Wednesday, July 16, 2014

vSphere Advanced Technics: Difference between VMware ESX and ESXiVMware ESX ...

vSphere Advanced Technics: Difference between VMware ESX and ESXi
VMware ESX ...: Difference between VMware ESX and ESXi VMware ESX ESX (Elastic Sky X) is the VMware’s enterprise server virtualization platform. In ES...

Friday, July 4, 2014

New features and capabilities available in vSphere 5.5

Doubled Host-Level Configuration Maximums – vSphere 5.5 is capable of hosting any size workload; a fact that is punctuated by the doubling of several host-level configuration maximums. The maximum number of logical CPUs has doubled from 160 to 320, the number of NUMA nodes doubled from 8 to 16, the number of virtual CPUs has doubled from 2048 to 4096, and the amount of RAM has also doubled from 2TB to 4TB. There is virtually no workload that is too big for vSphere 5.5 .
Hot-pluggable PCIe SSD Devices – vSphere 5.5 provides the ability to perform hot-add and remove of SSD devices to/from a vSphere 5.5 host. With the increased adoption of SSD, having the ability to perform both orderly as well as unplanned SSD hot-add/remove operations is essential to protecting against downtime and improving host resiliency.
Improved Power Management – ESXi 5.5 provides additional power savings by leveraging CPU deep process power states (C-states). By leveraging the deeper CPU sleep states ESXi can minimizes the amount of power consumed by idle CPUs during periods of inactivity. Along with the improved power savings comes additional performance boost on Intel chipsets as turbo mode frequencies can be reached more quickly when CPU cores are in a deep C-State.
Virtual Machine Compatibility ESXi 5.5 (aka Virtual Hardware 10) – ESXi 5.5 provides a new Virtual Machine Compatibility level that includes support for a new virtual-SATA Advance Host Controller Interface (AHCI) with support for up to 120 virtual disk and CD-ROM devices per virtual machine. This new controller is of particular benefit when virtualizing Mac OS X as it allows you to present a SCSI based CD-ROM device to the guest.
VM Latency Sensitivity – included with the new virtual machine compatibility level comes a new “Latency Sensitivity” setting that can be tuned to help reduce virtual machine latency. When the Latency sensitivity is set to high the hypervisor will try to reduce latency in the virtual machine by reserving memory, dedicating CPU cores and disabling network features that are prone to high latency.
Expanded vGPU Support – vSphere 5.5 extends VMware’s hardware-accelerated virtual 3D graphics support (vSGA) to include GPUs from AMD. The multi-vendor approach provides customers with more flexibility in the data center for Horizon View virtual desktop workloads. In addition 5.5 enhances the “Automatic” rendering by enabling the migration of virtual machines with 3D graphics enabled between hosts running GPUs from different hardware vendors as well as between hosts that are limited to software backed graphics rendering.
Graphics Acceleration for Linux Guests – vShere 5.5 also provides out of the box graphics acceleration for modern GNU/Linux distributions that include VMware’s guest driver stack, which was developed by VMware and made available to all Linux vendors at no additional cost.
vCenter Single Sign-On (SSO) – in vSphere 5.5 SSO comes with many improvements. There is no longer an external database required for the SSO server, which together with the vastly improved installation experience helps to simplify the deployment of SSO for both new installations as well as upgrades from earlier versions. This latest release of SSO provides enhanced active directory integration to include support for multiple forest as well as one-way and two-way trusts. In addition, a new multi-master architecture provides built in availability that helps not only improve resiliency for the authentication service, but also helps to simplify the overall SSO architecture.
vSphere Web Client – the web client in vSphere 5.5 also comes with several notable enhancements. The web client is now supported on Mac OS X, to include the ability to access virtual machine consoles, attach client devices and deploy OVF templates. In addition there have been several usability improvements to include support for drag and drop operations, improved filters to help refine search criteria and make it easy to find objects, and the introduction of a new “Recent Items” icon that makes it easier to navigate between commonly used views.
vCenter Server Appliance – with vSphere 5.5 the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) now uses a reengineered, embedded vPostgres database that offers improved scalability. I wasn’t able to officially confirm the max number of hosts and VMs that will be supported with the embedded DB. They are targeting 100 hosts and 3,000 VMs but we’ll need to wait until 5.5 releases to confirm these numbers. However, regardless what the final numbers are, with this improved scalability the VCSA is a very attractive alternative for folks who may be looking to move a way from a Windows based vCenter.
vSphere App HA – App HA brings application awareness to vSphere HA helping to further improve application uptime. vSphere App HA works together with VMware vFabric Hyperic Server to monitor application services running inside the virtual machine, and when issues are detected perform restart actions as defined by the administrator in the vSphere App HA Policy.
vSphere HA Compatibility with DRS Anti-Affinity Rules –vSphere HA will now honor DRS anti-affinity rules when restarting virtual machines. If you have anti-affinity rules defined in DRS that keep selected virtual machines on separate hosts, VMware HA will now honor those rules when restarting virtual machines following a host failure.
vSphere Big Data Extensions(BDE) – Big Data Extensions is a new addition to the VMware vSphere Enterprise and Enterprise Plus editions. BDE is a vSphere plug-in that enables administrators to deploy and manage Hadoop clusters on vSphere using the vSphere web client.
Support for 62TB VMDK – vSphere 5.5 increases the maximum size of a virtual machine disk file (VMDK) to 62TB (note the maximum VMFS volume size is 64TB where the max VMDK file size is 62TB). The maximum size for a Raw Device Mapping (RDM) has also been increased to 62TB.
Microsoft Cluster Server (MCSC) Updates – MSCS clusters running on vSphere 5.5 now support Microsoft Windows 2012, round-robin path policy for shared storage, and iSCSI and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) for shared storage.
16Gb End-to-End Support – In vsphere 5.5 16Gb end-to-end FC support is now available. Both the HBAs and array controllers can run at 16Gb as long as the FC switch between the initiator and target supports it.
Auto Remove of Devices on PDL – This feature automatically removes a device from a host when it enters a Permanent Device Loss (PDL) state. Each vSphere host is limited to 255 disk devices, removing devices that are in a PDL state prevents failed devices from occupying a device slot.
VAAI UNMAP Improvements – vSphere 5.5 provides and new “esxcli storage vmfs unmap” command with the ability to specify the reclaim size in blocks, opposed to just a percentage, along with the ability to reclaim space in increments rather than all at once.
VMFS Heap Improvements – vSphere 5.5 introduces a much improved heap eviction process, which eliminates the need for large heap sizes. With vSphere 5.5 a maximum of 256MB of heap is needed to enable vSphere hosts to access the entire address space of a 64TB VMFS.
vSphere Flash Read Cache – a new flash-based storage solution that enables the pooling of multiple flash-based devices into a single consumable vSphere construct called a vSphere Flash Resource, which can be used to enhance virtual machine performance by accelerating read-intensive workloads.
Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) Enhancements – with the vSphere Distributed Switch in vSphere 5.5 LACP now supports 22 new hashing algorithms, support for up to 64 Link Aggregation Groups (LAGs), and new workflows to help configure LACP across large numbers of hosts.
Traffic Filtering Enhancements – the vSphere Distributed Switch now supports packet classification and filtering based on MAC SA and DA qualifiers, traffic type qualifiers (i.e. vMotion, Management, FT), and IP qualifiers (i.e. protocol, IP SA, IP DA, and port number).
Quality of Service Tagging – vSphere 5.5 adds support for Differentiated Service Code Point (DCSP) marking. DSCP marking support enables users to insert tags in the IP header which helps in layer 3 environments where physical routers function better with an IP header tag than with an Ethernet header tag.
Single-Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) Enhancements – vSphere 5.5 provides improved workflows for configuring SR-IOV as well as the ability to propagate port group properties to up to the virtual functions.
Enhanced Host-Level Packet Capture – vSphere 5.5 provides an enhanced host-level packet capture tool that is equivalent to the command-line tcpdump tool available on the Linux platform.
40Gb NIC Support – vSphere 5.5 provides support for 40Gb NICs. In 5.5 the functionality is limited to the Mellanox ConnectX-3 VPI adapters configured in Ethernet mode.
vSphere Data Protection (VDP) – VDP has also been updated in 5.5 with several great improvements to include the ability to replicate backup data to EMC Avamar, direct-to-host emergency restore, the ability to backup and restore of individual .vmdk files, more granular scheduling for backup and replication jobs, and the ability to mount existing VDP backup data partitions when deploying a new VDP appliance. For more information about these new features as well as more information about VDP vs.

Difference between VMware ESX and ESXi

VMware ESX

ESX (Elastic Sky X) is the VMware’s enterprise server virtualization platform. In ESX, VMkernel is the virtualization kernel which is managed by a console operating system which is also called as Service console. Which is linux based and its main purpose is it to provide a Management interface for the host and lot of management agents and other thrid party software agents are installed on the service console to provide the functionalists like hardware management and monitoring of ESX hypervisor.

VMware ESXi

ESXi (Elastic sky X Integrated) is also the VMware’s enterprise server virtualization platform. In ESXi, Service console is removed. All the VMware related agents and third party agents such as management and monitoring agents can also run directly on the VMkernel. ESXi is ultra-thin architecture which is highly reliable and its small code-base allows it to be more secure with less codes to patch. ESXi uses Direct Console User Interface (DCUI) instead of a service console to perform management of ESXi server. ESXi installation will happen very quickly as compared to ESX installation.

Comparing the Legacy and New vSphere Architectures

Improve Reliability and Security - The ESX architecture available in releases prior to vSphere 5.0 relied on a Linux-based COS for serviceability and agent-based partner integration. In the new, operating-system independent ESXi architecture, the approximately 2GB COS has been removed and the necessary management functionality has been implemented directly in the core VMkernel. Eliminating the COS drastically reduces the install footprint of the vSphere ESXi hypervisor to approximately 150MB, improving security and reliability by removing the security vulnerabilities associated with a general purpose operating system.

- See more at: http://www.vmware.com/products/esxi-and-esx/why-esxi.html#sthash.BpABc3b8.dpuf

Improve Reliability and Security

The ESX architecture available in releases prior to vSphere 5.0 relied on a Linux-based COS for serviceability and agent-based partner integration. In the new, operating-system independent ESXi architecture, the approximately 2GB COS has been removed and the necessary management functionality has been implemented directly in the core VMkernel. Eliminating the COS drastically reduces the install footprint of the vSphere ESXi hypervisor to approximately 150MB, improving security and reliability by removing the security vulnerabilities associated with a general purpose operating system - See more at: http://www.vmware.com/products/esxi-and-esx/why-esxi.html#sthash.BpABc3b8.dpuf

- See more at: http://www.vmware.com/products/esxi-and-esx/why-esxi.html#sthash.BpABc3b8.dpuf

The ESX architecture available in releases prior to vSphere 5.0 relied on a Linux-based COS for serviceability and agent-based partner integration. In the new, operating-system independent ESXi architecture, the approximately 2GB - See more at: http://www.vmware.com/products/esxi-and-esx/why-esxi.html#sthash.BpABc3b8.dpuf

The ESX architecture available in releases prior to vSphere 5.0 relied on a Linux-based COS for serviceability and agent-based partner integration.In the new, operating-system independent ESXi architecture, the approximately 2GB COS has been removed and the necessary management functionality has been implemented directly in the core VMkernel. Eliminating the COS drastically reduces the install footprint of the vSphere ESXi hypervisor to approximately 150MB,improving security and reliability by removing the security vulnerabilities associated with a general purpose operating system.

- See more at: http://www.vmware.com/products/esxi-and-esx/why-esxi.html#sthash.BpABc3b8.dpuf

Comparing the Legacy and New vSphere Architectures

What’s New in vSphere 5.1

In the vSphere 5.1 release VMware has added several significant enhancements to ESXi.

NEW Improved Security - There is no longer a dependency on a shared root account when working from the ESXi Shell. Local users assigned administrative privileges automatically get full shell access. With full shell access local users no longer need to “su” to root in order to run privileged commands.

NEW Improved Logging and Auditing - In vSphere 5.1 all host activity, from both the Shell and the Direct Console User Interface (DCUI), are now logged under the account of the logged in user. This ensures user accountability, making it easy to monitor and audit activity on the host.

NEW Enhanced SNMPv3 Support - VSphere 5.1 adds support for SNMP v.3 to include both SNMP authentication and SSL encryption.

NEW Enhanced vMotion - vSphere 5.1 provide a new level of ease and flexibility for live virtual machine migrations. vSphere 5.1 now allows combining vMotion and Storage vMotion into one operation. The combined migration copies both the virtual machine memory and its disk over the network to the destination host. In smaller environments the ability to simultaneously migrate both memory and storage allows virtual machines to be migrated between hosts that do not have shared storage. In larger environments this capability allows virtual machines to be migrated between clusters that do not have a common set of datastores.

NEW vShield Endpoint Bundling - Now included in vSphere 5.1, vShield Endpoint offloads antivirus and anti-malware agent processing inside guest virtual machines to a dedicated secure virtual appliance delivered by VMware partners.

New Virtual Hardware - VSphere 5.1 introduces a new generation of virtual hardware with virtual machine hardware version 9, which includes the following new features:

64-way virtual SMP. vSphere 5.1 supports virtual machines with up to 64 virtual CPUs, which lets you run larger CPU-intensive workloads on the vSphere platform.
1TB virtual machine RAM. You can assign up to 1TB of RAM to VSphere 5.1 virtual machines.
Hardware accelerated 3D graphics support for Windows Aero. vSphere 5.1 supports 3D graphics to run Windows Aero and Basic 3D applications in virtual machines.
Guest OS Storage Reclamation. With Guest OS Storage Reclamation, when files are removed from inside the guest OS the size of the VMDK file can be reduced and the de-allocated storage space returned to the storage array’s free pool. Guest OS Storage Reclamation utilizes a new SE Sparse VMDK format available with VMware® Horizon (with View).
Improved CPU virtualization. In vSphere 5.1 the vSphere host is better able to virtualize the physical CPU and thus expose more information about the CPU architecture to the virtual machine. vSphere 5.1 also adds the ability to exposes additional low-level CPU counters to the guest OS. Exposing the low-level CPU counter information allows for improved debugging, tuning and troubleshooting of operating systems and applications running inside the virtual machine.

Other significant capabilities available with vSphere since the 4.1 release:

AD Integration - Ability to configure the host to join an Active Directory domain. Once added to the AD domain users accessing vSphere hosts will be authenticated against the centralized user directory.

Scripted Installation - Ability to do a scripted installation of the vSphere software to the local disk of a server. Various deployment methods are supported, including booting the vSphere installer off a CD or over PXE, and accessing the configuration file over the network using a variety of protocols, such as secure HTTP. The configuration file can also specify the following scripts to be executed during the installation:

    Pre-install
    Post-install
    First-boot

These scripts run locally on the vSphere host, and can perform various tasks such as configuring the host’s virtual networking and joining it to VMware® vCenter Server™.

Boot from SAN Support for vSphere - This support includes Fibre Channel SAN, as well as iSCSI and FCoE for certain storage adapters that have been qualified for this capability.

NEW Image Builder - A new set of command line utilities allows administrators to create custom ESXi images that include third-party components required for specialized hardware, such as drivers and CIM providers. Image Builder can be used to create images suitable for different types of deployment, such as ISO-based installation, PXE-based installation and Auto Deploy. It is designed as a Power Shell snap-in component and is bundled with PowerCLI.

NEW vSphere Firewall - The vSphere host management interface is protected by a service-oriented and stateless firewall, which you can configure using the vSphere Client or at the command line with ESXCLI command line interfaces. A new firewall engine eliminates the use of iptables and allows the administrator to define port rules for each service. For remote hosts, you can specify the IP addresses or range of IP addresses that are allowed to access each service.

NEW Secure Syslog - All log messages are handled by syslog, and messages can now be logged on either local and/or one or more remote log servers. Log messages can be remotely logged using either the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or TCP connections.

NEW Central Management of Host Image and Configuration via Auto Deploy - Combining the features of host profiles, Image Builder and PXE, vSphere Auto Deploy simplifies the task of managing vSphere host installation and upgrade for hundreds of machines. vSphere host images are centrally stored in the Auto Deploy library. New hosts are automatically provisioned based on rules defined by the user. Rebuilding a server to a clean slate is as simple as a reboot.

NEW Enhanced Unified CLI Framework - An expanded and enhanced ESXCLI command line framework offers a rich set of consistent and extensible commands, including new commands to facilitate on-host troubleshooting and maintenance. The framework allows consistency of authentication, roles, and auditing, using the same methods as other management frameworks such as vCenter Server and PowerCLI. You can use the ESXCLI framework both remotely as part of vSphere CLI and locally on the ESXi Shell (formerly Tech Support Mode).

What’s New in vSphere 5.1

Difference Between vSphere 5.1 and vSphere 5.5

Features	vSphere 5.1	vSphere 5.5
Physical CPUs per host	160	320
Physical RAM per host	2 TB	4 TB
NUMA nodes per host	8	16
Maximum vCPUs per host	2048	4096
VMDK Size	2TB	62 TB
Max Size of Virtual RDM	2TB	62 TB
VM Hardware Version	9	10
40 GBps physical Adapter support	No	yes
ESXi Free version RAM limit	32 GB	unlimited
ESXi Free version maximum vSMP	8-way virtual SMP	8-way virtual SMP
16 GB fibre channel End-to-End support	Support to run these HBAs at 16Gb. However, there is no support for full, end-to-end 16Gb connectivity from host to array.	Yes
APP HA	No	Yes
vFlash Read Cache support	No	Yes
VMware VSAN support	No	Yes
Expanded v-GPU and G-GPU support	only NVIDIA	NVIDIA, AMD and Intel GPU
vCenter Server Appliance With Embedded Database support upto	5 Hosts and 50 Virtual Machines	100 Hosts and 3000 Virtual Machines
Microsoft Windows 2012 Cluster Support	No	Yes
PDL (Permanent Device Loss) AutoRemove	No	Intoduced in vSphere 5.5
Graphics acceleration support for Linux Guest OS	No	Yes
Hot-pluggable SSDPCIe devices	No	Yes
Support for Reliable Memory Technology	No	Yes
CPU C-state Enhancement	Host power management leveraged only the performance state (P-state), which kept the processor running at a lower frequency and voltage	Processor power state (C-state) also is used, providing additional power savings and increased Performance
LSI SAS support for Oracle Solaris 11 OS	No	Yes
vSphere Big Data Extensions	No	Yes
SATA-based virtual device nodes via AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) support	No	Yes (Support upto 120 devices per VM)
Improved LACP Support	one LACP group per distributed switch	Supports up to 64
Multiple point-in-time replicas	vSphere Replication kept only the most recent copy of a virtual machine	Version 5.5 can keep up to 24 historical snapshots

Difference between vSphere 4.1 and vSphere 5

Features

	vSphere 4.1	vSphere 5.0
Hypervisor	ESX & ESXi	Only ESXi
VMA	Yes VMA 4.1	Yes VMA 5
HA Agent	AAM Automatic Availability Manager	FDM Fault Domain Manager
HA Host Approach	Primary & Secondary	Master & Slave
HA Failure Detection	Management N/W	Management N/W and Storage communication
HA Log File	/etc/opt/vmware/AAM	/etc/opt/vmware/FDM
DNS Dependent on DNS	Yes	NO
Host UEFI boot support	NO	boot systems from hard drives, CD/DVD drives, or USB media
Storage DRS	Not Available	Yes
VM Affinity & Anti-Affinity	Available	Available
VMDK Affinity & Anti-Affinity	Not Available	Available
Profile driven storage	Not Available	Available
VMFS version	VMFS-3	VMFS-5
VSphere Storage Appliance	Not Available	Available
Iscsi Port Binding	Can be only done via Cli using ESXCLI	Configure dependent hardware iSCSI and software iSCSI adapters along with the network configurations and port binding in a single dialog box using the vSphere Client.
Storage I/O control for NFS	Fiber Channel	Fiber Channel & NFS
Storage Vmotion Snapshot support	VM with Snapshot cannot be migrated using Storage vMotion	VM with Snapshot can be migrated using Storage vMotion
Swap to SSD	NO	Yes
Network I/O control	Yes	Yes with enhancement
ESXi firewall	Not Available	Yes
vCenter Linux Support	Not Available	vCenter Virtual Appliance
vSphere Full Client	Yes	Yes
vSphere Web Client	Yes	yes with lot of improvements
VM Hardware Version	7	8
Virtual CPU per VM	8 vCpu	32 vCpu
Virtual Machine RAM	255 GB	1 TB of vRAM
VM Swapfile size	255 GB	1 TB
Support for Client connected USB	Not Available	Yes
Non Hardware Accelerated 3D grpahics support	Not Available	Yes
UEFI Virtual BIOS	Not Available	Yes
VMware Tools Version	4.1	5
Mutlicore vCpu	Not Available	Yes configure at VM setting
MAC OS Guest Support	Not Available	Apple Mac OS X Server 10.6
Smart card reader support for VM	Not Available	Yes
Auto Deploy	Not Available	Yes
Image Builder	Not Available	Yes
VM’s per host	320	512
Max Logical Cpu per Host	160	160
RAM per Host	1 TB	2 TB
MAX RAM for Service Console	800 MB	Not Applicable (NO SC)
LUNS per Server	256	256
Metro Vmotion	Round-trip latencies of up to 5 milliseconds.	Round-trip latencies of up to 10 milliseconds. This provides better performance over long latency networks
Storage Vmotion	Moving VM Files using moving to using dirty block tracking	Moving VM Files using I/O mirroring with better enhancements
Virtual Distributed Switch	Yes	Yes with more enhancements like deeper view into virtual machine traffic through Netflow and enhances monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities through SPAN and LLDP
USB 3.0 Support	NO	Yes
Host Per vCenter	1000	1000
Powered on virtual machines per vCenter Server	10000	10000
Vmkernel	64-bit	64-bit
Service Console	64-bit	Not Applicable (NO SC)
Licensing	vSphere Essentials vSphere Essentials Plus vSphere Standard vSphere Advanced vSphere Enterprise vSphere Enterprise Plus	vSphere Essentials vSphere Essentials Plus vSphere Standard vSphere Enterprise vSphere Enterprise Plus