CommVault Simpana 10 SP9 Released

Amid the holiday season you might have missed the Service Pack 9 release from CommVault so here’s a reminder, it’s out. And if you’re in a XenServer shop, it’s likely a worthwhile upgrade. A big complaint of our customers was the discontinued XenServer support in earlier service pack levels of v10. Well, it’s back. You always had the option to deploy in-guest agents but in SP9 the Virtual Server Agent supports the XenServer hypervisor so you can capture full VM images. Based on the excitement I saw coming out of Citrix’s XenServer 6.5 announcements earlier this month, I think it’s a good call to bring support for this platform into CommVault again.

Another feature I’m excited for is the Live Sync Replication of Virtual Machines. This feature is still considered “Early Release” but I’m excited all the same. With Live Sync, you’ll be able to leverage your CV infrastructure to replicate VM’s from one site to another. These features exist within vSphere and other 3rd party tools but it’ll be great to have all your data protection tools within one pane of glass with CommVault.

Read more about SP9 features here: http://documentation.commvault.com/commvault/v10/others/new_features/newsletters/newsletter_sp9.pdf

If you’re ready for an upgrade, drop us a line as we can help speed you through the process. If you’re running v9 or v8, we can help you validate that the rest of your environment is ready for the leap to v10.

Unable to get vCenter server certification chain error during vcOPs 5.8.1 install

During the deployment of the vcOPs vApp for a customer I ran into a new error – well, new for me. While the vApp (v5.8.1) deployed and booted fine, as I was registering it with the vCenter (v 5.1) as part of the initial configuration I got the following error: Unable to get vCenter server certification chain. Off we go to Google… Here’s a quick summary of things to check:

• Confirm name resolution is working, username/passwords are right, etc.
  • Assuming Windows, RDP to vCenter with the user you’re attempting to use or try access via your favorite vSphere management tool
  • Hop on the console of the UI VM and ping the vCenter by IP and DNS name (username: root initial password: vmware)
• Check that your vCenter certificate hasn’t expired. It’s the rui.crt file in c:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\SSL. This article has good info on locating and renewing your certificate, should that be your problem.
• In the end, my fix came by importing the certificate file to the UI VM manually as outlined in this VMware KB article.
  • Full disclosure, the symptoms in the above article didn’t match my problem exactly and I don’t like just trying random fixes. However, when I found this Blog Post, in Spanish, with my exact error recommending a similar .cert import process I threw caution to the wind. The exact steps from the Spanish blog didn’t quite work, which could be a result of my inability to read Spanish and/or Google Translate not being perfect, but the VMware KB article was spot on.

After importing the certificate manually and restarting services, all was well and I was able to complete the configuration of vcOPs. By the way, did you know that since vSphere 5.1, all licensed versions of vSphere now include the Foundation edition of vcOPs? More than 5 hosts in your environment and you’ve got enough scale to warrant leveraging this tool. For a limited time, VMware is letting Lewan perform a free vSphere Optimization Check including a 60 day trial of the Standard Edition, complete with the capacity management features, dynamic thresholds, and root cause analysis. Give us a call today to test drive Operations Management!

Windows Server 2012 Licensing – a quick reminder

This came up recently for a customer and while it’s not new news, I thought a quick reminder would be useful. There are a few key points to remember about licensing of Windows Server 2012 in server virtualization projects, these rules apply to XenServer, VMware, Hyper-V, Oracle VM, etc.:

• Licenses are applied to physical servers, never to virtual machines. If you are thinking about how you need a license for the VM you are about to build, you’re probably doing something wrong
• There is feature parity between Standard and Datacenter editions, Enterprise Ed has been dropped
  • The only difference between these 2 major editions is in the number of virtual OSE’s (operating system environments, aka a virtual machine) granted with the license
  • A license covers 2 processor sockets within 1 server, 1 license cannot be purchased to cover 2 servers each containing 1 populated processor
  • The license allows for one bare-metal install of the operating system, but doesn’t require it – as would be the case if your hypervisor is anything other than Hyper-V
  • Virtual OSE grants by edition:
    • Standard: 2 virtual OSE’s per license
    • Datacenter: unlimited OSE’s per license
• More than 1 license of the same edition may be applied to a given physical server to cover additional CPU sockets or additional virtual machines
  • 2 Standard Edition licenses would cover 4 processor sockets and/or up to 4 VM’s
  • 2 Datacenter Edition licenses would cover 4 processor sockets and two * unlimited for the number of VM’s ..that’s like beyond infinity, but 4 CPU sockets.
• The license cannot be transferred more than once every 90 days – yeah, you read that right. This rule is to prevent a license from jumping from one host to another to follow live migration activities
  • This is where most people pause and say “oh..”. That tells me they were purchasing 1 license per VM and just thinking the license moves around with the VM
  • You need to cover the high water mark of virtual OSE’s for a given host
• Licensing math:
  • Standard Ed. list pricing is $882
  • Datacenter Ed. list pricing is $4809
  • The break-even point for Datacenter is at 5.45 Standard licenses; in effect, for a density of more than 10 VM’s (5 std licenses each granting 2 OSE’s), you should use a Datacenter Edition license
• A real world example: New virtualization customer deploying 3 VMware hosts
  • We generally size the environment for N+1, meaning we’re planning that 1 of the servers is a “spare” from the perspective of workload sizing – so all the workload can run on just 2 servers; we’re planning for this and so should you in your licensing.
  • If you plan to run more than 20 total VM’s in this environment, you need 3 Datacenter Edition licenses
    • 20 VM’s running on 2 servers = 10 VM’s/server
    • 10 VM’s requires 5 Standard Edition licenses to have enough OSE grants
    • More than 10 per server, and it’s now cheaper to have just bought a single Datacenter Edition license
      • 6 * $882 = $5292, which is greater than $4809 for datacenter
    • Since you don’t know which host (think of a rolling patching cycle) is going to carry the increase load, all the hosts in the environment should be licensed uniformly to this high water mark
  • Depending on the licensing model, an upgrade from 5 * Standard Edition licenses to a single Datacenter Edition license may not be possible – plan ahead!
  • If you have OEM licenses that came with your old physical server environment, these are likely not transferrable – they don’t follow the P2V action
• With this understanding, while you might have some work to do upfront (or scrambling to get back into compliance now) the long term savings are very real for dense virtualization projects that can leverage the Datacenter Edition license. On a modern 2 socket server with 16 cores/32 threads, 10 VM or greater density is easily achievable

General licensing FAQ:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/4/D/B/4DB352D1-C610-466A-9AAF-EEF4F4CFFF27/WS2012_Licensing-Pricing_FAQ.pdf

Licensing brief for virtualized environments:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/3/D/4/3D42BDC2-6725-4B29-B75A-A5B04179958B/WindowsServer2012VirtualTech_VLBrief.pdf

Gaining user acceptance for your desktop virtualization project

So proud of Lewan’s own Kenneth Fingerlos who will be speaking next week at Citrix Synergy. A link to his session overview is available on the Citrix Blog: Gaining user acceptance for your desktop virtualization project | Citrix Blogs. Well done, Kenneth! Read his post to the Citrix Blog below:

Gaining user acceptance for your desktop virtualization project
By Kenneth Fingerlos

With the IT press being dominated with articles on the pitfalls of BYO, MDM, MAM, mobile data and cloud-based services it’s clear that enterprise IT and end-users are thinking about different things. When we look at the OS on our compute devices it’s clear that more and more end-user concerns are driving the decisions which go into the design of the devices.

When IT takes on desktop virtualization we focus on costs, security and efficiency. We assess our users to help us determine what is needed for them to do their jobs. With that knowledge we optimize our designs to minimize costs and provide just what every user needs. We focus on single image management and questions of if MCS or PVS might be a better way to deliver our unified images. Do we need a 3rd party personalization manager or can we make due to with roaming profiles or perhaps we can drop personalization all together.

Meanwhile our users are purchasing iPads and Androids at an alarming rate.

It’s common for IT to focus on securing our borders, centralizing our data and developing the most efficient infrastructures we can. It is after all what good IT people are trained to. We read the design guides and perform our Assess Design Deploy process faithfully. We know who our user groups are and what applications they need. We’ve created pristine template images, with all of our corporate graphics and the approved list of applications pre-installed. In short, our design is textbook perfect we’ve addressed all of IT’s project goals and we’re ready to begin roll-out.

Why then do our users balk at adopting virtualized desktops? Often stalling or delaying projects indefinitely?

Often when projects reach the user testing phase we find that users are reluctant and frequently actively resistant to adopting new virtualized desktops. When presented with the new “IT Optimized” desktop paradigm our users blatantly refuse to use it. And the project stalls.

Let’s explore why users are resistant, and what we (IT) can do to help ease them into a new model. We’ll talk about easy use cases and end user wins. We’ll talk about marketing desktop virtualization to our users. We’ll talk about some not-so-easy scenarios that we may want to put off and tackle after the project has some steam and victories on the record. We’ll talk about gold images, RemotePC, personal vDisk, personalization and dedicated desktops. But most importantly we’re going to talk about what users are looking for and how we bring them on-board with the project.

Come join me Friday, May 24th in SYN216: Gaining user acceptance for your desktop virtualization project at Synergy Los Angeles to talk about these issues and learn how to not only drive user adoption but to convert your users into your project’s largest promoters.

Kenneth Fingerlos has been working in IT since 1996 in various roles including systems admin, IT manager and IT consultant with a focus on all aspects of datacenter and end-user computing. Kenneth currently holds certifications from VMware and Citrix and works as a systems architect with Citrix Platinum partner Lewan & Associates. Twitter: @Kfingerlos