Eric Sloof - NTPRO.NL

Recent Entries

vSphere Storage Appliance 5.1.x Brownfield Deployments
Wednesday, June 5 2013
VMware Certification Exams 75% off During VMworld
Tuesday, June 4 2013
Upcoming Training Course - VMware vCloud Director: Organization Administration
Monday, June 3 2013
vCloud Automation Center 5.2 - General Available
Friday, May 31 2013
Deployment Guide - VMware View with FlexPod
Thursday, May 30 2013
vCAC 5.1 Configuration Notes for Loadbalancer.org
Monday, May 27 2013
Reference Architecture - VMware Horizon Workspace
Monday, May 27 2013
VMware Workstation Technology Preview 2013
Monday, May 27 2013
Dutch - Een bar met geniën
Friday, May 24 2013
Now available as Rough Cut - Virtualizing Microsoft Business Critical Applications on VMware vSphere 5
Friday, May 24 2013
The Loadbalancer.org Virtual Appliance is VMware Ready
Thursday, May 23 2013
An interview with VMware Cloud Automation Center Guru Zack Kielich
Wednesday, May 22 2013
Cool Tool - Snapshot Explorer - Foglight for Virtualization Free Edition
Wednesday, May 22 2013
New Technical White Paper - How To Troubleshoot vSphere 5.x Performance Issues Using vCenter Operations
Tuesday, May 21 2013

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Monday, June 17. 2013

Now available as Rough Cut - VCP-Cloud Official Cert Guide

The Rough Cuts service from VMware Press gives you exclusive access to an evolving manuscript that you can read online or download as a PDF and print. A Rough Cuts book is not fully edited or completely formatted, but you'll get access to new versions as they are created.

VMware has offered the VMware Certified Professional (VCP) exam since the early 2000s but has recently expanded their offerings to include the VMware Certified Advanced Professional (VCAP) and VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) certifications.

Even more recently, VMware has increased the certification tracks to include End User Computing (EUC) - also known as “Desktop” - and Cloud certifications and has renamed the core virtualization track to Data Center Virtualization (DCV). This means that anyone with the legacy “VCP” certification is now considered VMware Certified Professional - Data Center Virtualization (VCP-DCV) holders.

What is common to each track is that there is a progressive certification path that takes the candidate from VCP to VCAP to VCDX. What’s involved with each step on the path?

The Official VCP-Cloud Cert Guide is a key component to studying for the certification on VMware vCloud Suite. With more than 200,000 VCPs currently in the marketplace, and VMware’s vCloud Director suite becoming the standard for private and hybrid cloud deployments, this guide will assist existing VCPs secure their VCP-Cloud certification, as well as assist new administrators interested in procuring the certification on  vCloud Director.

Rough Cut - VCP5-Cloud Official Cert Guide: VMware Certified Professional - Cloud
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Eric Sloof
in Books at 18:45 | No comments | No Trackbacks
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Integration of Log Insight with the vCenter Operations Management platform

In this video you will see the integration of Log Insight with the vCenter Operations Management platform. VMware vCenter Operations Manager 5.7.1 introduces integration with vCenter Log Insight (GA available in Q3 2013) and the vCenter Web Cleint. Log Insight can be configured to send alerts to vCenter Operations Manager about vCenter Server objects. In the vSphere UI, vCenter Operations displays links to launch Log Insight in-context from the alerts details page and from the objects details page.

Integration of Log Insight with the vCenter Operations Management platform extends operational visibility and proactive management capabilities across infrastructure and applications in a dynamic, hybrid cloud environment.  Integration also helps you maximize ROI and value by bringing unstructured data (such as syslog files) together with structured data (such as metrics and key performance indicators), offering a significantly enhanced solution for end-to-end operations management.

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Eric Sloof
in vCenter Operations Manager at 11:06 | No comments | No Trackbacks
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Thursday, June 13. 2013

New Technical White Paper - End Your Data Center Logging Chaos with VMware vCenter Log Insight

Although vCenter Log Insight can be used as a standalone log consolidation and analysis tool, it’s greatest strength (and biggest differentiator) is its tight integration with vCenter Server, vSphere, and vCenter Operations Manager. No other virtualization-management tool can give you such a complete view of your data center operations by correlating virtualization performance events and system log entries across the vSphere infrastructure.


Another of vCenter Log Insight’s great strengths is that it can also manage physical servers, storage, and network devices. vCenter Log Insight is extensible, because you can add third-party content packs (made up of numerous fields) or your own content packs.Both large enterprises and small and midsized businesses (SMBs) should use vCenter Log Insight to consolidate their log data to gain strong analytics and troubleshooting capabilities. 

VMware vCenter Log Insight is useful for monitoring, troubleshooting and securing your data center, and it’s quick to set up and enjoyable to use. In addition, vCenter Log Insight offers unique integration with vCenter Operations Manager to give you a complete view of your virtual infrastructure.
Posted by
Eric Sloof
in vCenter Log Insight, White Papers at 22:20 | No comments | No Trackbacks
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Wednesday, June 12. 2013

Upgrading to VMware vCenter Operations Manager 5.7.1

vCenter Operations Manager 5.7.1 is the latest release of VMware's integrated operations suite, converging performance, capacity, and configuration management. This new release introduces the following features and enhancements.

Performance Report Pack

This release introduces new performance report pack. By default, reports now include operations status report for line of business virtual machines, alert and performance trend, cluster utilization trend, average and peak virtual machine storage latency. With these reports you can get a consolidated operational status for a group of virtual machines and identify the clusters, datastores, or virtual machines have had performance problems. You can assess any impact to performance in terms of performance or health degradation, as well as determine which datastores had performance problems for the given time and identify the impacted virtual machines from a given datastore. For more information about the new performance reports, see the topic "Reporting Tools in vCenter Operations Manager" in the VMware vCenter Operations Manager Online Help.

Launch in Context

vCenter Operations Manager is enhanced to offer in-context application launch capability. Using this feature, you can configure a button or menu item to launch an external application using a URL in a specific context defined by the active UI element and selected object. For example, you can add an "Open in" drop-down menu that launches the vCenter Web user interface, navigating to the details of a selected virtual machine. In the same menu, there might be other items that launch into Hyperic or Log Insight for the same virtual machine.

vCenter Log Insight Integration

This release introduces integration with vCenter Log Insight (GA available in Q3 2013) and vCenter Operations Manager. Log Insight can be configured to send alerts to vCenter Operations Manager about vCenter Server objects. In the vSphere UI, vCenter Operations displays links to launch Log Insight in-context from the alerts details page and from the objects details page.

vSphere Dashboards in the Custom UI

The vSphere group in the Dashboards menu contains several default dashboards for managing virtual objects in a vSphere environment. These default dashboards are available to all members of the Administrators, Operators, and Users user groups. This release introduces the following default vSphere dashboards:
  • Troubleshooting Dashboard
  • VM Utilization Dashboard
  • VM Performance Dashboard
  • Host Utilization Dashboard
  • Cluster Utilization Dashboard
  • Datastore Performance Dashboard
  • Datastore Space Dashboard
  • Heatmaps Dashboard
  • Alerts Dashboard
  • Host Memory Dashboard
This video will show you some of the new features and how to upgrade to version 5.7.1. This procedure is applicable when updating to vCenter Operations Manager 5.7.1 vApp from the following product versions. vCenter Operations Manager 5.0, 5.0.1, 5.0.2, 5.0.3, 5.6, and 5.7.1, including any Hotfix versions.
Posted by
Eric Sloof
in vCenter Operations Manager at 16:44 | 1 Comment | No Trackbacks
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New Training Course - VMware vCloud Automation Center: Install, Configure, Manage

This training course (three days of instructor-led classroom) focuses on installing, configuring, and managing VMware vCloud Automation Center. This course covers the configuration and use of vCloud Automation Center as a platform for self-service provisioning of virtual, cloud, and physical machines to create and manage on-demand multivendor cloud infrastructures. 

Course Objectives 

By the end of the course, you should be able to meet the following objectives:
  • Understand the vCloud Automation Center architecture and use case in multivendor cloud environments 
  • Install and configure vCloud Automation Center 5.2 
  • Manage vCloud Automation Center 5.2 entities on VMware and third-party hardware and cloud infrastructures
  • Configure and manage provisioning groups and blueprints 
  • Configure and manage enterprise groups and reservations for compute resources on VMware, Microsoft, Citrix, and more 
  • Use the Self-Service portal to request and manage machines according to vCloud Automation Center approval policies 
  • Use the Report portal to monitor vCloud Automation Center configuration and managed resources 
  • Understand and configure vCloud Automation Center workflows 
  • Manage and monitor machines and resource reclamation
VMware vCloud Automation Center: Install, Configure, Manage [V5.2] - BETA
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Eric Sloof
in Training / Certification at 13:22 | No comments | No Trackbacks
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Tuesday, June 11. 2013

VMware vCenter Log Insight v1.0 Open Beta

VMware vCenter Log Insight is the new solution of VMware for log management and analytics. It delivers superior technology for automated log management through log analytics, aggregation, and search, and an easy to use user interface. Log Insight provides the operational intelligence needed to proactively enable service levels and operational efficiency in dynamic hybrid cloud environments.

VMware vCenter Log Insight addresses these challenges and enables improved quality of service, operational efficiency and continuous compliance.

Log Insight includes the following key capabilities:
  • Collects and analyzes all types of machine-generated log data, e.g. application logs, network traces, configuration files, messages, performance data, system state dumps, and more.
  • Enables administrators to connect it to everything in their environment, e.g. operating systems, applications, storage arrays, firewalls, network devices etc., providing a single location to collect, store, and analyze logs at scale.
  • Features an intuitive GUI-based interface that makes it easy to run simple interactive searches as well as deep analytical queries for quick, actionable insights.
  • Automatically chooses the best visualization for your data, saving you valuable time.
  • Adds structure to all types of unstructured log data, enabling administrators to troubleshoot quickly, without needing to know the data beforehand.
  • Delivers real-time monitoring, search, and analytics, coupled with a dashboard for stored queries, reports, and alerts, enabling correlation of events across multiple tiers of a hybrid cloud environment.
  • Comes with built-in knowledge and native support for vSphere.
  • Integrates with the VMware vCenter Operations Management platform to bring unstructured data (e.g. log files) together with structured data (e.g. metrics and KPIs), offering a significantly enhanced solution for end-to-end operations management.
Public Beta Program Opens to Foster Community Input 

To encourage broad product feedback and testing from customers and partners, VMware vCenter Log Insight is now available for download via a public beta program. Participants can provide detailed product feedback, rank features and request new capabilities via the public beta program site at: http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/vcenter/vcenter-log-insight.
Posted by
Eric Sloof
in vCenter Log Insight at 14:43 | No comments | No Trackbacks
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Sunday, June 9. 2013

vCenter Operations Manager - The GEO Dashboard Widget

In this video you will see how to group Resources by GEO location and activate the dashboard widget. Depending on your environment, you might want to group some or all of your resources according to their physical location. When resources are grouped according to their physical location, you can see the health of all of the resources in a particular place. To group resources by their physical location, you must activate the geographical location feature, create values for the GEO Location tag, and assign the resources that you want to track to GEO Location tag values.

  1. Activate the Geographical Location Feature - To group resources by location, you must activate the geographical location feature in vCenter Operations Manager.
  2. Create a GEO Location Tag Value - Before you can assign resources to a location, you must create that location as a value of the GEO Location tag and define its position on the map. Create tag values for each of your office locations.
  3. Assign a Resource to a GEO Location Tag Value - You define a resource's location by assigning it to a value of the GEO Location tag.
  4. View the Resource Map - You can use the world map on the Geographical tab on the Environment Overview page to see the health of the resources at some or all of your defined locations. The GEO widget shows a map similar to the map on the Geographical tab. You can add the GEO widget to any dashboard.
Posted by
Eric Sloof
in Online Training at 19:05 | No comments | No Trackbacks
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Wednesday, June 5. 2013

vCenter Operations and the Quest for the Missing Metrics has been accepted for VMworld 2013

We've received some great news today. Our session proposal "vCenter Operations and the Quest for the Missing Metrics" has been accepted for both VMworld US and Europe 2013. 

This session will teach you how to customize vCenter Operations to provide you the information you really need for your business. We do this by giving you some real life examples from the field where we use Custom Dashboards, Super Metrics, Adapters and Alerts in order to give you the best possible view in to the well-being of your environment. You’ll also see a live demo and hear how a VMware customer identified nearly significant savings and has streamlined the capacity management process with vCenter Operations Management.

The session will be presented by Duco Jaspars and Eric Sloof.

Posted by
Eric Sloof
in VMworld at 21:25 | No comments | No Trackbacks
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