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VMware Announces vCenter Server Heartbeat

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One of the announcments that came out of VMworld Europe 2009 last week (one which surprising didn’t seem to get much attention that I’m aware of) was that of vCenter Server Heartbeat.  One of the common issues that my clients have been frustreated with was the lack true monitoring and automatic redundancy for the vCenter.  A Virtual Infrastructure’s operation relies on vCenter and in the past the recommended solution from VMware was to run vCenter virtualized in a High Availability pair.  This worked fine if all vCenter components lived on the same VM.  Once you break those components up across multiple VMs for increased performance and flexability, you need a solution that is application aware.  This is exactly waht vCenter Server Heartbeat can deliver.  From the press release:

VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat monitors the vCenter Server connectivity and components, including the license server and VMware vCenter Update Manager, and can restart the entire vCenter Server on the passive server. This can help ensure a consistent, reliable operation of VMware vCenter Server if it is threatened by unplanned or planned downtime, and it provides a broad range of protection against operator errors, operating system or hardware failure, or external events.

vCenter heart beat it built ontop of Neverfail’s application availability technology and should be available in March.

VMware Converter 4.0 Available

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VMware recently released the GA version of vCenter Converter 4.0 (see release notes).  Converter allows you to convert your physical machines into virtual machines (P2V).   While Converter 4.0 is a plug-in for vCenter, the best news of all is that it also runs  standalone and is now available as a free download.

A quick summary of what’s new in Converter 4.0:

New Physical Source Support including P2V of Linux Servers and Desktops

  • New physical to virtual machine conversion support for Linux (RHEL, SUSE, and Ubuntu) as source
  • New physical to virtual machine conversion support for Windows Server 2008 as source
  • Support for converting new third-party image formats, including Parallels Desktop virtual machines, newer versions of Symantec, Acronis, and StorageCraft

Minimal Downtime during P2V Conversion

  • Hot cloning improvements to clone any incremental changes in the physical source system during the P2V conversion process

End to End P2V Automation & Centralized Management

  • Work flow automation enhancements to include automatic source shutdown, destination start-up as well as shutting down one or more services at the source and starting up selected services at the destination
  • Target disk selection and the ability to specify how the volumes will be laid out in the new destination virtual machine
  • Destination virtual machine configuration, including CPU, memory, and disk controller type

VI Toolkit 1.5 Released

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Wow, I literally don’t know what happened to the past three plus weeks!  First planning for a trip to the east coast, then running fast through meeting after meeting across the east coast (the planning paid off in spades), and now running just as hard following up from all the meetings (and new meetings as well).  Guess I have to do shorter blog posts to fit them in my schedule…

As I tweeted earlier today, where is this slowdown I keep hearing about? It sure has hit me in the virtualization space…

One of the recent announcements that I wanted to mention (even if a week late…) was the release of the VI Toolkit v1.5.   A quick summary from the VI Toolkit product manager:

The VI Toolkit is a great automation tool and if you manage more than about 20 VMs or deploy VMs or ESX hosts on a regular basis you should check it out, it can really save you a lot of time and effort when you’re making updates across large numbers of objects. Some popular uses include things like cloning VMs 50 or 100 times and creating virtual switches across multiple ESX servers. The most exciting new feature is the ability to execute scripts inside the VM guest, made possible by our integration with the VIX library.

Make sure to check out the blog posting to get to the download page, check out a video of the new features, and see a team photo of those behind the toolkit.