Eric Sloof - NTPRO.NL

In 2010, all VMworld Labs will be powered by the VMware cloud and presented via a self-service Lab Cloud portal, allowing VMware to increase the number of Labs offered and give you more opportunities to explore how virtualization can make a powerful impact on your organization. Unlike traditional instructor-led Labs, you are empowered not only to schedule which topics you want to take, but also when you want to take them, enabling you to choose the content that is right for your own business objectives on a schedule that allows you to maximize your conference experience.

VMworld will stage more than 18,000 lab seats and conduct up to 480 simultaneous Lab sessions during the four-day event. To build out this environment, VMware has committed 75,000+ man-hours in Lab creation and development to produce 30 Lab topics - all powered by vSphere Hypervisor, formerly vSphere ESXi. The Labs will cover everything from virtualized desktop infrastructure, through the vSphere-powered data center and into the VMware-powered cloud. With easy access to more than 100 VMware Subject Matter Experts on hand to answer questions and explore options, you'll get one-on-one attention when you need it, and still have the flexibility to move at your own pace. Forget pre-registration. With over 40 hours of available Lab time throughout the conference, you’re free to experience the latest in VMware offerings on your own schedule.

LAB01  Lab: VMware View™ 4.5 – Install and Config
LAB02  Lab: VMware View™ 4.5 - Advanced
LAB03  Lab: VMware ThinApp™ 4.6
LAB04  Lab: HyperIC for VMware vCenter™
LAB05  Lab: Intro to Zimbra Collaboration Suite
LAB06  Lab: VMware vCenter™ Configuration Manager - Provisioning, Patching, and Software Distribution 
LAB07  Lab: VMware vCenter™ Configuration Manager - Achieving Compliance 
LAB08  Lab: VMware vCenter™ AppSpeed 
LAB09  Lab: VMware vCenter™ Data Recovery
LAB10  Lab: VMware vCenter™ Server Heartbeat
LAB11  Lab: VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager - Basic Install & Config
LAB12  Lab: VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager - Extended Config & Troubleshooting 
LAB14  Lab: VMware vCenter™ Chargeback - Advanced
LAB15  Lab: VMware vCenter™ CapacityIQ
LAB16  Lab: VMware vCloud™ API 
LAB17  Lab: VMware vCenter™ Orchestrator 
LAB19  Lab: VMware vCenter™ Update Manager
LAB20  Lab: VMware vCenter™ vShield 
LAB21  Lab: Basic VMware vSphere™ - Install & Config
LAB22  Lab: VMware ESX 4.1 - New Features
LAB23  Lab: VMware ESXi Remote Management Utilities
LAB24  Lab: VMware vSphere™ Performance & Tuning
LAB25  Lab: VMware vSphere™ Troubleshooting
LAB26  Lab: VMware vSphere™ PowerCLI
LAB27  Lab: VMware vSphere™ Web Services SDK - C#
LAB28  Lab: VMware vSphere™ Web Services SDK - Java
LAB29  Lab: VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch and Cisco Nexus 1000V
LAB30  Lab: VMware Products - VMware vSphere™ Sandbox

This new book with essential information on how to protect data in will be released on August 2, 2010

Virtualization is changing the data center architecture and as a result, data protection is is quickly evolving as well. This unique book, written by an industry expert with over eighteen years of data storage/backup experience, shows you how to approach, protect, and manage data in a virtualized environment. You'll get up to speed on data protection problems, explore the data protection technologies available today, see how to adapt to virtualization, and more. The book uses a "good, better, best" approach, exploring best practices for backup, high availability, disaster recovery, business continuity, and more.

Covers best practices and essential information on protecting data in virtualized enterprise environments Shows you how to approach, protect, and manage data while also meeting such challenges as return on investment, existing service level agreements (SLAs), and more Helps system and design architects understand data protection issues and technologies in advance, so they can design systems to meet the challenges Explains how to make absolutely critical services such as file services and e-mail more available without sacrificing protection Offers best practices and solutions for backup, availability, disaster recovery, and others This is a must-have guide for any Windows server and application administrator who is charged with data recovery and maintaining higher uptimes.

View the VMworld 2010 San Francisco Content Catalog, or the Copenhagen Content Catalog to learn more about the sessions, labs and speakers that make VMworld the “must-attend” event of the year.

With the broadest variety of breakout sessions ever offered, you can dive deep into the heart of virtualization and cloud computing with topics like:

Future Direction of Networking Virtualization

Troubleshooting Using esxtop for Advanced Users

New Storage Technologies
And discover new technologies around the IT-as-a-service concept with sessions like:

Cloud 101: What's Real, What's Relevant for Enterprise IT, and What Role Does VMware Play
Technical Deep Dive: vCenter Chargeback

Plus, get your hands on new technologies with more than 30 Lab topics* like:
The future of VMware ESX, VMware View, vShield and more
New acquired solutions from Ionix and Zimbra

I’m very happy with being awarded as the Independent VCI of Q2 2010.

Kevin Johnson – VMware’s Northern Region Education Manager:

Eric has been very busy over the last 3 months and has delivered 14 classes over a wide range of subjects; two of these classes were LoL. Eric’s score were also consistently high. Eric is also very active in the VCI community.

Raymond Boelhouwer - Business Development Manager over at Global Knowledge:

Although Eric is a freelance instructor he has taught many advanced and new VMware courses for Global Knowledge in the last quarter. All his deliveries are granted high scores by the attendees even for first deliveries which are not easy to do. For an organization as Global Knowledge it is easy to work with Eric and you can trust a job well done.

Andy Cary - Senior Technical Trainer EMEA over at VMware

Congratulations on winning this award you had some tough competition! You also will receive a free pass to VCI day at VMworld.

This 3 day course explores a design methodology, criteria, and approach for designing a VMware vSphere 4 virtual datacenter architecture consisting of VMware ESX/ESXi 4 and VMware vCenter Server 4. This course, by discussing the benefits and risks of available design alternatives, provides information that supports making sound design decisions. This course also provides an opportunity to practice your design skills by working with peers on a design project.

Duncan Epping, a Consulting Architect working for the VMware vCloud Services team, was involved in the development of this new training. He says: I was fortunate enough to be part of the development team for the Design Workshop. Notice the "Workshop" part as this course is different then any other VMware course you have done so far. Indeed it is a real workshop and it is all about discussing design considerations with your peers and crafting a design based on specific requirements and constraints. Although it is not an official pre-requisite I would highly recommend this to anyone who wants to become a VCDX. I hope you will enjoy this workshop as much as we did creating it.

Duncan’s article regarding VMware's new approach for developing training courses will be available soon at yellow-bricks.com.

You can join me and reserve your seat at the following dates:

15 december Zwolle

This hands-on training course explores installation, configuration, and management of VMware vSphere 4,1, which consists of VMware ESX™/ESXi and VMware vCenter™ Server. The course is based on ESX/ESXi 4.1 and vCenter Server 4.1. Upon completion of this course, you can take the examination to qualify as a VMware Certified Professional (VCP4).

Students who complete this course may enroll in any of several advanced vSphere courses.

The old 4-day course will change in duration to a 5-day class for all sessions after August 23rd. For differences please look at the course datasheet.

Scott Vessey has discovered some differences between the old and the new course. The new content in the 5-day ICM will be:

• vCenter Linked Mode
• Host Profiles
• Distributed Power Management
• Deeper content on High Availability
• Fault Tolerance

Many admins rely on using serial port console connections to manage physical servers. These connections usually provide a non-graphical and hence low-bandwidth remote console approach for administering physical servers. Administrators use physical serial port concentrators to multiplex connections to several hosts. vSphere 4.1 enables support for virtual serial port concentrators to provide similar functionality for virtual machines. The feature allows you to redirect virtual machine’s serial ports over a standard network link using telnet or ssh. This enables solutions such as third-party virtual serial port concentrators, like the new virtual appliance-based Avocent Cyclades ACS 6000, for virtual machine serial console management or monitoring. Providing a suitable way to remote a VM’s serial port(s) over a network connection, and supporting a “virtual serial port concentrator” utility, thus, gives VI administrators a first-class support for the traditional server management approach. Furthermore, these console connections are also considered more secure for virtual machines since the traffic is only on the management network. The Virtual Machine settings user interface has been modified to allow serial port configuration.

Implementing the Avocent ACS6000 Virtual Serial Port Concentrator

Using a Proxy with vSphere Virtual Serial Ports

Finally, with Transparent Memory Compression, 4.1 will compress memory on the fly to increase the amount of memory that appears to be available to a given VM. The new Transparent Memory Compression is of interest in the workload cases where memory -- rather than CPU cycles -- has limitations. ESX/ESXi provides a Memory Compression cache to improve virtual machine performance when using memory over-commitment. Memory Compression is enabled by default when a host's memory becomes overcommitted; ESX/ESXi compresses virtual pages and stores them in memory.  

Since accessing compressed memory is faster than accessing memory swapped to disk, Memory Compression in ESX/ESXi allows memory over-commits without significantly hindering performance. When a virtual page needs to be swapped, ESX/ESXi first attempts to compress the page. Pages that can be compressed to 2 KB or smaller are stored in the virtual machine's compression cache, increasing the capacity of the host. The maximum size can be set for the Compression Cache and disable Memory Compression using the Advanced Settings dialog box in the vSphere Client.

The diagram at left should be familiar to most. When using 1GigE NICs, ESX hosts are typically deployed with NICs dedicated to particular traffic types. For example you may dedicate 4x 1GigE NICs for VM traffic; one NIC to iSCSI, another NIC to vMotion, and another to the service console. Each traffic type gets a dedicated bandwidth by virtue of the physical NIC allocation. 

Moving to the diagram at right … ESX hosts deployed with 10GigE NICs are likely to be deployed (for the time being) with only two 10GigE interfaces. Multiple traffic types will be converged over the two interfaces. So long as the load offered to the 10GE interfaces is less than 10GE, everything is ok—the NIC can service the offered load. But what happens when the offered load from the various traffic types exceeds the capacity of the interface? What happens when you offer say 11Gbps to a 10GigE interface? Something has to suffer. This is where Network IO Control steps in. It addresses the issue of oversubscription by allowing you to set the relative importance of predetermined traffic types. 

NetIOC is controlled with two parameters—Limits and Shares.

Limits, as the name suggests, sets a limit for that traffic type (e.g VM traffic) across the NIC team. The value is specified in absolute terms in Mbps. When set, that traffic type will not exceed that limit *outbound* (or egress) of the host.

Shares specify the relative importance of that traffic type when those traffic types compete for a particular vmnic (phyiscal NIC). Shares are specified in abstract units numbered between 1 and 100 and indicate the relative importance of that traffic type. For example, if iSCSI has a shares value of 50, and FT logging has a shares value of 100, then FT traffic will get 2x the bandwidth of iSCSI when they compete. If they were both set at 50, or both set at 100, then they would both get the same level of service (bandwidth).

There are a number of preset values for shares ranging from low to high. You can also set custom values. Note that the limits and shares apply to output or egress from the ESX host, not input.

Remember that shares apply to the vmnics; limits apply across a team.

The VMware knowledge base contains some useful articles regarding the new vSphere 4.1 release.

• Using Tech Support Mode in ESXi 4.1
• Troubleshooting ESXi 4.1 Scripted Install errors
• Recreate vSphere 4.0 lockdown mode behavior in vSphere 4.1
• vCenter Server 4.1 fails to install or upgrade with the error: This installation package is not supported by this processor type
• Migrating to the vCenter Server 4.1 database
• Update Manager 4.1 patch repository features
• Lockdown mode configuration after upgrading from ESXi 4.0 to 4.1
• Changes to VMware Support Options in vSphere 4.1
• Securing Credentials in vMA 4.1
• Overview of Active Directory integration in ESX 4.1 and ESXi 4.1
• ALUA parameters in the output of ESX/ESXi 4.1 commands
• USB support for ESX/ESXi 4.1

With the release of vSphere 4.1, storage IO Control allows cluster-wide storage IO prioritization. This allows better workload consolidation and helps reduce extra costs associated with over-provisioning. Storage IO Control extends the constructs of shares and limits to handle storage IO resources. The amount of storage IO that is allocated to virtual machines during periods of IO congestion can be controlled, which ensures that more important virtual machines get preference over less important virtual machines for IO resource allocation.

When Storage IO Control on a datastore is enabled, ESX/ESXi begins to monitor the device latency that hosts observe when communicating with that datastore. When device latency exceeds a threshold, the datastore is considered to be congested and each virtual machine that accesses that datastore is allocated IO resources in proportion to their shares and is set per virtual machine. The number can be adjusted for each based on need. Low priority VMs can limit IO bandwidth for high priority VMs and storage allocation should be in line with VM priorities.

This feature enables pre-datastore priorities/shares for VM to improve total throughput and has Cluster level enforcement for shares for all workload accessing a datastore. Configuring Storage I/O Control is a two-step process:

1. Enable Storage I/O Control for the datastore.
2. Set the number of storage I/O shares and upper limit of I/O operations per second (IOPS) allowed for each virtual machine. By default, all virtual machine shares are set to Normal (1000) with unlimited IOPS.

Duncan Epping        : Storage IO Control, the movie
Scott Drummonds    : Storage IO Control
VirtualMiscellaneous : Storage IO Control - SIOC