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Logging in vSphere 5.0 has been significantly enhanced. You now have fine-grained control over system logs, the location where logs are sent, and, for each log, default size and rotation policy. You can set up logging with the vSphere Client or with the esxcli system syslog command and the PowerCLI VMHostSysLogServer Commandlets. You can also set up logging behaviour for a host by using the Host Profiles interface in the vSphere Client and can then import that host profile into other hosts.

A vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS) functions as a single virtual switch across all associated hosts. This enables you to set network configurations that span across all member hosts, and allows virtual machines to maintain consistent network configuration as they migrate across multiple hosts.

In this video I'll show you how to troubleshoot and configure vNetwork Distributed Switch Network Adapters. The vNetwork Distributed Switch networking view of the host configuration page displays the configuration of the host’s associated vNetwork Distributed Switches and allows you to configure the vNetwork Distributed Switch network adapters and uplink ports.

For each host associated with a vNetwork Distributed Switch, you must assign physical network adapters, or uplinks, to the vNetwork Distributed Switch. You can assign one uplink on each host per uplink port on the vNetwork Distributed Switch.

Although Expandable Reservations are enabled by default on a resource pool, it doesn’t mean that they should stay enabled in every situation. In this white boarding session I’ll show what the hidden danger of using expandable reservations can lead to. The system considers the resources available in the selected resource pool and its direct parent resource pool. If the parent resource pool also has the Expandable Reservation option selected, it can borrow resources from its parent resource pool. Borrowing resources occurs recursively from the ancestors of the current resource pool as long as the Expandable Reservation option is selected. Leaving this option selected offers more flexibility, but, at the same time provides less protection. A child resource pool owner might reserve more resources than you anticipate.

I’ve received some awesome birthday presents this year and one of coolest presents is a sketch Design Tablet. This sketch board can be connected to my laptop trough USB and came with an real cool sketching tool called Artweaver. In this first episode I’ll explain how VLAN IDs can be used within a standard vSwitch environment. I know I’ll have to pick up some drawing skills but I think it’s a great way to explain complicated topics.

What are datastore heartbeats?

The host-X-hb (where X is the host’s MOID) is Located on each heartbeat datastore, this file is used to check for slave liveness through the heartbeat datastore.

This file is checked by the master host if the master loses network heartbeats from the slave.

For VMFS datastores, the vSphere HA agent locks this file with an exclusive lock and relies on the VMkernel heartbeat to indicate liveness.

For NFS datastores, vSphere HA periodically updates the time stamp to this file to indicate liveness.

The host-X-poweron (where X is the host’s MOID) is a per-host file that contains the list of all virtual machines that are powered on. This file is used as a communication channel if a management network outage occurs. Isolated slaves use this file to tell the master that it is isolated as well as to tell the master which virtual machines it has powered off.

The master host must determine whether the slave host:

• Actually crashed

• Is not responding because of a network failure

• The HA agent is in an unreachable state

The absence of both a network and datastore heartbeat indicates full host failure. Datastores are used as a backup communication channel to detect virtual machine and host heartbeats. Datastore heartbeats are used to make the distinction between a failed, an isolated or a partitioned host.

VMware vShield is a suite of security virtual appliances built for VMware vCenter Server and VMware ESX integration. vShield is a critical security component for protecting virtualized datacenters from attacks and misuse helping you achieve your compliance-mandated goals. vShield App is an interior, vNIC-level firewall that allows you to create access control policies regardless of network topology. A vShield App monitors all traffic in and out of an ESX host, including between virtual machines in the same port group. vShield App includes traffic analysis and container-based policy creation.

In this video I'll show you that vShield App installs as a hypervisor module and firewall service virtual appliance. vShield App integrates with ESX hosts through VMsafe APIs and works with VMware vSphere platform features such as DRS, vMotion, DPM, and maintenance mode. vShield App provides firewalling between virtual machines by placing a firewall filter on every virtual network adapter. The firewall filter operates transparently and does not require network changes or modification of IP addresses to create security zones. You can write access rules by using vCenter containers, like datacenters, cluster, resource pools and vApps, or network objects, like Port Groups and VLANs, to reduce the number of firewall rules and make the rules easier to track.

You should install vShield App instances on all ESX hosts within a cluster so that VMware vMotion operations work and virtual machines remain protected as they migrate between ESX hosts. By default, a vShield App virtual appliance cannot be moved by using vMotion. The Flow Monitoring feature displays allowed and blocked network flows at the application protocol level. You can use this information to audit network traffic and troubleshoot operational.

A few weeks ago I’ve delivered a VMware Site Recovery Manager training course and one of the attendees was Arnim van Lieshout. Besides being a co-author of the VMware vSphere PowerCLI Reference: Automating vSphere Administration guide, Arnim also works as a VMware PSO consultant. While we were trying to set-up SRM Host Based Replication, Arnim showed me a real cool trick to do some fast troubleshooting regarding the VPXD daemon, also known as the vCenter Service.

This video guides you through the process of troubleshooting a corrupted vCenter Server database with vpxd.exe -s and helps you to fix VPX daemon start-up problems. The video also helps you eliminate common causes for your problem by verifying the configuration of your database, validating network connectivity, and verifying the configuration of the vCenter Server service with vpxd.exe -b.

With VMware Data Recovery 2.0, VMware has extended the ability to quickly and simply protect and restore virtual machines. Fully integrated with VMware vCenter Server, VMware Data Recovery gives central management of backup and restore operations, and the inherent deduplication of data saves significant disk space and provides flexible options for storage. VMware Data Recovery 2.0 has introduced a number of improvements including performance enhancements, speed, and reliability improvements, as well as capabilities to enhance management with the ability to email reports and schedule maintenance windows

vSphere 5 introduces a new latency-aware Metro vMotion feature that not only provides better performance over long latency networks but also increases the round-trip latency limit for vMotion networks from 5 milliseconds to 10 milliseconds. Previously, vMotion was supported only on networks with round-trip latencies of up to 5 milliseconds. In vSphere 4.1, vMotion is supported only when the latency between the source and destination ESXi/ESX hosts is less than 5 ms RTT (round-trip time). For higher latencies, not all workloads are guaranteed to converge. With Metro vMotion in vSphere 5.0, vMotion can be used to move a running virtual machine when the source and destination ESX hosts have a latency of more than 5ms RTT. The maximum supported round trip time latency between the two hosts is now 10ms. Metro vMotion is only available with vSphere Enterprise Plus license.

Quest has created a piece of software that contains our entire ‘optimizing knowledge’ called the Quest vWorkspace Desktop Optimizer and they have decided to make it available to the desktop virtualization community, completely free of charge! The impact of the Desktop Optimizer can be huge. Quest has performed tests where they compared a vanilla install of Windows 7 Enterprise (no users logged on) to an install that was optimized using the default set of optimizations in the Quest vWorkspace Desktop Optimizer. The results are staggering! This Video will show you how easy your desktop can be optimized. More information and a download link can be found here.