That is not very nice.  But then again, neither was deleting my ESX templates.

Related posts:

1. SCVMM to VMware: You will be assimilated
2. Managing VI3 with SCVMM considered harmful
3. Don’t Sysprep Me, Bro!
4. The Truth About VM SAN Transfers

The resource pool is a means of partitioning CPU and memory, and it is also convenient for configuring access control.  Let’s say you have a DRS cluster with a resource pool for your web QA team.  When a QA engineer logs in with VI Client, he sees only the virtual machines that he has permission to access.

Now, let’s say that one of your fellow administrators wants to use SCVMM to manage this VMware environment.  He uses the SCVMM console to migrate a QA virtual machine from one ESX host to another in order to perform maintenance.

The VMotion completes without incident and everything seems OK…

Before too long, a QA engineer is on the phone asking what happened to his VM.  From his perspective, the VM has disappeared.

It’s not really gone, it has just been moved out of the resource pool.  Fortunately, you can log in with the VI Client and fix this problem by moving the VM back to the resource pool.

Do you really think that SCVMM is going to be your single pane of glass for virtualization management?

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1. Resource Pools to the Rescue
2. Managing VI3 with SCVMM considered harmful
3. VM Resource Management: Hyper-V versus SCVMM
4. Using SCVMM to attach ISO images to VMware ESX VMs

There is a related issue with cached self-signed SSL certificate thumbprints.  When you first connect to a VirtualCenter Server or ESX host, you see a dialog box:

By checking that box, the SSL certificate thumbprint is cached in your registry and you won’t be prompted again as long as there is a match.

If you ever want to take a quick look at the list, try this in a cmd window:

reg query "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\VMware\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Preferences\UI\SSLIgnore" /s

Related posts:

1. Automating SSL Certificate Deployments for HP iLO
2. Automating VI Client login
3. Easily view guest IP addresses with vSphere Client
4. How to see if Quick Migration is right for your workload

I was particularly interested in PRO Tips, which is consistently mentioned as a key benefit of SCVMM.  It is supposed to compete with VMware DRS, except that PRO relies on System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) while DRS is simply an easy-to-use feature of VirtualCenter. 

Considering the importance of this feature, I expected to see one of the labs cover the SCVMM-SCOM integration and PRO Tips.  No such luck.  We spent time applying hotfixes and rebooting Windows Server 2008 to install the Hyper-V role and other Deep-Dive topics like that.

Instead, PRO Tips received a couple PowerPoint slides and some hand waving about how great it is to be able to automatically migrate your virtual machines – and introduce downtime thanks to quick migration.

I did appreciate the fact that the instructor acknowledged this serious omission.  He intended to at least demonstrate PRO Tips in action, but resources fell short.

If PRO Tips cannot be covered in two days, due to the complexity of SCOM integration, who in the world is really going to be deploying Microsoft virtualization with all of the advertised features?  Probably just the two thousand.

Related posts:

1. SCVMM/PRO Complexity: High
2. Two thousand?
3. Say it ain’t so, PRO!
4. Save $14,970 on VMware ESX management

One catch with this feature is that your client system must be in the same Active Directory domain as your VirtualCenter Server. What about your VC test lab that is not domain-joined? What about VMware ESX?

If you would like to save yourself a bunch of typing for those scenarios, too, there is a similar solution. It involves passing the username and password on the command line, so if you are dealing with a sensitive system where this is not acceptable, please stop reading now.

OK, you are still with me? Let’s proceed…

Just like with passthrough authentication, you’ll use a VI Client shortcut. You can make multiple copies of the shortcut, one for each target system.

Append the following parameters to VpxClient.exe in the Target line:

-s servername (can be an ESX or VirtualCenter hostname/IP)

-u username (root or Administrator, for example)

-p password (this is the sensitive part, you already know)

It should look like this when you are done:

Note: you can omit the -p parameter to get a partial benefit; you will then enter your password as usual in the login dialog, but the hostname and username fields will be populated for you. Perhaps a decent compromise.

I use this feature every day. Hopefully you will find it helpful, too.

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2. Easily view guest IP addresses with vSphere Client
3. Your session has been terminated
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Microsofties have gone out of their way this year to emphasize that environments with multiple VMware VirtualCenter Servers are in great pain.  A pain that not even VMware can solve.  Yes, indeed, it is a horrible situation.  (Well, not exactly.)  In order to manage a second VirtualCenter, one must use the VI Client to actually log in to that other server.  I won’t go into great detail about how cumbersome this is, because it’s pretty technical in practice.  Well, actually, it involves double clicking an icon and selecting a host, but trust me, it is a lot more troublesome than it sounds.  Especially if you are selling a competing product.

Enter SCVMM and an amazing breakthrough.  Through revolutionary Redmond technology, SCVMM is not only able to manage VMware, it can manage multiple VMwares.  And, by the way, this feature refers to the use of the rich VMware API that has been provided by VMware for just this very purpose.

Never mind the boring details about what this management of multiple VMwares VirtualCenter Servers buys you.  Can you VMotion from one VirtualCenter to another?  Of course not.  Can you cold migrate?  No.  Can you deploy a template?  You’ve got to be kidding! Do you still need to open VI Client for many, many tasks?  Yes!

If centralized virtualization management servers that can only be deployed as autonomous systems that share no data or information are seen as a pain point from Microsoft’s perspective, you might like to see what the documentation says about SCVMM in this regard:

If your business needs dictate that you install more than one VMM server, keep the following points in mind:

• Each VMM server must be installed on a separate computer and each VMM server must use a separate VMM database. Multiple VMM servers can use the same database instance but cannot use the same database.
• Each host or library server can be managed by only one VMM server at a time.
• Multiple VMM environments are not integrated and cannot share data.
• VMM does not provide a method for replicating physical files in the VMM library or metadata for objects that are stored in the VMM database. Physical files must be replicated outside of VMM and metadata must be transferred by using scripts or other means. VMM does not support DFS Namespaces (DFSN), formerly known as Distributed File System (DFS), or DFS Replication (DFSR).

Yes, it’s true; the third bullet there says that each of your SCVMM deployments are independent systems that cannot be managed from that so-called Microsoft “single pane of glass.”  Furthermore, the library server cannot even be shared among multiple SCVMM instances.  Now that would be useful.

Looks to me like a clear case of “do as I say, not as I do.”  The saddest part is that the mainstream technical media happily regurgitates it.  Are you using SCVMM to manage your VMware infrastructure?  How is it working for you?

Administrative note:  The title of this post refers to a Biblical parable.  Google it.

Related posts:

1. SCVMM to VMware: You will be assimilated
2. No, not that VMM
3. Managing VI3 with SCVMM considered harmful
4. When does your “free” Hyper-V Server cost $1304?

Here is the document intro:

VMware Update Manager (VUM) provides a patch management framework for VMware Virtual Infrastructure. IT administrators can use it to patch VMware ESX, Windows, and certain versions of Linux virtual machines.  As data centers get bigger, performance implications become more important for patch management. This study covers the following topics:

• Benchmarking Methodology
• VUM Server Host Deployment
• Latency Overview
• Resource Consumption Matrix
• Guest Operating System Tuning
• Network Latencies
• On-Access Virus Scanning

Download it if you want to learn more.

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3. Resource Pools to the Rescue
4. Awesome performance through VMware DRS

Allow me to quote from the online help:

After you add a VMware VirtualCenter server to VMM, use the Import templates action in Administration view to import your VMware templates to the Virtual Machine Manager library so that you can use the templates in VMM.

Sounds innocent enough, doesn’t it? However, you might have a different opinion once you realize what really happens after you click that button:

1. The template is unregistered from VirtualCenter
2. SCVMM uses SFTP to copy the relevant files from ESX to the image library (Windows file server)
3. SCVMM deletes the original files from the ESX datastore (and spits out a couple errors in the process)
4. All your base are belong to us

Oh, great.  Now my trusty Windows 2003 VirtualCenter template is gone and its evil twin is under control of SCVMM.  I do admit feeling a bit violated after this experiment.  Now what?

Might as well see what happens if I deploy the template now from SCVMM.  Hmm.  I quickly find out that the template cannot be deployed to a Hyper-V host at all, which is fine by me.  I try again, telling SCVMM to deploy a new VM back to the same ESX host from which the template came.  After a long, long, long, long, time, the files are copied (again using SFTP) and a new VM is created.  Copying this template used to take 5 minutes, now it takes over 45!

That is not much of an improvement to my overall virtual infrastructure management experience.  It would have been nice if Microsoft would have simply imported a copy of the template.  Deleting the original seems unnecessary, and actually, kind of rude.

I’m sure this is not the first irritating discovery I will make as my investigation continues.  Stay tuned.

Related posts:

1. SCVMM ignores own plank, emphasizes VirtualCenter’s speck
2. Using SCVMM to attach ISO images to VMware ESX VMs
3. The Truth About VM SAN Transfers
4. Don’t Sysprep Me, Bro!

After you are ready to move up from the entry-level platform, or go from your evaluation stage to full production, shouldn’t it be a relatively easy and non-disruptive process?  I would expect this to be the case.  Maybe that’s because I’m used to VirtualCenter, which has an intuitive dialog box to control the product’s edition and evaluation state:

SCVMM takes a different approach.  I was a little surprised when I just read the steps required to move up to the full version.  Essentially, you need to uninstall the product but retain the database, reinstall the full version, and then give your mouse finger a little workout as you go through and right-click a bunch of things to resuscitate them from their state of denial.

While it may not be a task that is performed every day, simpler is usually better in my book.

Related posts:

1. VMware vCenter Server performance stats levels
2. Checkshots or Snappoints?
3. Misleading documentation or none at all? I’ll take the latter, thanks.
4. SCVMM to VMware: You will be assimilated