vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) is a cool product from VMware which allows you to create tasks and automated workflows which and be run directly within vSphere Web Client or the vCenter Orchestrator Client.

vCO brings automation to the next level and helps admins, engineers to orchestrate and integrate your cloud with the rest of management systems.

There are a number of pre-made workflows integrated in vCO to get you started. Almost any task that can be performed in vCenter can be automated through vCO. With the use of AD integration, API’s and other 3rd party plugin’s vCO becomes more powerful and can save a lot of time for the VMware admins.

Workflows can be anything from simple workflows that contain a single task to say create a virtual machine, to complicated workflows containing many tasks that might build an entire solution and integrate with 3rd party plugins.

vCO is included with vCenter Server and it’s free!  … Read More

Today when I booted my lab I saw some issues with one of the host and the summary page of host was showing the below error

“The vNetwork Distributed Switch configuration on some hosts differed from that of the vCenter Server.”

The cause of this issue can be explained as follows:

When we install distributed switch and add hosts to the vDS a hidden switch is created on all hosts and a copy of  vDS database is copied to each host with information on the switch. This database is synched every 5 minutes.

vDS are created and managed from vCenter as it holds the management plane and the the part of vDS which get installed on per host level is called IO plane. So if ever vCenter Server is down it will not affect the VM traffic on the host and you will only loose management capabilities.

Selecting the vDS and navigating to host tab will show you a warning (under VDS status) that your host is out of sync.… Read More

In the last 2 posts of this series we had a look into overview of factors affecting your storage design and discussed about designing storage from availability point of view. This post will be focusing on the capacity related factors which you should keep in mind before start configuring your storage devices or jump ahead and start creating your VMFS datastores.

When designing storage from capacity point of view it should be kept in mind that the capacity which we choose should be not only enough for initial deployments but should be scalable as well so as storage expansion in future can go easy without any fuss.

We will start this post with choosing the RAID type for your storage arrays.

Nearly all organization using storage array or SAN in their production environment go ahead with configuring RAID on the array so that disk failures issues in future can be easily dealt with and environment should not suffer any data loss.… Read More

In my last post Storage Design Considerations- Overview I have discussed few points that are very crucial and must be paid serious attention while designing the storage infrastructure.

In this post I will discuss about the importance of the availability of the storage component in a virtual infrastructure and important considerations:

Availability of the storage component is very crucial. No vSphere or SAN admin will ever want to face a situation of complete outage from storage point of view.

Performance and Capacity issues are not that much disruptive and if very well planned and monitored then those issues can be rectified without any downtime.

To avoid situation of complete outage we should build redundancy on each and every components of the storage devices. All your physical servers can be connected to a one large piece of storage device and failure of it means a situation of chaos for you. So every components and connections have sufficient levels of redundancy to ensure that there are no single points of failure

Whenever we talk about availability we always talk about the concept of the 9’s.… Read More

Storage is perhaps one of the most critical piece in any virtualized environment. All the virtual workloads in a small or large environment is running on some sort of storage. It may be either local disks present in a server or can be cheap NAS devices or the expensive SAN devices.

A lot of innovation is going on in storage technology and it’s kinda fueled by the capabilities which are induced in the new hardware versions of the devices. Storage is just not about how much space you are getting against every dollar invested. The advancements in virtualization has affected storage seriously and it is now much more than just capacity.

Due to this reason the vSphere 5.0 release is also known as storage release sometimes. Features such as Storage vMotion help abstract not just the server hardware but also the storage. Storage DRS and Profile Driven Storage features has allowed the admins to get more value from the expenditure made on storage.… Read More

These days it has become hard to keep track of all VMware’s Product Launches, upgrades, hotfixes and new releases.

To make things simpler VMware launched a new program called VMware Software Manager, that can help you track which is the most recent release of its products and more, download them while checking the integrity of them. It is a free product that dramatically simplifies the download of VMware suites and products.

VMware Download Manager was announced at the same time when vSphere 6.0 was announced and it is still in its early phase (version 1.0) and the download catalog is currently limited to the following Datacenter and Cloud infrastructure products:

• VMware vCloud Suite 6.0, 5.8, and 5.5
• VMware vSphere w/ Operations Management 6.0 and 5.5
• VMware vSphere 6.0, 5.5, and 5.1

Advantage of using Software manager over general downloading method:

Easy to Use

Provides an easy to use interface to find, select & download the content needed to install or upgrade a VMware suite with the push of a button

File Integrity Check

Verifies the suite was downloaded without corruption

New Release Detection

Automatically detects the release of new VMware suites, products and versions

System Requirements

To be able to install and use Download Service, you must ensure that your system meets specific operating system and Web browser requirements.… Read More