NTPRO.NL - Eric Sloof

This course enables storage administrators to better plan and manage their storage systems to support a VMware vSphere™ environment. The course uses lecture, hands-on labs, and case studies to demonstrate vSphere interaction and operation with storage rather than to teach vSphere administration skills.

Objectives   

•  Explain basic concepts related to virtual computing, including vSphere server and storage virtualization
•  Be cooperative partners with vSphere administrators to design, configure, manage, and troubleshoot storage in a vSphere environment
•  Identify and employ tools and utilities that can be used to inspect and modify storage configuration, from a virtual machine disk to a specific datastore 
 
Course Datasheet

VMware Attracts More Than 17,000 Registered Attendees to VMworld 2010 and Unveils Strategy for Next Era of Information Technology. New and Emerging Products Announced to Provide Customers a Clear Path to the New World of IT as a Service, the VMworld Europe 2010 Scheduled for October 12-14 in Copenhagen.

VMware announced the conclusion of its seventh annual VMworld 2010 conference, which was held from Aug. 30 through Sept. 2 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. VMworld 2010 attracted a record number of more than 17,000 customers, partners, press and analysts, and 233 sponsors and exhibitors signifying a major shift in the IT industry towards cloud computing.

VMworld 2010 featured more than 170 unique breakout sessions across 10 tracks from companies and customers driving innovation in the virtualization and cloud industry. VMware President and CEO Paul Maritz and Steve Herrod, VMware CTO and Senior Vice President of R&D, outlined the company's vision for IT as a Service and demonstrating new virtualization and cloud computing technologies in Tuesday's keynote.

VMware is doing a great job with recording interviews during the VMworld 2010 and broadcasting them through their YouTube VMworldTV Channel. In a recent interview VMware’s Senior Director, Mobile Solutions; Srinivas Krishnamurti showed a real cool app on the iPad which is able to manage virtual machines and ESX servers. Take a good look at the ESX version number, it’s showing the future ESX 5.0

 

Yes, we at VMworldTV try to hunt down all the good stuff that is going on here at VMworld. Including this exclusive cool new iPad App to manage your entire vSphere environment. So 'soon' you can use your iPad besides your win32 vSphere client to manage your servers, including possible features like vmotion and SRM interaction. How cool is that!!

One of my virtualization friends is attending the VMworld 2010 in San Francisco and has sent me some pictures of an early beta storage troubleshooting tool. VMware Storage Tester is an virtual appliance solution for performance and diagnostics. VMware Storage Tester automates the traditional storage performance analysis cycle to reduce the diagnosis time from days to hours. It provides an automated framework for configuring and launching storage diagnostic test in large-scale virtual deployments. In future releases it will feature a rule-based diagnostic engine running a decision tree algorithm to provide diagnostic information based on a knowledge base and the stored performance database.

If you’re attending the VMworld make sure you save some time to walk through the performance lab and stay till the end :-) This lab covers performance monitoring, troubleshooting, and optimization in VMware vSphere.  Key concepts of performance will be presented via hands-on activities that will demonstrate the concepts.  The lab will explore Storage bottlenecks, CPU contention, and Memory over commitment issues. Participants will learn how to identify these common performance issues using VMware vCenter charts and performance metrics. Participants will also learn basic tuning recommendations for how to address these issues and optimize their virtual environment.

Lab 24: VMware vSphere Performance & Tuning 

   

VMware vCloud Director is a software solution that enables enterprises to build secure, multitenant private clouds by pooling infrastructure resources into virtual datacenters and exposing them to users through Web-based portals and programmatic interfaces as fully automated, catalog-based services. By building secure and cost-effective private clouds with vSphere and VMware vCloud Director, internal IT organizations can act as true service providers for the businesses they support, driving innovation and agility while increasing IT efficiency and enhancing security. This solution provides a pragmatic path to cloud computing by giving customers the power to leverage existing investments and the flexibility to extend capacity among clouds.

Integrated vShield Edge technologies such as perimeter protection, port-level firewalling, network address translation and DHCP services offer virtualization-aware security, simplify application deployment, and enforce boundaries required by compliance standards in the private cloud. VMware vCenter Chargeback is a software solution that allows IT organizations to gain visibility into the costs of provisioned virtual machines to facilitate planning and decision making. It also enables IT organizations to meter and charge users based on policies.

http://www.vmware.com/products/vcloud-director/

VMware vCloud Director Evaluator's Guide

The purpose of this document is to support a self-guided, hands-on evaluation of VMware Cloud Director 1.0. This document is intended to provide IT professionals with the necessary information to stand up a VMware Cloud Director based Cloud in a VMware vSphere environment. This guide will walk you through key use cases for VMware Cloud Director to help you conduct a successful product evaluation.

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/VMW-vCloud-Director-EvalGuide.pdf

When you visit the VMworld Content Catalogue for a full listing of Labs and Breakout Sessions, you will notice that there are some numbers missing. This is because some of the Labs VMware can tell you about right now. Others will be revealed at the conference. After some ID guessing I finally have solved the lab 13 mystery and here it is:

Lab 13: VMware vCloud Director - Install & Config

VMware Cloud Director delivers the Infrastructure as a Service platform of VMware’s vCloud Strategy. This lab will enable you to understand the key components and high level architecture of VMware Cloud Director platform. Understand the system requirements and pre-reqs for a successful installation. Learn the steps to Install and configure VMware vCloud Director for first time use. Finally configure VMware Cloud Director to deliver a simple service offering.

Maximum vSphere is the complete, up-to-the-minute working reference for everyone who plans, implements, or runs VMware virtual infrastructure. Authored by top VMware consultant Eric Siebert, the book brings together proven best practices, tips, and solutions for achieving outstanding performance and reliability in your production environment. This book brings together crucial knowledge you won’t find anywhere else, including powerful new vSphere 4 techniques drawn from the experiences of dozens of advanced practitioners. You’ll find sophisticated, expert coverage of virtual machines, ESX/ESXi hosts, vCenter Server, networking, storage, monitoring, troubleshooting, backups, vMotion, fault tolerance, vSphere management, installation, upgrades, security, third-party tools, and more. The author takes the same hands-on approach that made his VMware® VI3 Implementation and Administration so popular. Whether you’re implementing or managing vSphere 4, upgrading from older virtualization technologies, or taking new responsibilities in any VMware environment, you’ll find this book indispensable.
 
Chapter 1: Introduction to vSphere
Chapter 2: ESX & ESXI HOSTS
Chapter 3: Virtual Machines
Chapter 4: vCenter Server
Chapter 5: Storage in vSphere
Chapter 6: Networking in vSphere
Chapter 7: Performance in vSphere
Chapter 8: Backups in vSphere
Chapter 9: Advanced Features
Chapter 10: Management Of vSphere
Chapter 11: Installing vSphere
Chapter 12: Upgrading To vSphere
Chapter 13: Creating And Configuring Virtual Machines
Chapter 14: Building Your Own vSphere Lab

Other Book Details:

Paperback: 400 pages
Publisher: Prentice Hall; 1 edition (20 Aug 2010)
Language English

Simon Seagrave and Eric Siebert have confirmation that the book is released this morning.  It will be available in both paperback and Kindle formats, an electronic version is also available on the Safari book website.
Simon has written the chapters on ‘Performance in vSphere’ and ‘Building Your Own vSphere Lab’ with Eric writing all the other chapters.  The forword is by John Troyer. 

If you’re attending the VMworld 2010 next week you might want to consider putting the following session on your most wanted list.

Session ID: BC8432
Session Title: SRM Futures: Host Based Replication

Host based replication (HBR) is the ability to replicate VM’s between dissimilar storage. Meaning for example, from an ESX local hard drive to a storage array in a different location. This technology will be in a future version of SRM and it will allow you to protect a remote location as if you had replicating storage arrays in common between it and your main datacenter. SRM will allow you to replicate individual VM’s as part of a protection strategy. This replication will be done without guest agents and is managed inside SRM. You will see screen shots, and learn the use cases that have driven this feature set. You will learn how to install, configure and use it.

Speakers: Patrick Tullmann; Senior Staff Engineer at VMware and Michael White; Senior Technical Marketing Architect BCDR at VMware

Pearson IT Certification has released the first sample chapter of the upcoming book "VMWare High Availability Constructs" written by Duncan Epping and Frank Denneman.

Duncan Epping is a Consulting Architect working for VMware as part of the Cloud Practice. Duncan works primarily with Service Providers and large Enterprise customers. He is focused on designing Public Cloud Infrastructures and specializes in bc-dr, vCloud and VMware HA. Duncan is a VMware Certified Professional and among the first VMware Certified Design Experts (VCDX 007). Duncan is the owner of Yellow-Bricks.com, one of the leading VMware/virtualization blogs worldwide (recently voted number 1 worldwide on vsphere-land.com) and co-author of the "vSphere Quick Start Guide" and "Foundation for Cloud Computing with VMware vSphere 4," which has recently been published by Usenix/Sage (#21 in the Short Topics Series). He can be followed on twitter at http://twitter.com/DuncanYB.

Frank Denneman is a Senior Consultant working for VMware as part of the Professional Services Organization. Frank works primarily with large Enterprise customers and Service Providers. He is focused on designing large vSphere Infrastructures and specializes in Resource Management and DRS in general. Frank is a VMware Certified Professional and among the first VMware Certified Design Experts (VCDX 029). Frank is the owner of FrankDenneman.nl an upcoming blog which has recently been voted number 14 worldwide on vsphere-land.com. He can be followed on twitter at http://twitter.com/FrankDenneman.

When configuring VMware High Availability (HA), two major decisions will need to be made. Will I enable Admission Control? And which Isolation Response will I select? This chapter will explain both concepts in depth and make you aware of the caveats and the impact of your decisions. After reading this chapter you will be able to select the correct Isolation Response and Admission Control policy based on your requirements and constraints.

This is Chapter 5 from the upcoming book.

The new SolarWinds free VM Console enables you to bounce your virtual machines without ever logging into VMware! Plus, you can track up/down status, take snapshots, and restart VMs even if you’re not a VMware administrator. Be a VM superhero with the ability to:

• Shutdown & restart VMs without logging into vCenter or vSphere
  
  
• Take snapshots of your VMs before bouncing them
  
  
• Get end-to-end visibility into your VMware environment — from vCenter through ESX hosts to VM guests
  
  
• Track the up/down status of your VMs without logging into VMware apps

I just downloaded a new FREE network tool from SolarWinds which you might like. SolarWind's VM Console Free Tool lets you monitor, and restart virtual machines without logging into VMware vCenter or Vsphere! You can download it here: http://bit.ly/93WjRH