This afternoon I attended the #VSP2384 session – Distributed Datacenters with Multiple vCenters Deployments Best Practises.  I didn’t take notes as I quickly got absorbed by this excellent presentation.  I’m already looking forward to downloading the video of this as soon as its uploaded to the VMworld website and watching it again.

However, as a brief abstract here is some of what they covered:

Ravi Soundararajan, who has 7 years of experience looking at customers vCenter performance, explained the components of the vCenter software.  He then looked at how different factors such as network latency and bandwidth over WAN links could affect your design.  Ravi explained the needs of each of the software components in vCenter and how to right-size the server hardware.

Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee then took over, and jumped into different vCenter deployments for spilt sites, and covered the effects of using Linked Mode in the design.

Some of the useful bits I gleaned were:

• Hosts separated over WAN links from their vCenters are more sensitive to network latency than they are to bandwidth.
• vCenter network traffic is regularly very bursty (up to 10x).
• vCenter 5 is more resource hungry than previous versions due the additional services they provide. So you should consider upping the hardware as you move to version 5.
• JVM resources should be sized appropriately (can be bad to oversize).
• vCenter minimum hardware requirements are minimums. You may need more for your environment.
• There is a hard limit of 500 connection sessions on vCenters and this is the same for Linked Mode vCenters (collectively, all Linked Mode vCenters only get 500) . Clients use one and each VM console uses one.  Other 3rd party software can use these as well.  So this limit can hit the larger deployments.

A couple of things I got from questions I posed at the end was this:

• The official vSphere 5.0 documentation (PDFs) state you can’t keep vCenter 5.0 in Linked Mode with 4.x vCenters.  However the vSphere 5.0 Release Notes state you can.  The former is true and the latter is a documentation mistake.  As you upgrade your Linked Mode vCenters, you disconnect them from 4.x hosts and can only join them back to the other vCenters after they are upgraded.
• When you upgrade your vCenter from 4.1 to 4.1U1, your client doesn’t automatically ask you to upgrade (like it would if you were connecting with a 4.0 client to a vCenter 4.1).  If you are running a 4.1U1 vCenter, you should manually uninstall and install the latest client.  This resolves a number of client side issues.

If you are interested in vCenter designs for multiple sites, or just want to understand more about the internals of vCenter, then I highly recommend you check it out once it’s available.  I heard from some folks this week that they felt the super technical deep dive stuff was lacking this year.  If you wanted more of that stuff then I’d say you should download this session.

VMware has announced that VMworld 2012 US will be at the Moscone Conference Center in San Francisco.  The VMworld 2012 conference will run 27th August through to the 30th August 2012.

Update: VMworld Europe 2012 will be in Barcelona on 16-18 October 2012. Update 2: Apparently this has been brought forward to 9-11 October 2012.

I attended Intel’s #SPO3040 earlier this afternoon – Best Practises for Deploying VMware vSphere 5.0 Using 10GbE.  It was an interesting session with lots of good material.  Here are 3 short little titbits that I tweeted about that I thought might useful to record here:

• Intel said we will start to see 10GBASE-T on server boards very soon. This allows WoL (Wake-on-LAN) and OOB (Out-of_Band) type services, unlike SFP+ DA or SPF+ Fiber (although as @AlexanderJN pointed out, 10GBASE-T is still much more expensive on the switch port side, and consumes more power).
• To check the speed and width of a server’s PCI Express slots, try this:

grep Express /var/log/vmkernel.log |more

You need at least a 5.0Gb/s (Gen 2) x 8 slot to get the full line rate of a 10GbE card.

• With the newer Load Balanced Teaming Policy that came with vSphere 4.1, the traffic needs to hit 75% bandwidth utilization for 30 seconds on a pNIC for the load to be migrated.

Along with today’s release of vSphere 5, VMware has published the vSphere 5 documentation:

http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-pubs.html

In addition to the online html library and the downloadable PDFs, there are now e-book versions to grab.  There are MOBI files for your kindle and EPUB files for most other e-book readers.  I’ve requested this for some time now, so I’m glad VMware is providing them.  They have to be one of the first large mainstream software vendors to offer their documentation in these formats.  I wouldn’t say it is a revolutionary concept, but nice that VMware is leading competition and being innovative when they can.

The result is great:

Over the last few weeks I’ve been working feverishly on my documentation notes and reference card for vSphere 5.  See here and here for the vSphere 4 versions if you’re not sure what I’m referring to.

I’m 90% done on my notes from the Release Candidate version of the official documentation, so I just need to finish them off and quickly check the new GA versions for changes.  I hope to get them published in the next couple of weeks.  So if you’re not willing to wade through 2000+ pages of official documentation then you might want to get a copy of my notes for some of the newer and more interesting excerpts.  I wanted to have them released in time for VMworld, but what with that being merely days away it probably isn’t going to happen.  We’ll see; after all, what’s else are plane journeys for if not documentation. BTW, if you’re heading to VMworld this year and spot me out-and-about, be sure to come and say hi. It’s always nice to meet fellow v12n geeks.

As soon as I’ve got the documentation notes out the door, I’ll be beavering away on the new reference card.  I can’t say when it will be available, as it takes a tremendous amount of work, but rest assured I’ll be working hard to complete it as quickly as possible.

If you want to be the first to know when the notes and/or card is available, be sure to follow me on twitter @forbesguthrie.  I’ll try to keep everyone abreast of my progress over the coming weeks.