Eric Sloof

The Operations Panel is a script tool, which runs on the client browser and extends the default ESX server web page with a short list of all available virtual machines. It gives the user the ability to perform simple power operations (start, stop, suspend, resume). Easily accessible user interface for some of the most common operations on an ESX host, available directly from the ESX home page.

This online training video will show you how to embed the Ops Panel into your existing ESX landing page.

This hands-on training course introduces the use of VMware vSphere™ PowerCLI to automate VMware vSphere 4. This course demonstrates ways to automate tasks that can reduce your IT costs while improving efficiency, availability, flexibility, and manageability.

Objectives   

•  Automate VMware® ESX™ configuration
•  Automate the provisioning of virtual machines
•  Automate changes to virtual machine configuration
•  Automate cluster operations
•  Automate reporting
 
Who Should Attend?   

This course is designed for technical persons responsible for managing ESX, VMware ESXi, and VMware vCenter™ Server, including IT managers, system architects, and system administrators.
 
Prerequisites   

System administration experience on Microsoft Windows or Linux operating systems and completion of either the VMware vSphere: Install, Configure, Manage or the VMware vSphere: Fast Track course. Also scripting experience in one of the following languages: VBScript, Perl, UNIX shell scripts, Python, or other languages with variables and control structures.

http://mylearn.vmware.com/mgrreg/courses.cfm?ui=www_edu&a=one&id_subject=19082

I think everyone knows the three admissions control policies which can be enforced on a VMware HA Cluster.  If you are using the default “Host Failures Allowed” policy, you must keep in mind that the largest virtual machine reservation will decide how big your cluster slot size is going to be. In most cases when you are using reservations that differ, I would prefer to use the “Percentage of cluster resources reserved as failover spare capacity”. But be careful, I’ve pulled two quotes which warn us for scattered resources and the need to set restart priority on large virtual machines. Duncan Epping over at Yellow-Bricks has written a real great HA-Deepdive article and says :

Basic design principle: Do the math, verify that a single host has enough resources to boot your largest VM. Also take restart priority into account for this/these VM(s). Make sure you select the highest restart priority for this VM to ensure it will be able to boot.

When looking at the slides from the VMware Design Workshop I’ve found a similar suggestion.

To avoid not being able to access a large portion of host resources in a smaller cluster, you can configure the Percentage of Cluster Resources Reserved policy. However, due to the way resources are divided across hosts, this policy cannot always guarantee that all virtual machines can be restarted.

So what does it mean? I’ve created a PowerPoint slideshow with heavy animation :-) which shows the three policies and explains the caveat of using the “Percentage of cluster resources reserved as failover spare capacity” policy.

VMware is thanking me for my contributions to the community of VMware users and my willingness to share my expertise with others.  They have presented me the VMware vExpert Award for 2010.

The vExpert program is a way for VMware to acknowledge and help those who 'go the extra mile' and give back to the VMware user community by sharing their expertise and time. vExperts are bloggers, book authors, VMUG leaders, event organizers, speakers, tool builders, forum leaders, and others who share their virtualization expertise.

I think you can imagine how proud I am with receiving this award. :-)

http://twitter.com/maishsk/vmware-vexpert-2010

Scott Herold is happy to announce the release of the vEcoShell 1.2.6. It’s out of beta and officially has been deemed as a stable release. The list of features is quite limited, but the biggest change is multi session management which makes copying and pasting from the web and PS1 files possible. Under the hood every single script in the function library was re-written from scratch. Scott also has transferred the community homepage of The vEcoShell Initiative to Vizioncore’s vCommunity.



What's New with 1.2.6?

•Completely rewritten PowerPack to support VMware PowerCLU 4.0 Update 1 and its ability to manage connections to multiple $viServer objects.
•Ability to copy and paste code from "PowerShell Code" tab directly into standalone PS1 files (Will still need to Add-PSSnapin and Connect-VIServer for script to function).
•Ability to copy and paste code snippets from the internet and they will work without needing to add the $managedHost.connection code everywhere.

Download the latest version of vEcoShell and additional PowerPacks here.

Scott Herold about the GA: I am happy to announce that the 1.2.6 version of vEcoShell is now available on the Downloads Page. This update brings us into full compatibility with VMware PowerCLI 4.0 U1. In addition, we have decided to remove the product from beta and have provided our first stable release , which has been rigourously tested by the Vizioncore QC team. vEcoShell will remain Freeware, and continue to have a community support policy. The major difference in 1.2.6 is in how connections to multiple vCenter or ESX Servers are managed. In previous versions, vEcoShell maintained all session management and required custom code in nearly all of it's scripts to function properly. These scripts could not run externally to vEcoShell, so the PowerShell Code tab provided limited value. With the 1.2.6 release, vEcoShell now lets PowerCLI manage all connections. This means we were able to remove all custom code from our script library. Nearly every script that is in vEcoShell today can be run externally. Simply copy a code block from the "PowerShell Code"...

In this article I will explain the hidden dangers when adding a resource pool with default settings to a DRS cluster, but first off all kudos to my famous virtualization friends Duncan Epping, Frank Denneman and Bouke Groenescheij. They already have written several great articles about resource pools, shares and reservations. You could ask yourself is there anymore to say about using resource pools? Well there is. I often see production environments where people have added two or three resource pools just for fun saying; there’s no reservation or limit on it so it doesn’t matter. Well they’re just plain wrong! On top of that, they even use resource pools as folders to group their virtual machines. Let’s look at an example.

In my home environment I’ve created two resource pools and one vApp. I didn’t adjust the settings and left everything default. I’ve added 8 virtual machines to recourse pool “test 1”. The two resource pools and the vApp are sibling with three virtual machines in the root resource pool. Take a close look at the ”% Shares” column in the “Resource allocation tab”. The sibling virtual machines will get 18% of the resources when there’s contention. The  vApp will get 26%, so that’s 13% for vCenter and 13% for SQL2008. The virtual machines within resource pool “test 1” will have to divide 26% among 8 virtual machines so that’s 3,25% per virtual machine. The sibling root resource pool virtual machines will get 6% each. So don’t use resource pools for cosmetic reasons, you better use virtual machine folders instead. As long as there’s no contention, there’s no problem. But as soon as you reach the max the resources might be divided in a way you didn’t expect.