Five vSphere 5.0 enhancements you may have missed

If VMware is of any interest to you, you’ve probably been consumed with the vSphere 5.0 licensing changes, both the ones announced during the product’s initial launch and those revealed later, after VMware modified them to be more palatable to upset users who yelled from the top of the virtual mountain.

Marrying the licensing changes with the vSphere 5.0 product announcement was a major marketing faux pas. Not to say that VMware couldn’t make licensing changes with the new version, but announcing them at the same time as the new release absolutely took away from the fantastic list of new features and updates. Now that the licensing (debacle) dust has settled, it seems like a good time to revisit the features and enhancements that should have been the focal point of a major new release of VMware vSphere in the first place.

[ Also on InfoWorld.com: Altaro readies Hyper-V backup tool for small businesses. | Read about how VMware listened to its customers and changed vSphere 5.0 licensing, again. | Keep up-to-date on virtualization by signing up for InfoWorld’s Virtualization newsletter. ]

VMware’s goal for quite some time has been to enable customers to become 100 percent virtualized, and the features found in vSphere 5.0 have taken great strides toward that goal by removing obstacles that keep people from virtualizing mission-critical applications. One such advance is being able to create monster-sized VMs with 32-way processors and up to 1TB of memory. Another new feature grabbing headlines is around Storage DRS, and its coverage is well deserved. However, with this article I thought I would take the opportunity to spotlight five other areas that may have been overlooked. Beyond these, you can always find a detailed list of features on VMware’s website.

1. Turn your unused x86 servers with direct attached storage into a vSphere storage node

Along with vSphere 5.0, VMware released a separate storage appliance called the vSphere Storage Appliance, or VSA for short. This VSA appliance is aimed at the small and midsize businesses that may not be in a position to purchase a physical SAN or NAS array for their virtual infrastructure. Not having access to shared storage, SMB customers would miss out on many of the features and capabilities that make vSphere such a popular virtualization platform, and they would be unable to implement many of vSphere’s core technologies such as vSphere HA and vMotion.

Customers who decide to deploy a VSA can benefit from many additional vSphere features without having to purchase a SAN or NAS device to provide them with shared storage. The VSA also comes with a new vCenter Server 5.0 extension that’s installed on a vCenter server machine. It comes with the VSA Manager component that’s used to manage the VSA Cluster.

VMware has done a good job of making this an easy process, and the installer does everything automatically for the user. This helps create an opex savings as the installation, configuration, and management of the VSA was designed to be handled by a vSphere administrator who may not have SAN or NAS management experience. At the same time, it provides capex savings for SMB shops since it removes the need to purchase a dedicated physical SAN or NAS device for shared storage.

2. vMotion undergoes scalability and performance enhancements

VMware vMotion is a core technology in vSphere and has been one of the feathers in VMware’s cap over the years when compared to its competitors. But as other hypervisor technologies have advanced, VMware has had to continue to improve its own features to maintain its competitive advantage.

Many of vSphere 5.0’s features rely upon the existance of vMotion, so there should come as little surprise that VMware has updated this core component. One of the most substantial changes to vMotion is its multi-NIC capabilities. vMotion is now capable of using multiple NICs concurrently in order to decrease the amount of time it takes to do a migration. That means that even a single vMotion can now leverage all of the configured vMotion NICs. Prior to vSphere 5.0, only a single NIC was used for a vMotion-enabled VMkernel. Enabling multiple NICs can remove some of the constraints from a bandwidth or throughput perspective associated with large and memory active virtual machines. vMotion can use up to 16 1GbE NICs or 4 10-GbE NICs to saturate all of the connections, greatly increasing the speed of migrations.

vMotion will also scale better with these new enhancements, enabling an increase in accepted latency for long distance vMotion. Prior to vSphere 5.0, the maximum supported latency for vMotion was 5 milliseconds, which restricted many organizations from being able to enable cross-site clustering. vSphere 5.0 increases the maximum supported latency to 10 milliseconds for environments using Enterprise Plus — a component called “Metro vMotion.” This still requires a fairly fast and low-latency network connection between hosts, but it opens the door for more customers to enable DRS between sites across longer distances.

3. vSphere 5 updates an often overlooked component of the platform — VMFS

VMFS is a purpose-built clustered file system for virtual machines, and it’s been around since the early days of VMware ESX. Many people just take VMware VMFS (Virtual Machine File System) for granted, while more hardcore virtualization administrators have complaints about it. But that’s just their way sometimes.

With vSphere 5.0, VMFS has once again undergone a series of changes. vSphere 5.0 introduces VMFS-5, an upgrade from VMFS-3 used in vSphere 4.x and VI3. The first change to consider with VMFS-5 is the unified block size, which is now 1MB. VMFS-3 was able to format at 1MB, 2MB, 4MB, or 8MB. With VMFS-5 supporting 1MB block sizes, the maximum size for Virtual Machine Disk Formats (VMDKs) are no longer limited like previous block sizes. For years, VMware administrators had to deal with various block sizes and limited virtual disk sizes, but VMFS-5 solves many of these issues. Administrators are now able to create larger files (larger than 256GB) by using those blocks.

Another important change is related to the sub-block algorithm allocation. VMFS-5 introduces support for a smaller sub-block. This is now 8KB rather than the 64KB used in previous versions. Now, small files less than 8KB but more than 1KB in size will only consume 8KB rather than 64KB. This can reduce the amount of disk space being stranded by very small files.

One other important update to the VMFS-5 file system to note is the boost in the large single extent volume, which has increased from previous versions of VMFS where the largest single extent was 2TB. Now with VMFS-5, this limit has been increased to 60TB.

VMware customers who remember upgrading from VMFS-2 to VMFS-3 may remember the complicated process; however, VMware has taken care to make the upgrade path from VMFS-3 to VMFS-5 a much simpler and straightforward process. Datastores can be upgraded, however; if you have the luxury of doing so, it is still recommended to create a new VMFS-5 file system with a 1MB block size instead and use something like storage vMotion to move the virtual machines over to the new datastore.

4. What about moving a virtual machine’s disk files with Storage vMotion?

Storage vMotion enables live migration for running virtual machine disk files from one storage location to another without any downtime or service disruption. VMware vSphere 5.0 features a redesign of this popular Storage vMotion feature, making it more efficient than before.

Storage vMotion no longer uses Change Block Tracking to record disk changes during the vMotion process. Instead, it uses a new feature called Mirror Mode, which enables a single-pass block copy of the source disk to the destination disk by mirroring I/Os of copied blocks. To ensure that both disks stay in sync, the source and destination disk both acknowledge each write.

Another major enhancement is that you can now live-migrate a VM that has active snapshots, something that wasn’t possible with the previous release. This capability will be in more demand as it runs on side of other new features found in vSphere 5.0.

5. Where is the networking love? What about any networking changes?

For the most part, it’s probably a safe bet to say that VMware administrators have been bothered and upset with the level of detail or the lack thereof when it comes to networking. To be fair, if you’ve never used VMware ESX prior to VI3, you really don’t have much to complain about. Networking capabilities back then were more or less non-existent. And vSphere 4.x has done a much better job with networking; but the latest release is finally plugging holes and filling in the gaps. While it still may not be perfect, these latest networking updates are making good progress.

vSphere 5.0 has improved the network administrator’s ability to monitor and troubleshoot virtual infrastructure traffic by introducing NetFlow V5 and Port Mirror (SPAN). Support for LLDP (Link-Layer Discovery Protocol) has also been added, which simplifies the network configuration and management in non-Cisco switch environment.

VMware has also enhanced Network I/O Control (NIOC), introduced in vSphere 4, to help prioritize VM traffic. Previously, VM traffic was grouped together in a single pool, keeping you from prioritizing individual VM traffic and ensuring critical workloads would receive enough network bandwidth. This has now been resolved. NIOC enhancements target the management of I/O resources in consolidated I/O environments with 10-GbE network interface cards. The enhancements to NIOC enable customers to provide end-to-end quality of service (QoS) through allocating I/O shares for user-defined traffic types as well as tagging packets for prioritization by an external network infrastructure. Key enhancements include the ability to create user-defined resource pools, support for vSphere replication traffic types, and support for IEEE 802.1p tagging.

VMware vSphere 5.0 offers a significant number of exciting new features and enhancements, and provides organizations with the necessary technology to feel comfortable with becoming fully virtualized. The features found in this latest release should also prove compelling enough to consider implementing or upgrading an existing VMware environment … if you can accept the licensing changes.

Now that the licensing issue has subsided somewhat, what is your organization thinking? Will you stick with vSphere 4.x, or will the above features and the laundry list of other enhancements be enough to get you to make the switch? And if so, what features are the most compelling to your decision making?

This article, “Five vSphere 5.0 enhancements you may have missed,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.