Eric Sloof - NTPRO.NL

Watch highlights from the VMworld Conference in Cannes, France (February 2009).

In this video, you'll see how a multi-tiered software solution (SugarCRM) can be deployed as an OVF package, how it is customized during deployment, and how it shows up in the vCenter inventory as a vApp icon. The installation experience is customized by the meta-data contained in the OVF package.

I just received a copy of Edward’s new book “VMware vSphere and Virtual Infrastructure Security: Securing the Virtual Environment”. This book reflects the same hands-on approach that made Haletky’s VMware ESX Server in the Enterprise so popular with working professionals. Haletky doesn’t just reveal where you might be vulnerable; he tells you exactly what to do and how to reconfigure your infrastructure to address the problem. 

VMware vSphere and Virtual Infrastructure Security begins by reviewing basic server vulnerabilities and explaining how security differs on VMware virtual servers and related products. Next, Haletky drills deep into the key components of a VMware installation, identifying both real and theoretical exploits, and introducing effective countermeasures.

It’s prepping time this week. I’m working my way through the new vSphere 4 ICM instructor guide. Module 11 is fun, I was very curious about the VMware Data Recovery lab. I completed this lab once before at the VMworld 2008 in Cannes together with my blog friend Duncan Epping. I remember the beta worked straight forward, but when I tried to add destination back-up storage in my home lab, I ran into trouble.

The destination storage can be a VMFS datastore, an NFS datastore or a CIFS share.  Since I’m using the StorCenter ix2 as CIFS and NFS server, I wanted to add a CIFS network share. Be sure to use the IP address of your CIFS server, the DNS name won’t work. One other thing, if you encounter a "Failed to create snapshot for vCenter, error -3948 ( vcb api exception)" error, keep in mind that for the "3948 ( vcb api exception)" error, you ensure that your appliance is capable of resolving the hostname of your ESX server.

- Network Destinations Must Be specified Using IP Addresses

Using DNS-resolved names to specify network destinations is not supported with Data Recovery. When adding network destinations using Configure > Destinations, enter an IP address. For example, use \\192.0.2.12\share rather than \\example\share.

- Non-English Characters Are not Supported with Network Shares

If a network share name, user name, or password contain non-English characters, attempts to add the network share fail. To avoid this issue, use English characters for share names, user names, and passwords.

http://www.vmware.com/support/vdr/doc/vdr_10_releasenotes.html

In this demo devfarm will deploy a PowerCLI script that's transcribed to a workflow using PowerWF earlier to an Agent to run automatically every 3 seconds. As a result of that script running as a workflow in the agent you'll see ESX Memory Usage in the local computer's Performance Monitor.

You can prevent the ESX/ESXi host from accessing storage devices or LUNs or from using individual paths to a LUN. Use the vSphere CLI commands to mask the paths. When you mask paths, you create claim rules that assign the MASK_PATH plugin to the specified paths. Via Kevin Kress the master of VMkernel and Console Config and esxcfg-* tools.

Organizations are increasingly looking to automate administrators' daily lives. Microsoft and VMware responded with two key technologies: Windows PowerShell, which has become the preferred scripting language for Windows administrators, and VMware’s PowerCLI which provides a Windows PowerShell interface to the vSphere API. vSphere PowerCLI includes PowerShell Cmdlets, and documentation for administering vSphere components.

PowerWF combines both technologies into a single easy-to-use product that replaces legacy batch files, scripts and custom application development, enabling you to completely automate your vSphere environment without writing a single line of code. I created a little one minute Jing demo -how to build a PowerCLI Work Flow with PowerWF.

PHD Virtual Technologies announced the availability of Patch Downloader version 6.0, a new freeware solution to simplify patch downloading for various VMware ESX versions. Patch Downloader is the fifth free virtualization utility to be offered by PHD Virtual as part of its longstanding commitment to the virtualization community.

The purpose of Patch Downloader is to ease the pain of downloading patches for various ESX versions from the VMware site by automating it. If a user does not want to or cannot use Update Manager (doesn't have a license, no internet access from the ESX/VC hosts) they need to download the patches manually from the VMware website through a Java Download manager. It's easy to miss a patch, and painfully slow to find and select the ones you want. These downloaded patches go on an HTTP or FTP repository, or are copied direct to each host over SSH, and the esxupdate utility is used to patch the ESX host.

http://www.phdvirtual.com/download?task=view.download&cid=18

Nava Davuluri is a new hire into VMware's Product Marketing and he’s going to manage the sample code arena for developers and system administrators that make up the majority of VMware developer community. His biggest goal is to make our life easier by creating a community based sample code site where it will be easy to create, collect and share sample codes in one single straight forward page. This community page is called CodeCentral.

The VMware Code Central Blog is intended for VMware community developers and system administrators who use VMware infrastructure and would like to have IT control through automation.

This year’s VMworld will last four full days instead of three. At Monday August 31th VMware will organize their first developer day. You get a chance to learn about VMware developer products from the engineers who built them. This one-day event will include seminars ranging from the vSphere SDKs to the vCloud API.

• New features of vSphere SDK 4.0
• vSphere Web Services SDK 4.0 Best Practices
• vSphere API Performance Monitoring
• vStorage API - Virtual Disk Development Kit
• Orchestrator API
• VIX API
• VMware Studio
• Developer productivity tools, Record/Replay...

More info can be found here and here.

This afternoon I presented at the 8th Belgium VMware User Group meeting. The slides and a short video of the demo part can be found here (thanks to Viktor van den Berg for recording). The location was great, we enjoyed some beers at the Palm Brewery in Steenhuffel. Never heard about Steenhuffel? Me neither, I was glad my Tom Tom accepted it and guided me. Eventually around 80 people showed up, much more than I expected. We had a great day.

This afternoon I presented at the Belgium VMUG event. My presentation is called “Managing VMware vSphere 4 with The Virtualization EcoShell.”, here are the slides.