VMware vSphere 4

VMware vFabric Hyperic

A demonstration of Hyperic and how it enables sysadmins to manage large environments, both in terms of giving them visibility into app infrastructure performance, as well as easing the amount of pain that it takes to install a conventional monitoring system and keep it up-to-date.

VMware High Availability Deployment Best Practices Whitepaper

VMware has released a High Availability Deployment Best Practices whitepaper for vSphere 4.1.

paper describes best practices and guidance for properly deploying VMware® High Availability (VMware HA) in VMware vSphere™ 4.1 (“vSphere”), including discussions on proper network and storage design, and recommendations on settings for host isolation response and admission control. This best-practice paper is not designed to replace existing product documentation. Instead it is designed to provide guidance based on the experience of VMware HA Product Management, Technical Marketing and Professional Services staff. Although
there are many configuration options to choose from and architecture choices that can be made, the recommendations in this paper are based on the most reliable and resilient possible choices for the majority of cluster deployments.

Click here to download

VMware Announces Hyperic 4.4 to Enhance Application Monitoring Across Virtual Infrastructure

VMware, Inc., the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter and to the cloud, today announced SpringSource® Hyperic™ 4.4, an award-winning solution for managing and monitoring custom applications. Through enhanced integration with VMware vCenter™ Server, Hyperic™ 4.4 now maintains a continually updated inventory of VMware vSphere™ ESX and ESXi hosts, enabling IT Administrators to more rapidly pinpoint, correct, and prevent application performance problems wherever they occur across physical, virtual, and private cloud infrastructures.

As organizations deploy an increasing proportion of their custom applications across virtual and cloud infrastructures, the dynamic nature of virtualized application resources has placed new demands on application operators needing visibility into the performance of those applications. Hyperic 4.4’s VMware vCenter Server integration enables application operators to ensure application performance despite this increased pace of change.

SpringSource Hyperic, a key element of SpringSource’s software suite, supports applications running on both physical and virtual infrastructure, providing in-depth real-time performance data on more than 75 technologies used to develop modern web applications and enabling customers to ensure that applications meet their service level commitments through reduced application downtime and improved performance.

“For some time, Hyperic has provided us with excellent visibility into the performance of our custom applications,” said Eric Schwalbe, technical advisor infrastructure integration, InterContinental Hotels Group. “By enabling us to understand performance at any point between the application and its ESX host, Hyperic 4.4 will enable us to extend this visibility across our virtualized infrastructure.”

"Without virtualization there is no cloud computing," said Rachel Chalmers, research director for infrastructure, The 451 Group. "The trouble with virtualization is that with it, datacenters become increasingly dynamic - not to say chaotic! That makes it extremely hard for the IT operations team to make sure applications are up and performing. What's needed are management tools that understand the whole software stack, from VM through OS to application payload - tools like Hyperic™."

“Hyperic™ 4.4 delivers a completely new level of integration with VMware vCenter Server designed to streamline the task of managing virtualized applications,” said Javier Soltero, CTO of Management Products for the SpringSource division of VMware. “Hyperic now provides system administrators complete, automatic visibility of virtual infrastructure resources as well as a completely new user interface built to enable analysis and correlation of every metric and event from VMware vSphere hosts up to the application.”

Hyperic 4.4’s VMware vCenter Server integration increases the effectiveness of IT operations teams in a range of critical application performance management activities that stem from the constant change inherent in virtualized datacenters, including:

Rapid Diagnosis of Virtualized Application Performance Problems: IT operations teams can now use Hyperic to rapidly pinpoint the cause of performance issues of applications running on virtualized infrastructure, by providing them with visibility into all application infrastructure layers, enabling them to determine whether the root cause of issues lies within an application, its guest operating system, or its ESX host. System administrators can easily compare performance data between an application and its corresponding virtual machine and ESX host via a new Hyperic user interface. This UI enables system administrators to reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR) and increase mean time between failures (MTBF).

Automatic Maintenance of Application Infrastructure Inventory: Hyperic 4.4 automatically discovers ESX hosts, virtual machines, and guest operating systems within minutes of their launch, and presents them in a unified topology so users can see which application components are running on which ESX hosts. This eliminates reliance on chronically out-of-date configuration management databases (CMDBs). Additionally, Hyperic detects when virtual machines are moved from one ESX host to another using vMotion™, and adjusts topologies accordingly: no monitoring data is lost and there’s no need to recreate alerting workflows. This exceptional level of automation saves system administrators time and lets them manage more applications and servers than ever before.

Virtualization-Aware Alerting: Hyperic 4.4 can distinguish between when a guest operating system has shut down unintentionally, and when it has been intentionally powered down or suspended. This prevents false alarms and enables system administrators to elastically scale their application infrastructure without triggering alert storms.

Additional Virtualization Features of Hyperic:
Hyperic 4.4 continues Hyperic’s tradition of leadership in the management of applications running in virtualized environments. In 2006, Hyperic delivered the industry’s first application performance monitoring for VMware ESX and GSX, and has long provided system administrators with the following capabilities, which remain in version 4.4:

Application Virtualization Migration Assurance: For IT teams running pilot projects to virtualize custom application workloads, Hyperic enables users to definitively quantify virtualization’s impact on application performance by baselining critical performance metrics for both physical and virtual infrastructure.

Automated Problem Resolution: Hyperic can automate common responses to application problems -- such as reverting a virtual machine to a snapshot, restarting a virtual machine, and rebooting a guest operating system. These automated recovery actions help fulfill virtualization’s promise of greater operational efficiency, especially for companies with global customers who need to keep consumer-facing applications running 24/7.

Virtualized Environment Event & Log Monitoring: Hyperic’s event management features provide visibility into the log events reported for every virtual machine. Log events provide system awareness for performance data, configuration changes, and security action changes, such as when a virtual machine has been reverted to a snapshot. These events can be used to generate alerts, or simply to correlate errors reported in the VMware logs with performance and health indicators elsewhere in the environment.

Availability and Support
Hyperic 4.4 is available immediately and can be purchased August 4, 2010. Additional Hyperic 4.4 details are available at http://SpringSource.com/hyperic44.

Upcoming Hyperic Webinar
SpringSource will host a free webinar entitled “The 10 Pitfalls to Avoid When Monitoring a Virtualized Environment -- Learn How the New Hyperic 4.4 Helps You Manage the Constant Change Inherent in Virtualized Datacenters,” on Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 9 am PDT. To register, visit http://j.mp/hyperic44.

F5 and VMware Solution Yields 10x Improvement in Long Distance Live Migration Performance Using VMware VMotion

F5 Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: FFIV), the global leader in Application Delivery Networking (ADN), today announced deployment guidance and test results that illustrate and validate the value of deploying F5^® and VMware solutions in concert to extend live migration capabilities across long distances for VMware vSphere^™ 4 environments in a secure, accelerated manner.

Building on the previous announcement and demo at VMworld 2009, these test results confirm that organizations can securely migrate live, virtualized web applications - and their associated storage - between data centers thousands of miles apart without downtime or user disruption using F5^® and VMware products available today.

The integrated solution enables organizations to rapidly respond to changing application and business requirements by seamlessly migrating live applications across geographically dispersed data centers.

Details

VMware VMotion^™ is deployed in production by a significant number of VMware customers to migrate virtual machines and data. The joint F5 and VMware solution helps solve latency, bandwidth, and packet-loss issues, which historically have prevented customers from performing live migrations between data centers. Long distance virtual machine migration across distributed data centers typically required the operator to halt online sessions, suspend the image, migrate the image to the new data center, and then bring the virtual machine back online at the new data center. This process could require significant downtime. Moreover, once the virtual machine was back online at the new data center, clients with previously established sessions would still be unable to access the migrated application until they received an updated DNS record aligning with the new location. This new solution mitigates the impact of migrating virtual machines across long distances - allowing live migration and automatic redirection of sessions - thus making the experience seamless to users.

A flexible Application Delivery Network is the fundamental component required to extend live migration capabilities beyond a single data center. There are two key ADN components to the new solution:

• BIG-IP^® WAN Optimization Module^™ (WOM^™) secures and accelerates VMware VMotion^™ and VMware Storage VMotion traffic up to 10x when compared to attempting long distance live migration without the solution—even over links that are subject to bandwidth, latency, or packet-loss issues. BIG-IP WOM encrypts and compresses data between BIG-IP devices, extending the effective distances of migrations and decreasing replication time for offline transfers.
• BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager^™ (LTM^™) and BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager^™ (GTM^™) enable local and global redirection of established and new web application sessions before and after the migration. This overcomes many of the networking hurdles that previously prevented organizations from migrating live applications between data centers.

Supporting Quotes

“VMware VMotion^™ and Storage VMotion capabilities are significant differentiators for VMware vSphere^™,” said Parag Patel, Vice President, Alliances at VMware. “F5’s technology complements VMware solutions, making it possible to execute live workload migrations over greater distances. Combining VMware vSphere with BIG-IP^® solutions expands the many use cases possible, and adds to the value we’re able to offer customers.”

“According to recent ESG research, increasing server virtualization usage is the top overall IT priority facing organizations over the next 12 to 18 months,” said Mark Bowker, Senior Analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group. “The mobility of virtual machines now provided by F5 and VMware will help companies distribute workloads across data centers, relocate applications closer to the end-user, and perform live data center migrations.”

“F5 and VMware are working closely to integrate Application Delivery Networking and virtualization with the goal of making our customers’ application infrastructures more resilient and responsive to business needs,” said Jim Ritchings, VP of Business Development at F5. “This joint solution frees applications from infrastructure constraints for maximum flexibility and business agility. We look forward to continued collaboration and innovation with VMware to address the growing demand for flexible virtualization solutions.”

Availability

F5’s step-by-step solution deployment guide for long distance live migrations performed with VMware VMotion^™ can be downloaded from f5.com. This resource includes general guidelines on expected performance gains and the types of applications best suited to long distance live migrations with VMware VMotion.

All products integrated within the joint solution are available today from F5 and VMware, respectively.

To learn more about how F5 and VMware solutions help customers virtualize their infrastructures and improve IT agility, please visit www.f5.com/solutions/applications/vmware/virtualization/