Josh's Blog

With VMworld 2010 right around the corner the latest release of vSphere 4.1 should make for some interesting sessions. VMware continues to push towards the “Jouney to the Cloud” as vSphere as the platform behind the Cloud. Many of the 150 new features and improvements in vSphere 4.1 create more efficiency and functionality to run in a Cloud environment. But enough talk about Clouds, the reality is that the new features and functionality included in 4.1 improve efficiencies in any environment. I wanted to highlight some of the features in this release.

vSphere Client Removal from ESX/ESXi Builds:
This one I glossed over in the release notes until a colleague mentioned it the other day, I really couldn’t believe it so I had to go back and look it up…VMware really? The easiest place to get it from is the server itself not logging into the website!!! But I will get over it.

Storage I/O Control:
We now have DRS like functionality which in my eyes is long overdue; Storage I/O Control also known as SIOC now give administrators the ability to put priority on storage traffic for our most important Virtual Machines in times of contention much like we do in the . This feature is enabled per-datastore, and will kick in when latencies are 30 ms or greater by default and this threshold is configurable and can changed via advanced settings.

Storage I/O Control is only available in Enterprise Plus versions of vSphere.

Network I/O Control:
Another Enterprise Plus only feature in this release since this only applies to Distributed Virtual Switches is basically QoS for network. I see this becoming increasing important as the cost of 10 Gb Ethernet is continues to decrease. Network I/O Control (NetIOC) extends the same concepts of shares and limits from VMware’s Distributed Resource Scheduler to manage network traffic.

NetIOC applies to the following types of traffic:
• VM
• Management
• NFS
• iSCSI
• vMotion
• FT Logging

Memory Compression:
Designed to assist with Memory Over commitment which many feel is a bad thing but if you have a well designed and optimized Virtual Environment you should not need to utilize any of VMware’s memory tricks. But what memory compression essentially does is takes the swapped memory and compresses it to physical RAM. When the VM requests the swapped RAM it will be uncompressed and presented to the VM. As we know anytime we can get data out of RAM rather than disk we can improve performance.

vMotion Improvements:
vMotion is the core technology that put VMware on the map and they continue to make it better and better. A few enhancements have been made under the hood to improve vMotion performance for faster transfers.

The limits for concurrent vMotions have also been increased:
• 1 Gb NICs = 4 Concurrent vMotions
• 10 Gb NICs = 8 Concurrent vMotions
• Datastore (both VMFS and NFS) = 128 Concurrent Storage vMotions

vStorage API for Array Integration (VAAI):
One of my colleagues, David Langley discussed this topic on his blog VMware And Its Storage - Faster, Smarter, Stronger... Free? so rather than me write about it I won’t let his opinions go to waste.

But here are the cliff notes….Storage functions can be done at the array level more efficiently and quickly so VMware and storage vendors have worked together to offload some functionality down to the array.

ESXi:
Say goodbye to the vSphere you know if you haven’t adopted the ESXi version. vSphere 4.1 is the last major release to support the classic ESX software with the service console. Future releases will be ESXi only, using APIs to control and configure the host, and people should consider moving towards ESXi. I will be the first to say I am little sad to see the service console go away. Maybe it is the old school administrator in me but this is also the same guy that up until recently stopped using the classic menus in Windows. I have been using ESXi for a little time now and I can say that it isn’t that bad just takes some getting used to but I like it. Check out the VMware ESX to ESXi Upgrade Center.

HA:
High Availability limits have increased and we also have application awareness via VMware Tools
The following limits are increased:
• 32 hosts up from 8
• 320 VMs per host
• 3000 VMs per cluster

vCenter:
The biggest change is that it is 64-bit only, which will be a problem for a lot of people who are running 32-bit Windows but you do what you go to do.

Well that is all I have for now. I hope upon my arrival at VMworld this year I can blast out a few updates on new releases, announcements, & cool sessions. I am hoping for some big news since I feel the last couple of years things have been flat from an announcement standpoint.