NTPRO.NL - Eric Sloof

Technical Papers - SAP and VMware

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 11:19:16 +0100

VMware has released several technical white papers and reports regarding hosting a SAP enviroment on vSphere.

This paper describes how SAP NetWeaver running in a Linux environment on VMware vSphere 4 can be protected. It provides good details on the key capabilities of SUSE Linux and VMware vSphere as it pertains to protecting a Tier 1 business critical application.

SAP Standard Application Benchmarks

This report shows the results of the SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark on a Fujitsu Primergy RX300 S6 system, running VMware vSphere 5.0

SAP Virtualization with VMware vSphere 5 on IBM System x

Virtualizing Tier-1 applications such as SAP allow end users to reap the benefits of virutalization such as improved server utilization, reduced maintenance costs, easier administration, higher levels of business continuity and faster response time to changing business needs. Read this paper to understand how to virtualize SAP on IBM System x3850 X5 servers

HP ProLiant DL980, Intel Xeon, and VMware vSphere 5 SAP Performance Analysis

This report provides the results of performance and scalability of the HP ProLiant DL980 server running SAP on VMware vSphere 5. The tests were done by ESG labs, which confirmed that vSphere 5 was able to effectively virtualize a CPU-intensive SAP workload and achieve scale as number of users grew.

Video - Configure vSphere SRM Replication for a Single VM

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 15:42:00 +0100

vSphere Replication (VR) uses replication technologies included in ESX Servers with the assistance of virtual appliances to replicate virtual machines between sites. VR is provided by vSphere Replication Servers (VR Servers or VRS). VR Servers are managed by the vSphere Replication Managment Server (VRMS). Both VRMS and VR Servers are virtual appliances. VRMS provides a way to manage VR Servers across multiple hosts. If you are using VR, you must establish at least one vSphere Replication Server and exactly one VRMS at the recovery site. To enable replication in both directions, you must deploy exactly one VRMS at each site and at least one VRS at each site. You may want to create multiple VR Servers at each site if multiple servers are required to meet your load balancing needs for replication of virtual machines. Each VRMS must be registered with a corresponding vCenter Server. For example, the primary site VRMS must be registered with the primary site vCenter Servers.

Both the VRMS and VRS appliances provide a virtual appliance management interface (VAMI). These interfaces can be used to configure the VRMS database, as well as network settings, public-key certificates, and passwords for the appliances. Before using VR, you need to configure the VR infrastructure including having managed IP defined in runtime settings at both sites and having a VRMS database installed. This video provides useful guidance to help ensure you complete the installation and configuration process correctly. When installing SRM, be certain to select the VR option. If you have installed SRM and want to add VR, you can add that option by running the installer again. So, here are the steps for configure-ring vSphere SRM Replication for a Single Virtual Machine.

1. On the vSphere Client Home page, click VMs and Templates.

2. Browse the inventory to find the single virtual machine to be replicated using VR. Right-click the virtual machine and click vSphere Replication.

3. In the Replication Settings page, configure general replication settings.

These settings include the disk file location to which the virtual machine is replicated on the recovery site, how often the virtual machine is replicated, and how the guest OS is quiesced. Use the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) slider or enter a value to configure the maximum amount of data that can be lost during the recovery. The available range is from 15 minutes to 24 hours. For example, a recovery point objective of one hour seeks to ensure that the virtual machine loses no more than one hour of data during the recovery. For smaller RPOs, less data is lost in a recovery, but more network bandwidth is consumed keeping the replica synchronized.

The available quiescing types are determined by the virtual machine's operating system. Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) quiescing is supported for Windows virtual machines running Windows XP or later. Linux does not support quiescing. If no target file location is specified or if you want to override the default determined by the datastore mappings, click Browse to select a target location for the virtual machine.

VMware Project Onyx for vSphere 5

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 09:00:53 +0100

Onyx is a standalone application that serves as a proxy between the vSphere Client and the vCenter Server. It monitors the network communication between them and translates it into an executable PowerShell code. Later, this code could be modified and saved into a reusable function or script.

http://labs.vmware.com/flings/onyx

New Book - The Official VCP5 Certification Guide

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 20:03:00 +0100

This is the first and only official guide to VMware's new VCP510 (VCP 5) exam. Organized to follow VMware's newest exam blueprint, it's also designed from the ground up to be both engaging and enjoyable. Author Bill Ferguson acts like a "study buddy," encouraging virtualization professionals, anticipating their questions, and helping them gain both mastery and confidence. Throughout, he provides many illustrations, tables, figures, screenshots, and realistic sample test questions - all designed to help readers learn more, learn faster, and remember more of what they learn. Coverage includes: * Understanding how virtualization can best be integrated into today's real-world IT environments * Recognizing what to change, and what to leave alone * Planning, installing, configuring, and upgrading vCenter Server and VMware ESXi * Planning and configuring vSphere networking and storage * Deploying and Administering Virtual Machines and vApps * Establishing and Maintaining Service Levels * Performing basic troubleshooting * Monitoring vSphere implementations * Managing vCenter Server alarms * Preparing for the future of VMware virtualization.

Video - Configure ESXi host swapping to a solid-state disk

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 20:56:00 +0100

vSphere 5.0 can be confgured to enable VMware ESXi host swapping to a solid-state disk (SSD). In the low host memory–available states (high memory usage), where guest ballooning, transparent page sharing (TPS) and memory compression have not been sufcient to reclaim the needed host memory, hypervisor swapping is used as the last resort to reclaim memory from the virtual machines. vSphere employs three methods to address limitations of hypervisor swapping to improve hypervisor swapping performance.

1. Randomly selecting the virtual machine physical pages to be swapped out. This helps mitigate the impact of VMware ESXi pathologically interacting with the guest operating system’s memory management heuristics. This has been enabled from early releases of VMware ESX.

2. Memory compression of the virtual machine pages that are targeted by VMware ESXi to be swapped out. This feature, introduced in vSphere 4.1, reduces the number of memory pages that must be swapped out to the disk, while reclaiming host memory efectively at the same time and thereby benefting application performance.

3. vSphere 5.0 now enables users to choose to confgure a swap cache on the SSD. VMware ESXi 5.0 will then use this swap cache to store the swapped-out pages instead of sending them to the regular and slower hypervisor swap fle on the disk. Upon the next access to a page in the swap cache, the page will be retrieved quickly from the cache and then removed from the swap cache to free up space. Because SSD read latencies are an order of magnitude faster than typical disk access latencies, this signifcantly reduces the swap-in latencies and greatly improves the application performance in high memory over commitment scenarios.

In this video I’ll show you how SDD storage is detected by the ESXi host after adding a new datastore. You will also learn how to configure VMware ESXi host swapping and redirecting virtual machine swap files to solid state storage.

Video - VMware vCenter Infrastructure Navigator - Install and Configure

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 20:36:00 +0100

VMware vCenter Infrastructure Navigator is an application awareness plug-in to vCenter Server, and provides continuous dependency mapping of applications. Infrastructure Navigator offers application context to the virtual infrastructure administrators to monitor and manage the virtual infrastructure inventory objects and actions. Administrators can use Infrastructure Navigator to understand the impact of the change on the virtual environment in their application infrastructure.

Infrastructure Navigator helps virtual infrastructure administrators perform the following tasks:
- Make accurate first-level triage to help either eliminate the problem or associate the problem with the virtual infrastructure when business service users report problems.
- Assess change impact, manage, and communicate virtual infrastructure issues for critical applications.
- Understand the application and business impact of changes to the virtual infrastructure on applications.
- Infrastructure Navigator is supported on vCenter Server 5.0 with the vSphere Web Client.

- Simplifies and automates the deployment and the discovery process and keeps manages Application Component Knowledge Base (KB) current Eliminates physical switch spanning or credential based discovery.
- Discovers and maps the application components and dependencies using KBs and presents this knowledge through maps or search for relevant use cases.

- Provide Infrastructure Navigator data for vCenter Server and related solutions Ensures that the application and dependency data is available to the rest of the vCenter Server entities and its various solutions through the vCenter extensibility APIs.
- Supports SRM integration to set up more focused and accurate site recovery and backup plans.

Video - Installing vCenter Server 5.0 - Quick Start

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 22:08:00 +0100

VMware vCenter Server allows you to centrally manage hosts from either a physical or virtual Windows machine, and enables the use of advanced features such as vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), vSphere High Availability (HA), vSphere vMotion, vSphere Storage vMotion, and vSphere Auto Deploy. You can install vCenter Server in a Microsoft Windows virtual machine that runs on an ESXi host. Deploying the vCenter Server system in the virtual machine has the following advantages:

- You can provide high availability for the vCenter Server system by using vSphere HA.
- You can migrate the VM containing vCenter from one host to another.
- You can create snapshots of the vCenter Server virtual machine.
- Rather than dedicating a separate server to the vCenter Server system, you can place it in a virtual machine running on the same host where your other virtual machines run.

This video will show you how to install VMware vCenter Server 5.0 in a virtual machine 13 simple steps.

Step 1 > In the software installer directory, double-click the autorun.exe file to start the installer.

Step 2 > Select vCenter Server.

Step 3 > Follow the prompts in the installation wizard to choose the installer language, agree to the end user patent and license agreements, enter your user name, organization name, and license key.If you omit the license key, vCenter Server will be in evaluation mode, which allows you to use the full feature set for a 60-day evaluation period.

Step 4 > Choose the type of database that you want to use.

Step 5 > Set the login information for vCenter Server.

Step 6 > Either accept the default destination folders or click Change to select another location.

Step 7 > Select Create a standalone VMware vCenter Server instance or Join Group.Join a Linked Mode group to enable the vSphere Client to view, search, and manage data across multiple vCenter Server systems. S

Step 8 > If you join a group, enter the fully qualified domain name and LDAP port number of any remote vCenter Server system.

Step 9 > Enter the port numbers that you want to use or accept the default port numbers.

Step 10 > Select the size of your vCenter Server inventory to allocate memory for several Java services that are used by vCenter Server. This setting determines the maximum JVM heap settings for VMware VirtualCenter Management Webservices (Tomcat), Inventory Service, and Profile-Driven Storage Service. You can adjust this setting after installation if the number of hosts in your environment changes. See the recommendations in the vCenter Server Hardware Requirements topic in System Requirements.

Step 11 > (Optional) In the Ready to Install the Program window, select Select to bump up the ephemeral port value. This option increases the number of available ephemeral ports. If your vCenter Server manages hosts on which you will power on more than 2000 virtual machines simultaneously, this option prevents the pool of available ephemeral ports from being exhausted.

Step 12 > Click Install. Installation might take several minutes. Multiple progress bars appear during the installation of the selected components.

Step 13 > Click Finish.

Vote for the Top VMware Bloggers

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 08:41:04 +0100

Eric Siebert over at vSphere-land is running a new blog contest which let you decide who the most favorite VMware blogger is. You can pick your 10 most popular bloggers; based on your points Eric Siebert will create a vSphere-land blogger top 25. Please cast your vote and make a chance to win a copy of the Train Signal’s new vSphere 5 and View 5 video training courses.

http://vote.vsphere-land.com

What happens to resource pools when vCenter goes down?

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 13:38:41 +0100

A fellow VCI who was teaching the vSphere 5 What's New training course got a question from a student asking what happens to resource pools when vCenter goes down, because with vSphere 5.0 all the setting for resource pools are "moved" to vCenter.

Andy Cary who works as a Senior Technical Trainer at VMware responded immediately with: I created a RP on my vCenter and turned off expandable reservations for memory. Placed VM1 under said resource pool and failed to power up because the VM need to reserve memory for the overhead of running the VM (had no reservations set on the RP). So next I directly connected to the host and powered on the VM with no problem at all. However when you go back to the vCenter it displays:

The Cluster with the RP is now invalid because it can see the VM has powered on. So the configuration about DRS RP is saved on the vCenter but it doesn’t stop you going directly to the host an powering on the VM. Now in vSphere 5.0 if you directly connect to a host and try and create a local resource pool it will throw up an error saying this isn’t allowed because it can see you are managed by vCenter, this is the case even if the Host isn’t a member of DRS cluster. So the creation and management of RP is done via vCenter, if vCenter goes down the rules cannot be applied so you could get admin powering on VMs by directly connecting to the hosts. So in summary all we have done is said “You can only create, modify resource pools via vCenter and not by directly connecting to the host”

Video - VMware vCenter Operations Manager 5.0 - Install and Configure

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 08:56:54 +0100

Join Hemant Gaidhani in a video walkthrough of the installation and configuration of the VMware vCenter Operations Manager, a component of the vCenter Operations Management Suite.

VMware vCenter Operations 5.0 - Introduction Video

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 22:24:47 +0100

Join Kit Colbert in a walkthrough oveview of the VMware vCenter Operations Manager, a component of the vCenter Operations Management Suite. These are the new Features of VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite Editions.

New Operations Management Dashboard provides comprehensive views into health, risk and efficiency scores of your cloud infrastructure. Quickly drill down to see what’s causing current workload conditions, pinpoint potential problems in the future and identify areas with inefficient use of resources.

New Correlation of Performance and Change Events inside the guest operating system enable administrators to quickly understand and remediate performance issues arising from configuration changes.

New Compliance Checking of vSphere Hosts allow administrators to maintain a compliant infrastructure and automated the hardening of vSphere hosts with pre-built security and compliance guidelines.

New Smart Alerts provide pro-active notifications of building health, performance and capacity issues in the environment. Automated root cause analysis identifies the offending metric across all layers of the infrastructure.

New Capacity Planning, Reporting and Optimization views help administrators optimize VM density; identify areas of reclaimable waste and chronic capacity shortfalls. Configurable alerts notify of changing capacity conditions in production and non-production areas.

New Integrated Cost Metering and Reporting capabilities provide visibility into the financial value of consumed resources and enable administrators to optimize provisioned capacity for lowest cost without sacrificing performance.

New Discovery and Visualization of Application and Infrastructure Dependencies bring application-level awareness to infrastructure and operations teams to ensure service levels and disaster recovery protection for all critical application services. Application components and version numbers are named automatically and updated continuously.

Video - vCloud Director 1.5 - Quick Start

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 21:42:00 +0100

This quick start video provides a simplified, step-by-step set of instructions for creating a new virtual machine on the StratoGen vCloud platform. The StratoGen vCloud platform is built upon VMware vCloud Director 1.5. This video is a supplement to the vCloud director 1.5 user manual which provides comprehensive information about the platform.

Step 1 > Log in - Using a supported browser (Internet Explorer 7 or above, or Mozilla Firefox 3 or above) connect to the URL as provided by StratoGen. A typical URL is of the format https://mycloud.stratogen.com/cloud/org/your-organisation. Enter the username and password supplied to login to your account.

Step 2 > Select the ‘My Cloud’ tab - The initial homepage for your cloud is displayed. Now click on the ‘My Cloud’ tab. In the following steps I will take you through the steps required to create a new virtual machine in your cloud. All virtual machines must reside in a vApp (a vApp is a container that holds 1 or more virtual machines).

Step 3 > Click the ‘+’ symbol to create a new vApp from a catalog. You will now create a new vApp by clicking on the + icon

Step 4 > Select Catalog - You can upload your own virtual machine templates or ISO installation media into your organization’s catalog, but in this example we will be using one of the pre-built templates supplied by StratoGen. Click on the catalog drop down list and select ‘Public catalogs’.

Step 5 > Select vApp Template - Select the required operating system from the list of vApp Templates. In this example we will be creating a virtual machine with CentOS 5.5 installed, so we select the CentOS 5.5 vApp. This will create a vApp which contains a single CentOS 5.5 virtual machine.

Step 6 > Name your vApp - Enter a name for your new vApp, and a short description if required.

Step 7 > Configure virtual machine - Enter a computer name for your new virtual machine and then click on the ‘Network’ drop down list to select a network to attach it to. In this instance we will select a ‘Direct Internet Connection’. Always leave the IP assignment as ‘Static – IP Pool’. We are now ready to create our vApp and virtual machine. Click ‘Finish’.

Step 8 > vApp creation - That’s it. Your new vApp and virtual machine will now be created. Your virtual machine’s network settings will be configured automatically and a new root/administrator password will be automatically generated and assigned. We will also review our new virtual machine and note our new password.

Step 9 > vApp display - Once the creation of your vApp has completed, ‘Stopped’ will be displayed as the status. Select the vApp, and then click on the name. A visual depiction of the vApp is displayed. Now click the ‘Virtual Machines’ tab.

Step 10 > Virtual machine properties - This tab shows us the virtual machines in the vApp. In our case this is a single virtual machine called CentOS 5.5. Right click on your virtual machine and select properties. We can now view the properties of our virtual machine. To find the newly assigned root/administrator password for your VM select the ‘Guest OS Customization’ tab. Your new password is displayed after the ‘Auto generate password’ text.

Video - Install vSphere Syslog Collector and configure ESXi logging

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 11:48:00 +0100

Logging in vSphere 5.0 has been significantly enhanced. You now have fine-grained control over system logs, the location where logs are sent, and, for each log, default size and rotation policy. You can set up logging with the vSphere Client or with the esxcli system syslog command and the PowerCLI VMHostSysLogServer Commandlets. You can also set up logging behaviour for a host by using the Host Profiles interface in the vSphere Client and can then import that host profile into other hosts. VMware vSphere ESXi 5.0 hosts run a syslog service (vmsyslogd) which provides a standard mechanism for logging messages from the VMkernel and other system components. By default in ESXi, these logs are placed on a local scratch volume or a ram disk. To preserve the logs further, ESXi can be configured to place these logs to an alternate storage location on disk, and to send the logs across the network to a syslog server. You have to install the vSphere Syslog Collector to enable ESXi system logs to be directed to a server on the network, rather than to a local disk. It’s possible install the Syslog Collector on the same machine as the associated vCenter Server, or on a different machine that has network connection to the vCenter Server. The Syslog Collector service binds to an IPv4 address for communication with vCenter Server, and does not support IPv6. The vCenter Server can be on a host machine in an IPv4-only, IPv4/IPv6 mixed-mode, or IPv6-only network environment, but the machine that connects to the vCenter Server through the vSphere Client must have an IPv4 address for the Syslog Collector service to work. In the ESXi Software panel there's an Advanced Setting called Syslog.global.LogHost, the value of this setting presents the remote host to which syslog messages are forwarded and port on which the remote host receives syslog messages. You can include the protocol and the port, for example, ssl://hostName1:514. UDP (default), TCP, and SSL are supported. The remote host must have syslog installed and correctly configured to receive the forwarded syslog messages. Checkout the video how the syslog service is installed on the vCenter host. You can also set up ESXi Syslog from the Host Profiles Interface. Hosts provisioned with Auto Deploy usually do not have sufficient local storage to save system logs. You can specify a remote syslog server for those hosts by setting up a reference host, saving the host profile, and applying that host profile to other hosts as needed. Best practice is to set up the syslog server on the reference host with the vSphere Client or the esxcli system syslog command and save the host profile. In some situations, setting up syslog from the Host Profiles interface is an alternative.

New Training - VMware View 5 Install, Configure and Manage

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 09:13:40 +0100

This 4 days hands-on training course builds your skills in the VMware View™ suite of products: VMware View™ Manager, View Composer, and VMware ThinApp®. This course is based on the View 5.0 and ThinApp 4.6 releases. Before attending this course, you must be able to perform the following tasks:
• Create a template in VMware vCenter Server™ and deploy a virtual machine from the template. • Modify a template customization file. • Open a virtual machine console in vCenter Server and access the guest operating system. • Configure Active Directory services.
Objectives:
• Install and configure View components. • Create and manage dedicated and floating desktop pools. • Deploy and manage linked-clone virtual desktops. • Configure and manage desktops that run in local mode. • Configure user profiles with View Persona Management. • Configure secure access to desktops through a public network. • Use ThinApp to package applications.

White Paper - Mobility and Disaster Recovery Solution for Virtualized Tier-1 Enterprise Applications

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 15:57:50 +0100

To meet ever growing IT infrastructure needs and to ensure business continuity in case of a site-level disaster, it is critical to have live mobility and fully automated, efficient disaster recovery (DR) processes for virtualized enterprise applications across data centers. Failure to have a robust and efficient mobility and fully automated disaster recovery solution can result in millions of dollars of lost revenue and employee productivity.

This white paper showcases a flexible solution from Cisco®, VMware®, and EMC® that allows customers to efficiently achieve live mobility and fully automated DR for virtualized enterprise applications across data centers with less than 10ms round-trip time (RTT) latency between them.

Live mobility for virtualized applications across data centers enables IT organizations to efficiently meet various operational needs, e.g., data capacity expansion, seamless migrations, disaster avoidance, etc.

Fully automated DR allows customers to protect their mission critical enterprise applications against site-level disasters and ensures business continuance. A key advantage of this solution over manual, runbook style DR process execution is "minimum downtime with lowest Recovery Time Objective (RTO)". This is extremely critical for next generation cloud solutions required to host hundreds to thousands of virtualized applications on the same shared infrastructure.

The Cisco, VMware, and EMC design presented in this white paper is very modular so that, based on customer requirements, there is flexibility to deploy both the live mobility and fully automated DR solution or deploy any one of these solutions.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/solutions/Enterprise/Data_Center/DCI/4.0/EMC/mobdisasterrecapps.html

Storage Design and Implementation in vSphere 5.0 - The Rough Cuts

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 08:58:25 +0100

The Rough Cuts service from Safari Books Online gives you exclusive access to an evolving manuscript that you can read online or download as a PDF and print. A Rough Cuts book is not fully edited or completely formatted, but you'll get access to new versions as they are created.

vSphere Storage is the essential component that glues the vSphere environment together. Most of the enterprise, as well as basic features, in vSphere require some sort of storage, be it local, remote, dedicated, or shared. The larger the environment, the more complex the storage design and choices. The author's approach is two-fold. He will first demystify the “black-box” called storage in the vSphere environment. He will then provide illustrated step-by-step procedures for doing common tasks that will gradually introduce more complex tasks. Based on the vSphere 5 release.

Storage Design and Implementation in vSphere 5.0 by Mostafa Khalil Published Jan 10, 2012 by VMware Press. Part of the VMware Press series.

Table of Contents Part 1: Storage 1. Storage Types 2. Protocols and Standards 3. Storage Connectivity and Media 4. VMware Pluggable Storage Architecture (PSA) 5. 3rd party Multipathing Plug-ins 6. Storage Virtualization Devices (SVDs) 7. LUN Sizing Design Decisions and Best Practices 8. Performance Optimization Monitoring Part 2: File Systems 9. VMFS 10. NFS 11. VisorFS Part 3: Storage Virtual Appliances (SVAs) 12. Concept and Architecture 13. Design Decisions for using SVAs Part 4: Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) 14. Virtual Machines and Applications Clustering 15. Metro Clusters and Stretch Clusters 16. Standby Servers (Blades) 17. Disaster Recovery Design

Top 25 Free Tools for VMware vSphere presented by David Davis and Kendrick Coleman

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 15:56:02 +0100

In this live webinar, vExperts David Davis and Kendrick Coleman share their list of 25 best free tools for VMware vSphere management, reporting, performance, scripting and more. Whether you're an experienced virtualization pro or someone just getting started with VMware administration, you'll benefit from learning about these 25 completely free tools.

http://www.trainsignal.com/blog/webinars

VMworld Session - VMware vMotion in VMware vSphere 5: Architecture, Performance & Best Practices

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 18:45:00 +0100

The new and improved VMware vMotion in VMware vSphere 5.0 incorporates a number of enhancements that leverage the power of the solid state drive and 10 gigabit Ethernet technologies that are increasingly adopted in today's datacenters. These enhancements vastly improve both the usability and performance of vMotion. Testing in VMware performance labs shows it is easier than ever to use vMotion to manage even large virtual machines running heavy-duty, enterprise-class applications with minimal overhead. This session will describe the vMotion architecture and the new and enhanced features of vMotion in vSphere 5.0. Performance implications with data from a wide variety of tier 1 application workloads will also be discussed. We will share common pitfalls as well as best practices that enable you to get the maximum benefit from the new and improved vMotion technology.

Video - Metro vMotion in vSphere 5.0

Video - Running vMotion on multiple–network adaptors

White Paper - vMotion Architecture, Performance, and Best Practices in VMware vSphere 5

LG Android running VMware Horizon Mobile hands-on

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 20:31:51 +0100

Deploy a Corporate Profile on Employee-owned Devices Enforce security and compliance policies. With VMware MVP, a personal profile and a corporate profile can securely and simultaneously run on the same device in isolated containers. Corporate applications and data are securely isolated from an employee’s personal profile. Ease Mobility Management Remotely provision, manage and update corporate profiles in a streamlined manner, irrespective of the mobile device. With VMware MVP, employees can connect their own mobile devices to the corporate network from a corporate profile that is provisioned and managed by the corporate IT group. IT administrator can manage mobile end-points and desktop from a single interface.
Check-out LG Android VMware Horizon Mobile hands-on for more details

Forbes Guthrie has released the vSphere 5 vReference Card

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 14:58:37 +0100

The card is available under a Creative Commons license, so feel free to copy and distribute this in paper or electronic format. Just check back frequently to www.vReference.com for updates, or subscribe to the RSS feed to be the first to know.

Forbes Guthrie: At long last, the vSphere 5.0 vReference Card is ready. Go and grab it over here. This time I’ve split it up into both an A4 version and a separate Letter size one. This should hopefully make the printing experience more consistent regardless of which side of the pond you try.New with this release is a full page version. This is the same information as the card, but I’ve increased the font to a less eye-ball screamingly small font. This should make it make much more conducive to reading as a study guide, or if you want to bone-up on a particular area.

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5.0 Performance and Best Practices

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 20:43:00 +0100

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 5.0 provides business continuity and disaster recovery protection for VMware virtual environments. Protection can range from virtual machines (VMs) residing on a single, replicated datastore to all the VMs in a datacenter and includes protection for the operating systems and applications running in the VM. The goal of this white paper is to provide you with SRM performance data and recommendations so that you can architect an efficient recovery plan that minimizes the recovery time for your environment. This white paper addresses various dimensions on which the recovery time depends: • Number of virtual machines and protection groups associated with a recovery plan • Leveraging DPM and DRS for a better recovery • Configuration of various recovery plan parameters • Priority assignment of virtual machines in the recovery plan • Improvements to the performance of recovering multiple protection groups within a single recovery plan Furthermore, VMware suggest best practices in applicable areas so that you can optimize the recovery time using SRM.

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/srm5-perf.pdf

New Training - VMware vSphere 5 Design Workshop

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 16:03:00 +0100

The goal of this 3 day course is to equip consulting professionals with the knowledge, skills, and abilities to achieve competence in designing a VMware vSphere 5 virtual infrastructure. Given an organization’s constraints and requirements, the infrastructure should be available, scalable, manageable, and secure while meeting the organization’s business objectives. The course is based on VMware ESXi and VMware vCenter Server 5. This course discusses the benefits and risks of available design alternatives and provides information to support making sound design decisions. This course also provides an opportunity to practice your design skills by working with peers on a design project. Objectives: • Understand and apply a framework to a design. • Design a storage solution to use vSphere in an enterprise. • Design a network to use vSphere in an enterprise. • Design compute resources for an enterprise. • Design virtual machines to run applications in a virtual infrastructure. • Design a virtual datacenter for an enterprise. • Incorporate management and monitoring features in the design. • Identify design goals, requirements, constraints, and risks. • Identify useful information for making design decisions. • Recognize and analyze best-practice recommendations. • Analyze alternative design choices. Course Datasheet

Voice Over IP (VoIP) Performance Evaluation on VMware vSphere 5.0

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 21:00:00 +0100

The majority of business-critical applications such as Web applications, database servers, and enterprise messaging systems have been successfully virtualized, proving the benefits of virtualization for reducing cost and streamlining IT management. However, the adoption of virtualization in the area of latency-sensitive applications has been slow partly due to unsubstantiated performance concerns. By taking VoIP service as an example, this paper demonstrates that vSphere 5 brings the same virtualization benefits to latency-sensitive applications, and vSphere 5 does this while driving good performance. In particular, vSphere 5 delivers excellent out-of-the-box performance in terms of voice quality when running VoIP service. VoIP applications are characterized by latency-sensitivity that dictates audio data be delivered at regular intervals to achieve good voice quality. Irregular delivery may lead to packet drops, severely deteriorating user experience. Therefore, timely processing and delivery of audio data is critically important to VoIP service. In the virtualized environment, however, meeting this requirement for VoIP applications is more challenging due to the additional layer of scheduling virtual machines (VMs) and processing network packets. Despite such challenges, vSphere 5 is able to achieve great performance for VoIP applications thanks to the following reasons. First, vSphere 5 facilitates the highly optimized networking stack and paravirtualized device drivers to minimize virtualization overhead, adding little variance in packet delivery1. The overhead is usually in the order of tens of microseconds that are negligible, especially to VoIP applications, where packets need to be delivered at intervals of tens of milliseconds. Second, vSphere 5 gives each VM a fair share of CPU2, ensuring the predictable processing of audio data even under high CPU contention when running multiple VMs. Finally, the Network I/O Control (NetIOC) feature allows VoIP traffic to be isolated by partitioning physical network bandwidth. This helps to achieve the intended voice quality when VoIP traffic competes for shared network resources. This paper illustrates that: • Excellent out-of-the-box VoIP performance is achieved with a large number of users served by a commercial VoIP media server hosted on vSphere 5. • vSphere 5 is able to maintain great VoIP performance when running a large number of instances of VoIP server; results showed that vSphere 5 provided good performance even when running 12 instances configured with a total of 48 vCPUs on a system with 8 cores, utilizing more than 90% of the physical CPUs. • With Network I/O Control (NetIOC), vSphere 5 is able to preserve voice quality under high contention for network resources.

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/voip-perf-vsphere5.pdf

VMware vCloud Director 1.5 Performance and Best Practices

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 20:51:37 +0100

VMware vCloud Director 1.5 gives enterprise organizations the ability to build secure private clouds that dramatically increase datacenter efficiency and business agility. Coupled with VMware vSphere, vCloud Director delivers cloud computing for existing datacenters by pooling virtual infrastructure resources and delivering them to users as catalog-based services. vCloud Director 1.5 helps you build agile infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud environments that greatly accelerate the time-to-market for applications and responsiveness of IT organizations. vCloud Director 1.5 adds the following new features specific to accelerating application delivery in the cloud: • Fast Provisioning
• vCloud Custom Guest Data • Expanded vCloud API and SDK • vCloud API Query Service • vCloud Messages • Cisco Nexus 1000v Integration • vSphere 5.0 Support • Microsoft SQL Server Support • Globalization • vShield Five Tuple Firewall Rules • Static Routing • IPSec Site-to-Site VPN This white paper addresses three areas regarding vCloud Director performance: • vCloud Director sizing guidelines and software requirements • Best practices in performance and tuning • Performance characterization for key vCloud Director operations

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/vcloud-director-perf.pdf

New Book: Administering VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.0

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 20:35:34 +0100

Administering VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.0 is the complete, technical, hands-on guide to VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 5.0 installation and configuration for experienced VMware professionals. VMware forum moderator and vExpert Mike Laverick fully explains SRM 5.0’s failover/failback procedures, walks readers through configuring storage replication with hardware from several leading suppliers, and shows how to efficiently implement fast, automated, centralized disaster recovery. Drawing on his extensive experience with SRM and vSphere, Laverick identifies common pitfalls and errors, explains why they occur, and shows exactly how to fix them. Fully up to date for SRM 5.0, this book delivers “in-the-trenches” technical knowledge you won’t find anywhere else, including expert guidance for utilizing SRM 5.0’s advanced new vSphere Replication (VR).

Continue reading "New Book: Administering VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.0"

VMware KB: Upgrading to vCenter Server 5.0 best practices

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 19:25:52 +0100

VMware supports in-place upgrades on 64-bit systems from vCenter Server 4.x to vCenter Server 5.0. You can upgrade VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 6 or later and vCenter Server 4.0.x to vCenter Server 5.0 by installing vCenter Server 5.0 on a new machine and migrating the existing database.

This upgrade method makes it possible to upgrade from a 32-bit system to a 64-bit system. Alternatively, if the VirtualCenter or vCenter Server database is on a remote machine, you can upgrade the database. vCenter Server 5.0 can manage ESX 3.5.x/ESXi 3.5.x hosts in the same cluster with ESX 4.x/ESXi 4.x hosts.

You cannot upgrade a vCenter Server 4.x instance that is running on Windows XP Professional x64 Edition to vCenter Server 5.0, because vCenter Server 5.0 does not support Windows XP Professional x64. This article provides information about upgrading to vCenter Server 5.0.

VMware KB: Upgrading to vCenter Server 5.0 best practices

New Book - Administering vSphere 5: Planning, Implementing and Troubleshooting

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 19:25:18 +0100

This new book will be released at January 11th 2012 and focuses on planning, installing, and maintaining vSphere environments. It is not a verbose documentation-style tome, but rather a comprehensive guide based on the tips, tricks, and gotchas gleaned from the authors' years of experience as vSphere consultants and trainers.

The book is separated into four discrete sections: planning, implementation, troubleshooting, and security. The structure of the book provides readers with a balanced, deep understanding of vSphere. The authors have incorporated nearly two decades of consulting and training experience in the pages of this book. Real-world experience has been leveraged to help readers avoid the pitfalls that the authors have learned the hard way.

Written by trainers, this book presents the material utilizing a practical teaching style. This experience will benefit both the new and veteran administrator alike. While this book does cover the new features found in vSphere 5, it doesn't assume that the reader has extensive experience with the previous versions of vSphere. ADMINISTERING VSPHERE 5: PLANNING, IMPLEMENTING AND TROUBLESHOOTING provides newcomers with a solid foundation in vSphere, while also filling in the gaps for more experienced readers.

Troubleshooting ESX virtual machine performance issues

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 22:21:00 +0100

- Tuning ESX/ESXi for better storage performance by modifying the maximum I/O block size
- ESX has performance issues due to IRQ sharing
- Enabling IOAT and Jumbo frames
- Troubleshooting network performance issues
- Analyzing SCSI Reservation conflicts on VMware Infrastructure 3.x and vSphere 4.x
- Determining if multiple virtual CPUs are causing performance issues
- Slow performance caused by misconfigured local storage or SAN array
- Slow performance caused by out of date firmware on a RAID controller or HBA
- Testing virtual machine storage I/O performance
- iSCSI and Jumbo Frames configuration on ESX 3.x, ESX 4.x and ESXi 5.x
- Using esxtop to identify storage performance issues
- Configuring Jumbo Frames on a vNetwork Distributed Switch
- Verifying correct storage settings on ESX 4.x and ESXi 4.x
- Network I/O Resource Management in vSphere 4.1 with vDS
- Impact of virtual machine memory and CPU resource limits
- Checking your firmware and BIOS levels to ensure compatibility with ESX/ESXi
- Enabling Jumbo Frames for VMkernel ports in a virtual distributed switch
- Changing the Queue Depth for QLogic and Emulex HBAs
- High co-stop (%CSTP) values seen during virtual machine snapshot activities
- Balloon driver retains hold on memory causing virtual machine guest operating system performance issues

Source KB 2001003

Cool Tool - HD_Speed

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 12:59:08 +0100

HD_Speed measures both sustained and burst data transfer rates of your virtual disks, cd/dvd-roms, flash cards/sticks, floppys, etc, and offers a realtime graphical display.

Download

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 21:20:10 +0100

I just wanted to send everyone a bit of Christmas Cheer!

Dutch: Vrolijk Kerstfeest en een Gelukkig Nieuwjaar! or Zalig Kerstfeest
English: Merry Christmas
German: Fröhliche Weihnachten
French: Joyeux Noel
Flemish: Zalig Kerstfeest en Gelukkig nieuw jaar
Greek: Kala Christouyenna!
Russian: Pozdrevlyayu s prazdnikom Rozhdestva is Novim Godom
Spanish: Feliz Navidad
Thai: Sawadee Pee Mai or souksan wan Christmas
Turkish: Noeliniz Ve Yeni Yiliniz Kutlu Olsun
Farsi: Cristmas-e-shoma mobarak bashad

Video - Troubleshooting a vNetwork Distributed Switch

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 20:12:00 +0100

A vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS) functions as a single virtual switch across all associated hosts. This enables you to set network configurations that span across all member hosts, and allows virtual machines to maintain consistent network configuration as they migrate across multiple hosts.
In this video I'll show you how to troubleshoot and configure vNetwork Distributed Switch Network Adapters. The vNetwork Distributed Switch networking view of the host configuration page displays the configuration of the host’s associated vNetwork Distributed Switches and allows you to configure the vNetwork Distributed Switch network adapters and uplink ports.

For each host associated with a vNetwork Distributed Switch, you must assign physical network adapters, or uplinks, to the vNetwork Distributed Switch. You can assign one uplink on each host per uplink port on the vNetwork Distributed Switch.

Whiteboarding session - Expandable Reservations are cool

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 20:36:00 +0100

Although Expandable Reservations are enabled by default on a resource pool, it doesn’t mean that they should stay enabled in every situation. In this white boarding session I’ll show what the hidden danger of using expandable reservations can lead to. The system considers the resources available in the selected resource pool and its direct parent resource pool. If the parent resource pool also has the Expandable Reservation option selected, it can borrow resources from its parent resource pool. Borrowing resources occurs recursively from the ancestors of the current resource pool as long as the Expandable Reservation option is selected. Leaving this option selected offers more flexibility, but, at the same time provides less protection. A child resource pool owner might reserve more resources than you anticipate.

VMware vSphere Storage Appliance Technical Deep Dive

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 20:03:30 +0100

In the release of VMware vSphere 5.0, VMware also released a new software storage appliance called the VMware vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA). VMware VSA provides an alternative shared storage solution to our Small to Medium Business (SMB) customers who might not be in a position to purchase a Storage Area Network (SAN) or Network-Attached Storage (NAS) array for their virtual infrastructure. Without shared storage configured in a vSphere environment, customers have not been able to exploit the unique features available in vSphere 5.0, such as vSphere High Availability (HA), vSphere, vMotion and vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS). The VSA is designed to provide “Shared Storage for Everyone”.

VMware vSphere Storage Appliance Technical Deep Dive.pdf

Myth - Resource Pools should always be used to categorize and allocate resources to VMs

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 14:35:00 +0100

Resource Pools should always be used

View more presentations from Eric Sloof.

You can use folders to group objects of the same type for easier management. For example, you can use folders to set permissions on a group of objects, to set alarms on a group of objects, or to organize objects in a meaningful way. A folder can contain other folders, or a group of objects of the same type. For example, a single folder can contain virtual machines and another folder containing virtual machines, but it cannot contain hosts and a folder containing virtual machines.

Resource pools allow you to delegate control over resources of a host (or a cluster), but the benefits are evident when you use resource pools to compartmentalize all resources in a cluster. Create multiple resource pools as direct children of the host or cluster and configure them. You can then delegate control over the resource pools
to other individuals or organizations.

In vSphere, the inventory is a collection of virtual and physical objects on which you can place permissions, monitor tasks and events, and set alarms. You can group most inventory objects by using folders to more easily manage them.

Myth - E1000 is faster than VMXNET3

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 10:01:00 +0100

E1000 is faster than VMXNET3

View more presentations from Eric Sloof.

What’s an e1000?

The e1000 is the Intel 82545EM Gigabit Ethernet Controller. VMware offers an emulated version of this controller. Most operating systems are shipped with a 82545EM driver. The 82545EM driver sucks! That’s why Intel replaced it with e1000e aka 82574L

What’s an e1000e?

The e1000e is the Intel 82574L Gigabit Ethernet Controller. In vSphere 5 (HW8), VMware offers an emulated version of the e1000e. Windows 7 and Windows 2008 are shipped with drivers for the 82574L. The 82574L is cool, but is it faster than an VMXNET3?

What’s VMXNET3?

The VMXNET3 adapter is the next generation of Para virtualized NIC designed for performance. The VMXNET3 network adapter is a 10Gb virtual NIC. Drivers are shipped with the VMware tools and most OS are supported. VMXNET3 is much faster than e1000 or e1000e. VMXNET3 has less CPU overhead compared to e1000 or e1000e. VMXNET3 is more stable than e1000 or e1000e

Whiteboarding session - Configuring VLAN IDs

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 18:23:00 +0100

VLANs can be configured at the port group level. The ESXi host provides VLAN support through virtual switch tagging, which is provided by giving a port group a VLAN ID (by default, a VLAN ID is optional). The VMkernel then takes care of all tagging and untagging as the packets pass through the virtual switch.

I’ve created this white boarding session on my new Sketch Design Tablet which came with an awesome sketching tool called Artweaver.

Upcoming New Course - VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5 - Install, Configure and Manage

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 08:56:59 +0100

VMware is about to launch a new course. It’s the long awaited SRM 5 training which will be most likely available in the first quarter of 2012. This new 3 day training course replaces the current 1.0 version which is a very welcome update. SRM 5 is still in beta, but there’s a datasheet available at this link.

SRM 5 Beta.pdf

This three-day, hands-on training course equips experienced VMware vSphere administrators with the knowledge to install, configure, and manage VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5.0. This course also equips vSphere administrators with the knowledge to assist in disaster planning and to test disaster recovery plans with SRM. At the end of the course, you should gain an understanding of the functionality in SRM 5.0 and be able to do the following:

• Install SRM 5.0
• Configure placeholder datastores
• Configure inventory mappings in SRM
• Configure datastore mappings
• Replicate virtual machines using physical couriering
• Configure vSphere replication-based protection groups in SRM
• Create, edit, execute, test, and remove a recovery plan in SRM
• Reprotect virtual machines
• Configure SRM alarms
• Troubleshoot SRM problems

http://www.vmware.com/products/site-recovery-manager/

Myth - VMware HA datastore heartbeats prevent host isolation

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 16:32:00 +0100

What are datastore heartbeats?

The host-X-hb (where X is the host’s MOID) is Located on each heartbeat datastore, this file is used to check for slave liveness through the heartbeat datastore. This file is checked by the master host if the master loses network heartbeats from the slave.

For VMFS datastores, the vSphere HA agent locks this file with an exclusive lock and relies on the VMkernel heartbeat to indicate liveness. For NFS datastores, vSphere HA periodically updates the time stamp to this file to indicate liveness.

The host-X-poweron (where X is the host’s MOID) is a per-host file that contains the list of all virtual machines that are powered on. This file is used as a communication channel if a management network outage occurs. Isolated slaves use this file to tell the master that it is isolated as well as to tell the master which virtual machines it has powered off.

The master host must determine whether the slave host:

• Actually crashed
• Is not responding because of a network failure
• The HA agent is in an unreachable state

The absence of both a network and datastore heartbeat indicates full host failure. Datastores are used as a backup communication channel to detect virtual machine and host heartbeats. Datastore heartbeats are used to make the distinction between a failed, an isolated or a partitioned host.

Dutch VMUG - Mythbusting Goes Virtual (Slides, Photos and Video)

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 13:46:13 +0100

Some things never change, or do they? vSphere is getting new and improved features with every release. These features change the characteristics and performance of the virtual machines. If you are not up to speed, you will probably manage your environment based on old and inaccurate information. The vMythbusters have collected a series of interesting hot topics that we have seen widely discussed in virtualization communities, on blogs and on Twitter. We’ve put these topics to the test in our lab to determine if they are a myth or not.

• Defrag your Guest OS disks for best performance
• E1000 is faster than VMXNET3
• CBT causes significant overhead on your VMs
• HA datastore heartbeats prevents host isolation
• LSI SCSI is always better than Paravirtual SCSI

Mythbusters_Dutch_VMUG.pdf

The MonsterVM appears at the Dutch VMUG

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 10:17:00 +0100

During the opening of the Dutch VMUG, Viktor van den Berg got a call from Steve Herrod announcing the MosterVM was on his way. Shortly after he apaered on stage.

Video – An Interview vNinja Christian Mohn

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 21:36:00 +0100

During my visit to Bergen (Norway), where I’m delivering a VMware vSphere Training course this week, I hooked-up with fellow vExpert Christian Mohn. Before heading into town :-) I’ve recorded a short interview with him.

Christian Mohn works as a Network Manager for a Norwegian shipping company where his responsibilities include developing and maintaining their IT infrastructure. He’s also the thin line between agile and fragile as blogger over at vNinja.net. Together with Chris Dearden and Ed Czerwin, Christian is running the vSoup shows. Oh, I almost forgot to mention Christian's 500px.com photo website.

VMware Labs presents its latest fling - VMware I/O Analyzer

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 17:56:57 +0100

I/O Analyzer is a virtual appliance solution by VMware that provides a simple and standardized way of measuring storage performance in a VMware vSphere virtualized environments. I/O Analyzer automates the traditional storage performance analysis cycle and reduces the performance diagnosis time from days to hours.

Features include:

• Integrated framework for storage performance testing
• Readily deployable virtual appliance
• Easily configure and launch I/O tests on multiple hosts
• View integrated performance results at both guest and host levels
• Easily export performance data for off-site analysis

vPanorama - An Integrated View of VMware, Storage and Network

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 08:45:36 +0100

vPanorama provides an integrated simpler and smarter view of all the resources in a VMware environment. vPanorama gives VMware Administrators and Managers a simple, action-oriented way to grasp the complete VMware environment including storage and network resources. It shows you where in the network and storage bottlenecks are occurring, identifies which VMs are responsible for the bottlenecks, and provides a integrated way to address the bottleneck using vMotion, or Storage vMotion.

For up to 250 VMs it is free, get the Big Picture at http://www.vpanorama.com/

Video - Taking Memory Snapshots of vSphere Virtual Machines

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 19:56:57 +0100

Learn how to plan for and take a snapshot that captures the virtual machine's memory. This video shows how to take a snapshot and discusses prerequisites and best practices for taking memory snapshots of vSphere virtual machines.

VMware has released vCenter Chargeback Manager version 2

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 09:45:46 +0100

vCenter Chargeback Manager is an end-to-end cost reporting solution for virtual environments that are using VMware vSphere. vCenter Chargeback Manager provides functionality to define unit costs and calculate the overall costs based on the actual usage or reservation of computing resources. This Web-based application interacts with the vCenter Server Database to retrieve usage information, calculates the cost by using the defined chargeback formulas, and generates cost and usage reports.

vCenter Chargeback Manager runs on an Apache Tomcat server instance. Users interact with vCenter Chargeback Manager through a load balancer (Apache HTTP Server). vCenter Chargeback Manager connects to the vCenter Chargeback Manager database that stores application-specific information, such as the defined chargeback hierarchies, cost models, users, roles, and so on. The application interacts with the vCenter Server using VIM APIs and with the vCenter Server database through a data collector. The data collector communicates with the vCenter Server Database using JDBC.

Continue reading "VMware has released vCenter Chargeback Manager version 2"

Webinar - Building Next Generation Virtualized Data Centers with VXLAN

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 21:13:11 +0100

Join Arista and VMware technical leaders as they go in-depth into the new Virtual eXtensible LAN technology -VXLAN. VXLAN delivers on the ability to execute Stateful Layer-3 vMotion's - the live migration of a workload to any server in the network, at any time, in seconds, regardless of the IP addressing topology of your infrastructure. VXLAN overcomes the segmentation boundaries and broadcast domain constraints of 802.1q VLANs, replacing them with a more granular and scalable model for segmentation and scaling. In this session you will learn about VXLAN, the framing format, encapsulation mechanism, how to prepare the network and infrastructure, and how to operate and troubleshoot this environment.

Please register and you will receive a confirmation email reserving your spot in this webinar!

December 2, 2011 - 10:00am PDT

VMware Labs presents its latest fling - ESX System Analyzer

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 08:23:00 +0100

The ESX System Analyzer is a tool designed to help administrators plan a migration from ESX to ESXi. It analyzes the ESX hosts in your environment and, for each host, collects information on factors that pertain to the migration process:

• Hardware compatibility with ESXi
• VMs registered on the ESX host, as well as VMs located on the host’s local disk
• Modifications to the Service Console RPMs which have been added or removed or files which have been added or users and cronjobs which have been added

This tool also provides summary information for the whole existing environment

• Version of VMware Tools and Virtual Hardware for all VMs
• Version of Filesystem for all datastores

By having this information, administrators can determine what tasks need to be done prior to the migration. Examples include:

• Relocate VMs from local datastores to shared datastores
• Replace cronjobs with equivalent remote scripts written with PowerCLI or vCLI
• Make note of what agent software has been added to the host and obtain the equivalent agentless version

Be one of the first one to try, rate and comment - ESX-system-analyzer

Update: Remon Lam over at VirtualVlouds.info has figuered out the username and password, he also has a link to the userguide.

The Dutch VMUG event 2011 – Impressive Speaker Line-Up

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 08:41:00 +0100

Viktor van den Berg is ramping up. He has presented a great line-up of speakers who are going to deliver the most awesome sessions at the Dutch VMUG event. If you didn’t register yet, there's still a chance. Make sure you mark the 9th of December in your agenda. More information can be found here.

Here’s the list with the celebrities:

• Alan Renouf, Senior Technical Marketing, VMware
• Andre van der Werff, Senior Systems Engineer, VMware
• Bob de Kousemaeker, Principal Product Manager, RES Software
• Bouke Groenescheij, Freelance Consultant, jume.nl
• Cormac Hogan, Technical Marketing Manager for Storage, VMware
• Duncan Epping, Principal Architect, Technical Marketing, VMware
• Eric Sloof, Freelance Trainer/Consultant, Famous Blogger, NTPRO.NL
• Gabrie van Zanten, gabesvirtualworld.com / Consultant - OpenLine
• Henk Arts, Senior System Engineer, Veeam Software
• Jeroen van de Kamp, CTO, Login Consultants
• Luc Dekens, System Engineer, Eurocontrol Maastricht
• Marcel Steenman, Senior Technical Consultant, Platani
• Mattias Sundling, Virtualization Expert, Quest
• Michael Heffernan, Global Chief Technologist Virtualisatie, Hitachi Data Systems
• Raymon Epping, Technical Account Manager, Professional Services, VMware
• Ruben Spruijt, Technology Officer, PQR
• Stefan Willems, Senior Solution Architect, Platani
• Verron Martina, vSpecialist, EMC
• Viktor van den Berg, VMware Consultant, PQR, Dutch VMUG Leader

Cisco UCS white boarding with Jeffrey Hall

nospam@example.com (Eric Sloof) — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 20:00:00 +0100

I’ve met Jeff last week in Oslo (Norway) where he was delivering a Cisco UCS training while I was teaching the VMware vSphere 5 Install, Configure and Manage course. During one of the dark Nordic evenings, we went out for dinner. We had some great hamburgers and I offered him a taste of my homemade sambal The ice was broken and we had some pretty good laughs that evening.

Jeff works as a full-time Independent Instructor/Consultant that focuses on Cisco UCS and IP Telephony technologies as well as VMware virtualization solutions. One of his biggest interests is the implementation of Unified Communications on the Cisco UCS solution using VMware’s vSphere datacenter suite.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/layer8man

He has started a weblog over at cloudinaround.com, in one of his most recent articles he introduces the first in a series of videos that will explore the Cisco UCS architecture and signal flow. In this first video, he starts by identifying the main components and their connectivity. In follow-on videos, he’ll dive deeper into how everything communicates.

NTPRO.NL - Eric Sloof

Technical Papers - SAP and VMware

Video - Configure vSphere SRM Replication for a Single VM

VMware Project Onyx for vSphere 5

New Book - The Official VCP5 Certification Guide

Video - Configure ESXi host swapping to a solid-state disk

Video - VMware vCenter Infrastructure Navigator - Install and Configure

Video - Installing vCenter Server 5.0 - Quick Start

Vote for the Top VMware Bloggers

What happens to resource pools when vCenter goes down?

Video - VMware vCenter Operations Manager 5.0 - Install and Configure

VMware vCenter Operations 5.0 - Introduction Video

Video - vCloud Director 1.5 - Quick Start

Video - Install vSphere Syslog Collector and configure ESXi logging

New Training - VMware View 5 Install, Configure and Manage

White Paper - Mobility and Disaster Recovery Solution for Virtualized Tier-1 Enterprise Applications

Storage Design and Implementation in vSphere 5.0 - The Rough Cuts

Top 25 Free Tools for VMware vSphere presented by David Davis and Kendrick Coleman

VMworld Session - VMware vMotion in VMware vSphere 5: Architecture, Performance & Best Practices

LG Android running VMware Horizon Mobile hands-on

Forbes Guthrie has released the vSphere 5 vReference Card

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5.0 Performance and Best Practices

New Training - VMware vSphere 5 Design Workshop

Voice Over IP (VoIP) Performance Evaluation on VMware vSphere 5.0

VMware vCloud Director 1.5 Performance and Best Practices

New Book: Administering VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.0

VMware KB: Upgrading to vCenter Server 5.0 best practices

Top 10 - Most Viewed Videos of 2011

New Book - Administering vSphere 5: Planning, Implementing and Troubleshooting

Troubleshooting ESX virtual machine performance issues

Cool Tool - HD_Speed

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Video - Troubleshooting a vNetwork Distributed Switch

Whiteboarding session - Expandable Reservations are cool

VMware vSphere Storage Appliance Technical Deep Dive

Myth - Resource Pools should always be used to categorize and allocate resources to VMs

Myth - E1000 is faster than VMXNET3

Whiteboarding session - Configuring VLAN IDs

Upcoming New Course - VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5 - Install, Configure and Manage

Myth - VMware HA datastore heartbeats prevent host isolation

Dutch VMUG - Mythbusting Goes Virtual (Slides, Photos and Video)

The MonsterVM appears at the Dutch VMUG

Video – An Interview vNinja Christian Mohn

VMware Labs presents its latest fling - VMware I/O Analyzer

vPanorama - An Integrated View of VMware, Storage and Network

Video - Taking Memory Snapshots of vSphere Virtual Machines

VMware has released vCenter Chargeback Manager version 2

Webinar - Building Next Generation Virtualized Data Centers with VXLAN

VMware Labs presents its latest fling - ESX System Analyzer

The Dutch VMUG event 2011 – Impressive Speaker Line-Up

Cisco UCS white boarding with Jeffrey Hall