Cloud Advisor Release Notes

Rev 1.1.7.0

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2 Introduction

CLOUD ADVISOR FROM SAVISION / RELEASE NOTES © 2014 Savision B.V. – savision.com – All rights reserved.

This manual, as well as the software described in it, is furnished under license and may be used or copied only in accordance with the terms of such license. The content of this manual is furnished for informational use only, is subject to change without notice, and should not be construed as a commitment by Savision B.V. Savision B.V. assumes no responsibility or liability for any errors or inaccuracies that may appear in this manual. Except as permitted by such license, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of Savision B.V.

Any references to company names, organizations, persons, or places are for demonstration purposes only and are not intended to refer to any actual company, organization, person or place. Copyrighted and/or trademarked materials remain the property of their respective owners. REVISION NUMBER: 1.1.7.0

Savision B.V. | Cloud Advisor | Release Notes | Rev 1.1.7.0

Contents

1

Introduction ... 4

2

Releases ... 5

2.1 Version 1.1.7.0 ... 5

2.1.1 What’s New... 5

2.1.2 What’s Fixed ... 5

2.2 Version 1.1.6.0 ... 5

2.2.1 What’s Fixed ... 5

2.3 Version 1.1.5.0 ... 5

2.4 Version 1.1.4.0 ... 6

2.4.1 What’s Fixed ... 6

2.5 Version 1.1.3.0 ... 6

2.5.1 What’s New... 6

2.5.2 What’s Fixed ... 6

2.6 Version 1.1.2.0 ... 6

2.6.1 What’s New... 6

2.6.2 What’s Fixed ... 6

2.7 Version 1.1.1.0 ... 7

2.7.1 What’s New... 7

2.8 Version 1.1.0.0 ... 7

2.8.1 What’s New... 7

2.9 Version 1.0.0.108 ... 7

2.9.1 What’s New... 7

2.9.2 What’s Fixed ... 8

2.10 Version 1.0.0.107 ... 8

2.10.1 What’s Fixed ... 8

2.11 Version 1.0.0.106 ... 8

2.11.1 What’s New... 8

2.11.2 What’s Fixed ... 8

2.12 Version 1.0.0.105 ... 9

4 Introduction

1

INTRODUCTION

This document describes the new features and bug fixes contained in each release of Savision’s Cloud Advisor.

Savision B.V. | Cloud Advisor | Release Notes | Rev 1.1.7.0

2

RELEASES

2.1

VERSION 1.1.7.0

2.1.1

WHAT’S NEW

 This release added a new tip "Potential Space Overcommitted" for hosts and cluster shared

volumes. When using dynamic virtual hard disks, it is possible to promise more storage space to your virtual machines than actually exists in your environment. This tip looks for this situation in your environment and offers solutions such as migrating virtual machines to other uncommitted storage volumes.

 This release added a new tip "Are Dynamic Virtual Hard Disks Near Capacity". This tip alerts

you when dynamically expanding virtual hard disks have expanded almost to their limit.

2.1.2

WHAT’S FIXED

 In previous versions a drop-down menu in the credentials window whimsically positioned

itself far from the dialog that hosted it. This has been corrected.

2.2

VERSION 1.1.6.0

2.2.1

WHAT’S FIXED

 The "Is Dynamic Memory Enabled" tip no longer incorrectly generates alerts for VMware

virtual machines.

 The "Is There Enough Installed Memory To Support Failover" tip now respects the "cluster

reserve" setting for a cluster. Previously, the tip only considered the potential failure of one host.

2.3

VERSION 1.1.5.0

6 Releases

2.4

VERSION 1.1.4.0

2.4.1

WHAT’S FIXED

 This release added a new tip: “Known Operating System” for virtual machines. Virtual

machines without specified operating systems are at risk of being skipped over during server wide updates. This tip generates a warning when virtual machines have an unknown

operating system.

 We no longer only criticize your environment, but we also provide feedback as to which tips

have passed. Show off your finely tuned cloud with a list of green check marks!

2.5

VERSION 1.1.3.0

2.5.1

WHAT’S NEW

 We’ve improved the dialog that asks for your credentials to the Virtual Machine Manager

database. If you no longer want to provide credentials you’re given the option to skip the dialog and generate just the tips that don’t rely on historical performance data.

2.5.2

WHAT’S FIXED

 The “Starting Memory Too High” tip would generate an error when running on the R2

release of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012. Microsoft changed an interface in the R2 release and a method we were counting on was no longer present. We’ve updated our code and the tip works in both 2012 SP1 and 2012 R2.

2.6

VERSION 1.1.2.0

2.6.1

WHAT’S NEW

 This release added a new tip: “Checkpoints Present” for virtual machines. As Microsoft

recommends not using checkpoints in production settings, this tip generates a warning when it finds virtual machines that have checkpoints.

 This release added a new tip: “Virtual Hard Disk Is Not Located On A Cluster Shared Volume”

Savision B.V. | Cloud Advisor | Release Notes | Rev 1.1.7.0

is not able to handle. We are very happy to the customers so far who have provided error reports that have contributed to making the product even better.

 When retrieving information from Virtual Machine Manager, we’ve added further isolation.

Some customers reported no tips being generated when information about a particular virtual machine had been corrupted by Virtual Machine Manager. (We’ll note that VMM crashed when opening the settings dialog for those virtual machines). Now any corrupt clusters, hosts, or virtual machines are skipped over and tips will still be generated for the remaining resources.

 If customers had named their Virtual Machine Manager database anything other than the

default VirtualManagerDB they would not see any tips based on historical performance data. Now the name of the database is read from Virtual Machine Manager instead of hardcoded.

2.7

VERSION 1.1.1.0

2.7.1

WHAT’S NEW

 This release added a new tip: “Virtual Machine Name Does Not Follow A Recognized

Convention” for virtual machines. This tip generates a warning when the name of the virtual machine does not match (at least partially) the fully-qualified domain name of the guest OS.

 We’re very sad to see the “Apply Recommendation” button removed from the product.

Cloud Advisor users weren’t clamouring for this feature to be completed, but they have been very persistent in asking us to give them tools to better manage and visualize their Hyper-V environment. Based on that feedback, a new product in our Cloud family will be making an appearance later this year…

2.8

VERSION 1.1.0.0

2.8.1

WHAT’S NEW

 The product is now known as “Cloud Advisor”.

2.9

VERSION 1.0.0.108

2.9.1

WHAT’S NEW

 This release added a new tip: “Prediction: All Available Memory Will Be Consumed” for

clusters. The purpose of this tip is to predict when a cluster (as opposed to the individual hosts within the cluster) will run out of available memory.

8 Releases

2.9.2

WHAT’S FIXED

 If any virtual machines had been stored in the library, no tips would be reported. The add-in

tries to find the host for all virtual machines that VMM reports and virtual machines in the library don’t have an actual host (the host listed is the VMM server itself). This caused an exception and the add-in did not proceed to evaluate any tips at all.

2.10

VERSION 1.0.0.107

2.10.1

WHAT’S FIXED

 The “Virtual Guest Services Are Not Installed” tip mistakenly identified any virtual machine

that wasn’t currently running as not having virtual guest services installed. This was due to VMM not providing the true information on the state of virtual guest services unless the machine is running. As such, we now only generate “Virtual Guest Services Are Not Installed” tips for virtual machines that are running.

 While the display of tips depends on the current selection context (i.e. what cloud, cluster,

host group you’ve selected), when selecting a host group we only showed tips for virtual machines in that selected host group and not for virtual machines that were contained in child host groups of the selected host group. Based on customer feedback, we now show tips for the virtual machines that belong in any host groups below the currently selected one.

 Thanks to customer feedback, we now understand VMM’s “definition” of a SQL Server

instance name. For the curious, it seems to be “host name\instance name” with only the host name supplied when the instance is the default.

 No tips would show up if the user had selected a Host, Host Group, or Cloud that contained

one or more virtual machines that were not part of a cluster.

2.11

VERSION 1.0.0.106

2.11.1

WHAT’S NEW

 This release added a new tip: “The Installed Memory in the Cluster Cannot Support

Failover.” The purpose of this tip is to identify situations where the total amount of configured memory for all running virtual machines in the cluster is more than could be supported by the remaining hosts in the cluster should one of them fail.

Savision B.V. | Cloud Advisor | Release Notes | Rev 1.1.7.0

value is now editable. Further, the code has been improved so that it does a better job of identifying the instance name.

 A number of users reported that they received no tips. This was due to the fact that an

error in generating any one tip would result in all generated tips being discarded. Tips are now generated in isolation from one another so that if a particular tip encounters an error the other tips should still appear. Further, if an error does occur in generating a tip, an error tip is generated allowing the user to pass the relevant information to Savision for further troubleshooting.

 The list of possible credentials that can be used to connect to the VMM data warehouse has

been clarified. Previously, the tool gave the impression that the user could enter any valid Windows credentials while under the covers it only used the credentials of the current user. The dialog has been clarified to reflect that only the Windows credentials of the current user may be used, or if SQL authentication has been enabled on the database server that valid SQL credentials may be presented.

 Once a connection has been made to the VMM data warehouse, the credentials are tested

to ensure that they are able to query the relevant tables. If they are not, an appropriate error message is present. Previously, it was simply assumed that the credentials had the correct permissions and the tool silently failed to generate a number of tips if that assumption was incorrect.

 A bug in VMM sometimes causes it to withhold the “PowerShellContext” from our add-in.

This prevents the add-in from operating and leads to a crash of the VMM console. The tool’s handling of this situation has been improved. The tool will no longer cause the VMM console to crash and will attempt to find the “PowerShellContext” on its own rather than solely relying on the value passed by VMM.

 Some tips may have appeared even though they were not related to the selected Cloud,

Cluster, or Host. This issue has been resolved.

2.12

VERSION 1.0.0.105

10 Current Known Issues

3

CURRENT KNOWN ISSUES

 While the tool is supposed to filter the list of tips so that only those relevant to selected the

Cloud, Cluster, or Host are displayed, a bug in VMM will sometimes prevent us from being notified when the selection changes. If you encounter this situation, you will need to restart the VMM console in order to re-enable context sensitive tips.