Friday, May 24. 2013
Dutch - Een bar met geniën
Now available as Rough Cut - Virtualizing Microsoft Business Critical Applications on VMware vSphere 5
- Windows Server 2012 Active Directory Domain Controllers
- Windows Server 2012 Failover Clusters
- Exchange Server 2013
- SQL Server 2012
- SharePoint 2013
Virtualizing Microsoft Business Critical Applications on VMware vSphere 5 - Rough Cuts by Matt Liebowitz and Alex Fontana
Thursday, May 23. 2013
The Loadbalancer.org Virtual Appliance is VMware Ready
- High Availability
- Full Layer 4/7 Server Load Balancing
- Supports unlimited Virtual & Real Servers
- Web-based GUI
- HTTP Cookie Persistence
- RDP Cookie Persistence
- SSL Offloading
- 802.1q VLANs
- 802.3ad Bonding
- Feedback Agent
- Stateful Packet Inspection
- Full IPv6 Support
- SIP Support with Call-ID Persistence
- Full System root Access
Wednesday, May 22. 2013
An interview with VMware Cloud Automation Center Guru Zack Kielich
With the upcoming release of VMware Cloud Automation Center 5.2 on the horizon, I had the opportunity to ask Zack Kielich who works at a Senior Systems Engineer at VMware, a few questions.
Q: Hi Zack, you've recently launched the website vCACTeam.info. Is this website officially a VMware website?
A: No it's not officially affiliated with VMware. Contributors may come form VMware, but it's mainly a site designed on how to best use and implement vCAC.
Q: The VMware Cloud Automation Center product is fairly new to a lot of people. What's the greatest takeaway value for new users? Do you really have to use it for managing or automating multiple clouds or are there other use cases?
A: If there's one thing people should know about vCAC, it's that it enables customers of any knowledge level to consume the cloud resources you give them access to. At the end of the day, customers don't care where a machine gets spun up as long as it's fast and it will do what they want. That means that maybe there's an approval in the request process, but then it goes off to one of the many hypervisor or cloud vendors we support. Imagine not having to put your cloud admins to work to build VMs on the daily, while at the same time they are getting deprovisioned automatically so that you don't have to buy hardware as often--that's the goal: ease of use for the customer, cost savings for the organization.
Today, the main value that vCAC adds is the ability to manage and automate multiple cloud management tools (vSphere, RHEL KVM, AWS, etc) as well as provision to physical hardware (through UCS, iDRAC, and iLO) to build manageable hybrid cloud, private cloud, virtual desktop, and platform as a service environments. That's a pretty large feat in itself, and you can bet that there are plans to add even more value to this product as it further integrates into the VMware suite of products.
Q: The vCAC product has a lot of overlap with existing products like vCloud Director. How are both products positioned?
A: vCAC was an acquisition which had already started down it's own journey to produce value for the DynamicOps customers. Now that it's part of the VMware family, we're in the process of addressing some of the overlap, but it generally comes down to this--what are your business and, therefore, technical goals? If you need robust multi-tenancy functionality with the ability to dynamically create vApp level networking, then you probably need vCD. If you have a use case where all machines are direct connected to a vSphere vLAN and you have no need to isolate a group of machines into an application, then you could probably just connect vCAC to vSphere. It all goes back to your organization's vision and maturity level.
Q: The scripting and workflow language within vCAC is very .NET oriented and has a steep learning curve, is it going to be targeted at developers or administrators?
A: If you're building/importing new workflows, you're right, it can be .NET focused. One thing that we're trying to emphasize in order to limit that is the utilization of vCO. Many customers own vCO today as part of the vSphere suite, but don't use it. It gives organizations the ability to integrate with 3rd party applications like Infoblox, Active Directory, Remedy, and ServiceNow without having to build it. They just install the plugin and collect/pass the strings from vCAC to vCO.
Q: What will happen with vCenter Orchestrator since this product offers the same capabilities. Will both product live side by side?
A: Personally, I think that vCO will become a more central product within the VMware portfolio. The history states that there hasn't been much focus on vCO in the past, but VMware is now starting to make some large improvements in it and have more regular releases. I am encouraging everyone I speak with to check it out, if they haven't already, and if they're building extensions to vCAC to build them in vCO if possible. If you want a great resource for learning the ropes, check out the book Cody Bunch wrote.
Zack, many thanks for the interview. If you want to learn more about vCAC, you definitely have to tune in at the community roundtable podcast which was recorded by Mike Larerick recently. (#231 - vCloud Automation Center) can be downloaded at this address.
There's will also be a training course available in the near future. The vCloud Automation Center Foundation Training is designed for Technical Post-sales delivery specialists, this 2-day, hands-on class is ideal for IT Administrators who are responsible for the provisioning, management and decommissioning of machine resources. Students will learn how to install, configure and administer Cloud Automation Center 5.2 for use in data center resource provisioning. Plus learn how to how to quickly set up and create on-demand private and public cloud services.
The Basics
Configuration
Configurable Customizations
Advanced Customizations
Cool Tool - Snapshot Explorer - Foglight for Virtualization Free Edition
Snapshot Explorer eliminates the time-consuming and tedious need to track snapshots manually. It detects all snapshots, including orphaned snapshots, and provides all of this information at a glance. Snapshot Explorer provides VM administrators with advanced filters and a detailed snapshot list.
Foglight for Virtualization, Free Edition, a single downloadable virtual appliance, now offers six free utilities:
- Snapshot Explorer - Detects all snapshots, including orphaned shapshots, to avoid problems with performance and capacity.
- Environment Explorer - Provides at-a-glance information about performance, efficiency and capacity.
- Change Explorer - Lists all changes that occur in a virtual environment, and provides associated risk impact.
- Storage Explorer - Assesses storage performance and capacity across datastores and VMs.
- vScope Explorer - Offers immediate identification of VMs, hosts and datastores suffering performance, capacity and efficiency issues.
- SearchMyVM Explorer - Delivers search capabilities, similar to Google, of the virtual environment.
Tuesday, May 21. 2013
New Technical White Paper - How To Troubleshoot vSphere 5.x Performance Issues Using vCenter Operations
Moving to a virtualized computing environment adds new software layers and new types of interactions that must be considered when troubleshooting performance problems. Proper performance troubleshooting requires that you start with a broad view of the computing environment and systematically narrow the scope of the investigation as you eliminate possible sources of problems.
Troubleshooting efforts that start with a narrowly conceived idea of the source of a problem often get bogged down in detailed analysis of one component, when the actual source of the problem is elsewhere in the infrastructure. In order to quickly isolate the source of performance problems, you need to adhere to a logical troubleshooting methodology that avoids preconceptions about the source of the problems.
Often,though, many environments are susceptible to the same performance issues, so this document is focused on addressing the most common performance issues VMware sees in the field and how these issues can be diagnosed using the VMware vCenter Operations Manager suite.
vCenter Operations Manager is a complex tool and can be leveraged many different ways. This guide will focus on the Virtual Machine object primarily as a starting point for learning to leverage the vCenter Operations Manager tool.