Eric Sloof - NTPRO.NL

Viktor van den Berg did an interview with Herco van Burg, Heco is the developer of the EDA appliance. In this interview which van be found on the Dutch VMUG site, Herco reveals the plan to combine UDA and EDA in one new virtual appliance. This means that  Herco van Burg and Carl Thijssen (UDA) are going to join their forces and build a new unattended ESX deployment appliance with the best of both worlds.

The VMworld Europe 2009 Flickr Group provides a great way to swap your VMworld stories and photos. This VMworld Flickr Group is much the same as other Groups you can join online. Flickr Groups are places where people of similar interests meet to exchange photos, videos and stories. At this Flickr Group, you also can follow other VMworld Europe 2009 fanatics who are visiting Cannes.

The annual Dutch VMUG meeting was held at the Café Le Crillon, situated near the Palais des Festivals.  This informal meeting started at Monday 21:00. Paul Davey and Peter Grant, two members of the Xtravirt team were also present.

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Xtravirt was present at the Dutch VMUG Meeting in Cannes from Eric Sloof NTPRO.NL on Vimeo.

David Bieneman wishes you a great VMworld in Cannes.

David Bieneman wishes you a great VMworld in Cannes from Eric Sloof NTPRO.NL on Vimeo.

I would like to share my days experiences but anyone who attends the VCI (VMware Certified Instructor) day is under strict NDA (Non Disclosure). This means that I can’t say anything about lots of demo sessions, demonstrating all the new features in the next generation of VI. Besides that there was an open discussion to talk about certification paths, course roadmap, and all things VCI and VATC related, including the MyLearn, evaluation. I made some pictures and collected a video footage.

VMware train the trainer day in Cannes ‘09 from Eric Sloof NTPRO.NL on Vimeo.

Are you wondering what Scott Herold has been working on the  past few months? He’s in the process of branching PowerGUI’s code and developing a new freeware virtualization specific PowerShell management product called the Virtualization EcoShell. You can read about the details at the website http://www.thevesi.org.

What is The Virtualization EcoShell Initiative?
The Virtualization EcoShell Initiative (VESI™) is a Vizioncore sponsored community initiative being driven by Virtualization expert and author Scott Herold. The goal of The VESI is to enhance the virtualization administrative experience by providing a consolidated graphical toolkit for virtualization management that is easily extensible by the community called the Virtualization EcoShell.

What is the Virtualization EcoShell?
The Virtualization EcoShell is a freeware "Power Toolkit" for virtualization administrators powered by Quest Software’s award winning PowerGUI. The Virtualization EcoShell provides limitless extensibility through a customizable graphical interface that includes an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for managing, creating, and debugging PowerShell scripts that extend the capabilities of daily virtualization management.

When is the Virtualization EcoShell scheduled to be released?
The current schedule is to provide a public beta of the Virtualization EcoShell at the end of March 2009. Individuals that are interested in leveraging the core technology today may download and use PowerGUI with the VMware Infrastructure Management PowerPack. A good primer to get started can be found at VMGuru.com.

As a special Veeam VIP, I was cordially invited to the Veeam partner & customer  appreciation party. I met up with the Veeam executive team on board the yacht "Free Life" in the Cannes harbour for a high-energy party with food, drinks, music & fun.

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Veeam partner & customer appreciation party '09 from Eric Sloof NTPRO.NL on Vimeo.

This evening it was party time in Cannes, I enjoyed the Vizioncore Partner Reception at the Majestic Barriere Beach Club. Al always I brought my camera and made some video shots, and as always this year’s Vizioncore Partner Reception was another memorable event with food, friends and fun.

Vizioncore Partner Reception Cannes '09 from Eric Sloof NTPRO.NL on Vimeo.

This afternoon I landed in Cannes and I picked up my VMworld registration materials, including my badge and program guide. While Viktor van den Berg was checking his presentation, Paul Maritz walked into the VMware office. The video shows Paul prepping his Partner Day session. Afterwards I got a glimpse of the Solution Exchange, the guys were working really hard to build up all the booth’s.

I Picked Up My VMworld 2009 Europe Badge from Eric Sloof NTPRO.NL on Vimeo.

Continue reading "I Picked Up My VMworld 2009 Europe Badge" »

The annual Dutch VMUG meeting will be held at the Café Le Crillon, situated near the Palais des Festivals.  This informal meeting will start at Monday 21:00. Paul Davey and Peter Grant, two members of the Xtravirt team will also be present. You have the opportunity to share your thoughts about a new comprehensive white paper which outlines the USB device connectivity capabilities and support options for ESX 3.x, ESXi and Virtual Machine Guests with a summary of its key features and options available.  Viktor van den Berg is also preparing another sticker campaign; at Rotterdam airport you will find out what’s the catch.

VMware has launched a new campaign, when you are still a VCP on 2.5 you have the opportunity to be updated to VCP for VI3.5 and rock the world. If you’re  one of the first 100 to pass before February 28th. VMware will give you an Altec Lansing T612.

http://www.vcpsrock.com

During the delivery of my VMware View training I experienced a nasty error. It took me a while before I figured out what caused it. When you’re adding a vCenter server to the Connection server you have the option to enable the Composer. Before enabling the Composer you have to install the Composer software on the vCenter server. After activating the enable mark box, you must add a Domain administrator account. When I added an account, the following error showed up in the event log of the vCenter server.

Bad domain name. com.vmware.vdi.admin.ui.VCBean.a(SourceFile:1002)
AxisFault
faultCode: {http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/}Client
faultString: VMware.Sim.Fault.AdHostsUnavailableFault
{http://vmware.com/SviService}AdHostUnavailableFault:<AdConfigId i:nil="true"/>

After trying a lot of different things, I finally ended up with two solutions, the hard way is remove your vCenter server from the AD Domain and let it rejoin the AD Domain again. The easy way is add an AD Domain record to your DNS server. Quick and dirty, open your DNS manager, add an A record, don’t fill in the host name and just hit OK. After that, it works like a charm.

Maishsk over at technodrone.blogspot.com posted the official VMware Video stencils at VI:OPS. Here’s the link http://viops.vmware.com/home/docs/DOC-1346
Via Arne Fokkema at http://ict-freak.nl.

This afternoon I had a special guest trainer on stage. Viktor van den Berg did a dry run of his “the Unattended Deployment of VMware Infrastructure 3” VMworld session. Afterwards I did a short Mino interview with him.

Viktor van den Berg did a dry run from Eric Sloof NTPRO.NL on Vimeo.

Viktor van den Berg, Product Manager and Technical Trainer at the Xpert Training Group is going to present a session about the Unattended Deployment of VMware Infrastructure 3 at the VMworld Europe 2009 Cannes.

An unattended deployment of VMware infrastructure 3 reduces the time needed for installation and configuration of your VMware ESX and vCenter server(s). It also reduces the risk misconfiguration. Unattended deployment of these products will gain you a consistent configuration. At Xpert Training Group, an indepedent VMware Authorized Training Centre from The Netherlands, unattended deployments of VI-3 are used on a regular basis. In this session you will learn how to automatically deploy your ESX servers and how to connect these fresh installed ESX servers to a vCenter server. After the introduction of a step-by-step plan for unattended deployment, this session will focus on some useful scripting techniques used in a unattended deployment scenario. Expect some bash and powershell scripting in this session.

I’m delivering a VMware View training this week. When I reached the “Replicate Server” chapter we had to do a lab with the “Hercules virtual appliance”. The goal of the lab is building a multiple “Connection Server” environment and let the appliance do the load-balancing.  Although the “Hercules virtual appliance” is well documented and even has a VA page at the VMware website, I had a hard time to get it working. The virtual appliances available on http://istanbul.sourceforge.net/ either have a IDE disk or an old SCSI disk which isn’t compatible with ESX 3.5. I converted the “Hercules virtual appliance” to the Open Virtualization Format (OVF), and it’s available for download at the following address :

http://www.ntpro.nl/software/Hercules-SCSI-ESX3.zip

Here’s the way to set it up:

• Import the OVF virtual aplience.
• Power-on the Hercules VM.
• Open a console. Login as a user-ID of "root" with a password of "root".
• Enter the following command at the command line:
• pen 443 10.168.100.3:443 10.168.100.4:443

The format of the command is: pen <port-number> <first-server:port> <second-server:port>. There is a space between the first port number and the first server IP. There is a second space between the first server's 443 port and the second server's IP.

It runs on a Linux OS built from scratch to have a minimal footprint. It can run with just 32MB memory for normal usage and you can increase memory requirements for the appliance as you need. It also has a built in web server, SSH server, DHCP client. You can administer the machine remotely via SSH. It is setup for DHCP so the networking is setup automatically. A webserver is installed to both serve up this page and to help you test different configurations. The load balancing functionality is provided by the excellent open source project pen.
The amount of disk space used by it is 4.0 MB. The virtual disk will expand as needed and has a maximum size of 100 MB. This is the minimum size of a virtual disk that can be created in VMware Workstation.  The  compressed/zipped image of this appliance is 2.5 MB !

Mike has rented out his advertisement space and is living in wealth now. He doesn’t have to earn his money with writing book anymore, so he’s giving them away. :-) You can download the first chapter of Mike's SRM book at RTFM-Education.

"This book will teach how install and configure VMware's Site Recovery Manager product. It also covers in detail the failover and failback processes - and I will guide you through step-by-step through the setup of the product. This book is not filled with project management padding that typifies a lot of IT books. It's practical and technical, and assumes you are already pretty familiar with VMware's Virtual Infrastructure products including ESX 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5. In this book you will learn the strengths and weakness of the Site Recovery Manager product, and show you the common pitfalls and errors that can happen, and also more importantly why they happen, and how to fix them."

Update : Mike did it again, another Four Free Chapters from the Vi3Book are online.