RVTools – Updated

What is RVTools?

RVTools uses the VI SDK to display information about your virtual machines and ESX hosts, it can list information about cpu, memory, disks, nics, cd-rom, floppy drives, snapshots, VMware tools, ESX hosts, nics, datastores, service console, VM Kernel, switches, ports and health checks

Whats new?

Version 3.1 (April, 2011)
Logon form tab order rearranged
Logon form will remember your last selected host / vCenter server
On vInfo new fields Provisioned, Used and shared storage
On vInfo new fields install Boot Required, number of Virtual Disks
On vInfo new fields Fault Tolerance State,  FT Latency Status, FT Band width and FT Secondary Latency
On vInfo new field 128-bit SMBIOS UUID of the virtual machine.
On vDatastore new fields Total provisioned, Used and shared storage
On vDatastore new fields SIOC enabled flag and congested threshold value
On vDisk new field disk persistence mode.
On vNetwork all IP addresses of adapter are now visible
On vMemory new field distributed Memory Entitlement
On vCPU new fields static Cpu Entitlement and field distributed Cpu Entitlement
On vHost new fields Current EVC mode and Max EVC mode
New batch command line parameters -u user and -p password
Bugfix: custom fields not always visible on vSnapshot tab.
Bugfix: Export to Excel, some numeric columns are saved as text instead of numbers
RVToolsBatch.cmd with send by email example deployed in RVTools program file directory

Where do i get it?

RVtools

ESX to ESXi Migration

VMware have announced its plans to move away from the traditional ESX hypervisor architecture, based on its Console Operating System with its release of vSphere 4.1.  It is to concentrate on its lightweight hypervisor, known as ESXi.

The question is, you’ve already got an ESX infrastructure, how do you migrate?  VMware have released several technical white papers as a general guide on how to accomplish this.

Migration Checklist

Migration Guide

Host Configuration Worksheet

These papers will help you plan and perform your migration to the ESXi architecture alongside some helpful checklists for shaping the steps required to perform such a migration.

My latest upgrade path was to just upgrade the VC server and then rebuild the ESX hosts to ESXi, quite easily done when you have a HA environment based on shared storage, maybe not so easy when you have a single node with local storage.  But, if you are in that situation, and your VMFS storage is on a separate volume to the ESX installation then you can just re-install, but don’t delete any existing VMFS volumes, and make sure you have backups.  Or, even better, install ESXi on an SD or USB key and boot straight from that, without touching the local drives (and possibly the VMFS storage).

Veeam – the next generation

Veeam Backup & Replication will support image level backup of virtual machines running Microsoft Hyper-V, whereas is can only support VMware VM’s at the moment

Veeam will support all versions of Hyper-V, including the free version.

Why this sudden decision to support Hyper-V?  Easy – its the marketshare for Hyper-V.  VMware has a marketshare of 84% of the virtualization market whilst  Hyper-V only has 11%.  Gartner thinks that Hyper-V will grow by 27% by the end of 2012 while VMware will reduce by 65% (!).  It also expects Hyper-V and VMware to be running in the same datacenter, that is, companies will use both flavours of hypervisors.

Veeam will support the following major features for backing up Hyper-V virtual machines:

  • changed block tracking
  • image based backup and replication
  • compression and deduplication

So pretty much what is supports for VMware at the moment.

The new version is expected to be released in Q4 of 2011. It is also believed that VMware support will see additonal features implemented.

Host based replication will be made available to Hyper-V which is not available in other backup software, alongside Change Block Tracking, which means faster incremental backups of VM’s at the image level.  Basically Veeam will keep track of any change blocks in a VHD of that particular VHD (whereas CBT is completed by VMware when utilizing it, rather than Veeam itself)

Surebackup isnt implemented yet, but is sure (get it 🙂 ) to be implemented at some future point.

Thinking outside the box

Some interesting ways of utilizing HP Bladesystem, MDS and VSA to give you a solid virtualization platform:

http://h30507.www3.hp.com/t5/HP-Storage-Blog/Thinking-Outside-the-Box/ba-p/91583

 

HP Virtual Connect Fibre Channel Networking Cookbook

Want to know the supported implementation steps and concepts for integrating your spangly new HP Virtual Connect Fibre Channel and FlexFabric Modules into your existing SAN Fabric?
Simply check out this guide.

It gives details on all the basic building blocks of this type of design solution whilst being simplistic in nature to allow easier understanding for the reader.