Eric Sloof

This evening I had a cool GoToMeeting with Tintri’s David Friedlander and VP of Engineering Pratik Wadher. They showed me their new Tintri VMstore, it’s the first VM aware storage system. The VMstore T440 is an 8.5 TB hardware appliance that is designed from the ground up for hosting virtual machines through 10 GigE NFS.

Tintri uses virtual machine abstractions. VMs and virtual disks in place of conventional abstractions such as volumes, LUNs or files. This allows the VMstore to measure and control I/O performance individually for each virtual disk in the system. In effect, the only layer of abstraction in a Tintri device is the virtual disk itself. Other solutions rely on storage abstractions that create a fundamental mismatch between the storage and VM layers.

I’m very impressed by their appliance, hundreds of VMs in 4U - An intelligent hybrid flash and disk architecture provides enterprise flash performance at disk prices.

http://www.tintri.com/

Using Private VLANs doesn’t consolidate the number of VLANs used or does it? If you want to add security between virtual machines on the same subnet without exhausting VLAN number space, VMware advises to use Private VLANs. Private VLANs are an excellent way to provide layer 2 network isolation between servers in the same subnet. In this video you will learn that using Community Private VLANS doesn’t consolidate the number of VLANs used. On the other hand, when using Isolated Private VLANs you won’t exhaust the number of available VLAN IDs.

With SugarSync, you can backup, sync, access and share all your files on-the-go, instantly and securely from any device including PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, and more. SugarSync matches the way you organize your files and folders. You can sync any file or folder from any of your computers and access those files and folders via your Personal Cloud.

DESKTOP
Windows 7
Windows Vista
Windows XP
Mac OSX
WEB
Internet Explorer 7.x
Internet Explorer 8.0.x
Chrome 8.0.x
Firefox 3.6.x
Safari 5.0.x
MOBILE
iPad
iPhone
BlackBerry
Windows Mobile
Android
Symbian
SugarSync Mobile Web

https://www.sugarsync.com/free/

This morning I’ve taken the VCP4‐DT Beta Exam. The final VCP4‐DT exam is a core component of the VCP4‐DT certification. The certification requires a passing score on the exam. The VMware Certified Professional (VCP4) and the VMware Certified Associate – Desktop (VCADT) certifications are pre‐requisites.

The VCP4‐DT certification is a requirement for the upcoming (live lab?) VMware Certified Advanced Professional: Desktop (VCAP-DT). Note: Unlike the other VCAP certifications, VCAP‐DT is not required to pursue the VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) certification.

The VCP4‐DT VMware Certified exam tests potential VMware Certified Professional ‐ Desktop (VCP4‐DT) candidates on their skills and abilities monitoring and managing a View 4.5 environment. Successful candidates demonstrate mastery of these skills and abilities.

The beta exam consists of 100 questions and a short pre‐exam survey consisting of 7 questions. The questions are fair but certainly not easy. Although there was a very time short notice, I had about a week to prepare for the exam. As a VMware Certified Instructor, I have access to the instructor training guide for the View 4.5 Install Configure and Manage training. I’m glad I went through it again, the training is well aligned to the exam. I also recorded a VCP-DT Prep Video – Installing the VMware View Composer which actually contains a few interesting topics. Besides that Mark Benson did a great job with his video about The VMware View 4.6 Security Server and PCoIP.

Conclusion: Don’t take this exam for granted - you have to know your stuff and have been around in a View environment. You don’t learn troubleshooting by reading a book or watching a cool Sloef video :-) True troubleshooting skill comes from attention to detail and experience.

In this video Mark Benson discusses the architecture and setup of View 4.6 Security Server to support remote access with PCoIP.

While I was prepping for my upcoming VCP-DT (beta) exam, I couldn’t resist recording a new video and here it is. The VMware View Composer, a key component of VMware vSphere 4.6, is tightly integrated with VMware View Manager to provide advanced image management and storage optimization. VMware View Composer reduces storage requirements for virtual desktop machines by up to 90 percent and enables organizations to more effectively manage their desktop images.

The cornerstone of the Xangati VDI Dashboard is its performance health engine that analyzes the health of VDI in an unprecedented four microseconds. Relying on Xangati’s memory-driven architecture, the performance health of the VDI is being continuously monitored across a broad spectrum of performance metrics to the unrivaled scale of 250,000 objects (which can include desktops and clients). In contrast, other performance management architectures are database-driven and unable to keep apace of dynamic interactions to scale that are fundamental to VDI.

The output of Xangati’s performance health engine is a real-time health index that is linked to the health of every client, desktop, network link, host, VDI protocol and IT server that can impact VDI end–user experience. In real-time – as an object’s health shifts – the health index changes to reflect the urgency of the performance issue. Moreover, the performance shift will trigger a real-time alert, which is uniquely paired with a DVR-recording.

The DVR-recording will show exactly where the performance problem stems from and present contextual insights about what is driving the sub-optimal performance. For instance, a specific user community is seeing obvious delays in screen presentation due to a high latency network link. These DVR recordings capture issues that are often outside of a VDI vendor’s software framework and can be passed to the appropriate IT function, e.g. to the storage team when storage latency is at the heart of the performance issue.

http://xangati.com/vdi_dashboard/

http://d4vu5i9co7ynd.cloudfront.net/VDI_Dashboard.mov

VMworld 2010 Copenhagen - At the labs with Xangati

Just as VMware’s virtual machine technology decouples the operating system from hardware, VMware ThinApp breaks the bond between software applications and operating systems to deliver the same benefits of flexibility, portability and isolation.  ThinApp’s agentless/serverless approach enables corporate IT and ISVs to plug into existing Application Management systems to deliver untethered applications across a variety of similar OS versions (NT, XP, Vista) to enable applications to move with users as needed while complying with corporate directives.

Mightycare has released a cool free to use tool which is able to see the anatomy of a ThinApp package. With MCS-ThinView you’re able to explore the contents of a ThinApp package. It also enables you to Register, Unregister, Install or Uninstall these packages.

Features

• Information about the Package
• Register / Unregister ThinApp Package
• Install / Uninstall ThinApp Package
• Shortcut List
• Restive Virtual Registry entries
• Retrieve the virtual File system
• Retrieve the contents of the package.ini
• Retrieve the  icon
  
  ntpro.nl's MCS-ThinView photoset
  http://www.mightycare.de/downloads/mcs_thinview

VMware has released their VMware vSphere Client for iPad and it’s available for free at the iTunes App store now. The VMware vSphere Client for iPad is a companion interface to the traditional vSphere client, optimized for viewing and managing your vSphere environment on the go. With vSphere Client for iPad you can view key performance metrics and perform essential tasks in a simplified interface from anywhere. The  iPad Client is not meant to be functionally equivalent with the existing Windows client, but rather to perform the most common 80% of vSphere admin’s tasks. Virtual machines can be started, stopped and suspended.  vSphere hosts can be rebooted or put into maintenance mode.

Features

• Search for vSphere hosts and virtual machines in your vSphere environment
• Monitor the performance of vSphere hosts and virtual machines
• Manage virtual machines with the ability to start, stop and suspend
• View and restore your virtual machines’ snapshots
• Reboot vSphere hosts or put them into maintenance mode
• Diagnose vSphere hosts and virtual machines using built-in ping and trace route tools

Requirements

• vCenter Mobile Access (vCMA) virtual appliance available from the VMware Labs: http://labs.vmware.com/flings/vcma
• Network connection to the vCMA virtual appliance; can use built-in VPN client
• VMware vSphere and VMware vCenter Server
• iPad ;-)

VMware Labs presents its latest fling Thinapped vSphere Client. This fling uses VMware ThinApp to package vSphere Client into a single portable EXE giving you instant access to your virtual infrastructure from any computer.

Run vSphere client 4.1 in a snap. No install, just download the EXE and double-click. Place the ThinApped vSphere client on any network share and it will automatically stream to any Windows PC with no installation, agents, drivers, or specialized servers required. Carry ThinApped vSphere client and your customization on USB stick and now your vSphere client is available on the GO!

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