Activating and using VMware PSO credits

For the second time, in my company, we've negotiated a rather large ELA agreement with VMware (ultimately via a reseller) which includes buying a bunch of new licenses and then renewing SnS for the existing ones. With this ELA, there are quite a lot of PSO (Professional Services Organisation) credits that come with the agreement. First time it took us a while to figure out what to use them for, and now the second time it still creates confusion in regards to activating and using them.

After entering into the ELA, we received an activation email to an email address that we had specified (we had just told it to the VMware sales guys). Once the credits were activated, we received a confirmation email that they were indeed activated.

From here on, it is possible to buy different products and services with the credits.

To use the PSO credits, log in to:

https://mylearnssl.vmware.com

Use the email address that the license activation mail was sent to. If there's no account associated with this email address, then create one.

Once logged in, you can add multiple users so that they can log in with their own account and book training courses on their own: Home -> Services -> VMware Training -> myPaymentAccounts -> Edit (or go to My account -> myPaymentAccounts). Here you can also see how many points you have available and what you have used your points for.

From the mylearn site it's fairly easy to browse for course training and then paying with the credits. But the credits can also be used for other things such as paying for your VMworld ticket, for consulting services (PSO), and to pay for the VCP exam.

To pay for the VCP exam you need to retrieve a voucher first on the mylearn portal: Home -> Services -> VMware Training -> VMware Consulting and Training Credits -> Continue. Or go directly to this link. Going through this process will generate a voucher code which costs some credits. When you book the exam at Pearson VUE (requires a seperate account) you can use your voucher code to pay for the exam.

Nondisruptive upgrade of VMFS-3 to VMFS-5

In vSphere 5 the VMFS filesystem has been updated to version 5 (currently 5.54). In vSphere 4.1 update 1 the VMFS version was 3.46.

In earlier versions of ESX, live upgrades of VMFS, or in-place upgrades, haven't been an option so to upgrade VMFS, basically a new LUNs had to be created and then VMs could be migrated to these new LUNs.

With vSphere 5, VMFS can be upgraded nondisruptively. This is done for each LUN by going to:

Datastore and Datastore Clusters -> Configuration -> Upgrade to VMFS-5.

It is a prerequisite that all connected hosts are running vSphere 5. The upgrade itself takes less than a minute (at least in a small test environment).

In VMFS 5, there is only one block size which is 1 MB. However, when upgrading from v3 to v5, the block size remains what it was before (see the last screendump). In the example below, the 8 MB block size is retained.

The new maximum LUN size is 64 TB - but a single .vmdk file can still not exceed 2 TB minus 512 bytes. The only way to have larger .vmdk's than 2 TB is to create an RDM and mount it as a physical device (as opposed to virtual). See this VMware whitepaper for further info.

Licensing: vSphere 5 Enterprise and 8 way VMs

In my experience, more and more customers are asking for multiway VMs with more than 4 vCPUs. For my company, an IT service provider, this is a little problematic as most of our licenses are vSphere Enterprise - not Enterprise Plus.

With vSphere 5, 8 way VMs are now possible both in the Standard edition and Enterprise edition. For up to 32 way VMs, the Enterprise Plus license is required.

See link for more info, page 6.

P2V with VMware Converter Standalone 5 and sync feature

For this blog post number 100 (uh la laa) I decided to spice things up a bit with video tutorial showing some of the new features in VMware vCenter Converter Standalone 5 including the enhanced synchronize feature (it also existed in v4 but it didn't work too well..).

The video guides you through the migration wizard and discusses some relevant use cases for the sync feature.

Here's a link to Converter Standalone 5

Remember that as of v4.3 Windows Server 2000 is no longer supported as a source OS, so to convert win2k use Converter Standalone v4.01 in stead. In the release notes you can see supported guest operating systems.

Upgrading vCenter v4.1 to v5.0

I just upgraded my home lab vCenter server the other day from v4.1 to v5 and took some screen dumps of the installation process. The steps look fairly familiar compared to earlier versions. At one point in the installation I had an error stating that:

"The Fully Qualified Domain Name cannot be resolved. If you continue the installation, some features might not work correctly"

The reason for this error is that I had not created a reverse lookup on the DNS server. By following this guide, the issue was resolved and installation process could continue without further warnings.

Here are the screen dumps:

It was at this step that the DNS error ocurred. Below image shows how a reverse lookup zone was created on the DNS server.

Configuring iSCSI for vSphere 5

Configuring a software iSCSI initiator for ESXi 5.0 is a relatively simple operation. This quick guide assumes that you have already configured an iSCSI target and published it on the network.

For inspiration, have a look at this VMware KB

Create a new vSwitch (Configuration -> Networking -> Add Networking) and add a VMkernel. Configure it with an IP address. 

Go to Storage adapters and click "Add" to add a software iSCSI adapter if it does not exist already.

Once added, right click the software initiator and choose "properties". 

Go to Network Configuration tab and click "Add".

Choose the vSwitch/VMkernel that you created above.

Go ot Dynamic Discovery tab and click "Add" to add an iSCSI target

You will be prompted to input IP address of the iSCSI target, just leave port 3260 as default unless you have configured it differently on your target.

Go to Configuration -> Storage and click "Add storage". Click DISK/LUN and next. If everything has been done correctly, you be able to see your published iSCSI target and can then add and format it with the new VMFS5 file system, uh lala!

vSphere 5 official release date

Update: 2011.08.25: vSphere has finally been released (as of 2011.08.24)! It can be downloaded from the VMware site.

Update 2011.08.23: Well, vSphere 5 was not released yesterday as rumors would have it - so I guess we'll just have to wait and see. A guess, not completely unreasonable, would be sometime during this week or on the first day of VMworld in the US...

When: The official release date of vSphere 5 - for GA - has been set to Monday 2011.08.22.

I found info about it here and I got the same info from our license vendor.