• Start-NaNdmpCopy
• Stop-NaNdmpCopy
• Get-NaNdmpCopy

New Cluster-Mode cmdlets:

• Audit (2 cmdlets)
• Autosupport (11 cmdlets)
• Cf (6 cmdlets)
• Clock (1 cmdlet)
• Ems (19 cmdlets)
• Host (1 cmdlet)
• Name mapping (10 cmdlets)
• Ndmp (2 cmdlets)
• Perf (4 cmdlets)
• Qos (18 cmdlets)
• Ses (3 cmdlets)
• System (7 cmdlets)
• Wafl (2 cmdlets)

Enhancements:

• A new cmdlet, Add-NcHostIscsiTargetPortal, handles iSCSI initiator target portal configuration for Cluster-Mode.
• A timeout parameter is available on Invoke-NaSsh and Invoke-NcSsh.
• The Install.ps1 and Uninstall.ps1 scripts have been improved for simpler operation.
• Get-NaEfficiency now reports overprovisioning levels for aggregates.
• Improved reporting of RPC error messages.
• Added -Use32Bit switch to New-NaAggr.
• Set default igroup type in New-NaIgroup and New-NcIgroup to “windows”.
• Improved Get-NaClone parameter sets.

NetApp has updated its “Making the Most of Data ONTAP PowerShell Toolkit” with the new 2.0 features

Have a look at the PPT, Getting Started With Data ONTAP PowerShell Toolkit for installation instructions.

Updated: 11 May 2012 to amend link and try work out HP support. Apologies I had the wrong ESX(i) version link in the original post and hadn’t properly investigated HP support for  Virtual Connect/FlexFabric which is confusing. Sorry, Sloppy me!

VMware has released a new Emulex be2net driver version 4.1.334.0 for both ESX(i) 4.x and ESXi 5.x for the Emulex OneConnect 10Gb Ethernet Controller which is used in HP G7 Blades. But, before you get too excited, HP has NOT certified these drivers for use with HP Virtual Connect and FlexFabric…I think.

You see in this page from VMware which was updated on 4 April 2012 the advice is to use the 4.0.306.0 driver for ESX(i) 4.x and 4.0.355.1 for ESXi 5.x
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2007397

This page however from VMware says for ESXi 5 driver version 4.0.355.1 isn’t supported for HP ProLiant G7 servers. It requires a new firmware version that is not currently available.
http://partnerweb.vmware.com/comp_guide2/detail.php?deviceCategory=io&productid=19067&vcl=true

but I think this is old as the HP advisory has been updated to say the 4.0.355.1 driver is supported
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=c03005737

But in this document which looks like it has been written by HP, the 4.1.334 drivers for both versions ARE supported (but again with different firmware version numbers that don’t really tally up with what has been supported before)
http://partnerweb.vmware.com/programs/hcl/ESX_Flex_config.pdf

I’m thinking that this document may be a little premature as no other HP information has been updated to reflect support for the 4.1.334 drivers

So, just for your information, the 4.1.334 drivers can be downloaded from the following links when they may be supported:

ESX(i) 4.x:
https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/details?downloadGroup=DT-ESX4041-EMULEX-be2net-413340&productId=230

ESXi 5.x:
https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/details/dt_esxi50_emulex_be2net_413340/dHRAYndld3diZHBqaA==

But, I’m thinking the currently supported drivers are:

ESX(i) 4.x: version 4.0.306.0
http://downloads.vmware.com/d/details/dt_esxi40_emulex_be2net_403060/ZHcqYnQqaGpiZEBlZA

ESXi 5.x: version 4.0.355.1
https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/details/dt_esxi50_emulex_be2net_413340/dHRAYndld3diZHBqaA==

I’ve updated my post: HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 & VMware ESX(i) pre-requisites

Check your diaries, the next London VMware User Group will be on the 17th May 2012 at the.

I have the lucky task of presenting again at one of the sessions. I’m going to be talking VDI with a presentation I’ve  called for fun “Help, My VDI Project is Hell!” I’ve found many VDI projects fall apart at some stage so I’m going to be dolling out some of my strategic musings on tackling the VDI minefield and then hopefully offer some practical & useful tips to help you make your project a success if you decide VDI is for you.

Even if you don’t want to hear me drone on again and VDI isn’t something you are interested in, there’s plenty more to find out during the day with presentations from 6 community members! I think this may be a London VMUG record which I’m very proud to be part of. I’m very keen on ensuring there’s plenty of U being put into VMUGs  along with all the other presentations from VMware and other vendors.

The presentations by users are:

• Darren Woollard: Over to You: Design Me a Highly Available Virtualised Infrastructure
• Chris Kranz: Flexpod: The Flexible Converged Infrastructure
• Ricky El-Qasem: Writing VMware Apps for Novice Programmers
• Neil Mills: The vMarket – Skills in Demand for the Next Five Years
• Steve Bryen: Management and Orch’n – What, Why & How

along with 2 great presentations from VMware:

• Climb the Stack and Pimp your Cloud with VMware vFabric – Peter Holditch
• The vCenter Appliance – Hugo Phan

and presentations & labs from other vendors

• Trend Micro: Using vShield to Drive Efficiency and Costs Savings – Stephen Porter
• Liquidware Labs: Desktop Transformation with Liquidware Labs – Dan Falconer
• Tintri: Solving VM Storage Cost and Performance Challenges with VM-aware Storage
• VMTurbo Labs

If you haven’t attended a VMUG before, its time to get on board! It’s a phenomenally good training/educational/networking day for techies and it’s free!

Time to register at http://www.vmug.com/e/in/eid=429

Follow the Twitter conversation here: http://twitter.com/#!/search/LONVMUG

See you there!

These were both released on the same day.

3.50 was released to support Gen 8 blades and is required before you insert any Gen 8 blades into your enclosure (along with having Virtual Connect 3.51). There are also a lot of other fixes. You will also need to update HP SIM to at least 6.3 to be able to discover OAs from 3.30 up.

3.55 was released on the same day as it seems testing missed some issues with authentication and EBIPA (great!) so I’m not sure why 3.50 was released at all. Confusingly the release notes and fixes for 3.55 include all the information from 3.50 so its not immediately obvious what the difference is.

So, no point really even looking at 3.50 but rather going straight for 3.55 which can be downloaded from:
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=329290&prodSeriesId=3188465&swItem=MTX-1ee4cda0b03447c6974e4ca184&prodNameId=3188475&swEnvOID=4040&swLang=8&taskId=135&mode=4&idx=3

Enhancements/New Features

• Hardware Support
  • HP ProLiant BL460c Gen8 Server Blades
• Firmware Additions
  • The Gen8 Active Health System provides a log of historical information including the most recent states and events for Gen8 servers.  This log is obtained from Gen8 Server Blades via iLO4.  When enabled via the OA GUI or CLI, the OA adds status information about enclosure fans, power supplies, and enclosure configuration to the health log for each of the servers in the enclosure.
  • HP ProLiant BladeSystem c-Class server blades now provides identification information such as server name, UUID number, and IP address to the Intelligent PDU and to HP Insight Control power management software. To utilize this feature, the new “HP BLc 1PH Intelligent Power Module” and Insight Control Version 7.0 or later are required. This Intelligent Power Discovery feature which is unique ProLiant BladeSystem c-Class reduces the amount of time needed to configure the power distribution software and hardware, and eliminates manual configuration errors.
  • iLO and VC each display information about server NIC configurations.  However, the naming scheme used varies based on the tool used to view the configuration.  The OA NIC display has been enhanced to correlate NIC labels between the OA, iLO and VC.
  • OA 3.50 or later increases the default SSL private key size used for encryption of network communication from 1024 bits to 2048 bits.
  • Updated OA to use the June 27, 2011 time zone data files. The list of newly supported time zones includes:
    • America\Argentina\Salta
    • America\Bahia_Banderas
    • America\Kralendijk
    • America\Lower_Princes
    • America\Matamoros
    • America\Metlakatla
    • America\North_Dakota\Beulah
    • America\Ojinaga
    • America\Santa_Isabel
    • America\Sitka
    • Antarctica\Macquarie
    • Asia\Kathmandu
    • Asia\Novokuznetsk
    • Pacific\Chuuk
    • Pacific\Pohnpei

Important Notes

• HP Gen8 Blade Support
  • OA 3.30, OA 3.31 and OA 3.32 will correctly power up and perform the initial configuration of Gen8 Server Blades.  However, when used with Virtual Connect, subsequent configuration changes to the network and storage profiles may not be handled properly resulting in incorrect port configurations.  OA 3.50 is required for use with Virtual Connect and Gen8 blades.  For more details, refer to the Customer Advisory (ID= c03246192) Onboard Administrator and Virtual Connect – HP ProLiant Gen8 Server Blades Require Onboard Administrator Firmware Version 3.50 (or Later) and Virtual Connect Firmware Version 3.51 (or Later):http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=c03246192.
  • Correct configuration of HP ProLiant Gen8 server blades requires updating the Onboard Administrator to version 3.50 or later and Virtual Connect to version 3.51 or later before inserting your ProLiant Gen8 server blade into an enclosure. Failure to upgrade the OA before inserting a Gen8 blade in the enclosure will result in a profile pending status with Virtual Connect.
  • Versions of the OA prior to OA 3.30 will not properly configure Gen8 server blades and should not be used.
• HP SIM Support
  • Version 6.1 and 6.2 of HP SIM do not discover and associate enclosures running OA versions 3.30 or later.  If you are running HP SIM v6.1 or 6.2, please do not update to OA 3.30 or later until you’ve applied all patches available for your HP SIM version, or upgrade your HP SIM to v6.3 prior to upgrading your OA environment. If running versions of HP SIM prior to v6.1, you must upgrade to HP SIM v6.3 or later prior to upgrading to OA 3.50 or later.
• Enclosure Power Subsystem
  • Onboard Administrator detects power supplies within the scope of Customer Advisory c01519680 and flags them with a “Red X” critical error condition and displays the message: “HP strongly recommends replacing power supply #X at the customer’s earliest possible convenience pursuant to Customer Advisory c01519680.” Flagged power supplies continue to function and the enclosure remains operational. See Customer Advisory c01519680 for more information:http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=c01519680.
• Enclosure Dynamic Power Capping
  • Caution: Onboard Administrator v3.10 or later: Enabling Enclosure Dynamic Power Capping may result in one of the following:
    • Servers halted in POST after a reboot and status Degraded due to “Insufficient Enclosure Power”
    • A server may be unable to power on

    This condition can be a result of reducing the Enclosure Dynamic Power Capping after all server blades are powered on. If the enclosure Power Available is lower than the iLO Advanced report of Initial Power-On Request Value from a server blade – then that server blade could encounter this issue. The workaround is to increase the Enclosure Dynamic Power Capping to provide more power available to the enclosure devices.

  • With Enclosure Dynamic Power Capping enabled, changes to power supplies, input power feeds, power redundancy mode, power capping, power limit and the power state of other blades and devices in the enclosure may affect the ability to power on a server blade or reboot a server blade. HP recommends testing a fully configured enclosure from a completely powered-off state before finalizing the enclosure power settings.
• VLAN
  • If the Enclosure VLAN feature is enabled:
    1. Ensure that all HP Virtual Connect Ethernet and Virtual Connect FC interconnect modules are configured with the same management VLAN as the Onboard Administrator modules.
    2. Ensure all enclosures with Virtual Connect multi-enclosure domains have the same management VLAN configuration for all VC interconnects and all Onboard Administrator modules.
    3. Ensure that all HP SAS Switches are configured with the same management VLAN ID as the Onboard Administrator modules in that enclosure.

Have a look at my updated post: HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 & VMware ESX(i) pre-requisites for information on all firmware & driver compatibility.

This is an offline update so will require you to boot from an .ISO to apply the firmware update.

New Features

1. Added support for the following operating systems: – RHEL 6.2

Resolved Issues from Firmware Version 4.0.360.15

1. A file level restore (FLR) request sent to a BE3 device while rebooting an HP UX guest VM image caused a timeout event.
2. When users tried to disable beaconing, they would receive a “Success” status even if beaconing had already been disabled.
3. The CN1100e device using VLAN did not pass traffic using “copy”. This failed only in full power mode. Traffic only passed in auxiliary mode.
4. The NC551 adapter failed to link with the 10Gb Pass-Thru module when using a 1Gb SFP transceiver.
5. The CN1000e device occasionally lost connection to network-attached storage (NAS) volumes when running an FCoE protocol under heavy load.
6. The FCoE port did not register as connected after repeated virtual connect (VC) module failovers.
7. The Flex NIC required changes to the DCC method to keep the link down until the switch explicitly sent link up.
8. A BL460c G7 array with P410i version 5.1x firmware would not boot from iSCSI if a logical drive was connected to it.

Known Issues

There are no known issues for this release.

Have a look at my updated post: HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 & VMware ESX(i) pre-requisites for information on all firmware & driver compatibility.

The HP ESXi Offline Bundle for VMware ESXi 5.0 includes the latest HP Common Information Model (CIM) Providers, HP Integrated Lights-Out (iLO) driver, HP Compaq ROM Utility (CRU) driver, and the new HP Agentless Management Service (AMS).

https://h20392.www2.hp.com/portal/swdepot/displayProductInfo.do?productNumber=HPVM09

Direct Download:
http://h20565.www2.hp.com/portal/site/hpsc/template.PAGE/public/psi/swdDetails/?sp4ts.oid=4194638&spf_p.tpst=psiSwdMain&spf_p.prp_psiSwdMain=wsrp-navigationalState%3Dlang%253Den%257Ccc%253DUS%257CprodSeriesId%253D4194735%257CprodNameId%253D4194638%257CswEnvOID%253D4115%257CswLang%253D8%257CswItem%253DMTX-c14ba20dc6274cc38e3203c3cb%257Caction%253DdriverDocument&javax.portlet.begCacheTok=com.vignette.cachetoken&javax.portlet.endCacheTok=com.vignette.cachetoken

The latest versions are:

• hp-smx-provider 500.02.10.61.43-434156
• char-hpilo 500.9.0.0.9-1OEM.500.0.0.434156
• char-hpcru 5.0.0.8-1OEM.500.0.0.434156
• hp-ams-esx-500.9.0.0-55.434156

Enhancements:

• Added support for:
  • HP ProLiant  BL460c Gen8 server
  • HP ProLiant DL360p Gen8 server
  • HP ProLiant DL380p Gen8 server
  • HP ProLiant ML350p Gen8 server
  • HP ProLiant DL160 Gen8 server
• Added the new HP Agentless Management Service
• Added the following support to the HP CIM Providers:
  • HP iLO4 (Integrated Lights-Out)
  • HP SmartSSD Wear Gauge
  • HP SmartDrive
  • Support for additional Power Supply

We had a great chat talking about certificates, VDI strategy, private cloud CraaP! & SRM with PowerCLI.

You can see/hear/subscribe to/download the chinwag from here:
http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/2012/03/23/chinwag-with-julian-wood-episode-71/

Thanks Mike!

So, What’s New?

The Monitoring and Host Configuration capability adds support for the following:

• Data ONTAP® for Cluster-Mode
• Management of consolidated storage controller credentials. These credentials apply to the Monitoring and Host Configuration capability, the Provisioning and Cloning capability, and the Optimization and Migration capability.
• Scanning for and flagging indirect paths used to access data for Cluser-Mode based NFS exports, and providing a list of potential direct data paths
• The NFS VAAI Plugin. This is a software library that integrates with Virtual Disk Libraries and allows VMware software to execute certain primitives on NetApp storage controllers.

The Provisioning and Cloning capability enables you to perform the following tasks:

• Provision and manage NFS and VMFS datastores on storage systems running Data ONTAP for Cluster-Mode
• Use the Monitoring and Host Configuration capability to add and remove storage systems

A new capability, Optimization and Migration, enables you to perform the following tasks:

• Review the alignment status of virtual machines
• Perform online alignment of virtual machines by migrating them into optimized VMFS datastores
• Migrate a group of virtual machines into new or existing datastores

The Backup and Recovery capability enables you to perform the following task:

• Back up and restore a virtual machine even if a VMware consistency snapshot fail

The Virtual Storage Console 4.0 can be downloaded from here (NOW login required)

1. Installing a Root Certificate Authority
2. Distributing the root CA certificate to clients
3. Creating the default vCenter 5 Server Certificate and including a DNS alias
4. Replacing the default vCenter 5 Server Certificate
5. Replacing the default vCenter 5 Web Client Server Certificate
6. Replacing the default vCenter 5 Inventory Service Certificate
7. Replacing the default vSphere Update Manager 5 Server Certificate

vCenter Server actually has three different components which need their certificates updated, vCenter Server, vCenter Web Client Server and vCenter 5 Inventory Service. Initially I had only written the vCenter Server certificate steps but luckily Michael Webster (VCDX #66) keeps me on my toes and I’ve now added parts for the other two components.

You should have now created the default vCenter 5 server certificate files, replaced the default vCenter 5 Server certificate, replaced the vCenter 5 Web Client Server certificate and can now go ahead and replace the vCenter 5 Inventory Service Certificate with the same new certificate files you have created.

On the vCenter Server navigate to C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\Inventory Service\ssl.

Make a backup copy of the SSL folder.

Copy the rui.crt, rui.key and rui.pfx files from C:\OpenSSL-Win64\bin into the into the vCenter Inventory Service SSL folder

Restart the vCenter Inventory Service which will also restart the VMware vSphere Profile-Driven Storage Service.

Part 7 will show you how to replace the default vSphere Update Manager 5 Server certificate.