Virtualization

A few weeks ago here on System Center Forum, I descibed (at least in part) the role of Operations Manager 2007 in virtualization initiatives.

Recently, I ran across a good deep dive on how Quick Migration (Hyper-V) and Vmotion (VMware) actually work under the hood I think will be of interest to many of you.
While the technical bits in these articles are great, take the business case in part 2 with a grain of salt. While Vmotion definitely has the advantage over Quick Migration in terms of downtime, I think one could plausibly develop some alternate strategies for maintaining high availability at the application layer that could offset some or all of the disadvantages of Quick Migration shown in the scenario described.

• Vmotion versus Quick Migration - Part 1
• Vmotion versus Quick Migration - Part 2

As you may be aware, Virtual Machine Manager 2008 beta was announced at MMS. VMM 2008 provides management of not only Hyper-V and VS 2005 R2, but VMware ESX as well. With this release and the Operations Manager 2007 integration with VMM, it is clear MS plans to fight its next battles in the virtualization war on the front-end, providing effective management tools with broad heterogeneous management capabilities.

Update your MOM skills to Operations Manager 2007 at the Operations Manager 2007 Bootcamp! Check the 2008 Bootcamp Schedule and request pricing and availability HERE.

While it’s clear MS has a long journey to take the lead in the virtualization market, it’s interesting to see how System Center technologies can drive virtualization, often on the cheap. But with hyper V on the way, we’re going to see more Windows shops looking to consolidate servers on the new virtualization platform.

Operations Manager 2007 plays an obvious supporting role in monitoring VM hosts and guest operating systems. However, Operations Manager can play a key role in actually planning your organizations virtualization initiative.

Did you know you can order up Operations Manager 2007 virtualization reports from the System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) Administrator Console?

The reports are generated by Operations Manager 2007 monitoring, but can be ordered through the VMM Console. This makes it convenient for your virtualization gurus to analyze their piece of the infrastructure, even if they don’t know a thing about Operations Manager 2007.

This does require three things to make the magic happen:

1. You must import the Server Virtualization MP for Operations Manager 2007.

2. You must enable reports in SC Virtual Machine Manager.

3. The second item is that to see and order reports in SC Virtual Machine Manager, you must be a member of an Operations Manager Report Operator role

Available Reports:

The available virtualization reports through Opsmgr include these listed below.

• Virtualization Candidates report - Helps identify physical computers that are good candidates for conversion to virtual machines. The Virtualization Candidates report displays average values for a set of commonly requested performance counters for CPU, memory, and disk usage, along with hardware configuration, including processor speed, number of processors, and total RAM. You can limit the report to computers that meet specified CPU and RAM requirements, and you can sort the results by selected columns in the report.
• Virtual Machine Allocation report provides information you can use to calculate chargebacks to cost centers for virtual machines.
• Virtual Machine Utilization report provides information about your virtual machines. For the identified time, this report shows average usage and total or maximums for virtual machine processors, memory, and disk space.
• Host Utilization report shows the number of virtual machines running per host. For the identified time and host group, this report shows average usage and total or maximums for host processors, memory, and disk space.
• Host Utilization Growth report shows the percentage growth of host resources and number of virtual machines running for the identified time period.

What is this worth?

VMware partners (like EMC) actually offer a services package in which they collect data from your environment, which they then analyze and make recommendations. I’ve had some customers tell me they actually paid for this service.

The real value here is that System Center takes the planning process from a professional services engagement to an in-house activity.

As you might have read earlier, the System Center Virtual User Group was launched, on March 27th. It’s a user group dedicated to providing resources for education and collaboration between users of Microsoft System Center technologies everywhere. Check it out at www.systemcenterusergroup.org.

To get the user group off to a fun start, we were discussing the possibility of hosting a contest for the best custom System Center solution, and need to know if you’d be willing to participate. Please read the following, and then post a comment to this thread if you would be willing to play.

The contest would showcase the best custom System Center community solution for a number of categories, including custom Management Pack (Opsmgr / Essentials), Configuration Pack (SCCM), Scripts (any System Center product), etc. Users would submit their entries to the site for judgement by a panel of System Center experts. Prizes would include XBOX 360 (for the overall winner), a Zune for the first couple of runners-up overall, and then books and miscellaneous prizes for the runners-up in each category.

Would you be willing to participate?
If so, register on the site (free) and add a comment to this post. If it looks like there will be a good number of participants, we will announce something official in the next few days!

This has been floating around the virtualization community for awhile, but saw an official announcement of the VI Powershell Toolkit beta, a new management interface for VMware virtualization platform.

Do you think they’re going to aim for the same cross-platform management coming in SCVMM vNext?

Update your MOM skills to Operations Manager 2007 at the Operations Manager 2007 Bootcamp! Check the 2008 Bootcamp Schedule and request pricing and availability HERE.

The next release of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (currently  dubbed “SCVMM vNext”) aims to consolidate management of virtual machines from multiple platforms and sources (VS 2005, VMware 3.x, and Xen in a future release). But to really win the war in the end, I believe MS needs to target the following key areas: 

1. DR / HA - MS currently has no true  VMotion equivalent today. Addressing disaster recovery scenarios is definitely a key area. Check out the High Availability with Hyper-V webcast.
2. Performance - By some estimates I’ve seen, VMware outperforms Virtual Server 2005 by 15-20%. We’ll see how far Windows 2008 cuts into that.
3. Make virtualization accessible for the mid-market - Virtualization has found it’s way into shops as small as 35 users amongst my clients, but the VMware mgmt interfaces (and let’s face it, virtualization concepts in general) are tough for IT generalists to grasp. Delivering a better mouse-trap to this market is critical for adoption.
4. Appliances - With the release of 3i, VMware enterered the world of plug-and-play virtualization with minimal user knowledge of necessary configuration items. This would no doubt ease deployment not only in mid-market, but branch office deployment in the enterprise space.

Read more about Microsoft’s plans for the next version of VMM HERE.

Virtualization support and guidance for MOM 2005 and OpsMgr 2007 is an often discussed, yet ill-documented subject. Ops Mgr PM Satya Vel shared some of his thoughts on which Ops Mgr 2007 server roles are good candidates for virtualization.

More at the source

VMware ESX 3.x / VI3 provides a variety of methods for collecting critical performance and configuration data, including SNMP, Syslog, ESXTOP utility (via ssh), the SDK Web Service and the now deprecated ESX COM API.

Jonathan Hambrook has created a very nice 60-page how-to guide taking users through the configuration process of discovery and configuration of basic (and free!) ESX monitoring using SNMP and Telnet. He put many hours into this no doubt. You can down his guide HERE. Very well done Jonathan.

With no budget this is a great start. For those who can spare an extra $975 US (retail), nWorks offers a full-featured ESX management pack leveraging all the available data sources, most importantly the SDK Web Service, which is a very rich data source in the latest release. For a demo of the nWorks offering, see the demo on their product homepage at: http://www.nworks.com/vmware/

SCVMM is moving along, bringing MS somewhat closer to competing with VMware ESX. Bear in mind that the V-motion functionality of ESX / VI3 is not expected from MS until the release after this one in the neighborhood of 2010.

Resources

• SCVMM 2007 Homepage
• SCVMM 2007 Beta 2 Download link

Key features

• Centralized deployment and management of virtual machines
• Intelligent Placement analysis to determine the best servers for virtualization
• Powershell command shell interface
• Conversion  features physical-to-virtual and virtual-to-virtual
• Ease of use with a familiar interface and seamless integration with other Microsoft products
• Self-service provisioning of VM resources
• Resource efficiency with server consolidation and increased processor utilization