During the delivery of my VMware training courses I really enjoy interacting with the students using the whiteboard. It should contain just enough information to demonstrate understanding and students are encouraged to participate in the discussion. Here are some examples from this week’s vSphere Fast-Track training.
Thursday, November 12. 2009
VMware What’s New training (weekend edition) for inPeople
The past weekend I’ve delivered a special edition of the VMware vSphere What’s New training for the VMware gurus working at inPeople. The What’s New training is a hands-on training course which explores new features in VMware vCenter Server 4 and ESX/ESXi 4, as well as how to upgrade to VMware vSphere 4. inPeople is a specialized IT company focused on Virtualization. They have a team of dedicated IT experts and consultants that combine experience and passion for this niche in IT and are devoted to becoming a leading company in this field. Some of the employees working at inPeople are well known VMware gurus.
Anthony Drewes- Storage & Virtualisatie Consultant
Hayscen de Lannoy - RES Powerfuse administrator
Willem ter Harmsel - Owner at inPeople
Frank van Egmond – Consultant
Steven Jans - VMware Technical Specialist
Kenneth Van Ditmarsch - VMware Consultant
René Elout - Chief Technology @ inPeople
Frank Denneman - Senior Consultant at VMware
Alex Pelster - Director at inVirtualize
Mark van Hout - Storage & Virtualization Consultant
Amit Gangapersadsing - Consultant
Nyaz Mahawat Khan - Consultant
Recently inPeople started their project organization inVirtualize, dedicated to bring several virtualization solutions inTime and inBudget to their customers. inPeople and inVirtualize also succesfully attended the Virtualisation Executive Summit 2009 in Hotel Huis ter Duin. Around 50 IT Managers from companies like DSM, Rabobank International, SANDD, Universiteit Leiden, CenterParcs and Stork were present to hear the 'expert story' behind inPeople & inVirtualize.
Tuesday, November 10. 2009
ActiveBatch Job Scheduler Adds Integrated VMware Support
Extensions to ActiveBatch Job Library Let Users Easily Create and Manage Virtual Systems For Running Workflows; Additions Include Support for VMware Job Steps and Events.
ActiveBatch’s new VMware support is made possible through a new set of production-ready job steps in the application’s integrated jobs library. These job steps eliminate the need for command line use and/or expensive scripting, replacing those actions with a convenient drag-and-drop interface.
“With VMware support, ActiveBatch users can achieve a dramatic new level of resource utilization both within and outside the VMware infrastructure,” said Jim Manias, Vice President of Marketing and Sales for Advanced Systems Concepts. “By combining ActiveBatch with VMware, for example, you can create and/or power on a virtual machine, submit the workflow, and power off the virtual machine when the workflow has successfully completed, enabling the hardware and software involved to be made available for other purposes. The result is reliable, unattended execution of jobs in a fashion that improves service levels and maximizes the efficient use of computing resources.” The ActiveBatch VMware library includes support for the complete set of VMware events as well as vCenter and vSphere. VMware events can trigger ActiveBatch plans and/or actions based on events such as Power Up, Power Down or Reboot. It can also initiate jobs based on any of the event classes that are already supported by ActiveBatch including File Trigger, WMI, Email, MSMQ, Web Services and many others.
Monday, November 9. 2009
Launch of VMware View 4
@herrod: Launch of VMware View 4 - see the new videos & info: http://www.vmware.com/products/view/
VMware View PCoIP display protocol provides a superior end-user experience over any network. Adaptive technology ensures an optimized virtual desktop delivery on both the LAN and the WAN. Address the broadest list of use cases and deployment options with a single protocol. Access personalized virtual desktops complete with applications and end-user data and settings anywhere and anytime with VMware View.
Sunday, November 8. 2009
Using Host Profiles for Disaster Recovery
For provisioning of ESX hosts, vCenter leverages a technology called Host Profiles, these profiles can be associated with a cluster so when you add capacity to your cluster, the host profile is automatically applied to your new host. It also facilitates compliance monitoring and remediation.
But it can also be used for disaster recovery. A host profile captures the configuration of a specific host. This profile can then be used to configure a newly added host based on the profile of your crashed host. The first step is to create a profile for every ESX host, this means that every host will function as its own reference host. After creating all the host profiles, the individual profiles can be customized. In this step we’re going to customize every individual host profile and change the setting where a user is prompted for an IP address, these prompts must be replaced with a specific fixed setting. The prompts are typically found at for instance the service console and the kernel port group. When one of your ESX servers is broken you just have to add an empty host to the cluster and make it compliant with one of your disaster recovery templates. There’s also the possibility to export the disaster recovery host profile to an VMware Profile Format XML file. Steven Jans thanks for the inspiration.
Client Virtualization with NeoSphere’s Neocleus
At NeoSphere’s core is Neocleus’ second generation pioneering client virtualization technology; a Type 1 hypervisor that runs directly on the bare metal of the client hardware. Leveraging the hypervisor, virtual machinesare distributed to PCs where they execute locally in isolated VMs. Isolation of VMs provides a robust and secure client computing environment and ensures problems that surface in one VM (such as a virus attack or an OS failure) cannot bleed into the other VMs on that computer.
For end users, NeoSphere turns a single laptop or desktop into a multi OS machine. Users can seamlessly move between environments without any degradation in performance or user experience. For instance, if a user has a touch screen monitor on their physical machine, it will operate with native performance within NeoSphere. In addition, NeoSphere delivers the broadest client hardware support in the industry. As a result, IT addresses end user needs with greater ease.