The VMguy

You may remember from a recent article that I wrote about the VMware licensing dilemmas, that one of the scenarios I mentioned was SRM licensing when a customer wants to protect only a small percentage of VMs.  In the per-CPU licensing model, a customer would have to license all of the CPUs in a cluster even if they wanted to protect only 10% of the VMs.  VMware has announced that Per-VM licensing will be available on September 1, 2010.  Customers will now be able to license SRM on a Per-VM basis.  Customers who like their per-CPU model will be able to continue that purchasing method until December 15, 2010.  After that, it’s per-VM only.

There are a few things to think about with regard to licensing  first, vSphere 4.1 now allows for DRS affinity so that VMs only move between certain hosts of a cluster.  I’m still waiting for a definite answer from my VMware friends but that should allow you to protect some VM’s and set their DRS Affinity to only the hosts that you own SRM CPUs for and still keep the full cluster for the unprotected VMs. Previously, VMware would recommend that you create a separate cluster for your “protected” VMs if they were a small subset of the whole.  Now with DRS Affinity, you can dictate that certain “protected” VMs only move between a subset of a cluster.  We’ll still have to wait and see the final ruling from VMware but I’m thinking that would work in the short-term for those in the per-CPU dilemma.

The second feature of the new licensing that I really like is the rolling average of VMs over the last twelve months.  What that translates to is that now I need to buy what my daily average of VMs protected would be over a 12 month period.  If I have certain points of the year where my VM count spikes, this average would be monitored by vCenter and alarm if I am going over my licensing limits.  However, I would only need the average number of protected VMs over the past year.  The system will continue to run after going over your limit but that’s definitely not something I would condone (Famous VMware SE saying: ethics don’t ship in the box people).

The per-vm licenses are sold in blocks of 25 and range from $1,250 to $11,250 depending on the product.  Per-vm licensing will be available for Chargeback, Appspeed, SRM, and, later this year, CapacityIQ.  You can find more information on VMware’s website here.

The last question I had was, “How do I know what my rolling average is for those licenses?”  The good news is that once you enter in a license key, the new license reporting manager in vSphere 4.1 will tell you what your rolling average is year-to-date.  Looks like someone was planning ahead.

I was going over the KB digest this morning and saw a few KB articles that hit home with a couple issues that customers have been asking me about regarding View.

The first is wondering how an admin can do more advanced things with the View Manager Server.  For instance: assign a default desktop out of a pool to a specific user or  listing orphaned desktops (users that no longer exist or have changed permissions and no longer have access to a desktop in a pool but still have one assigned to them) or cleaning up after removing a secondary View Manager server.  All of these items can be performed by a little-known command line utility included in View called vdmadmin.exe. Read the rest of this entry »

The first update to Site Recovery Manager has been released.

Here’s the What’s new section from the release notes: Read the rest of this entry »

This one has been going around the blog sites today.  I have to share it as well.  The doc created by Tomas over at tendam.info.  It’s a great enviornment to setup for testing purposes and to learn Site Recovery Manager.  I plan on using it to demo SRM for my customers.  You do need a little bit of hardware (6GB of RAM) and some software (NetApp Simulator – available only to customers and partners).

You can find a link to the post and documentation here .

I plan on trying to set this up entirely in ESX in my lab.  I will report back on my results.

One of my favorite things in talking to people is when they tell me how well the software I teach them about works.  Even better is when someone will take the time to blog about their experiences.  I have had a few customers become early adopters of Site Recovery Manager.  One of the most memorable was a customer (let’s call him Virtual_JTW) whom I worked with in September.  On a Friday afternoon we ran thru configuring and setting up SRM in his environment.  We worked thru the configuration and integration with his Celerra storage.  In the end, we passed with flying colors and his Disaster Recovery test was 100% successful.  It was fun and exciting for me to watch Virtual_JTW’s reaction to the success of the test.  He felt so impressed by the results and his subsequent demonstration for his Disaster Recovery team, he felt the need to blog on the whole experience.  You can read his account of what happened as well as the test results here .