NTPRO.NL - Eric Sloof

Ernst  Cozijnsen and John van der Sluis, two of my colleagues over at Capgemini Outsourcing presented at the VMWORLD EUROPE 2008 in Cannes. Their presentation is called “We practice what we preach� and is all about the success story of implementing a Virtual Infrastructure as a Business Critical solution. By combining intimacy, industrialization and innovation Capgemini Outsourcing has set a footprint on the world of Virtual Infrastructures. Due to extensive research a new architectural vision was created for this Business Critical solution. This new architectural blueprint is based on multiple datacenter with architectural principles like pay-per-use, flexibility, scalability and standardization. With installing new and migrating existing customers this multi vendor infrastructure lead to a growth of over 1600% last year. With shared architectural building blocks a custom solution can now be realized for any environment and future challenges. Capgemini Outsourcing offers dual site and disaster recovery at a lower cost by creating a new version of on-demand scalability for new customer potential. (Picture from Viktor van den Berg)

The new VMware VMsafe Technology Allows the Virtual Datacenter to Be More Secure Than Physical Environments. Twenty Industry-Leading Security Vendors, Including CheckPoint, McAfee and Symantec, Endorse VMsafe Technology and Announce Plans to Build Interoperable Security Solutions. The global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, today announced new security technology called VMware VMsafe(tm) that protects applications running in virtual machines in ways previously not possible in physical environments. The VMsafe APIs allow vendors to develop advanced security products that combat the latest generation of malware. VMsafe technology integrates into the VMware hypervisor and provides the transparency to prevent threats and attacks such as viruses, trojans and keyloggers from ever reaching a virtual machine.  Twenty security vendors have embraced VMsafe technology and are building products that will further enhance the security of virtual machines, making the virtual environment unmatched in the level of security and protection it provides compared to physical systems.

Virtualization.com interviews Richard Garsthagen, Organizer of VMworld Europe 2008 and VMware Evangelist  Cannes, France and experienced virtualization industry event organizer, VMware Evangelist and coordinator of several TSX Events for VMware. Interviewer: Tarry Singh of http:// Virtualization.com bloggers Tarry Singh and Nicolas 'Charbax' Charbonnier sit down with Richard Garsthagen, organizer of the VMWorld Europe 2008 Summit in Cannes, France and experienced virtualization industry event organizer, VMware Evangelist and coordinator of several TSX Events for VMware.

Viktor van den Berg has taken some pictures at VMworld Europe 2008 and the official Dutch VMUG Gettogether in Cannes. Stay tuned at his Flickr landing page because more will follow.

The VMware Infrastructure 3.5 Plugin and Extension Programming Guide - Revision 1 is now available at VIPlugins.com. This document is not sponsored or supported by VMware in any way. This paper focuses on educating developers on:

Client Plugin Architecture
This includes where plugins are installed, how the VI client discovers local plugins and ones advertised on the VC server, and finally how to create a client plugin.

Server Extension Architecture
Includes how to register server extensions and how to make client plugins centrally available.

Tomcat Architecture
Discusses how the VirtualCenter Tomcat installation impacts server extension daemons.

Database Schema
Review the new VirtualCenter database tables that are related to extensions.

Creating Windows Installers
Reveals some problems with creating Windows Installers for server extensions.

Namespaces
Details the namespaces and assemblies VMware provides to create plugins and extensions.

Terminology
Coins new terminology that developers can use when discussing the above concepts.

Imagine being able to instantly identify capacity bottlenecks on hosts, clusters and resources pools. Currently, organizations are struggling with many VM lifecycle management issues such as controlling VM sprawl, identifying current and future capacity bottlenecks and maximizing existing VMware infrastructure. Learn best practices and effective strategies to help curb these problems in a one-hour educational workshop.

Veeam is pleased to inform you that the Veeam Backup for VMware Infrastructure 3 beta is now available for download. A groundbreaking disaster recovery solution for VMware Infrastructure 3 that combines backup and replication Veeam Backup is the first solution that combines backup and replication for fast recovery of your VMware environment. It is really two products in one: traditional backup and recovery for less-critical applications or virtual machines, and replication-based backup and recovery to meet high-availability requirements. With Veeam Backup you get both, and you can choose which method to use and when. In addition, both backup techniques integrate with VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB), giving you the option to use VCB for even faster backup and recovery when you need it most.

Features and Enhancements:

• Backup and Replication in one
• Integration with VCB technology
• VCB on-the-fly support
• Synthetic backup for faster recovery, eliminating the need for full backups
• File-level recovery for the most widely used file formats
• Single instance storage for reduced storage cost
• Multi-ESX management
• ESX to ESX direct copy
• Complete file management and Windows integration

VMware Customer Education is developing an instructor-led training course for customers who are building VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructures. The course offers skills training and hands-on experience on VMware Virtual Desktop Manager and related technologies. We are pleased to invite enrollments in the test delivery of this course.

Here is a preliminary course outline:

Module 1: VDI/VDM Overview
Module 2: Virtualizing Active Directory for VDM
Module 3: Group Policy Objects and Roaming Templates
Module 4: Remote Desktop Protocol
Module 5: Best Practices for XP and Vista Virtual Machines
Module 6: Installing VDM
Module 7: Using VDM Clients
Module 8: VDM Administration
Module 9: VDM Dynamic and Static Pools
Module 10: VDM Security Server
Module 11: VDM Load-Balancing and Multi-Server
Module 12: VDM Tunneled and Direct Connections
Module 13: VDM Security
Module 14: VDM Logs and Troubleshooting
Module 15: VMware Update Manager

EDU-DATASHEET-VDM-beta.pdf (84.5 K)

Elias Knaser created a real cool trailer for his upcoming ESX 3.5 CBT. We can expect this new version in March.  Elias' current focus is on Server Based Computing and Virtualization. He is currently the Sr. Network Engineer for Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, IL with a Citrix implementation serving 14000 customers. Prior to that, he was the Server Based Computing Architect for General Growth Properties, the second largest shopping mall owner and operator in the world. He co-authored many books including: "Citrix CCA MetaFrame Presentation Server 3.0 and 4.0 (Exams 223/256) (Exam Cram)" by Que Publishing, "MCSE Designing Security for a Windows Server 2003 Network: Exam 70-298 Study Guide and Dvd Training System", and "Citrix MetaFrame XP Including Feature Release 1" by Syngress Publishing.  He was the Citrix series trainer for a computer based training company and developed their Citrix MetaFrame XP 1.0 FR1 & FR2 training videos.  Elias is a Contributing Author at WindowsITPro Magazine, Techrepublic.com, Certcities.com, Cramsession.com, and Brianmadden.com.

With the latest addition of Schley Andrew Kutz the VMware tools repository vm4all.com has reached 60 entries. Vm4all.com has nearly 2000 unique visitors a day and is linked by 280 websites.

Add Port Groups is a VI 2.5 client plug-in that enables the ability to create many port groups at once on many ESX hosts and many virtual switches.

Andrew Kutz has released the source code of his tool that can be used to create a VI 2.5 plug-in. Andrew has been professionally involved in the technology sector for 12 years. For the last seven of them he has worked with the latest technologies while employed by the University of Texas at Austin. Three years ago, Andrew started his own consulting firm and development house, l o s t c r e a t i o n s. He is also a founding member of the Austin VMware Users' Group (VMUG). His current pet development project is SVMotion plug-in.

LeftHand's Virtual SAN Appliance for VMware ESX is the industry's first full-featured, virtual iSCSI SAN. Powered by the SAN/iQ software platform, a Virtual SAN for VMware converts unused storage internal to VI3 servers into a clustered iSCSI SAN, providing all of the SAN services necessary for storage provisioning, data protection, management and availability in demanding datacenter environments. The solution offers scalable capacity and performance along with advanced data availability via network RAID and multi-site SAN capabilities.

 

I have written a few articles about VMware and the PowerShell command let’s and at the VMworld 2008 EUROPE in Cannes you can explore the  PowerShell interfaces for VMware Infrastructure in the Automating VMware with PowerShell: Hands-On Lab. But the downside of PowerShell is that there isn’t a nice user interface. Wouldn’t it be great to use the PowerShell .net library’s and connect to your Virtual Centre server with Visual Basic Express 2008. It isn’t documented but I have found a way to connect to VC using the following code :

Public Class Form1

Private Sub Button1_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Button1.Click

        Dim Config As New VMware.VimAutomation.Client20.VimClient

        Config.ConnectivityService.Login("https", "VC.NTPRO.LOCAL", "443", "Admin", "vmware")

        MsgBox(Config.ConnectivityService.IsConnected)

        MsgBox(Config.ConnectivityService.GetApiInfo.ApiVersion)

    End Sub

End Class

If everything goes well you will receive two message boxes, the first one will tell you “True� so you’re connected and the second one will display “2.5�, this is the version of the API. The remainder of the code is up to you, please let me know if you can stop and start a VM. The beta version of the VI3 Windows Toolkit will be launched in March.

Pearson was kind enough to send me a review copy of the Vmware ESX Server in the Enterprise book. This book is written by Edward Haletky and all I can say is that he really did a great job. Since some of the information in his book is based on VI3 (ESX 3.0) I asked him how the readers are going to be updated to the ESX 3.5 version. I received his answer a few minutes later and at this moment he is working on the Errata. You can find it online at his website. John Troyer conducted an interview with Edward last week which can be found here.