Eric Sloof - NTPRO.NL

With virtualization come management challenges. Now that applications compete for shared, dynamic infrastructure resources such as storage, memory, and CPU, an inevitable resource allocation problem arises, that if not addressed will impact the performance of both VMs and their associated applications. This presentation discusses the 20 metrics that truly matter in vCenter to evaluate and manage this situation.

Watch this video to learn

• Which VMware metrics you should care about and why you can't ignore them.
  
• How they reveal issues that impact application performance.
  
• Ways to further analyze the data provided to fix issues and improve performance in your data center.

There's also a VCP LinkedIn group which you can join. Members of this group have gained the in-depth skills and industry-recognized certification on VMware technology. The VMware Certified Professional Program is designed for everyone who wants to demonstrate their expertise in virtual infrastructure and increase his potential for career advancement. If you are a VCP you can join this group.

If you don’t know what a LinkedIn group is, here is a short explanation : Many professionals advance their careers and business goals by counting on industry and professional groups, alumni organizations, industry conferences and corporate alumni groups to help them make vital new business contacts. The VMware LinkedIn Groups offers extra features stay in touch with one another and discover powerful new business contacts within their groups and beyond.

RVTools is a windows .NET 2.0 application which uses the VI SDK to display information about your virtual machines and ESX hosts. Interacting with VirtualCenter 2.5, ESX 3.5, ESX3i, ESX4i and vSphere 4 RVTools is able to list information about cpu, memory, disks, nics, cd-rom, floppy drives, snapshots, VMware tools, ESX hosts, nics, datastores, service console, VM Kernel, switches, ports and health checks. With RVTools you can disconnect the cd-rom or floppy drives from the virtual machines and RVTools is able to list the current version of the VMware Tools installed inside each virtual machine. and update them to the latest version.

http://www.robware.net/

  Pass-through authentication implemented. Allows you to use your logged on
Windows credentials to automatically logon.
  All numeric columns are now formated to make it more readable.
  On vInfo the columns Commited, Uncommited, Shared and on vSnapshot the
column size are now formated in MBs instead of bytes.
  New tabpage created with service console and VMKernel information.
  Now using vSphere Web Services SDK 4.1 which supports the new features
available in vSphere 4.1
  Export to csv file now uses Windows regional separator
  using NPOI to make it possible to write directly to xls files without the need for a
installed Excel version on the system.
  New menu function to write all information to one excel workbook with for each
tabpage a new worksheet.
  new command line options. Check the documentation!

This article is written by Ernst Cozijnsen.

A few days back after applying some patches via "Update Manager" we came to notice that our ESXi 4.1 host bacame unresponsive after a reboot. Loggin into the command prompt via ILO was unsuccessful too because the rootpassword was not working anymore. That just sucks!.... but nothing to get all emotional about since is just linux (well a sort of...)

Looking for a nice how-to explaining this i stumbled across the following article: http://www.vm-help.com/esx/esx3i/Reset_root_password.php

After doing the endless tar commands described in the article I rebooted the machines and what the ....... still not working. (And this is where I got frustrated since this is the only decent way to reset a security feature like this).

VMware states that it is impossible to reset a root password of an ESXi server in a supported way. Well.... let's see if we can bend that opinion. 
Since VMware was so nice to give us "host profiling"  I thought this was the time to look into it and see if we can use it in an alternative way. Chaning a root password without root permissions would normally be a serious security leak. OK, so the assumption is that the host you are having issues with was connected to vCenter and the account you are using has admin rights.

Execute teh following steps:

- Take a "similair" server and create a host profile from this machine
- Edit the Host profile and change the "Administrator password"  to a fixed one

Apple has approved my new iTunes podcast located at Online VMware Training. It already contains 16 interesting free episodes. I’m planning on recording more cool videos in the future so stay tuned to my channel. If you want to view one of the episodes, just follow this link and fire up iTunes. When streaming a training video, playback starts in a secondary pop-up window within the iTunes Store. Clicking anywhere in the store outside of the pop-up window will stop playback. To view a downloaded episode, click on Podcasts underneath the Library subheading on the left side of the jukebox window and double-click on your video. The selected video podcast will automatically begin playing in the jukebox window. You can play video back in full-screen mode by clicking the “Fullscreen” button at the bottom of the player.

Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Design (DRBC Design) is a self-paced course that provides students with a 4-hour introduction to disaster recovery and business continuity concepts and enables them to map some of these concepts to specific VMware product features.

The course consists of four modules:

1.  An Introduction to Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity. 
2.  Using Decision Trees to Design Disaster Recovery Plans.
3.  Using Decision Trees to Design Business Continuity Plans.
4.  Mapping VMware Product Features to DRP and BCP Requirements. 
 
Objectives 

•  Describe the differences between disaster recovery and business continuity.
•  Describe decision trees involved in disaster-recovery design with vSphere/vCenter and SRM, and the pros and cons of each path in the tree. 
•  Map SRM features to DR concepts. 
•  Describe vSphere best practices that facilitate successful DR implementations.
•  Describe the role of VMware clustering and backup/restore technologies in disaster recovery. 
•  Plan for performance monitoring in the event of a failover. 
•  Describe the business planning and process planning required to implement a disaster recovery and business continuity design for a VMware vSphere deployment.

This course is recommended by VMware when you’re preparing  for the VMware Certified Advanced Professional on vSphere 4 - Datacenter Design which is open for registration.

The integration of SpringSource as a division of VMware has come to a point where VMware is offering a brand new workshop which is focusing on the development of applications that can run in the cloud. The new one day workshop; Developing for the Cloud is delivered in classroom format. This week Eberhard Wolff will kick off with the first one in New York and says:

"The move to the Cloud will change the way IT services are consumed - and developed. This workshop gives a good introduction to the challenges you face when creating Cloud applications - and of course how to deal with them."

You can find Eberhard's weblog at http://jandiandme.blogspot.com/

Overview

Moving to the cloud is the next major evolutionary step for IT systems. The cloud offers a lot of clear benefits such as better resource utilization and improved flexibility – both desired by businesses. Cloud computing also offers novel and smart approaches to technical problem such as scalability or fault tolerance. Therefore it is important to adapt cloud computing and by that gain a competitive advantage.However, developing software that runs well in cloud environments is a difficult and demanding task. Completely new levels of scalability must be supported. New approach and new architectures are emerging and need to be supported. This Workshop will teach the basics of cloud technologies and how to develop software for it.
 
 
Objectives    

•  Understand the advantages of Cloud technologies
•  Understand challenges when developing software for the Cloud
•  Learn about the impact of IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) such as Amazon S3 or VMware vCloud on software development and how to use it efficiently
•  Comprehend the PaaS (Platform as a Service) approach and some typical implementation such as Google App Engine, VMforce or Cloud Foundry
•  Find out how to architect applications for the cloud and how to develop applications for the cloud using Spring Roo

VMware Labs presents its latest fling IOBlazer - a multi-platform storage stack micro-benchmark tool. IOBlazer started as a minimalist MS SQL Server emulator which focused solely on IO component. It has now matured into a scalable application with multi-platform support, capable of generating highly customizable workload by configuring parameters like:

• IO size and pattern
• Burstiness (number of outstanding IOs)
• Burst interarrival time
• Read versus write mix

Be one of the first one to try, rate and comment - http://labs.vmware.com/flings/ioblazer.

IOBlazer is a multi-platform storage stack micro-benchmark. IOBlazer runs on Linux, Windows and OSX and it is capable of generating a highly customizable workload. Parameters like IO size and pattern, burstiness (number of outstanding IOs), burst interarrival time, read vs. write mix, buffered vs. direct IO, etc., can be configured independently. IOBlazer is also capable of playing back VSCSI traces captured using vscsiStats. The performance metrics reported are throughput (in terms of both IOPS and bytes/s) and IO latency.

IOBlazer evolved from a minimalist MS SQL Server emulator which focused solely on the IO component of said workload. The original tool had limited capabilities as it was able to generate a very specific workload based on the MS SQL Server IO model (Asynchronous, Un-buffered, Gather/Scatter). IOBlazer has now a far more generic IO model, but two limitations still remain:

1.The alignment of memory accesses on 4 KB boundaries (i.e., a memory page)
2.The alignment of disk accesses on 512 B boundaries (i.e., a disk sector).
Both limitations are required by the gather/scatter and un-buffered IO models.

A very useful new feature is the capability to playback VSCSI traces captured on VMware ESX through the vscsiStats utility. This allows IOBlazer to generate a synthetic workload absolutely identical to the disk activity of a Virtual Machine, ensuring 100% experiment repeatability.

Fellow vExpert David Davis over at Train Signal has released the new vSphere Troubleshooting video training. This course took him 3 months to create, it’s almost 14 hours, and it’s made up of 30 videos. Like all the other training courses from Train Signal, it’s available via streaming online video (iPad compatible) and in the DVD offline format. In this course, David will educate you on how to troubleshoot vSphere networking, storage, management processes (and much more), from the GUI but especially from the CLI.

The new vSphere Troubleshooting course will be part of an upcoming VCAP-DCA training package. David has covered all topics related to troubleshooting on the DCA blueprint. Even if you aren’t interested in the VCAP-DCA certification, the course is designed to be an excellent resource to learn how to solve virtual infrastructure trouble. Mike Laverick is the tech editor for the course.

You can view three sample videos on David’s YouTube channel which can be reached here.
In this sample from Train Signal's VMware Troubleshooting course David Davis will show you how to restore connectivity to an ESX host after management network access was lost.